It Could Happen Here Weekly 100

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's got to be nothing new here for you. But
you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Pod Cast it's a podcast that you're listening to. It's
it could happen here. It's that the show where things
fall apart and so that you put them back together again.
And actually, okay, you know, I really should have checked
the calendar before I did it, before I tried to
do this introduction where I've referenced the thing that I'm
saying came out last week but might actually have come

(00:47):
out like no, no, no, okay, okay, I got it right.
I got it right. I should never have doubted myself.
Last week, we did an episode about inflation, and we
told maybe half that story and the part of it
that we didn't tell, you know, we got through the
most of the part about like you know what what

(01:09):
this sort of theory of inflation that the people a
strange matter to fello up. We got through what it was.
What we didn't really talk about was what happened next,
which is a very very interesting set of sort of
maneuvers that happened where this theory started spreading through a
bunch of very disparate academic circles and you know, sort

(01:29):
of like economic circles and different political circles that usually
don't have anything to do with each other. But we're all,
i don't know, taking taking things in very interesting directions,
and to talk about how how how this sort of
supply Shaine theory of inflation like spread through the world
and all of this very very interesting, somewhat bizarre stuff

(01:51):
that happened. Next, we once again have Steve Mann and
John Michael Cologone, who are co editors as Strange Matters. Yeah,
Steve jmc welcome back to the show.

Speaker 3 (02:00):
Thanks for having us.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
Yeah, I'm glad, glad, glad we could have YouTube back,
and glad we get to talk about the really really interesting,
somewhat strange things that happened next, which was, Yeah, a
lot of people started picking up your theories and starting
to work with them. Yeah, I was worrying if you

(02:23):
could talk a bit about I guess like how that
kind of first started and how people first started sort
of coming to you for stuff.

Speaker 4 (02:30):
Yeah, like last year. So last year when the first
of these pieces came out Notes toward e theory of inflation,
we got like a really good response in general from it,
and it was kind of provoking discussions between groups of
economists and like readers of econ stuff on Twitter and

(02:54):
stuff like that, who otherwise wouldn't have really been talking
to each other, but suddenly having a different theory of inflation,
one that was like a lot different than what sort
of like the people who thought it would be super
transitory or the people who thought it was like purely
a monetary phenomenon or something like that. Like having that

(03:14):
option sparked good conversations, and it eventually led to some
writers approaching us who are sort of inspired by those conversations,
and particularly a few of them really wanted to follow
up on like specific key like either points from the
paper or follow some of the implications as far as

(03:40):
they think they could take them. So one such paper.
Oh and by the way, just as a refresher the
original theory that is laid out in Part one of
this series that we're doing is essentially saying that inflation
has a tendency to propagate a long supply chains first

(04:01):
and then through supply chain networks secondarily. And so it's
it's saying it's essentially that that's that's how it propagates.
It starts in supply chains. Things like bottlenecks along production
processes have give the price setters, who are people at companies,
socially acceptable reasons to eventually if they need to raise prices.

(04:26):
And but they but that generally pricing managers refrain from
raising prices unless that us like every other lever they've pulled,
essentially has not worked. So like people took that theory
and wanted to follow up on it, and so one
author who did that was Alex Vaccolo who approached us
and he essentially wanted to do an updated version of

(04:48):
the pricing manager survey that we found really helpful in
writing those initial pieces. So in my piece No sort
of Theory of Inflation, I relied upon like a wealth
of pricing manager surveys that showed that where they asked

(05:08):
these pricing managers under what circumstances would you raise prices,
and they sort of went through each scenario of that
over the decades, starting in the thirties and going into
the nineties and two thousands. In order to not have
a replication crisis, like, we need more and more studies, right,
Like this is a that's phenomenon across social sciences and elsewhere.

(05:32):
So you want to have good replication studies. One way
to do that is to have an updated pricing manager
survey that talks to like sort of modern corporations in
the twenty twenties. So are they still concerned about some
of the same things? Are they not? Are there innovations
and pricing that we should know about? And so Alex Paccolo,
who's a financial journalist by trade, he went and interviewed

(05:56):
some managers at Walmart and other big companies and some
smaller ones and found that, like, broadly speaking, a lot
of the same issues are at play. So companies have
cost plus markeut pricing as kind of their bedrock, and
from there they develop some innovations such as like so

(06:19):
called dynamic pricing, where they have the like if you're
a larger company who knows that they are viewed as
a price leader, you have some leeway in responding to
sales forecasts and changing your pricing, like Walmart does what

(06:40):
they have like everyday low prices, that type of thing.
And if you're a grocery store and one of your
competitors is Walmart, Serve on the flip side, you might
start developing indexes of prices set by Walmart or like
one of the other big like behemoth chains, knowing how
important they are to the overall supply chain network and

(07:05):
knowing how important they are for the demand for groceries.
Like like if wherever Walmart goes, many people have no
choice but to follow them in terms of their pricing schedules.
And so that's another thing that is going on, Like
people are developing just entire price indices of like Walmart
or Costco or Sam's Club or who have you.

Speaker 2 (07:26):
Yeah, that was something that's I think interesting in terms
of like the the difference between the way that like
economists think about sort of price, the difference between and
how it's actually getting set, which is like a lot
of it, a lot of it. Very much seems to
be like if you are if you are like the

(07:46):
largest company in a market, like if you are like Walmart, right,
you have this incredible ability to sort of like like
you have this ability to like like force people force
your like downstream or like a guess upstream suppliers to
like sell it to you at low at lower prices
because you have this enormous sort of like you know,

(08:06):
amount of buying power that like, you know, if you're
like if you're like a smaller thing, you don't necessarily
like you know, like like the same company will charge
like another grocery store more for like the same thing
because Walmart, Walmart has an ability to sell it at
a lower price than if I'm remembering this right, I'm
getting I'm gonna im getting strange looks.

Speaker 3 (08:27):
Yeah, well it's it's it's important not to mix up
two separate things. One is Walmart's relationships to suppliers and
the other one is relationship to its competitors. Right, So
the supplier bit, you were totally right on the right track.
It's like, you know, like people who supply Walmart with
with products because Walmart is such a big customer. If
you get the Walmart contract and you're a small producer

(08:48):
or a medium sized producer, like you're set right because
like you know, then then you can basically just like
you know, they can even be your only customer in
many cases. But that comes at a cost, which is
that you sell at the price that will dictates, otherwise
they'll just tell you to fuck off basically. And you know,
it's not only price, it's also the quality. You have
to hit the standards. And oftentimes what these firms that

(09:10):
are like the big important firms, so called nuclear firms
in a supply chain do is that they set those
standards like very rigidly, and you have to be certified
with them. So McDonald's does this for example, you know,
like all those poultry farmers or whatever who supply the
chickens for the chicken mc nuggets, they have to go
through this extremely rigid process in order to be able
to qualify to be a McDonald's certified supplier or whatever,

(09:32):
because that's how they keep the product standardized even though
they're not in house. And then the other thing that
you were alluding to, which is a vocalo's piece, is
the relationship to competitors. So obviously Walmart's able to keep
things cheap all the time, and they're famous every day
low prices because basically those they have economies of scale.
You know, there's this notion, I think common sense for

(09:53):
a lot of people, especially those who don't have a
lot of business experience, is that the more that you
make of something, the more expensive it's going to But
actually it's almost the exact opposite. Any firm that has survived,
like over a period of time being able to make
more and more of something has generally found ways of
making more and more of the same thing using fewer

(10:15):
inputs and less labor, like you know, and that's something
that happens through automation, but it's also something that happens
through administrative innovation and through and sometimes through less than
than nice things, right through through through you know, Amazon
warehouses where people aren't allowed to take bathroom breaks, or
through sort of like you know, coercive measures that they
can do because they've found a nice little spot in

(10:37):
the economy that lots of people are depending on them,
and they can dictate terms. But whatever it is, you know,
as firms get bigger, it actually gets cheaper to make
more of their kind of thing. So people in a
bodega can't match Walmart's prices for everything from like hamburgers
to detergent right, because for them it's more expensive to
produce or to acquire. So what they do instead knowing

(10:57):
this and they're able to survive, is that they do
Walmart price and then they do a markup over Walmart's price.
So in the same way that like by themselves, they
would do a markup over their costs, Walmart's costs are
lower and they do a markup, so they do a
percentage over Walmart's markup, and as long as it basically
is something that's doable in terms of cost, they do that,

(11:19):
which means that they're basically advertising themselves to customers as
the slightly more expensive but more local you know, more
you know, more reliable or easier to get to you
can just walk to the corner store or whatever, you know,
whatever conveniences. They're kind of like justifying themselves with to
the customer base. And in the cities this can be
enough to keep you know, small to medium sized you

(11:40):
know sort of retailers in business, although in the suburbs
the competition is basically just all other ali gobalistic firms
on Walmart's scale, like you know, Wegman's or in Florida
it will be something like Public's you know, and that
kind of thing so generally Vacola was discovering was I

(12:00):
want to just emphasize Steve's point about replication. Like, you know,
if a lot of the supply chain theory depends upon
a story about prices that most economists just don't believe in.
Economists believe that supply and demand are automatically adjusting based
on changing prices, and that those adjustments determine in turn,
how we spend and how we produce. You know, that's

(12:22):
that's supposedly how everything works. They believe in this thing
called the price mechanism. The supply chain theory depends upon
a story where the vast majority of prices in the
economy are a markup over costs or you know, beyond
that some kind of strategic decision being made in pursuit
of a certain strategy. But like, you know, if some
studies had verified that, but then other studies refuted it,

(12:45):
then you would have a situation like psychology, where you know,
the psychologists are always saying all human beings really have
a neck fetish. But then you know, because some study
of like some college students you know, said this, and
then six months later it'll be like, actually that failed
to replicate this. It turns out that human beings don't
have a neck fetish, you know. And I'm being rude

(13:06):
to psychology, but this is a real crisis that happened
there called a replication crisis. Now. Fred Lee that the
economists who kind of like started us along this track
in his famous book post KINSI and Price Theory, found
seventy one pricing studies, and they form an appendix called
Appendix B in his book, which ought to be legendary,
but it's not, because all this stuff is very obscure.
The seventy one studies from very different book length studies

(13:30):
from very different people with very different like political and
economic commitments. Some of them are business school literature, some
of them are empirical studies commissioned by states or by
corporations on how corporate management works. Some of them are
by like Marxist economists, some of them are by neoclassical
economists like and they all converge, no matter what the
biases of the people of the people involved, upon this

(13:50):
same kind of similar cost plus administered prices model. Vocolo
writing now in the present day, not in the period
that Lee was talking about, which is roughly from the
thirties to roughly the nineties, Like you know, he's talking
about the twenty twenties. He just went out and started
talking to pricing managers and capitalists and all this other stuff,
and lo and behold he found the exact same thing.

(14:14):
So the the evidence base, the empirical evidence base for
the underlying basis of the supply chain theory is very
very sound. The ball is in other people's court, in
mainstream economists court, who want to defend the supply and
demand bullshit and the price mechanism bullshit to prove us wrong,
because frankly, the weight of the evidence is so strong

(14:37):
that they're the ones who who have to prove their case,
not the other way around. You know that the what's
it called when you when you've got the you know,
the I think that the presumpture the burden of proof,
thank you, The burden of proof is on their side.

Speaker 4 (14:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:54):
And so something also I think is really interesting from
that color pieces that like, you know, there is a
bit in there about firms that try to do this
sort of like like in real time reacting to supply
and demand stuff, and it's like uber and if you
look at Uber's like, okay, so uber has a couple
of things. One they don't have, like the thing that

(15:17):
they're like they don't really have a supply chain really
a B. They don't make any money. They never make money,
they will never make money. And the other the third
thing that's really interesting about is that like that kind
of pricing, Like you know, if if you have some
people who go in ideologically and or like we're gonna
build an algorithm to like try to have pricing respond
to demand or whatever it like, it fucking sucks and

(15:38):
everyone hates it because it means that like, you know, suddenly,
like when you actually need a thing, it's unbelievably expensive
and it pisses people off. Like most most people who
have to deal with actual like the normal things that
a business do don't do. And the only people who
do it are like the insane tech people who are

(15:59):
like like, I don't know, I almost want to call
it like intensely ideological and also assholes and also don't
make any money, which is just I don't know, it's
it's I think it's kind of a coincidence, but it
is just very funny to me that the people who
actually try to use the neoclassical like pricing theory. It
sucks and everyone hates them.

Speaker 4 (16:21):
Yeah, and uh, the Colo kind of summarizes like the
several different uh pricing procedures that he witnessed, and to
just say, like on both on both determining your company's
costs and determining what market markup you should have, so

(16:43):
the cost plus markup you need to you need to
figure out both of those pieces. It's anything but automatic. Yeah,
it's a very manual process. And even I would I
would go so far as to say, like Walmart has
teams of tech people, yes, but they're liaising heavily with
the finance department and sales and marketing to determine what

(17:06):
is an appropriate margin based on historical like in industry
and sub industry trends and like what is our historical
cost structure for each product down to the product level.
And they have so many different products that they might
actually say, well, because we're selling everything to everyone, maybe
some things can just be what are called lost leaders

(17:27):
and have a negative margin because they get people in
the store, and then those people are there and they
see other things which have higher markups, and then they
buy those and then overall they've made more of a
profit because they use something's a negative margin on them.
And it's like it's a really complex process. And even
if an algorithm is being developed by say uber to

(17:49):
like dynamically priced things up and down based upon events
like a baseball game or something they are going on
in a city so they can get more revenue, that
was still a people. It was a group of people
in a room in a very extremely manual process. Coding
is extremely manual still, and like lasing with like sales, marketing,
finance people all at once.

Speaker 2 (18:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (18:15):
And the other thing is that it's like supply and
demand is a phrase that gets thrown around anytime that
there's any kind of interaction between like the amount of
people who want something and the amount of people and
the amount of stuff that there is, right, which is

(18:37):
a lot of different situations. But the specific supply demand
price theory that's at the core of neoclassical economics is
this price mechanism story whereby you know, companies basically all
make one thing. The price of that thing is not
something that is really under their control. It automatically fluctuates
based on demand, which I guess you can roughly measure

(19:00):
as sales and like the and in turn, like what
the price of that thing is determines how much they
produce and how much of it people buy, because people's
buying decisions are in some fixed functional way, and people's
production decisions, in some fixed functional way are tied to
that price.

Speaker 5 (19:19):
Like if you.

Speaker 3 (19:20):
Want to create an algorithm that includes as a consideration
doing a discount when you haven't yet sold all the
seats in an airplane in the hopes that you'll get
some last minute sales, which, by the way, statistically is
shown to not actually help that much those kinds of
last minute sales and discounts. I mean, I suppose in
a flight where there's a time limited thing, it might

(19:41):
work better. But for a typical product, it doesn't move
the dial very much in terms of sales, which is
why Walmart pursues an every day low price. Is strategy
just keeping prices down in general, so you don't do
sales and discounts which don't move the dial much. But
like you know, that's a strategic pricing decision that you've
chosen to make because you think that it might move
the die in some way. You experiment it with it

(20:02):
and see if it works or whatever. That's not the
automatic lawlike functional relationship that is supposed to exist according
to neoclassical theory between supply demand and prices. People will
say that the algorithm is about supplying demand, but that's
not really how it works. That's it's it's not the
same thing as the theory, right. It's just a pricing

(20:25):
system that takes into account among many other variables and
usually not as the primary thing, whether or not. For example,
there is available available slack in the in the you know,
in what you're producing to be able to get some
last minute sales if you do a discount or something
like that, like or like Steve was saying, like, you know,

(20:46):
there's a there's a game today, so you can do
surge pricing because people are gonna you know that a
bunch of people are going to want to get in
the game. So you're basically just price gouging based on
this opportunistically based on this event that's happening or whatever,
like like, yeah, you can do that, and you can
say that it's pricing that tries to take into account
supply and demand, but it's not the supply demand price

(21:09):
mechanism of neoclassical theory and also as McColo like you know,
finds out it, attempts to do this are very very
mixed in their success at best.

Speaker 2 (21:22):
You know.

Speaker 3 (21:23):
Basically, people who are trying to do it are like, yeah,
maybe it could work, and then they try it and
nine times out of ten it doesn't work very well,
so they go back to some variation on a cost
plus model, you know, or a price leadership model or
something like that. You know, the kinds of methods that
Lee discusses.

Speaker 4 (21:42):
Yeah, I mean the customer good will that you kind
of put at risk with these more dynamic pricing models
is like often a little too risky, Like even for
big companies like Uber, Like there's been a backlash against
Uber for doing that.

Speaker 3 (21:57):
Absolutely the only reason they can maybe get away with
it has been because they have access to infinitive finance.

Speaker 2 (22:03):
But yeah, how long is that gonna last? Yeah? Like,
and that's another thing that's interesting, Like, you know, this
is this is does some except like a different economic question,
but like you do at some point have to ask
the question, like to to what extent can you learn
things about the economy based on companies that don't have
a revenue model, or the revenue model is they will

(22:24):
continue to be headed piles of money by like the
same seven billionaires they've conned, and that's like a I
think there's an interesting interplay of how dependent you are
on actually making like actually having revenue be the source
of like the continuing existence of your company, and how
ideological you can be about running.

Speaker 4 (22:45):
Do you have a game?

Speaker 6 (22:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (22:48):
Well, it's actually very funny that you say this because
one of the people that Vocolo talks to is this
guy Cohen. I can't find his first name right now,
and I don't want to scroll up, but somebody who's
last name is Cohen is quote unquote more skeptical of
the of the dynamical pricing, and he says, I think
it's a sexy idea and probably it has a lot

(23:09):
of intellectually valuable pathways, except when it crashes into the
sensibility of the customer. He said, it could create a
universe of very inconsistent prices across categories in time, which
I don't think human beings are going to align to.
These dynamic models need common sense judgment attached to them,
which is not always necessarily available. Now, this is a
very diplomatic statement by somebody who's formerly of Sears Canada.

(23:32):
Now I find this very funny because there's a kind
of subtext here. Vocola doesn't get into it, but Sears
Canada obviously kind of related to Sears. In the nineties,
Sears had a CEO who was like this ultra libertarian,
you know. He basically believed that the problem with the
free market is that it's not free enough, right at

(23:53):
the height of neoliberalism. So he's really pissed off about
the fact that inside the corporation there's no free market.
It's all a planned economy, you know, which is is true.
There's no there's no market exchanges in there, Like, it's
all allocations, Like, Okay, we have this goal, so we're
gonna allocate these workers to this place and blah blah
blah blah. You know, and and we're and and uh

(24:15):
and you know, anything that the company owns, they just
use it to pursue their goals. He wanted everything inside
the company to have a price, so that everything could
just be you know. But and this is kind of
like mad scientist experiment done on this like very old
American corporation. But somehow. I guess it was the nineties.
You know, people were coked up on this kind of thing.

(24:36):
They tried it, and it was a catastrophic failure that
actually generally seen as contributing to the end of Sears
as a as a major player in retail. And it's like, like,
so it shows So I think that the fact that
this person very diplomatically from Sears is like maybe this
doesn't work, you know, and that might be born of
more experienced than than than than not.

Speaker 2 (24:56):
You know, yeah, okay, we have to go to an
adrak before we that. I want to tell one more
insane nineties Like, people in the nineties really really had
market brain in a way that's like difficult to understand now.
And you can even see this kind of through Obama,
Like they really have market brain. And like I think
the most market brain thing anyone ever did was the
the the I think it was the Army joint. She's

(25:18):
of staff brought in like a group of economists who
were you know, like you were doing the whole like okay,
we like, how can we make how can we use
the market to make the army run more efficient? And
the first polls that they put down on the table
is we're going to have each part each like like
each like section, like what's the type time declartim We're
gonna have each branch of the military bid for control

(25:40):
of who of who gets controlled the nuclear weapons. And
there's a bunch of just like five star generals sitting
at this table going like what the fuck are you
guys talking about? This kid about And that was the
end of like but that was like like peak absolute
peak nineties brain of like these these people thought you
could solve terrorism by like having futures markets on like

(26:00):
where when terrorist attacks would happen, Like it was these
people were wild. None of this stuff worked, unlike the
products and services that you're gonna you're gonna now hear
ads for and we're back from these fine products and services.
If you're if if if the thing you were doing
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(26:21):
we have gold ads again, like please don't like please
leave Sophie alone. Oh my god, I think we we've
gotten we've gotten a little we've we've gotten sort of
into the weeds of I guess like the kind of
research stuff it's been produced, but I wanted to move on,
I think to some of the some of the other
like kinds of like I don't know, kinds of discourse

(26:43):
and kinds of sort of work that's been produced out
of this.

Speaker 3 (26:46):
Yeah. So the Cola's piece, I think was was very,
very accomplished, and it adds to this proud tradition of
pricing surveys, like you've been saying. But the the piece
that I would say ended up having the biggest impact
in this sense that it really kind of started getting
followed up on by a lot of people and it
cut a lot of attention was Tim Demetzio's piece. So

(27:10):
a little about Tim. He's an economist based in Australia
and I should remember the name of his university, but
it was the University of something and it starts with
W and it's a very long name there you go,
University of Well. Yeah, and he's a political economist. He

(27:32):
does a lot of stuff pertaining to kind of like
international relations type stuff, but he also comes at economics
from a particular perspective. So we mentioned last time that
there's these the orthodoxy and economics. Is this one school
called the Neoclassicals. Who believe in the supply and demand
stuff and along with a whole bunch of other dogmas.
Then there's a bunch of dissident heterodox schools. And there's

(27:54):
a whole bunch of these, and one of them is
called the capital as Power school, which is named after
a book called Capitalist Power by these two professors called
Bickler and Nitsen, and it has a lot of things
to say about a lot of subjects. But so Capital's
Power is a book that says a lot of things

(28:16):
and a lot of different subjects, but at its core
is the idea that what makes the capitalist system tick
is the process of capitalization, and that that process of
capitalization is controlled by certain people, and their control over
that process is the basis of the entire economic system.

(28:40):
That's very heavy stuff. It tends not to have to
do with what we're going to be talking about, but
it informs the perspective that Demutzio comes from. Now, Demuzio
saw Steve's brilliant essay on the suplashing theory of inflation,
was very inspired by it because there are certain affinities
between the framework that we're coming from in this kind
of research and the capitalist power framework. They don't agree

(29:01):
one hundred percent on everything, but there's a lot of
common ground there. So he basically hopped aboard to say, well,
why don't we talk about interest rates? Because remember the
main upshot of Steve's of Fred Lee's administrative crisis theory,
and then and then by extension, Steve's theory about inflation
is that inflation is not about money. It's about prices.
And in order to understand inflation, you have to understand

(29:23):
why people set the prices that they do, and why
prices across the economy will go up at any given moment,
because it's people who set prices, not the market, not
the money supply, and not any of these other sort
of automatic, general macroeconomic things. It's a microeconomic decision made
by particular people within particular institutions, with the ability to
pull the lever on particular prices. Right, So the interest

(29:45):
rate is a price, you know, it's a very important
price too, because.

Speaker 2 (29:50):
We should look, we should we should back off for
a second and explain what when when you say the
interest rate, you should explain what that is, because well, yeah,
that's under explained.

Speaker 3 (30:00):
That's totally exactly where I was going because there's actually
many interest rates out there in the economy. When we
talk about the interest rate, what we tend to be
talking about is the interest rate that is set at
the central bank of the country that control of the
currency under discussion, right. That is basically an interest rate

(30:23):
that sets the price for credit for loans in the
rest of the economy. And it's basically you can see
it as a supply chain, even though it's not a
physical one, and it's basically the main cost for banks
that want to borrow, you know, and they then have
to set a markup over that cost as the price

(30:44):
for anyone who wants to borrow from them, which includes
other banks but also includes end consumers and firms. So
that's basically I mean, I'm oversimplifying and seeing probably a
more nuanced version of this, but that's that's the basics.

Speaker 4 (31:01):
Yeah, Banks, just like any company, need to determine both
their cost structure to the extent that they are able
to themselves, and their markup. And the markup is they
like banks, have costs just like anyone. One of their
principal costs is their rate of interest that they pay
on deposits of their customers in order to get them

(31:23):
to get new customers in Like, that's one of their
main services that they provide is checking checking accounts and
savings accounts, and like, so, how much interest are you
is a bank willing to set on its savings account
is like an important decision that's like part of its
cost structure. But where people if the Federal Reserve were

(31:46):
to raise its federal it's a the federal funds rate,
it's a principal policy rate up to what they have
now five and a half percent or so, when it
was less than one percent only a year ago, in
order to compete with all of the other products which

(32:08):
are based upon this so called risk free rate of
return that the central bank offers that that governments used
to like set the rate of things like treasury treasury
bills and stuff like. Eventually, if you're a bank, you
have to start charging higher and higher interest rates. Sorry,

(32:28):
you have to start offering higher and higher interest rates
on your savings accounts. And likewise you need to, like
you need to start charging higher interest rates on the
products that are your actual money makers, like mortgages and
home equity, lines of credit and that sort of thing.
And so like the cost so the cost structure of

(32:53):
a bank will shift as the Federal Reserve is changing
its policy rate, and so too will its margin over
time as it competes with other banks, for like a
narrowing pool of qualified mortgage applicants, and also for people
who are willing to shop around for where to keep

(33:14):
their deposits in a way that they previously they weren't
because there was no sort of differential in interest rates
at all. It was just being held steady.

Speaker 3 (33:24):
Yeah, absolutely, So the key thing to understand, and by
the way, up to now, Steve and I have been
describing what we regard as the real world. Like everything
that we've just described, we can see it in action,
like in the world right Like if the Fed raises
this interest rate effectively, what that means is that this
whole supply chain of people lending to other people, who

(33:47):
lend to other people, who lent to other people, the
cost of lending has essentially increased, which will eventually lead
to a rise in the cost and the cost of
lending to people downstream until for end consumers, which basically
like firms and households trying to get a loan from
the bank, those loans are going to be more expensive,
and conversely, if the Fed's interest rate goes down, those

(34:08):
prices will tend to go down as well, if you like.

Speaker 4 (34:12):
Crucially, none of it is just automatic.

Speaker 3 (34:14):
That's Y's absolutely true.

Speaker 4 (34:16):
There's even just just because it's a bank doesn't mean
it's any different than the story that Facola was laying
out for retailers.

Speaker 3 (34:25):
Mm hmm, that's exactly right. The Fed's rate is a
very important rate because it's basically the first, the first
one in this chain, and it's a cost for pretty
much everybody who's doing business and dollars. But that doesn't
mean that it in some simple way just controls everything else.
You can hope that it controls if you're if you're

(34:46):
the central banker. But of course all these firms are
making their own decisions based on their own reasons, so
you know, they can make all sorts of decisions based
on their priorities and based on like like all sorts
of things. Now, by the way, if you want the
more detailed version of this story that actually talks about
the different agents at each step of this process in

(35:07):
much more detail, you should check out Perry Merling's work
on this, and there's even online online lectures that kind
of get into the nitty gritty which I have absorbed
and then since completely forgotten the details of, so I
would need to watch them again to actually be able.

Speaker 6 (35:22):
To name the names.

Speaker 3 (35:23):
But the point is that so far, so real right now,
here's where things get a little bs. Remember that the
mainstream theories of inflation are all basically descended in their DNA,
even though they've been moving further and further away from
it from the old school quantity theory of money, the

(35:45):
idea that the amount of money in the economy basically
determines the price level. More money that there is circulating,
the less that money is worth because there's too much
of it, so the price of it goes down, and
the price of money basically determines like how much your
money is able to buy. Now, people have been moving
away from that towards theories that get more realistic but

(36:07):
still retain the basic structure where the money supply is
the main thing that matters, and they'll say, for example,
that it's the amount of money circulating in people's pockets
relative to the amount of goods being produced, such that
if too much money is chasing too few goods, like
there isn't enough supply to meet the demand, and that
causes something, although people disagree on what, that causes prices

(36:31):
to be bid upwards, and that's called the demand poll theory.
It's the dominant theory that most economists, classical mainstream economists
that you talk to today will will will pedal to you.
The ones who are not orthodox monitorists, they still believe
in this, which means that they still think that you
have to when there's an inflationary event, you have to

(36:52):
attack the money supply. Now from them, from their point
of view, it doesn't have to do with the absolute
amount of money circulating. It has to do with the
amount of money in people's pockets relative to the amount
of stuff that can be bought. So, if there's too
much money in people's pockets, how do people use their money?
They spend it on goods and services that are produced
by firms. So if you reduce that amount of money,

(37:16):
that basically the only way that you can do it
is by putting people out of work, right, you know,
because then they don't get the wages which they would
have spent on stuff that you know, the factor is
in Walmart and everything else. The agriculture and whatever, all
the stuff that gets made, the goods and services. Now
they think that if you raise the interest rate, it

(37:39):
makes the cost of finance more expensive. Some firms are
depending on finance, so if that cost increases for them,
they're going to go under. And when they go under,
people get unemployed. When people get unemployed, they have less
money in their pockets, which means that they're spending less,
which means that some other firms go out of business,
and then those people go unemployed. Now, the of this

(38:00):
is like the crash of two thousand and eight or
nineteen twenty nine, where suddenly a whole bunch of people
are unemployed and a whole bunch of companies are empty.
They don't want to go all the way with that,
but they want to kind of get part of the
way to that. They want to put the squeeze on
the economy and get some companies put out of business
and some people unemployed on the dole so that people

(38:22):
don't have money in their pockets, so that the supposed
pressure of too many people spending money on goods that
are not being produced enough to meet that demand, the
demand pressure goes down, so therefore it equilibrates and inflation prices.
Inflation ceases because prices go down too, because the idea

(38:42):
is that there's a law like relationship between demand and prices,
souch that if demand goes down, the price will go down.
The actual explanation for this is will vary depending on
the thing. They basically accept it as a religious orthodoxy
and then different economists justified in different ways. But that
that's why they're trying to raise interest rates so that

(39:03):
basically people get thrown out of work and that'll cause
prices magically to go down. Now, as we discussed, the
actual cause of the inflation was an exogenous shock based
on like the chip shortage, the labor shortage, and key
things like agriculture, the container shortage and the war in
Ukraine causing increases in grain prices that have caused cost increases.

(39:27):
That firms tried to hold off price increases as long
as they could, but then they couldn't, and then they
traveled down the supply chain and a whole bunch of
prices across the economy went up. So we know that
because we have looked at the news stories that you
know and talk to people at these different companies. We
I don't mean strange matters. I mean, like you know,
journalists or whatever, and like, you know, that's what they say.

(39:51):
And yet nevertheless, they're trying to make the interest rates
go up to throw people out of work and partially
induce a recession in the hopes that that will drive
is down.

Speaker 4 (40:00):
But they can't even get that right, that's right.

Speaker 3 (40:03):
They haven't actually haven't.

Speaker 4 (40:05):
Been able to get unemployment up either, So it's it
doesn't work in either direction exactly.

Speaker 3 (40:10):
Well, and what's really funny is that Demucio basically says, Okay,
why do people believe this? They believe it for a
lot of reasons, but they think that it worked in
the seventies. That's the myth. Right. You asked Larry Summers,
why do you think this ship will work? And Larry
Summers will say, well, you might not like it. And
I think he actually said things like this, like a
couple of weeks ago. You might not like it, but

(40:30):
this is how we got out of the crisis of
the seventies. If we hadn't done the vulgar shock, which
is basically the same thing they raised interest rates through
up the yazoo, you know, like like we and hadn't
induced that unemployment or whatever, prices would never have come down.
But you see, Demucio did something that you're not supposed
to do, which is that he actually checked out on
the relationship between between interest rates and prices. And what

(40:54):
he found was that basically, there's either that I believe
that I explained his essay is that there's a strong
version of his argument and there's a weak version. The
week version is definitely true. The strong version is speculative.
So he charted it and he found that there is
absolutely no inverse relationship between interest rates and prices. They

(41:17):
raise interest rates, they raise interest rates, the prices keep
going up. Then they're not coming down, right, and the
prices don't start to go down until oil because remember
the oil shock caused by the war in the Middle
East between Israel and Weal and and Egypt and a
whole bunch of other places caused opek to raise their
prices in order.

Speaker 2 (41:37):
Yeah, it's I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna. I'm gonna
point in a thing, which is that the actual story
behind that is slightly more complicated, which is that, like, okay,
so to be completely one hundred percent accurst about this,
OPIK had a meeting where they decided to raise prices,
and then the war started and then like like two
weeks afterwards, and then they kind of ta their explanation

(42:01):
on to the back of the price increase state already
decided on. Oh okay, but yeah, so this this, this
is the thing that like, I don't know there there
there was a there was an oil historian who went
back and like spent a bunch of time looking through
the records of OPEC and shit and trying to figure
out what the actual sequence of events was. But it

(42:22):
it is true that like one of the things behind
keeping OPEK together so that it could increase the price
of oil was like the like what was their sort
of solidarity and they faced the opposition of the war.
But also it's slightly more complicated than that, And I
want to I want to I want to put that
on the record, just because the oil knowers will get
mad at us. We Yeah, yeah, so that that that's

(42:43):
the version of it that like like ninety nine percent
of accounts will give you. It's just slightly not quite
exactly what was happening.

Speaker 3 (42:53):
Yeah, I gotta wrote that book.

Speaker 2 (42:54):
Yeah, I think it was God, I remember what book
I think it was in. I think was in Carbon Democracy,
maybe like eighty percent. Sure, Sorry, I read like four
books about oil and coal in like incredibly rapid succession,
like several years ago, and sometimes I have trouble remembering
exactly which one which thing is from. But yeah, although

(43:17):
I want to say sorry, I guess I want to
say one other kind of interesting thing about that that
makes specifically trying to use the interest rates arguments about
like I think it is it is pretty clear that
raising the interest rates directly would like did not immediately
did wasn't the thing that brought down prices. I think
there's like an interesting there's like a weird thing going

(43:40):
on there too, because the like almost like when when
economists tend to look at this, what they tend to
look at what the interest rate rises, was what was
happening to the US economy and the other The other
thing that the vocal shock did was it raised the
interest rates on it raised it raised the interest rates
in all of these audjustable rate loans that like all
of these countries like all over the world had and

(44:02):
those economies got fucking obliterated. And that actually I think,
I think actually that there is an argument that like
my my argument would be, I think it kind of
probably prevented prices maybe from going up more, But it
did that because it prevented any more opex from forming
and just like absolutely annihilated any kind of political movement
to like have pricing be set by like raw material

(44:24):
producers rather than by like countries that do production. And
this is a kind of like separate thing, but like
this is I think, I think the moral of my
story with this before we get back to sort of
like the I don't know the the other arguments about
this is that like that moment was such a fucking

(44:44):
shit show. There were so many things going on, It's
so complicated. It is absolutely nuts to try to base
literally your entire theory about how you stop inflation by
raising interest rates on one event in like probably the
most complicated economic crisis, and it like we've ever had.
And yeah, because like it it did, like the Vulcar

(45:05):
shock did a lot of things that weren't what Volcar
were not nottarily not what Vocal were trying to do,
But it did a lot of things that aren't what
economists talk about when they talk about what the Volcan
shock did, like it had all of these incredibly like
powerful political ramifications that they just don't put in the
equations because it doesn't feel like how how do how

(45:28):
do you mathematically model like the collapse of the like
like the collapse of the non online movement and like
the third world movement, Like you can't, right, and so
they just sort of like wave their hands and pretend
that it was just like directly it caused more unemployment,
the unemployment prout inflation rate doown.

Speaker 4 (45:47):
Yeah, it's interesting to think of the global effects of
the Vulcar's shock. It's like you have countries who are
dependent upon USD finance suddenly are facing much stronger dollar.
So if they didn't already have dollars, that's a huge problem.

Speaker 2 (46:04):
Yeah and again yeah and again also just like like
just literally the interest rates on their loans like increased
by like twenty percent, and that's like, you know, like
you're it doesn't really matter what your economy is, you can't,
I don't know, it's it's unbelievably difficult to survive them
like that.

Speaker 4 (46:20):
Yeah, on the four x dimension and just on regular
lending terms in dollar lending anyway, it's going to get
way tougher. Yeah, even domestically, like to de Mitiu, superimposes
the oil price onto the inflation and like the the
inflationary crises of the seventies and early eighties, it was
a double it was a double victim, if you remember.

(46:43):
And so like the first time the FED chairman who
proceeded Paul Voker was blamed for not raising interest rates
during an inflationary crisis because of the emerging theory, said
that maybe that would be a good idea, and so
like the monitorists had like their one moment after that
to say, like they where they became more than simply

(47:07):
an academic movement and became like briefly hegemonic with the
vulgar interest rate arise that happened to like set in
nineteen seventy five or so, when the oil price was
about fifteen dollars per barrel. That's when inflation and the
oil price start to move closely in conjunction with each other,

(47:30):
going into nineteen eighty, which is also when the interest
rates are being raised more like give or take nine
to eighteen months or so, and the economic historians, the
neoclassical economic historians, will forget about the supply chain, pressures

(47:50):
like the oil price, which has nothing to do with
the FED, and like that happened in this inflationary when
oil prices were up to like one ten. During our
current inflationary crisis, this exact debate debate was taking place again.

Speaker 2 (48:06):
Yeah, which like where it's like, I.

Speaker 4 (48:08):
Mean there's like all of the prices that the FED
has no control over. It's like, well, if you ignore
those ones, then actually, our theory is like kind of
getting close to being right.

Speaker 3 (48:18):
And the worst part, the worst part is that the
interest rate correlates positively with prices. This is so like
so like so like the interest rate when it's high,
theory expects that prices will be low. But actually and

(48:38):
and and and like even if you adjust for like
a delay where maybe like the prices get low afterwards,
like no, that's not what happens. It's like the interest
rate goes up and prices go up, to prices go
down and the interest rate goes.

Speaker 4 (48:55):
You know, like like like it's like yeah and like
and Demucio is like it hurt when he eventually he
super imposes oil price, Fed funds, thoral funds, rate, and
inflation all in one chart. It's just like this epic
wave of all three going up at once, yeah, like
almost in lockstep. And then oil goes back down, and

(49:15):
then interest rates go back down, and then prices go
back down.

Speaker 3 (49:18):
Yeah I can't. I think prices first before interest rate.

Speaker 4 (49:21):
Let me see, oh yeah, yeah, like inflation cress like yeah,
somewhat concurrently with the federal funds, and then the UH
oil price eventually falls like like shortly thereafter.

Speaker 2 (49:36):
Yeah, and then and this this just gives you a disaster,
right because you like, okay, so the you will get
neoclassical economists who are like, oh my god, oh no,
all these idiots are saying that increasing the increasing the
interest rate actually increases prices. It's not what happening. It's
like you get into this mess. You have to figure
out the new classical explanation, right, is that like, okay, well,

(49:56):
the reason it looks like the fund rate increasing increase
prices is because you do that in response to the
inflation happening. Right, But like you can also just very
easily look at this as like a panic index basically
like where you know, it's like okay, well, prices go up,
and then the Fed panics, and so they they raise
their it doesn't and you know it like it's it's

(50:17):
this is one of those things where like the neoclassical
economists have invented a mechanism that like allows them to
explain their own actions in a way that's plausible enough
that they can call anyone that they've they've gotten a
veegibility that could say anyone who says they're wrong is
just like nuts, right, right, And also it's it's it's

(50:40):
entirely possible that not only are they not right, they're
literally perfectly exactly wrong.

Speaker 7 (50:46):
Yeah, and that yeah, they tried out the like the
the econometric jargon long and variable lags, when people say,
when our interest rate's gonna cause unemployments arise, when are
interest it's going to cut down on inflation by themselves
and not some other supply chain phenomenon, And they say, like, well,
the monetary transmission mechanism has long and variable lags, which

(51:08):
means that like ninety eighteen months from now, it will
settle down and then we'll know it's from interest rates.

Speaker 3 (51:13):
Trust us, right, And even their purported explanations are demonstrably false.
So theoretically, the mechanism by which this happens is that
the monetary that the money supply will go down.

Speaker 2 (51:24):
Well, yeah, M.

Speaker 3 (51:25):
Two is our best estimate for the monetary for the
money supply, and it's not even a perfect one. You know,
interest rates go up, interest rates go down. M two
keeps going up. And this is over the course of
like from the seventies to the nineties, you know, Like, yes,
another graph of the monsios.

Speaker 4 (51:43):
That's another important point that like the money, it doesn't
even get the money supply down.

Speaker 3 (51:49):
Yeah. So, like it's quite questionable whether this interest rate
adjustment thing even works at all on its own terms,
because all the and says that there's at least and
this is what I mean by the weak version of
Dic's argument that all the evidence shows that there's at
least no relationship between interest rates and the price level.
That there is like no relationship whatsoever. It basically just

(52:13):
is useless for controlling prices one way or the other.
The uh Now, the strong version of argument is he
takes the he takes the the the fact that interest
rates track prices very seriously, and he's like, well, what
if making finance more expensive actually raises business costs? And

(52:33):
businesses choose to respond to it by raising their prices.
You know, what if you what if you actually, by
raising the interest rate, are contributing to inflation. Now, this
is this is kind of how we framed the whole
article in our title editors make titles, not not not
not writers do interest rate hikes worsen inflation? And I

(52:54):
remember showing this to some of my friends who were
financed bros. And they were like, what what are you
talking about? This is crazy idea, But like it makes
a lot of sense because if you look at things
as a supply chain, at the very least, rising financially
rising cost of loans would be a higher cost for
at least some businesses. Theoretically they could respond to that
by raising their prices. Now, in actual fact, it probably

(53:17):
at least my solo opinion is this is a small effect.
If it exists at all, it's much more plausible that
there is simply no relationship.

Speaker 2 (53:24):
Yeah, and the general price yeah, and that and that
and that, Like the fact that they're correlated is just
it's just a panic index on the on the on
the on behalf of the fed that they just get
scared and do this thing and it doesn't it has
no effect. But like you know they've got to press
the panic button.

Speaker 4 (53:42):
Yeah, I think I'm for a variety of reasons. I
think I'm a weak form demusiist on this point. I think, like, like,
especially these days, there's so many other like a relatively
small percentage of commercial and bussiness credit is variable right
to begin with. These days, more of it is fixed rate,

(54:05):
and like especially for more well certainly for mortgages, like
it's it's like eighty percent plus approaching eighty five percent
even fixed rate, which will not be affected. And then
businesses have other so many other means of liquidity other
than loans these days, particularly the like medium large scale businesses,

(54:27):
like the you know, you can go to the capital markets,
private equity or the stock market and get the funding
you need. That I'm in ways that don't don't depend
upon what the federal funds rate is doing or only
weekly depend upon it. So it's just like there's so
many other liquidity sources, especially like in the last thirty

(54:48):
years or so, like well since since the Vulcar shock.
Basically they've like all of these like private equity and
other capital markets methods for liquid you have opened up
and a good deal of the debt. A good deal
more of the debt as a percentage of total debt
is fixed rate, so like on that basis, and like
all right, well maybe it doesn't maybe it doesn't increase prices,

(55:11):
but there is at the very least, it's like non correlated.

Speaker 3 (55:15):
This caught a lot of people's attention, like ONCET, once
you put this paper out there, this is one of
our most successful essays because it got picked up by
a bunch of folks, I mean, Investipedia cited it as
a source. Economy called this a blog and not a magazine,
you know, like like it ended up being taken up
by another capital as Power influenced economists Blair Fix, who

(55:39):
found yet more empirical evidence that there is no relationship
whatsoever between interest rates and like the general price level,
you know, and to the extent that there is, it's
only because you induce a recession, you know that that
that puts people out of work, in which case you've
basically you know, you've in order to deal with a

(56:00):
paper cut, you've cut off your hand, right and even
then like they can't they can't reliably get unemployment up,
you know, by raising rates. So like what like what
use is that even if you accept that mechanism. So
they found more evidence and then got even more attention.
Cory Doctoro, the science fiction writer and futurist and kind
of left wing all around public intellectual, he found both

(56:23):
Demusia's study and Blair Fix's study and was like really
excited about it. And after that it really took off.
It started getting debated all over the place. There's a
heterodotsy economics international organization called Rethink Economics, which is all
about like you know, inciting pluralism and the discipline. And
in their Australian blog, because they're all over the world,
an economist called Matthew Harris, you know, took up took

(56:45):
up the controversy and basically sided with with Demusio, like
and JW. Mason writing in Baron's also basically sided with
us in an essay called the Fed Can't Fine Tune
the Economy. JW. Mason's very important heterodox economists who's often
on the cutting edge of a lot of these kind
of theoretical developments. Interestingly, the first fellow though, Matthew Harris

(57:10):
at Rethink Economics, he actually found a study which I
was not aware of, which is why I love these
When we started all these conversations all over the place,
people dug up stuff that we didn't even know about.
There was a study done by the National Bureau of
Economic Research by two professors from the University of Chicago,
but notably they were not University of Chicago economists. They

(57:30):
were in the University of Chicago Business School. And as
many people have pointed out, you know, capitalists started business
schools because economists are basically just propaganda, but like, you
actually also need people who know how the world actually
works in order to run your companies. So that's why
economics and business schools are two separate schools.

Speaker 2 (57:47):
Yeah, this is like a real like I remember this
on campus. This is like, this is a real thing.
Where like, if you're so the business school, if I'm
remembering correctly, the business school is like is most I
think it's I think it might only be a grad
school for han So let me let me look this up.
Yeah that was my memory of it. Yeah, so, so
this is a real thing because because the University of

(58:09):
Chicago doesn't have an undergrad business program, you get people
who want to do business who go into ECON and
the ECON people fucking hate them because they see them
as like like they see them as sort of like
like these like inferior like fly by night people who
don't care about like the sort of deep like the

(58:30):
deep math and like the deep sort of like you know,
like intellectual like political pursuit of economics. They just want
to like go be a business person. And this has
really interesting effects because it means that like you know,
like the business school, cause it's not like the business
school is like a bastion of leftist or whatever, but

(58:52):
they don't agree on stuff a lot because they're like
like the the University of Chicago Economics program, it produces
basically two things. It produces like a bunch of people
who go on to be investment bankers where you don't
actually need to know how a firm works at all,
and then it goes on to produce a bunch of

(59:13):
people who become economists and so like it's it's actual
sort of ideological purpose is is specifically it's it's a
school that trains other economists, right, it's a school that
teaches like the ruling class what to think, whereas the
business school is like the school that teach This is
like This is a very very very explicit. It's it's
something that like when you're there, you can like watch

(59:35):
like in practice, the fact that these aren't the same thing,
and the fact that like you know, they're they're they're
they're going to produce different conclusions because you know, the
the like because like because their actual like purpose is different.
One is ideological, the other one is like making money.

Speaker 3 (59:54):
Yes, and and and this is a great case study
of it because these folks at the business school, their
names are Nil's, Nils Gormson, and Killian Huber, they actually
went and asked companies what they do when credit gets
more expensive. Now, according to the theory, and this is the

(01:00:15):
most sophisticated theory, the theory that people at the FED
will tell you, which is, you know, you might need
to put a few drinks into them first, but you know,
it's like we have to induce a partial recession in
order to make it so that people have less spending
money in their pockets and prices get bidd down.

Speaker 6 (01:00:27):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:00:28):
Theoretically, the mechanism by which this works at the individual
firm is that the firm season that the cost of
capital goes up and they invest less, you know, or
just outright go out of business. Right, But in fact
future investment is only weekly correlated to the cost of
capital because of the limited transition into discount rates, you know,
in other words, like basically there's no real effect.

Speaker 7 (01:00:52):
So yeah, you go around and do business service, sorry,
go ahead companies.

Speaker 4 (01:00:58):
Yeah, they do a good amount, if not perhaps most,
of their capital investment from cash on hand before going
before seeking out finance.

Speaker 2 (01:01:14):
Yeah, and that and that like, and that means that
it doesn't have an effect.

Speaker 4 (01:01:18):
And then even if you need financing their non debt finance,
there's like equity finance, either private or public, that you
have as an option site alongside the debt options exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:01:30):
So we go from like a situation where we published
this article in twenty twenty two, right, and it's got
a title that for a mainstream economist, even a very
sophisticated one, is unthinkable, like do interest rates hikes, you know,
cause inflation to get worse or even just don't matter

(01:01:50):
for inflation. But then suddenly, like you have a bunch
once it gets taken up by a larger discussion, you
have a bunch of quite rep people saying the exact
same thing, citing us directly, and even in one case,
six months after our article comes out. Lo and behold
that a certain little known economist rights in the Guardian.

(01:02:15):
In fact, raising interest rates could do more harm than
good by making it more expensive for firms to invest
in solutions to the current supply constraints. The US federal reserves.
Monetary tightening has already curtailed housing construction, even though more
supply is precisely what is needed to bring down one
of the biggest sources of inflation housing costs. Moreover, many
price setters in the housing market may now pass the

(01:02:35):
costs of doing business onto renters. You know. So in
other words, like maybe higher interest rates can actually induce
price increases as the higher interest rates and do businesses
to write down the future value of lost customers relative
to the benefit of higher prices to be sure, a
deep recession you know, parenthesis like the kind of they're
trying to induce. That's my parenthesis. Back to the quote,

(01:02:55):
a deeper session would tame inflation. But why would we
invite that? You know, Oh, Jerome Powell and his colleague
seem to relish cheering against the economy. Meanwhile, they're friends
in commercial banking are making out like bandits. Now that
the Fed is paying four point four percent interests on
more than three trillion dollars a bankers or balances. Blah blah,
blah blah. Now this little known economist writing for The

(01:03:16):
Guardian is Joseph Stieglitz, who won the Nobel Prize in economics.
Now does he cite our article who's talking points he's
basically going through point by point. No, does he cite
any of the better known places that cited us that
are heaterodox. No, he basically presents it as if it's
his own idea. Now, maybe he did have this idea

(01:03:37):
six months after we started.

Speaker 2 (01:03:39):
Axtendid in like Stinglets has not had a single idea
in like fifteen years. Like that man, Oh, that man
is a transparent medium through which the stuff that he
reads appears on a page. I'm going to be made.
I'm I'm sick of doing this bullshit.

Speaker 3 (01:03:58):
And you know the worst part is, like, you know,
this is something that happens a lot. There's an orthodoxy
that says certain things that are nonsense. The heterodoxy goes
through the hard work of like figuring out the reasons
why it's not true and presenting an alternative model. It's
denied at first, but then increasingly it's just plagiarized, you know,

(01:04:20):
perhaps accidentally, probably not, you know, like like and that
it's presented as if actually, this is what the theory
has always been all along, you know, and like, how
can anyone think differently? And it's this, it's this unfortunate
thing because since the neoclassicals control the discipline, they control
advancement through the ranks of the economists, so they're always

(01:04:41):
wrong and never right, but they're never punished for it,
and they control all the leavers of who gets to
be an economist. So it's this sort of like continual, sad,
unfortunate thing. But on the bright side, we were right.
We were right early A bunch of people picked it up,
and our talking points ended up making it too very
very distant and well regarded places to the point where

(01:05:02):
now it's it's a viable alternative that exists out there
in the world in terms of like, you know, why
keep raising rates it's not doing any good, It could
even do bad. And that's the talking point that I
don't think would have existed if hadn't been for Democio's
research which depended entirely upon the supply chain theory of
inflation framework that Steve developed out of Fred Lee's work,

(01:05:23):
which is basically a research program that now the magazine
has put out there in the world that and it
is continuing to build up on that. That actually makes
it make more sense.

Speaker 2 (01:05:34):
Yeah, And I want to just sort of like take
a second to highlight like how impressive it is had
this happened, because like again like like a year and
a half even like like like even like even like
a year ago, right for the entire time I have
been alive if you tried to say that raising interest
rates raises inflation, like people would have thrown bananas at you,

(01:05:58):
like like volleys of tomato. Was like they they would
have like you would have you would have gotten sixteen
contracts to be a professional clown like this. This was
the thing that like you could not you couldn't even
like suggest this, and you know, like within a pretty
rapid span, suddenly like Stinglets is being like, ah, I
want this very real. Maybe this is a plausible thing,

(01:06:18):
and it's like, oh my, like I don't know, I
think it's I think it's it's really it's really impressive
watching how fast I don't know, like how fast the
combinations of like reality and having an explanation of reality
that actually like lines up with it has been able
to change, like as been able to actually just sort

(01:06:40):
of like change what the discourse at like the highest
levels of power and sort of like what what has
actually been happening in the economy like has shifted And
that's wild, Like I would not have guessed that that
that was the thing that was even remotely possible, and
and yet we are now here.

Speaker 4 (01:06:58):
Yeah, the Overton window has shifted so far that like
the idea that interest rates just don't seem to have
any discernible effect upon the price level is kind of
like becoming the base case.

Speaker 2 (01:07:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:07:12):
Yeah, so like the entire yeah, the entire spectrum has
shifted like a strong form and have like I'm starting
to use that phrase now, by the way, And okay,
people won't be throwing a ton of they'll still throw
something at you, but like it's it's like manageable now.

Speaker 3 (01:07:36):
I mean you can always point to that argument from
authority but says it might be so yeah, so you
know it's like.

Speaker 2 (01:07:45):
Es he won the prize, really prize to.

Speaker 3 (01:07:54):
Should say about.

Speaker 2 (01:07:58):
Want this is a whole.

Speaker 3 (01:08:02):
The so called Nobel Prize in economics is not actually
the Nobel Prize in economics. It's that there's Nobel prices
in science and you know, literature and all this stuff
that's administered by the Alfred Nobel Organization and the fund
that he left and whatever. This started in the sixties,

(01:08:24):
like I think some seventy years after the Nobel started
or something like that, and it was started by the
Swedish Central Bank to imitate the Nobel Prize. So technically
it's the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, you see. And
it's and it's just it's basically like peeling off the
skin of the face of the Nobel Prize and then
wearing it, you know, and saying, where we have a
Nobel price too. Totally basically it's not. And you know,

(01:08:50):
it puts the lotion on its skin or else it
gets the hose again. You know, they did this specifically.
There's a historian of of economics. Oh my god, what
the hell is his name? The it's it's the it's
the more heat than like guy. He's oh my goodness.

Speaker 2 (01:09:13):
I cite him in the Friendly thing and I can't Mosi.

Speaker 3 (01:09:16):
Morowski, that's the guy. Yeah, Okay, So he actually like
went and like studied the origins of it, and it
turns out that they specifically did it as a scheme
to only give the Nobel Prize to people who are
basically like neoclassical economists, and they mostly have so sometimes
they've diversed, but mostly they've done it to very reactionary economists.
In order to promote neoclassical economists in Europe, because it

(01:09:38):
was stronger in America than it was in Europe, and
in order to promote the idea of central bank independence,
which is a fancy term for uh, you know, the
a central bank should not need to operate under a political,
uh a democratically controlled you know, legislature that says, actually,

(01:09:59):
we don't want more unemployment because that would be bad,
so don't do that. Like, instead, they should have independence,
the independence that allows them to technocratically decide that it's
time for people to get out of work, you know,
and and and that kind of thing. So you know,
that's that's the story of the Sokel Nobel Prize. It's
really the fake Nobel, Yeah, which is I just.

Speaker 2 (01:10:18):
Call it the fake Nobel yeah, which is also really
funny if you talk to other people, like specifically, one
of the things that happened to me when I was
in the university was like I knew a bunch of
people who were like really really good at math. Like
one of my friends was like like like actual genuine
prodigy was doing like like was doing like like graduate
level like math in high school. And if you talk

(01:10:39):
to these people, and you talk to like math professors
about the Nobel Prizes, they like they will like yell
about it for like twenty minutes because the math is
so bullshit. It's like, yeah, this guy like like the
math involved in these Nobel Prizes are like they figured
out too blos two weekos four and they gave them
like this fucking fake Nobel prize. You look at like
the fields metal and it's like, I don't know, like

(01:11:00):
it's it's it's it's it's it's really nonsense. All the
math people are really mad about the fact that the
econ people think that they know math because they don't.
And the consequence of this is you get these like that,
you get people handing out Nobel prices for saying shit
like the economy can't miss like the market can't miss price,
like in like assets that are like the price of houses,
and then the entire housing market immediately imployed because it

(01:11:21):
was all miss priced. It's it's it's a disaster. It
has been. I don't know. We should everyone at all
times should be doing anti fake Nobeil price propaganda against
the economics Nobel price, because it's it's it's fake and
bad and we should all say it more.

Speaker 4 (01:11:38):
Uh, you know, there's on the heterodox side of things,
there's some really promising uses of mathematical economics to create
like input output matrices. Yeah, and to model, like do
an io model of the economy that the math is
very much subservient to empirical data that is coming in

(01:11:59):
that trains them model, and it like like to so
much of economics is well, data fits, data fits the model.
Data fits the model, like over and over again when
it should be the other way around.

Speaker 3 (01:12:11):
Yeah, absolutely, does the model fit the data, because if
it doesn't, then you got to throw it out like
this whole like raising interest rates is going to control prices? Bullshit?
When has that even happened? Theoretically happened in the seventies,
but then you look at it and yeah, it doesn't
tell you that story. So you know, do they throw
it out?

Speaker 4 (01:12:29):
No, like brief brief callback to Fred Lee's table table
B was it?

Speaker 3 (01:12:40):
Oh?

Speaker 4 (01:12:42):
Yeah, is the Blinder study in there? I forget?

Speaker 2 (01:12:44):
Yes, Yes, that's like an instance.

Speaker 4 (01:12:47):
That's an instance where Alan Blinder is and neoclassical economists
who like, he messed up and did real science and
what he found was was the administer price theory.

Speaker 3 (01:13:01):
Yeah, he made the terrible mistake of thinking that his
bullshit theory would be vindicated and then it turns out
that it was not.

Speaker 4 (01:13:09):
Yeah, there's just like the history of intellectual thought for
economics is like replete with examples where they kind of
like they screw up and they actually do real science
for a change, and like find things like cost plus
markups happening.

Speaker 3 (01:13:25):
And he tries so hard to explain it away. You know,
he's like, well, supply and demand exists.

Speaker 8 (01:13:31):
It's just that these prices are sticky because the cost
of changing the price on the menu is actually too expensive,
so they choose not to and that's why prices are sticky.

Speaker 3 (01:13:42):
They can't they can't change the stickers. You know, it's
completely insane.

Speaker 4 (01:13:48):
The cost of admit there's a cost to administering prices themselves,
and that's why they don't change prices. Like the price
mechanism for neoclassical economics would suggest.

Speaker 3 (01:14:00):
To look for the stickers, and he couldn't find it.
You couldn't find the costs. So he's like, well, I
guess it's not sticky because of menu costs. It's like,
I wonder what it could be. What a mystery?

Speaker 2 (01:14:15):
Okay, so we we should we should start wrapping up
because this has been This has been a very long
episode already, but I wanted to ask before we go,
what what what? What are you all doing next? And
what other incredibly funny economics discourses can we expect to
have giant like creators punched into in the next couple
of years.

Speaker 4 (01:14:34):
So one thing we've started to work on, and we've
discussed a little bit on this podcast, I believe. Yeah, Well,
Beck was the importance of for X foreign exchange for
all sorts of microeconomic things like inflation being one of them,
Like if you're a small country that that does not

(01:14:57):
have hegemonic monetary authority like the US does to get
people to use its currency and you have to go
out and import things and some other currency. How does
that affect your ability to socially provision yourself as a
nation state and like do development work. And we're developing
a theory of for X. Essentially that is it's a

(01:15:21):
it's an extension of the chartlist framework that informs MMT,
but with some important criticisms about how like the central
MMT insights sort of is like you can create if
you're the sovereign issuer of your own fiat currency, you
can always provision enough of it to you can always

(01:15:43):
spend as much of it into existence as you need
to to do productive things. And yes, that's true. You
can create infinity of your own money, but your own
not other people's money. Yeah, so other currencies like if you're.

Speaker 2 (01:15:59):
Like, uh, really Sri Lanka for example.

Speaker 4 (01:16:08):
If you're Sri Lanka or Mexico or whoever, most of
most of the world, basically you need to maintain and
augment your balance of like the trading the major trading
currencies US dollars, yen, the euro, to name three, and

(01:16:29):
have balances of those. You need to maintain your balance
of payments and your balances of specific currencies in order
to meet the biophysical obligations that your whatever your development
strategy necessitates, because in most instances, not all, but most,

(01:16:50):
you're going to need to, like no one's going if
you're Sri Lanka, no one's going to want to to
transact in your currency. For major purchases of like staple goods.
You're going to need to use like dollars or euros
or end or are you on perhaps you know who
knows exactly one of the major trading currencies.

Speaker 3 (01:17:10):
And this also raises the question of how it currency
becomes a major trading currency, and that almost invariably takes
you in two directions. One is which countries are powerful
and able to industrialize and make capital goods that nobody
else has that everybody wants a piece of. And two,
which are the powerful imperialist great powers. And it turns
out that those are the nexus that's created between imperialism, development,

(01:17:35):
and the balance of payments. Those three things can't even
be discussed independently of each other, and the politics of
what is going to be used as the what Steve
and I are tentatively calling the international means of payment,
in other words, what you can use in international transactions
across a whole region or across the entire planet. That

(01:17:56):
is a hugely political question that all the major great
powers in their interimperial conflict are constantly fighting over. So
right now it appears that China is attempting to make
a bid for a global yuon. First, they tried to
do it through the digital un Now they're seemingly trying
to do it through bricks by getting the other bricks
countries to agree to a kind of EUON gold standard,

(01:18:16):
mirroring the Breton Woods agreement that was basically the dollar
piggybacking off of gold to reach global pre eminence. Will
it work, will it not? Nobody really knows. It's a
total mess. But in theory, that could be one way
that you could suddenly have, like the yuon, at least
in a certain currency zone, be used as the main

(01:18:37):
way of doing imports, and if the US suddenly needs
an import from that zone, which hypothetically, if it existed,
right they couldn't use dollars anymore, or or maybe dollars
would be at a high disadvantage, you know, in the
exchange rate between dollars and that currency at that point,
or maybe they would just be banned entirely from using dollars.

(01:18:57):
They have to get it in that currency, which means
is suddenly the US, which has basically been able to
print for X, to print the international means of payment
for some fifty years now, would suddenly have to actually
hold reserves of this thing. Now, if we have to
hold reserves of it, that means that we have to
sell something to the people who issue that currency. That
means that we suddenly have to worry about which firms

(01:19:18):
are the most profitable exporters. And I bet you anything
that none of our listeners know what the most important
company in America would become if that situation happened. Is
it Uber? Is it Amazon? Is it all these like
Fortune five hundred companies and whatever?

Speaker 2 (01:19:38):
No?

Speaker 3 (01:19:38):
No, I mean it's one of the Fortune five hundred,
But it's not like towards the top of that list.
It's Boeing. Boeing is by far our single greatest exporter firm.
It would be in a situation like this, the national champion,
so to speak, to use language that's usually reserved for
less developed countries than the US. And this is exactly

(01:19:59):
the kind of like thinking that is important, because you know, obviously.
The other thing that would happen if dollar hegemony ended
is that it would be a huge economic crash in
the US, Like suddenly the import the costs of importing
anything that we're in that zone would skyrocket, and it
would mess up, you know, our ballance of payments, and
it would cause inflation, depending on how quickly it happens
and how how little, how much or how little time

(01:20:22):
firms have to adjust their supply chains and stuff like that.
So it's, uh, this is exactly what you need in
order to understand everything from the decline and fall of
the Roman Empire to current geopolitics today. And and and
I'm hoping that that Steve and I, through developing the theory,
will create a general framework that can be used to
tie discussions that people usually have in purely political terms

(01:20:44):
about interimperial conflict into economic questions, so that there's no
longer a kind of division of labor between between economics
which denies the existence of imperialism. And then the people
who study imperialism as historians or political scientists.

Speaker 2 (01:20:58):
Or whatever, stay stay tuned for more theories dropping at
some point in the future.

Speaker 3 (01:21:07):
Oh and we should do our marketing pitch. If you
like the stuff that you hear, you should seriously consider
checking out the magazine which is at Strange Matters dot
co op. And also please consider if you have the
ability to subscribe or donate subscription storty five dollars. And
it really, uh, it really helps because all the money
that we get that doesn't just go to our capitalist

(01:21:29):
overlords for basically like you know, paying for the services
that we use to keep the website going and the
magazine going. All of it goes to our writers, and
we try to pay them a both market rate for
little magazines of our size. So if you want to
see more of this stuff and more arts, philosophy, anthropology, history,
all the other kind of stuff poetry that we publish,
definitely please consider.

Speaker 2 (01:21:51):
Yeah, well we'll we'll put we'll put a link to
the magazine and the description. Yeah, Steve GenZ, thank you
so much for thank you so much for being on
the show and for yelling at the kind of opriced
with me.

Speaker 4 (01:22:07):
It's been a pleasure.

Speaker 3 (01:22:08):
It's been great MANA thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:22:10):
Yeah, and you can find us at it could happen here,
but that happened here pod on Twitter and Instagram. Yeah,
we have a website where we post our sources. It's
schools on media dot Com. There's other stuff there. You
should go there and yeah, go into the world and
make life worse for mainstream economists. It could happen here.

(01:22:47):
It's the podcast that's called it could Happen here. I
think things fall apart and put them back together again, etcetera,
et cetera. We're slightly rushing this intro because Garrison have
to leave in like ten minutes, not ten minutes, but yeah,
we're with the way. Yeah. So we've spent a lot
of time covering the sort of various aspects of the
transgend aside we haven't The aspect of the angle we

(01:23:08):
haven't covered that much is The New York Times. And
partially that's my fault because if I every time I
try to write something about New York Times, it has
devolved into about seven hours and me reading every single
time The New York Times wrote an article that was
pro Hitler. So you know, it's difficult to be what
you would describe as reasonably objective when you're talking about

(01:23:29):
these people and not just start yelling about the Iraq War. However,
coma other people have done a very very good job
about this, and things have developed in the sort of
world of the New York Times printing just incredibly bizarre
transphobic articles. And to talk about one of these things

(01:23:52):
and some developments on one of their stories, we are
talking to Evan erk Hard of Assigned Media, who has
published a very very good story about some real nonsense
that the New York Times and their journalists have gotten
up to. So Fa, welcome to the show.

Speaker 5 (01:24:09):
Yeah, thanks for having me. Always glad to talk about nonsense.

Speaker 2 (01:24:12):
Yeah, it's been it's it's been a real time. Also,
here is Garrison. Yeah. So I guess, okay, I think
the place to start with this is getting people caught
up with the incredibly bizarre story of Jamie Reid. So
I guess I wanted to start there, of can you
talk a little bit about who Jamie Reid is and

(01:24:34):
how the New York Times and a bunch of other
very less reputable somehow newspapers got involved with this.

Speaker 5 (01:24:41):
Yeah. So, I mean there are certainly reputable newspapers that
have looked into the allegations of former Gender Clinics staff
member in Saint Louis, Jamie Reid, and those organizations including
local papers, have found that her allegations didn't hold up.

Speaker 4 (01:25:03):
This was.

Speaker 5 (01:25:05):
Months ago, kind of the beginning of the year, I believe.
She kind of came forward with great fanfare and an
alliance defending freedom lawyer and said that the gender clinic
she once worked at was harming children. They weren't engaging
in informed consent. They were pressuring parents to go along

(01:25:28):
with these harmful treatments, horrifying stuff that if true, would
be just a major, major scandal if true. And the
allegations fell apart pretty quickly. Numerous parents and patients came back, came,
you know, forward saying this is nothing like what we've experienced.

(01:25:50):
Some of that was pretty directly refuting things that she said,
such as, you know, kids never got any therapy. They
just saw a therapist for an hour and an undercanologist
for an hour and were immediately approved for hormones. And
so people came forward saying, I did six months of therapy,
I did nine months.

Speaker 2 (01:26:07):
I wish you could do that. Like no, like right.

Speaker 3 (01:26:11):
I mean.

Speaker 5 (01:26:12):
It was very wild and very discredited. And then, for
some reason, apparently back in May, as Ing Graashi of
the New York Times started looking into this story, and
she didn't find anything different. I mean, if you look
at her reporting, if anything, she found even more evidence

(01:26:33):
that Jamie Reid is not accurate and not on the
up and up. But the story that she came out
with is really really weird.

Speaker 2 (01:26:39):
And and I think the thing, the thing that that
is the most at least before the most recent round
of incredibly bizarre stuff, the thing that's the most infuriating
to me about the sort of Jamie Reid's story is
that the thing that had come out by the time
The New York Times is writing about it was that

(01:27:00):
it looked a lot like if you look at the
stuff that Jamie Reid had been doing and people talking
about their experiences with her, it looked like she was
trying to sabotage kids getting healthcare because she personally didn't
believe in it.

Speaker 5 (01:27:14):
I talked to a parent, a parent who was also
talked to by The New York Times, who had really
just wanted like an educational visit for her like eight
year old, and Jamie Reid said, we can't do anything
for you. Sorry. You know, we can only bring you
in if your child is an adolescent ready to go

(01:27:36):
on hormone therapy. And so after the allegations came out,
this parent got in touch with the clinic Jamie Reid
had left, and they were like, what are you talking about.
We do educational appointments all the time. Come in. They
spent you know, almost two hours talking to the family
about the different you know, medical possibilities in the far
future and just you know, trying to help educate the
kid about their body and their options years and years

(01:27:58):
before they never did anything.

Speaker 2 (01:28:00):
Yeah, which is really infuriating because like the actual story
here is that you know, even even clinics that are
like trying to do the right thing wind up with
just incredibly deranged CIS people who basically can at every
point in the process act as a gatekeeper and decide
that like you don't get to get treatments, and that's

(01:28:21):
awful and is one of them. I mean, you know,
even even in place, even even in parts of the US,
at clinics that are good, that is the thing that
can just happen to you is you get the sort
of gatekeeper stuff. But instead of doing that, instead of
again covering the story they had been handed about someone
trying to keep kids from getting health care, they did

(01:28:44):
this they you know this, This turned into this like
like full court press against Wait, Gary, you you're right.

Speaker 9 (01:28:55):
I closed my door because the air conditioner is way
too loud. Only now the cats start screaming at the door.
But now I open the door. They and they don't
want to come in. They're just like all the threshold,
just like staring at me, like make a choice, come
in or come out.

Speaker 3 (01:29:11):
And I think we're leaving this in.

Speaker 2 (01:29:13):
This's great content. They're out, They're gone. They had their chance.
They blew it. Yeah, what happens instead is is this
sort of like full court press with a bunch of
you know, starting in sort of conservative media and then
moving into sort of liberal media, like using this story

(01:29:35):
as an example of like why why we have to
like stop like we have to shut down clinics and
stuff while.

Speaker 9 (01:29:41):
Children's hospitals are getting bomb threats, Yeah, constantly, mostly due
to kind of prodding by ghouls the Daily Wire who
are hunting for clicks. And yeah, there's also a big
part of this is like this tactic of attacking like
healthcare centers and clinics proved to be a pretty good

(01:30:01):
recipe to go viral. That's what the Daily Wire discovered.
And that's something that New York Times certainly took notice
of as well, is that, hey, this is this is
a way to drive a lot of attention towards our website.
That is just another another angle about this, this sort
of thing which also like it leads to real world consequences,

(01:30:22):
not just in terms of healthcare getting restricted, but also
like threats of violence against doctors. The right has historically
been completely willing to carry out acts of violence against
healthcare workers and let alone you know, trying threatening to
bomb a children's hospital.

Speaker 5 (01:30:39):
Yeah, and the exact allegations were were really devastating for
these families. I mean, I love to Heidi, who's you know,
her daughter's personal medical history was misrepresented, shared with the world,
shared in a million articles, and used to to fuel

(01:31:00):
gender firm and care bands, you know. I mean that
is like really damaging for a like seventeen eighteen year
old who's just trying to like live her life in
kind of a conservative town.

Speaker 2 (01:31:11):
Which also and this is another aspect of this, is
like she is sharing the private medical history of patients
at a clinic, which you are not allowed to do.
That is a which is very funny for people who
rant about these all of these people all the time.
We finally got one, we finally got an actual hippo violation,

(01:31:33):
and h yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:31:35):
I think the hippa thing has been I mean, you know,
as Zingeration could have gotten that story, I feel, I mean,
I think it's been really undercovered. My understanding is that
healthcare workers are not supposed to have to share information
that's identifiable to the patient. And we have a patient
saying I could tell this was my story. And so

(01:31:56):
again I'm not a lawyer, but I think that people
have underestimated the extent to which real families could look
at these allegations and say, this is me, twisted, distorted,
used to hurt my family and other families like mine,
and there's kind of no outrage about that. It's kind
of this neglected backwater of this story.

Speaker 2 (01:32:16):
Yeah, and I mean, I mean, the thing it reminds
me the most of is the is the original like
vaccines cause autism story where you have someone who is
incredibly politically motivated, who is incredibly unreliable, who's demonishrably unreliable,
who is not someone who's you know, who's someone who
in the field. Everyone's like, what is going on here.
This is complete nonsense who like misrepresents and just straight

(01:32:38):
up lies about about like about about their patients. And
then also it turns out like has abused their patients
or in this case is not has abuse of patients
in this case case like has successfully like stopped parents
from being able to talk to the clinic about what
the options for their kids are. But the media sort
of doesn't care about that all. All they all they

(01:33:00):
see is sort of this story and they they just
sort of latch onto it, and then they spread all
of this stuff and it's like, you know, it reminds
it reminds me a lot of that where like, wait,
we're still dealing with the consequences of just the completely
fake bullshit about like vaccism, vaccines supposedly causing autism, which
and again like that that's stuffing that never that never

(01:33:20):
would have gotten mainstreamed if the media hadn't picked it
up and ran with it. And yet you know, every
single time one of these absolute like politically motivated frauds,
it gets up on the stands, like there there's the
New York Times doing doing their article about it, and
and like.

Speaker 9 (01:33:35):
This used to be like Glenn Beck's territory, who would
like bring out like a chalkboard and make like a
make like a crazy wall with yarn and string. And
now it's it actually has been relegated to the New
York Times, the sort of the sort of coverage that
they're doing over these types of like moral panics around healthcare.
I think if you look at like Fox News twenty

(01:33:58):
years ago, this was the type of stuff that they
did for a long time before it was actually a
little bit too insane and they had to like fire
Glenn Beck.

Speaker 3 (01:34:09):
And it's this.

Speaker 9 (01:34:09):
It's the same sort of stuff now that's propagated by
people like The Daily Wire and then picked up on
by even more kind of mainstream publications.

Speaker 5 (01:34:18):
I mean, I think what's so insidious about this story
in particular and some of the other New York Times
stories is that they represent this as being their deep
investigative journalism. They represent this as being the finest that
the Times produces. And here is you know, the mother
of a trans girl who went to the reporter and said,

(01:34:38):
I can prove to you I have medical records, I
have emails to prove to you that what is in
this allegation is about my family. And isn't true. The
reporter takes that and kind of sticks it in at
the end, you know, like that it's not lying, but
it is so totally distorting the truth that it feels
like lying. It feels worse than lying almost.

Speaker 9 (01:34:59):
Yeah, especially because there's like like thousands of people who
will just read the headline. They're not going to scroll
to the bottom of the thing and read a little disclaimer,
being like haha, JK.

Speaker 2 (01:35:08):
If there's a line on everything, that's not good enough. Yeah,
And I think this gets into the part they So
you very recently talked to uh, the mother of one
of the girls who was you know who who to
read has been lying about and.

Speaker 5 (01:35:25):
To three of the parents who who a zine had
talked to.

Speaker 2 (01:35:30):
Yeah, and you discovered some very disturbing and incredibly bizarre
stuff that a zine was doing to get parents to
stay in the story after reads and like this was
in her follow up story, after a bunch of people
came out and were like, hey, this is like not correct,

(01:35:50):
this person has in fact been lying about this. Yeah,
So could you could you go into what you found
about this?

Speaker 3 (01:35:57):
Yeah?

Speaker 5 (01:35:57):
It was truly truly bizarre. I mean I going in
there were some parents that contacted me because they'd spoken
to a Zene Grashi and they were really upset about
the story. And you know, I went into it thinking
I'm going to do them a favor. I'm going to
let them feel heard. They feel disappointed about the story.
This kind of happens in journalism. I was not expecting

(01:36:20):
what I got. So this parent had been very suspicious
of a zine because of a zine's previous writing about
trans issues, and so I think she and her family
kind of were very cautious and very savvy, and they said,
we don't want to be part of a story that's
going to be negative on this clinic that we feel

(01:36:41):
saved our daughter's life. So you know, I'm willing to
talk to you, I'm willing to give you this information
about this person who lied about our daughter's history, but
if you're going to turn that into a hit piece
on the clinic, we don't want to be part of it.
And a Zene, you know, reassured her, calmed her fears,
and so you know, they were going forward but cautiously.

(01:37:03):
And then this mother sees a zine at a courthouse
where Jamie Reid was testifying about the allegations in Missouri
and just sees the warm relationship between a Zine and
Jamie Reid, and she thinks something isn't right here. I
helped her catch this person in a lie, but they're all,

(01:37:24):
you know, buddy, buddy, that seems weird. So she, you know,
she first went up to Jamie Reid and confronted her.
She said, I'm liver toxicity mom, and you know, she
again noticed that Jamie Reid is kind of saying how
can I help you? What do you want and like
looking to a zine like save me from this crazy person.
And so that's when the mother said, we're out. We're

(01:37:46):
not We're not going to be part of the story.
And a Zene did not take that for a Yeah,
it's nuts. She followed them to their car as they're
trying to leave, She stood in the car door so
they couldn't drive away, saying, you know, please keep talking,

(01:38:07):
to keep talking. You know, I don't know exactly what
she's saying, but like I need you in the story.
And you know, the mom says like no, Azine, we're out.
Could please step away from the car and they drove away,
and then Azine called them and called them, and they
picked up and A zine managed to convince them to
let her come over to their hotel room. This is

(01:38:28):
the night before the New York Times article published. And
so now Heidi and her husband and Zene are in
this hotel room and A zine is going paragraph by
paragraph telling her everything that's in the story, trying to
convince her that it's not a hit piece on the clinic,
and the family isn't buying it at all. The family
is like, no, you're describing a hit piece on the

(01:38:50):
clinic where Yeah, But they're left with this horrible, horrible
conundrum because if they actually pull out of the article,
which as far as I can tell, they really did
have this agreement. Again, azine wouldn't talk to me, so
like it's a little unclear what the agreement was or
exactly what's going on here. But in the end they decided,

(01:39:10):
you know, there's no evidence that this woman lied if
we pull out of the story. So they felt that
they had kind of no choice. Even though they felt
completely betrayed, completely devastated that their story was going to
be used in this way, they felt they had no
choice but to stay in.

Speaker 2 (01:39:26):
Yeah, And then like the and the way that like
it ends the article like is is basically like the
article is like completely supportive of Jamie Reid, even though
again demolishably in the article she is lying.

Speaker 5 (01:39:38):
Such a weird article. You find someone's lying, but you're
still spending all of your words saying, well, so she's
sort she lied this one time, but she's basically credible.
Just bizarre.

Speaker 2 (01:39:47):
Yeah, and then you know, and the New York Times
is response to this is like the piece you're referring
to was rigorously a reporter and edited and thoughtful and
sensitive to the moment. The time stands behind his publication.
I'm reservedull It's like, well, yeah, of course, of course
it meets the New York Times like incredibly demanding standards
for journalism. These are the people who published like these
are the people who published the yellow Cake Uranium story,

(01:40:08):
like these people like these people have published things that
like a a like these are these people have published
off about the Iraq War that like British tabloids wouldn't publish.
So like, yeah, it's it's not it's not I don't
I don't think it's that surprising to me that, like
the New York Times was like this passion editorial standards.

(01:40:28):
But that's because again the New York Times backed Hitler
and like deliberately good forth the entire country. You're starting
a war by straight up lying about a bunch of
stuff they knew was fake.

Speaker 5 (01:40:41):
Let me take a moment and say, there are a
lot of reporters who work for the New York Times
who do really great work, very very occasionally it's even
about trans issues. But like it is certainly not a
monolith of ridiculous nonsense. It's just all of the good
work kind of camouflages the ridiculous nonsense. And them get
it through when they when they go on a tear,

(01:41:02):
when they go on a crusade against you know, against someone.

Speaker 2 (01:41:08):
Yeah, and I mean it's it's they. I don't know,
New York Times. They they pick, they pick their moments
to get incredibly ideological about this, and then they hide
behind the more normal reporting they do in order to
sort of like disguise the fact that again there's sort

(01:41:29):
of this person knows that their sources lie is demonstrably
lying to them. I just I don't know, it's it's
the thing that was interesting to me about the story too,
is that a zen as someone who up until this
point like seems to it like like from from everything
I had been aware of, A zine from.

Speaker 5 (01:41:48):
Asinine did really good me too, reporting, I believe. Yeah,
the science astronomy.

Speaker 2 (01:41:53):
Community in astronomy, which I like. The thing I don't
talk about enormously was that I did astronomy for a
little bit. I didn't do very much astronomy, but there
was a there was a small amount of time where
I wanted to do astronomy, and so like I knew
a bunch of the people like in that scene, as
he had a very very good rep there, as like
the person you could go to to talk about like

(01:42:16):
like to do a B two story, which makes it
even more weird that, you know, I guess this is
just I don't know, I'm hesitant to just brush this
off as sort of like trans brain, where like some
like a sister reporter starts covering trans stuff and just
completely loses their mind. But you know, it's it's a
really startling and disturbing like shift from this person who

(01:42:39):
had a very very good rep on yes, like as
someone you could go to to like her standing in
someone's car door trying to stop a family from driving
away because they want because they don't want to be
involved in a story where she's lying about them.

Speaker 9 (01:42:54):
Who who could have thought that a radical feminist could
be trans exclusionary. It's just crazy people.

Speaker 5 (01:43:05):
People are complicated. It I think has to do with
who she feels sympathy for, and women in science are
maybe people that she feel sympathy for and who she
or I have no idea what reason doesn't And like
innocent parents of trans youth are apparently people she doesn't
really have that empathy for, have.

Speaker 2 (01:43:23):
That ability to or the kids themselves apparently.

Speaker 5 (01:43:27):
I mean, as a transperson, I never expect a reporter.

Speaker 2 (01:43:30):
To have empathy for me.

Speaker 5 (01:43:31):
But these white parents, these middle class white parents, please,
you must take them seriously.

Speaker 2 (01:43:41):
The other thing I think I wanted to talk about
was the impact that this reporting has had on the
broader So we we allude to this a little bit,
but yeah, I wanted to talk a little bit about
the way that right wing sort of right wing lawyers
like right wing politicians have been using specifically this coverage

(01:44:02):
and also sort of like the fear mongering around gender
clinics as something they're using to support, like health to
support healthcare bands, on trans youth.

Speaker 5 (01:44:13):
Yeah, Jamie Read's allegations directly resulted in a ban on
gender affirming care in Missouri. You know, there were families
that were going to the legislature week after week and
we're keeping it at bay, and then these allegations came
out and it fell apart and the care ban was passed.

(01:44:34):
And you know, it would be bad enough if they
found a bad clinic, but you know, there's nothing miraculous
about doctors who treat trans people that makes them incapable
of being an ethical you know, like it would have
been devastating if it was the truth, but for it
to have been, you know, all based on lies, is
it's just a really tough blow.

Speaker 2 (01:44:57):
Yeah. I mean, like, you know, like I have friends there,
and it's it's like it's bleak right now, and I
think I've been really you know, I mean, I don't
know why I would I expected these people to sort
of like even remotely feel a single emotion about the
fact that directly the stuff, the actions that they did

(01:45:19):
led directly to a bunch of kids losing their health care.
But you know, there's been no there's been no reckoning
with this. Right as best I can tell neither the
New York Times nor any of the journalists, involve, any
of the editors, any publishers, none the people seem to
care at all about the fact that they're about their
work directly is leading to the suffering and possibly death
of children. And I don't know, like I I this

(01:45:43):
is one of those things where like either either something
about this changes and you know, we get to a
point where it's unacceptable to sort of do this kind
of stuff, or we just you know, we wait for
the next rounds of journalists to like find some absolute
crank who they like dug out of some like Derain
super Room MC mansions somewhere to like push push another

(01:46:06):
one of these stories. Because right now, like this is
this is disappears to just be an established path that
you can use to sort of like you know, but
from from both ends, right, the thing you can use
the journalist's advantage career. It is the thing you can
use as like a crank to be suddenly on the
talk shows start going to get a bunch of money.
It's just lying about all of this stuff, yep.

Speaker 5 (01:46:26):
And I mean, you know, you try to inject some accountability,
but you can't make people listen. Yeah, this is what
I do every day, and I'm going to keep doing it.
But I'm under no illusions that since people are necessarily
going to start listening, it's just you got to put
it out there.

Speaker 10 (01:46:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:46:45):
So, I guess two more things I wanted to ask
about before we sort of wrap up. One is, Okay, so,
on the off chance that there are SIS journalists listening
to this, what kinds of things would you recommend to
them to, like to to make sure you a don't
fall down this rabbit hole, and b to make sure
that if you are attempting to write a story that

(01:47:06):
is good, that you get things right.

Speaker 5 (01:47:09):
Yeah. So, the trans Journalist Association recently published an updated
style guide, which I would absolutely suggest people check out
because it's much more in depth than anything that I
can say. But I think that the biggest pitfall people
have is thinking that they understand more than they do so,

(01:47:32):
and I think that the kind of connected pitfall is
is just a wow, there's smoke, there's fire, like, well,
there must be more to the skeptical side than there
really is. So while I, you know, always try to
butter journalists up by saying you can make up your
own mind and you know, look at the evidence. Like,

(01:47:53):
really engage with trans people who are not just telling
their stories, but who are science porters themselves, like myself.
Really engage with experts who are not trans, but who
understand this medical information and are representatives of a mainstream
medical consensus, and really try to, you know, understand that

(01:48:13):
the experts are experts for a reason, and the mainstream
consensus is a mainstream consensus for a reason. And don't
be so quick to just assume that a bunch of
activists and cranks know something that everyone else is trying
to keep from you, because that is a conspiratorial mindset
that is below you as a mainstream cisgender journalist, and
that you wouldn't be falling into with you know, masks

(01:48:34):
or anti vacs or whatever. And it's just because trans
people are marginalized that I think people are kind of
falling for this crap and getting rolled.

Speaker 9 (01:48:42):
You are not a conspiratorial thing.

Speaker 2 (01:48:44):
Yeah, well, and this is this is something, This is
some thing I'm going to talk about at length more
in one day. The like sixty five thousand word thing
that I've been writing about, the lab leak stuff is
going to come out and you know, one of the
god I have spent so many hours talking to epidemiologists.

(01:49:05):
You have no idea, but one of the things that
you know comes up there, and it comes up also
just in general science, conspiratism is if someone like people
who actually do normal science do not start yelling about
how they're being censored by the scientific establishment and like
there's a giant conspiracy to stop them from talking about

(01:49:25):
their work, even people who legitimately are being like actually
screwed over by scientific establishment, right, people who have been abused,
people you know, like people of color, people from marginalized backgrounds,
who like like, I know these people, right, I grew
up with a bunch of these people. They don't talk
like this about that. The only people who talk like
this are absolute cranks. And it would be really great

(01:49:47):
if journalists realized that actual scientists don't talk about science
in a way where they're like, ah, the medical establishment
is sensor me. I would I would love for that
to happen.

Speaker 6 (01:50:02):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:50:03):
I'm skeptical that it will happen because it's I mean,
it's a great story.

Speaker 5 (01:50:09):
Everyone knows that there are times when the medical or
when the medical or scientific establishment is wrong, You, as
a lay journalist, are probably not going to be able
to tell I am sorry which times those are so
slow your role. Don't envision pulitzers and get grounded on
you know what the basics are, instead of thinking that

(01:50:31):
you kind of know better than the people who spend
their lives researching. This is my entreaty to journalists who
maybe don't realize how transphobia might be playing a role
in there wanting to believe certain things.

Speaker 2 (01:50:45):
Yep, and I guess the last thing I wanted to
ask you about. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about
the trans Data Library because I'm very excited about this.
This sounds rad.

Speaker 5 (01:50:54):
Yeah, So you know, a few months ago I started
working and you know, with some other people in the
trans community, most of whom are you know, staying anonymous
on a resource to try and help people who you know,
we've really envisioned people who are in good faith, but

(01:51:15):
trans issues are not their main thing, you know what
I mean? So like not somewhat not as Ingoatie, but
maybe a Zingerashi of five years ago, you know what
I mean, the person who's a journalist who wants to
get the story right, but there's so much misinformation out there.
There's so many groups with so many different names. They're
very skilled sometimes as presenting themselves as you know, legitimate.

(01:51:37):
So this is the trans Data Library upcoming hopefully by
the end of the month, is going to be a
kind of you know, Wikipedia for the user, not Wikipedia
and not like edible by the community, because that's very
bad idea for trans stuff. I mean, a resource on

(01:51:58):
what are these groups, who are these activists, what have
they done in the past. It is intended as a
journalistic resource, not an activist resource, which just means, you know,
if someone is there isn't anyone like this. But if
someone is a Nobel Prize winning scientist, we're not going
to pretend they didn't, you know what I mean. If
someone has legitimate potentials, you will find that out. If
someone has said things that are discrediting, you'll find that out.

(01:52:21):
But it isn't just a list of the most discrediting
things someone has said, and we are going to, you know,
directly try to get this out to journalists, local journalists,
particularly people again who have decent coverage, not people who
are you know, already on a tear and to democratic
politicians who similarly are you know, sympathetic but might need

(01:52:41):
an extra source of information, and yeah, it is, it
is coming. I want people to be aware of it
so that they can start spreading it and sharing it
when it does, so that we can hopefully try to,
you know, just get some basic information into the hands
of people who I think desperately need it. They may
not know that they desperately need it, but desperately need

(01:53:05):
basic information on some of these groups and some of
these bad actors.

Speaker 2 (01:53:09):
I think that's definitely a good thing because there is
a lot of information out there on the connections between
you know, the sort of right wing grifters who come
out of the woodworks talking about this stuff, and you know,
they're they're they're they're they're sort of demonstrable links to
far right extremist groups, to the Proud Boys, to you know,

(01:53:30):
sort of right wing think tanks. But that's stuff that like,
the the subset of trans people who spend their time
doing this are all very well aware of, but the
reporters who are sort of venturing into the space for
the first time don't know about it all. And yeah,

(01:53:53):
having having a thing we can put into their laps
being like, hey, this is these are all the people
who are like getting paid by the lines depending freedom
yeah stuff, Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:54:07):
Yeah, that's what I'm hoping to make. So the u
RL is probably going to be trans Data Library dot org.
It is a little broken right now. Go to a
signedmedia dot org. You follow me, follow my Twitter, follow
my project, and watch that space for the trans Data
Library because I'm hoping it can do some good.

Speaker 2 (01:54:28):
Yeah, I'm I'm I'm excited for it. And yeah, do
you have anything else do you want to say before
we close up?

Speaker 5 (01:54:36):
I think that's it for me. Thank you so much
for having me on. This was really fun and uh.

Speaker 2 (01:54:41):
Yeah yeah, thanks for coming and thanks thanks for reporting
on the story, because lord knows, the rest of the
media wasn't going to do it.

Speaker 5 (01:54:50):
That's why I started doing it.

Speaker 2 (01:54:54):
All right, this has been It can happen here. You
can find us on Twitter, Instagram. It happened here, pods
and yeah, go into the world and be better about
this than The New York Times, which is not an
enormously high bar, but it's a bar they consistently failed across.
So you too could be superor have superior journalistic ethics.
The New York Times.

Speaker 5 (01:55:14):
Ah, this is what I tell myself every day.

Speaker 1 (01:55:32):
Welcome everyone back to it could happen here a podcast
about things falling apart, and sometimes stuff that's slightly less
depressing than that, but not today. Today we're talking about
the falling apart sort of thing, and are our you know,
continuing coverage of what we like to call the crumbles.
Here today leads us to a little state called New Mexico,

(01:55:54):
and specifically a little city in New Mexico called Albuquerque.
If you have been kind of casually skimming the news
about the American Southwest, you might be aware that the
governor of New Mexico has recently announced a ban on
citizens carrying openly or concealed with a license, firearms within

(01:56:17):
the county that contains Albuquerque. The justification for this is
a recent surge in gun violence in the state, most
of which is centered on Albuquerque. And this is there's
a been a pretty over the last specifically the last year,
a pretty dramatic increase in the number of shootings from

(01:56:38):
twenty twenty one to twenty twenty two. The number of
shootings in Albuquerque or murders, I should say, most of
which are shootings, also about eighty four percent the number
of murders in Albuquerque almost doubled. I think it's and
I think still you know, it's gone down a little
bit this year, but there's still about fifty percent higher
than the normal rate. Now, as you might guess from

(01:57:01):
the fact that you've probably watched Breaking Bad fifteen years
ago or whatever, the drug trade, drug trafficking, drug deals
gone bad have something to do with this.

Speaker 2 (01:57:11):
But I think this year.

Speaker 1 (01:57:13):
About seventeen something like that, seventeen twenty percent of the
homicides in Albuquerque are drug related, but a much higher
number above seventy percent. The police have given the kind
of primary cause as individual disrespect. Now what does that mean, Well,
it means kind of what you think of it. People
getting into shit with each other and somebody pulls a gun.

Speaker 11 (01:57:34):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:57:35):
A lot of these have been traffic related, and in fact,
the shooting that kind of most directly inspired the governor's
controversial legal measure was a road rage incident. About what
was this, Yeah, on September ninth, I think it was.
An eleven year old boy was shot and killed in

(01:57:56):
a road rage incident as his family was leaving a
minor league baseball game. It looks like his aunt cut
off another driver. The driver followed them and fired seventeen
shots into the car. The eleven year old boy was
killed and his aunt is still in the hospital in
the unstable condition at least last I checked after this shooting.

(01:58:20):
And this is, by the way, you know, prior to this,
there was another case where a little kid, I think
a four year old was killed in another road rage
shooting incident. We don't know who shot the kid in
this instance. We don't know if it was a for example,
a citizen legally carrying a firearm or somebody. Although in
the state of New Mexico you are allowed to carry

(01:58:41):
a loaded firearm in your vehicle. You're not allowed to
walk around with it concealed without a license, but you're
allowed to conceal it in your vehicle. The shooting that
preceded this one, the road rage shooting, wasn't illegal shooting.
It was because the guy was a drug dealer. He
had illegal drugs on him, all that stuff. But yeah,
it's messy. So really, in response to the governor's proclamation,

(01:59:05):
there have been quite a bit of people have gotten angry,
in part because the Supreme Court ruled fairly recently that
you have a right to carry a concealed firearm. There
are some barrier states can set up in terms of licensing,
but you can't stop people from carrying, like you have
to have a legal avenue for people to carry concealed firearms.
That's something that the Supreme Court has said you have

(01:59:26):
a right to do, and governors do not have the
right to overrule that sort of thing on public health grounds.
So this has become an increasingly contentious issue. We're going
to talk about some of the things that have followed
from this, but I want to bring on our source
for the day, Lucas Herndon. Lucas is a New Mexico
based activist, someone we've had on the show before as

(01:59:49):
well as a gun owner.

Speaker 2 (01:59:50):
Lucas, Welcome to the program, Thanks Robert. Good to be back,
sort of as always. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is
a messy one. Yeah.

Speaker 11 (02:00:00):
So that was a good a good summary of of
of what got us here this the the executive order
was dropped Friday afternoon, and I immediately went to my
work chat and said, hold on, y'all, this is going
to be a wild weekend. And as you can imagine,

(02:00:23):
it was. There has been incredible responses from sort of
everybody on just sort of yeah, despite political ideologies.

Speaker 2 (02:00:34):
The responses have been swift and ranging in their.

Speaker 6 (02:00:40):
Loudness.

Speaker 11 (02:00:41):
Let's say, uh, and it's created uh yeah, national buzz.
A number of right wing talking heads from the state
have now you know, been brought into national talking spaces.
We have seen the news bounce around the far right blogosphere.

Speaker 6 (02:00:58):
And you know, it's made it to.

Speaker 2 (02:01:00):
Alex Jones and that kind of ilk.

Speaker 4 (02:01:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 11 (02:01:04):
But then of course, you know, and so obviously there's
there's that far end of the spectrum, and you know,
then there's the response here in the state, which is
you know, ranging from supportive, too indifferent, to angry.

Speaker 1 (02:01:16):
To all you know, all the different things you can
think of. Yeah, one of the things people may be
kind of confused about this. One of the things that's
problematic about this is specifically the fact that it is
restricting citizens who have concealed carry permits from continuing to
carry in the county. States have a right to at
least currently the Supreme Court has not you know, ruled

(02:01:37):
counter to that. Currently have a right to restrict people
from open carrying, and you have a right to restrict
people from doing stuff like have unlicensed carrying a handgun
in your car. Right in the state of Oregon, for example,
you cannot carry a loaded weapon in your vehicle without
a concealed carry permit. As far as I'm aware, there's
not been any sort of constitutional challenge to that. There
may be in the future, but the Supreme Court, you know,

(02:02:00):
has ruled very differently on the issue of concealed firearms,
and so that's a problem because, you know, regardless of
what you think about how the law on concealed carry
of firearms should be, the idea of a governor overturning
a right like that, access to a right like that
based on what they call the public health emergency is

(02:02:21):
deeply concerning, you know, which is why you've had, you know,
a surprising people come out against this, including David Hogg,
who's one of the Parkland kids, and a gun control
advocate who said, you know, the govenor simply doesn't have
the right to do this, which is kind of more
or less where I land.

Speaker 11 (02:02:36):
Yeah, and you know, and just to be clear, right,
I'm not an attorney, but yeah, I am a gun
owner and have exercised that right since I was legally
allowed to do so. At eighteen, which was very long
ago at this point. So, yeah, I've been I have
been a New Mexico gun owner paying attention to things

(02:02:57):
and how those laws affect me for quite a while.

Speaker 6 (02:03:00):
Well.

Speaker 11 (02:03:01):
One of the yeah, one of the interesting things about
the executive order, and you sort of touched on it,
is that the in in the in the order, it
specifically limits having a firearm in your vehicle to traveling
to any excluded place that she listed in the executive order. Right,
So so there's there's a there's a ban on you know,

(02:03:25):
carrying unless you're going to like X, Y or Z
specific places, and that then is furthered that you can
only have a firearm in your vehicle if you're traveling
to one of the said places. So yeah, that's that
is in direct contradiction to existing law because New Mexico,
in ostensibly your home or your car is an extension

(02:03:49):
of your home. You don't there is there There basically
is no law about having a car firearm in your car,
which has led to some weird things because so for instance,
you can get a dui on a bicycle and so
that law has actually been used that you can carry
a concealed firearm like in a backpack on a bicycle,

(02:04:10):
but the second you step off the bicycle, now you're
in violation of the law unless you have a permit. So,
you know, those specific pieces of gun law and her
executive order, even in the state are at odds, let alone,
whatever the maybe you know, the federal implications are yeah,
and I.

Speaker 2 (02:04:30):
Think you know.

Speaker 1 (02:04:32):
One of the things that is kind of concerning about
this to me is and that should be concerning about
these people, is that I don't see how I can
see an argument for saying we want to restrict the
unlicensed carry of firearms in vehicles, right, because not a
significant number of these shootings seem to have involved that.
Although it is a little bit unclear. We don't know

(02:04:54):
who carried out the most recent road raid shooting, so
we don't know if that person was legally allowed to
pass as a firearm. Right, we know that in at
least one of the recent shootings that killed a kid,
the person was, you know, had a dealing amount and
what appeared to be a dealing like setup of you know,
it was parceled out into baggies marijuana on him, which

(02:05:14):
is illegal. I'm not making a moral statement about that
I don't think it should be illegal to but it is,
it is illegal, right Like, he was not carrying within
the bounds of federal law. But restricting people from carrying
licensed concealed handguns does not seem I mean, number one,
I haven't seen evidence that like that's a major driver
of gun violence. But number two, if a decent number

(02:05:37):
of these shootings are people acting outside of the bounds
of the law, which they appear to be, I don't
see how restricting people from lawfully carrying a weapon is
something that can that's going to make the problem better,
right Like, it seems like you're kind of striking at
this in an ineffective way that's going to galvanize resils

(02:06:00):
distance to any kind of gun control, as opposed to
going out with kind of a more limited and surgical
approach to try and actually tackle the causes of the problem.

Speaker 11 (02:06:10):
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the reasons why
being on your show to talk about this is worth
thinking about. The last time I was on was, you know,
earlier in the year when there we discovered that there
was a GOP operative who had committed acts of violence
in the form of shooting at Democrats elected Democrats up

(02:06:33):
in the Bernoleo County area as an act of political
violence and worth thinking about is that, you know, he
was charged with firing a firing a firearm from a
moving vehicle, which is a crime, like.

Speaker 1 (02:06:49):
It's a specific crime, which and also like very valid crime.

Speaker 2 (02:06:54):
You should not be you should never shoot from a
moving vehicle.

Speaker 11 (02:06:58):
Like that's correct, that's press so the right, so we
you know again yeah again not a lawyer, however, it
seemed duplicative to have a law on the books that
already there.

Speaker 2 (02:07:13):
It is a crime to fire your gun from a
car already h.

Speaker 11 (02:07:17):
And people who have, people who have committed heinous acts
of violence by violating that law could be and should
be charged under that law. First of all, let me
just say, like, if we believe in a car serial state,
because that's a whole other moral question. However, if for
the purposes of this conversation, however, if somebody is just
driving down the street and has a gun in their car,

(02:07:39):
does that create you know, are they are you know,
are they committing a crime that feels conflicting and harmful?

Speaker 1 (02:07:48):
Yeah, And it's you know, as you there's a couple
of things we should talk about here. I think one
of them is what I what I consider to be
a kind of a dishonest anti gun control argument that
comes out from time to time, which is the idea
that you shouldn't restrict access. You can't restrict access to
firearms because criminals won't obey those laws. It's true, criminals

(02:08:11):
don't obey like people who are committing gun crimes, are
not obeying the law by definition the people who are
committing gun crimes. But increased availability access to firearms makes
it easier for people who are going to be bad
actors to acquire firearms. Right regardless of what you think
the legal remedy to that situation is, that is a

(02:08:32):
pretty undeniable situation. I consider this to be quite different,
because what you are saying in this instance is we
are restricting We have people who are not acting legally
with firearms they already own, So we are going to
restrict people who are acting within the bounds of the
law with firearms they own from behaving in a certain way,
which I have a serious issue with. But I do

(02:08:53):
think that there is a difference between those two kind
of situations on a pretty fundamental level. I would agree
and and and the disingenuous, knee jerk response from the
far right over this, while completely expected, that's exactly what
you know, that's exactly what they're doing, right, They're equating

(02:09:15):
this ill informed, uh poorly worded however you want to say,
they're they're they're taking this thing and using it as
a pretense for all their uh far right propaganda extremes,
you know, calling to impeach the governor because she's you know,
intending to violate the constitution or some silliness like that,

(02:09:37):
which is yeah, which is just yeah, it's that's just
far right conspiracy mastormation, in my opinion, and it has
galvanized them. Right, there's been an open carry protests already,
and the sheriff saying or one of the sheriffs in
the area saying like, I'm not going to we will
not be enforcing this law.

Speaker 11 (02:09:58):
Well and and yeah, and I think that that's actually
maybe something that for this podcast and for for your audience,
for those longtime listeners who who followed this show, that
to me is actually one of the most maybe interesting
and like crumbles oriented parts of this Yes, yes, absolutely, yeah,
so yeah. So yesterday the berno Leo County sheriff, who

(02:10:21):
is an elected official and it is his county that
the that this executive order effects, came out and said
that he would not enforce it. He said that the
uh he'd got he'd barely gotten a heads up from
the governor, but he did admit that. You know, she
she sort of like reached out to him, said hey,
I'm gonna do this thing. I know you probably won't agree,

(02:10:43):
and he's like, yeah, I don't agree, and she's like, okay,
well we'll figure it out.

Speaker 2 (02:10:46):
And he was like, okay, I guess we will anyway. Uh. Yeah,
So this he came out, made this announcement he's not
going to enforce it. The the chief of police from
the Albuquerque depart has more or less made the same intonation,
with support from the very progressive Democratic mayor of Albuquerque,

(02:11:10):
who hasn't necessarily outright said he disagrees, but has said
that he's more concerned about his officer's safety. And that
brings up an interesting point that like, oh yes, like
like cops trying to enforce this law like that sounds
like a recipe for disaster, which is which is why
you didn't see any cops enforcing the the order at
the protest on Sunday. Yeah, and it is one of

(02:11:33):
those like why why would you write like that's such
a yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:11:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 11 (02:11:39):
So the most recent thing this afternoon is that the
the state's attorney attorney general, whose whose job it is
to defend the state or you know, officers of the state,
has announced that he will not defend the governor in
his official capacity from the three current lawsuits that have
all right been filed since Friday. So so yeah, there

(02:12:05):
there basically seems to be this complete lack of support
from the from the parts of government that are supposed
to do the things you know, yeah, absolutely, and and
you know, it begs the yeah, it for those of
us that think about these things, it begs the question of, yeah,

(02:12:26):
how far does this go? What is the next you
know thing that a sitting governor attempts to pass using
administrative power and then isn't enforced, And what does that mean?
And how do we care about this one but not
other things or you know whatever? So those are those
are the questions that that we're all asking ourselves here
in New Mexico, And as somebody who works in this

(02:12:47):
field professionally, like we've spent a lot of time in
the last forty eight hours, like asking ourselves those questions.

Speaker 2 (02:12:52):
It's tough, it's there, there is a there isn't an
easy answer.

Speaker 5 (02:12:55):
On this one.

Speaker 1 (02:12:57):
And this is something by the way, that is I
think pretty directly relevant to everybody listening because one of
the stories probably under reported stories. We've talked about it
from time to time here, you know, it was something
that kind of was in the DNA of the original
you know, run of it could happen here, but probably
we could stand to talk about it a lot more.

(02:13:17):
Is the rise of the most common term these guys
use for themselves as constitutional sheriffs, right, And there is
this this is a long standing belief on the far right.
It comes out of really the seventies and eighties is
when a lot of this stuff started cooking. But this
belief that has kind of formed over you know, particularly
the last twenty years, that the sheriff constitutionally is the

(02:13:40):
highest law of the land, basically, right. And so you
can have sheriffs who refuse to particularly and this is
where it comes in most often refuse to enforce gun
control laws, right. And this has sort of you've got
a lot, you know, a lot of some of this
came got sort of like mixed in with a lot

(02:14:01):
of the election bullshit on the right, where like you
had a lot of sheriffs, you know, there was a
lot of concern as to how they would respond to
states and the federal government sort of enforcing, you know,
or stopping, you know, the Trump administration from doing certain
things around the counting of votes. You know, there was

(02:14:22):
a lot of real concern about that. And I think
this is something that is going to continue to be
more and more of a problem because a lot of
these sheriffs departments are completely out of fucking pocket, right
these are. And by the way, with sheriff departments, not
that being part of a police hierarchy in a traditional
sense provides much restraint, But sheriffs are completely fucking out

(02:14:45):
there right like they are there are not It does
vary from state to state, but there's not any sort
of like central requirement about like what it takes to
be a sheriff or a sheriff's deputy. A lot of
them are just dudes, right Like That's why you had
it was either in New Mexico or Arizona, like a
small sheriff's department basically selling to like celebrities. You can
become a sheriff's deputy here like work a week and

(02:15:07):
a year, and then you can carry a concealed handgun
wherever because cops get that, right, you know, right right, yeah.

Speaker 11 (02:15:13):
Yeah, So I just want to be clear because what
you're talking about and how it pertains to New Mexico
is both one hundred percent correct and has and has
and has happened here, it could happen here is But
in the case of this issue right now, bring up yeah, yeah,
bernal Leo County sheriff took office this year.

Speaker 2 (02:15:36):
He is a Democrat. He's a man of color.

Speaker 3 (02:15:39):
Uh not.

Speaker 2 (02:15:40):
This is not me making excuses for cops, cuse, but
I just to be clear about this.

Speaker 11 (02:15:45):
And he is generally disliked by the right and has
been seen as you know whatever, soft on crime and stuff,
which he hates and has tried. He's tried real hard
to sort of buck that position, and and so and
and that, which which makes this all the maybe worse
right that that Yeah, yeah, a Democrat elected in a

(02:16:09):
democratic county with a you know, the city, the state's
largest democratic municipality, right, like, for that guy to be
like yeah, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna do this.
And and I also there's something that needs to be
said here. You you cited some great, well tragic statistics

(02:16:29):
about my state and specifically about Albuquerque earlier, and and
this is a public health crisis, right gotten by absolutely yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:16:38):
It's out.

Speaker 1 (02:16:39):
When you're seeing the number of homicides basically double, you
know in the space of a fucking year, that that
is a that's a crist Something needs to be done.

Speaker 2 (02:16:47):
Right, right right.

Speaker 11 (02:16:48):
And and so one of one of one of the
big things that hasn't I don't think been said loud
enough is that if if we you know, you know,
if we all agree that it is a crisis, a
thirty day ban is not gonna it's not going to
do anything, and it's certainly not going to address the

(02:17:09):
root causes. And I actually, very reluctantly have to hand
it to the sheriff for his statements yesterday, because, as
he put it, he has enough crime to deal with,
He's got enough going on that his deputies have to
have to deal with right now to then go and
enforce this arbitrary rule or you know order. It's not

(02:17:33):
a it's not a lot, it's but you know what
I mean. So so that's another thing, right, like, this
is your You're we're dealing with a public health crisis
by putting the impetus on law enforcement, which is the
whole problem with you know, the way that this country
deals with you know, the quote unquote drug problem. And

(02:17:53):
and let's be very clear here, when the governor issued
her order on Friday, she issued two orders. One is
called the one with the one with dealing with guns,
is declaring state of Public Health Emergency due to gun violence.
But at the same time, she issued one saying declaring
State of Public Health Emergency due to drug abuse. And there,
you know, for her, these things are related, and and

(02:18:17):
she's you know, she's trying to time together. And I
think we all know that given the last forty years
of American history dealing with drugs via you know, law
enforcement has not done anything to help the problem. And
so that it just again, this is one of those

(02:18:39):
things where it feels counterintuitive for a governor who you know,
generally the Democrats of this state support, who has won
by fairly large margins in both of her elections and
and has a Democratic majority in her legislature.

Speaker 2 (02:18:56):
That for her then to issue this order and put
more requirements on her law enforcement that she's expecting to
you know, also then carry it just doesn't it doesn't
make sense, right, And so that's where we're all scramblings.

Speaker 1 (02:19:15):
There's a couple of things that make this so dangerous.
One is that it's this unnecessary own goal, right, you know,
as you stated, this is not this and I didn't
want to be sort of intimating that he was. That
this sheriff is not particularly tied in directly to some
of these longer standing weird constitutional sheriff things, but it
does tie into this this pattern of sort of conservatives

(02:19:39):
backing sheriffs against state power and against federal power that
they dislike. And in this case, one of the things
that makes this so toxic is they have a point, right,
this order is not constitutional, and giving them ammunition like
that is number one. It strengthens right wing organizing in
a way that is you know, dangerous, but also it's

(02:20:01):
completely unnecessary, It's completely it does not address the problem,
and the problem is is very like, extremely serious, and
so I find this kind of distracting from realistic solutions here,
you know, which which by the way, can can you know,
probably do to some extent involve restricting you know, uh

(02:20:23):
certain the ability of people to carry in certain situations,
to carry in certain ways in certain situations.

Speaker 11 (02:20:29):
I think one of the yeah, oh yeah, no, no,
you have well I was just gonna I just want to,
you know, for for folks interested in, you know, what
New Mexico has done. Things that have happened in the
under this administration, are there are There have been some
advancements that as a gun owner I support. One was
closing private sales as a thing. You know, I grew

(02:20:52):
up buying guns out of the backs of cars. Uh wild,
I have some wild stories about that, but that was
a fully legal thing to do. We had private sales
in this in the state. I've bought a lot of
car guns.

Speaker 12 (02:21:06):
Yeah, yeah, And it is fun, but we should probably
probably that's not probably should be probably probably and and
and especially for those of us that don't have anything
restricting us from by purchasing firearms, there's no reason to
not just anyway.

Speaker 11 (02:21:26):
So so that being said, so the New Mexico did
did end private sales, So that's one thing, and then
this last year we instituted It's not a full safe
storage law, but it goes a long way into instituting
a safe storage law. It specifically creates a situation where
if a minor gets access to a gun that was

(02:21:49):
not secured and then commits a crime with it, then
the per the owner of that firearm, is then held liable.
And it has been used now twice and two fairly
high pro file tragic shootings in the state. I should
note here a decent number of the recent spike and
homicides have been children getting access to firearm zoned by adults,

(02:22:11):
either accidentally or purposefully using them to shoot and kill people. Right, yeah,
so as you yeah, the law, the laws. The law
is called the Benny Hargrove Act, which was named in
honor of a of a young man who was killed
at a middle school by a fellow middle schooler with
a gun that the guy got off of. You know
that the kid got out of a you know, a
bedside drawer. And uh yeah, And as again, as a

(02:22:35):
firearm owner, like I'm sitting across from my safe right now,
I keep my guns locked up. So there are there
are practical solutions here, yes, And and I know that
this country has a hard time talking about guns without
it getting out of pocket very quickly. But there are
practical solutions we have. You know, one of the interesting

(02:22:57):
responses from Democratic lawmakers in the state over the last
you know, three days has been a call for a
special session of our legislature to discuss what some of
those things might be. The trouble with that is that
in everybody's got this like knee jerk thing and everybody
wants to talk about crime. I'm using big air quotes
crime and and which is in direct counter you know,

(02:23:22):
counterance to the idea that this is a public health crisis.
So you know, we have a lot of reservations about
what what might come out of a session like that.
We would have to do a lot of work to
protect you know, some of the things we've we've you know,
we've done a lot to protect people from the car
cerial system in this state, which is hell a predatory,

(02:23:47):
and so those are protections we want to keep, you know,
keep in place. But it's easy for the right of
course to blame like that's the reason, the reason, the
reason why shootings have increased is because we let people
who've been arrested for you know, petty theft or something
out of out of jail, and for some reason that's
why crime is up. I don't know, it doesn't make sense,

(02:24:08):
but anyway, so you know, it's even even with the
solutions come more problems. But but yeah, there does seem
to be this the the unintended consequences of this order
seem to be the not just the backlash, but then
the sort of non support from folks who would otherwise
be supporting her.

Speaker 1 (02:24:29):
So I kind of want to close probably by talking
about and thank you for that, by the way, for
that context for talking about what I think is the
underlying A big part of the underlying cause you that
is also a big part of a surge and violence
in a number of states nationwide, which is that like
people are a lot of a significant chunk of this

(02:24:50):
country has become unhinged since COVID. I kind of suspect
that has a lot to do with it. But you
are seeing in a number of states a significant amount
of like anti social violence, violence that occurs because somebody
cuts somebody off in traffic, somebody gets into an argument
at a store, you know, somebody gets into an argument

(02:25:12):
at a parking lot. There have been a number of
shootings as a result of this, it's happened. You know,
this is a big part of the rise and gun
violence in Texas, which is also tied I think, to
permitless carry to an extent, but like it is broader
than that too, Right, this is not purely a access
to guns, is why a lot of these crimes involved guns.
But there's just been this rise in anti social violence,

(02:25:36):
a lot of which comes out of arguments or perceived
disrespect between one person and a group of people or
two people or whatever. And I think this is probably
tied into with a lot of the you know, increase
in political violence we've seen, because a decent amount of
it does arise out of that. And this is part
of what I think is kind of disheartening about the
governor's response here, is that this is a very serious

(02:25:57):
problem and the kind of knee jerk reactions don't help it.
But also, like I don't know what does right. You
can deal with aspects of this problem, Right, maybe if
people aren't just able to throw a gun in their
pants and legally be carrying, there will be less of
these shootings, But that doesn't deal with all of the

(02:26:21):
underlying problem. And I don't really know what does this
kind of like increased willingness of Americans to resort to
violence in interpersonal conflicts is a real issue.

Speaker 2 (02:26:34):
Yeah, oh man, you said enough.

Speaker 11 (02:26:39):
Yeah, I think that, you know, I'm thinking of I'm
thinking about the first time I was able to go
to a school function of my daughters after after COVID
orders were lifted. And I remember I was was with
a family member and they were, you know, they were

(02:27:01):
the commenting on sort of people's bad behavior in the auditorium,
and you know, and I had to remind them. I
was like, you know, the these people have not been outside, yeah,
in a year and a half, and you know, and
like specifically, like some of these little kids that are
running around, they maybe have never been to a function

(02:27:24):
like this, you know what I mean. Like by the time,
by the time most three or four year olds have
are going to i don't know, like a baseball game
or a band concert, you know, they've at some point
it's the first time, but you know, they get used
to it, they start to understand the rules of things.
But yeah, like after you know, if you grow up
and you're all of a sudden, you're five and you've
never been to something like this like you don't know,
you're supposed to sit down and be quiet, listen to

(02:27:44):
the thing, right, like you're just just sitting on your
phone anyway.

Speaker 2 (02:27:47):
So yeah, I definitely agree with you. I think in
New Mexico we're not.

Speaker 11 (02:27:53):
Isolated from other states in the sense that we have
arise in drug use and related We're not isolated in
the sense we have a rise in you know, our
houseless population, uh in in lack of job or at
least good jobs, and and all of those things come
together to make life hard, you know. And when life

(02:28:14):
is hard, it it impacts people and they make, you know,
bad decisions. The thing that I think does hurt New
Mexico and and and is maybe what makes New Mexico
unfortunately sort of stand out from some of its issues
is you know, we are a very rural state. We
have one fairly large city in Albuquerque, but even then,

(02:28:37):
the surrounding parts of Albuquerque, just like the rest of
the state, are very rural, and there's a certain amount
of you know, we just as a state, we are
lacking resources and always have you know, we rely so
heavily on one industry and without without the systems in
place to ensure that people have a place to live

(02:28:57):
or you know, a meal to get ob to go
to recreation, that they can afford things like that.

Speaker 2 (02:29:03):
I mean, it is tough. It is just tough out there.

Speaker 11 (02:29:07):
And I'm I'm privileged and I get to you know,
I'm I'm raising my daughter in a home that you know,
we want for very little. But I see it even
in my in my peer group, I see people who
are struggling all the time. And yeah, it's just tough
out there, you.

Speaker 1 (02:29:23):
Know, it is, it is, And I honestly, you know,
New Mexico and Oregon are similar in a lot of ways,
and that they're both very low popular. I think we're
both at around four million people if I'm not mistaken.

Speaker 2 (02:29:35):
Oh New Mexico is only like two million. Oh you're
two millions.

Speaker 1 (02:29:37):
So yeah, even even less so low population states that
have one big city that kind of dominates politics, but
a very conservative kind of rural area in a lot
of ways outside of that, and in both cases, that
urban area has seen recent massive spikes in interpersonal violence
and in you know, fatal issues due to drug use.
Right yeah, now, one of the think obviously, one of

(02:30:00):
the things Oregon has coming through it is because of
all of the retire recent stuff here, like a much
higher tax base, right, so there's theoretically more resources, although
I tend to argue very incompetently applied, so most of
us don't actually get out, but you do have this
kind of this This is one of these places where
this urban rural divide is both a lot stricter and

(02:30:22):
where this state that is the majority of the population
and is dealing with such severe issues is also kind
of the political center or the city is also the
political center of the state.

Speaker 11 (02:30:34):
Well, yeah, that and just yeah, you absolutely hit on
something there. You know, Albuquerque has been historically, you know,
decentralized due to gentrification for the last generation because of
exactly what you said, which is that retirement community, you know,
outside of oil and gas, and then the federal government
in terms of like the labs and the universities and

(02:30:56):
things like that, like retire ease are basically our third
high miss genera you know, generative avenue agriculture probably in
there too, but you know what, you get what I'm saying,
they're a very high portion. And yeah, and and you
know the Albuquerque that I grew up going to visit
all of my family in and like going you know,
going downtown, going you know, down to the International District,

(02:31:20):
going near the university. You know, it never felt it
never felt I hate to use the word dangerous, but
it never felt dangerous, right, it never it never felt
that way at all to me. Not that it does
not that I feel danger to my to my person
as a you know, as a white sis. He had
dude with a beard like walking around like I usually

(02:31:43):
feel pretty safe in my person.

Speaker 2 (02:31:45):
But yeah, I can't say that.

Speaker 3 (02:31:46):
I would.

Speaker 11 (02:31:47):
I have reflect that from everybody that I know that
lives there. And people make choices about where they go,
what time of day, et cetera, et cetera. And a
big part of that is because of the gentrification that
has pushed the the you know, native population of Albuquerque
out into these more rural places. It makes it harder
to get to you know, get to groceries, get to jobs,

(02:32:07):
get to transportation. Yeah, all of those are factors in this.
And it's and it's not just a one size fits
all solution.

Speaker 10 (02:32:15):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (02:32:16):
Well, Lucas, is there anything else you wanted to get
into today?

Speaker 5 (02:32:19):
Oh?

Speaker 11 (02:32:19):
I mean there's always something, but no, this was this
was great, thank you. Yeah, yeah, I appreciate you giving
us the opportunity. It's you know, I'm a I'm a
longtime listener of this show, and when this issue came up,
I really was thinking about some of those topics you
brought up, you know, way back in the first run
of It could Happen Here, and thinking about the that

(02:32:41):
conflict that exists between state entities and you know, passing
laws and enforcing laws and who does that and who
doesn't and what does it mean if they don't.

Speaker 2 (02:32:50):
Yeah. Yeah, So this will continue to be a topic of.

Speaker 1 (02:32:58):
Vibrant discussion. So I'm sure we'll well, we'll have you
back in the very near future.

Speaker 2 (02:33:03):
Yeah, happy to come back for that.

Speaker 10 (02:33:05):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (02:33:05):
All right, everybody, this is the This has been an
episode of It Could Happen Here? You know, go go, Yeah, Lucas,
you have any pluggables to plug before we're all out
of here?

Speaker 2 (02:33:14):
Oh yeah, sure me. If you are interested, I'm on
Twitter at Lucas Herndon.

Speaker 11 (02:33:18):
And if you're curious about you know, New Mexico politics,
progress now New Mexico on all the socials.

Speaker 1 (02:33:25):
Most excellent. All right, everybody, Uh, this has been an episode.

Speaker 2 (02:33:29):
Go home, Family, with.

Speaker 13 (02:33:56):
Hi everyone, It's me James, and I'm joined by and Robert.
Today we're going to be talking about the border, which
is where that audio you heard at the start was
recorded yesterday.

Speaker 2 (02:34:07):
Hi Sheren and Robert, Hi James. Hello James, thank you, Robert,
Thank you Serene. It's lovely to have this for one
introduction time.

Speaker 4 (02:34:17):
Okay.

Speaker 13 (02:34:18):
So yeah, we're gathered here to go to talk about
the border. And the reason we are talking about the
border is because border patrol are doing their thing, the
thing that they like to do tiemingly like on a
quarterly basis actually exactly three months after the last time,
which is to hold people out in the open in
between the two board defenses in Santi Seddo, just about

(02:34:40):
fifteen minutes south of where I live. It's probably worth
grounding this discussion in the various claims and counterclaims. So
there are about two hundred people in between the two
border defenses right now. People I spoke to were from Azerbijan,
Turkmenistan and Zbekistan, Turkey, Vietnam, Hondoors, Guatemala.

Speaker 2 (02:35:03):
Yeah. Like, the reason that sometimes.

Speaker 13 (02:35:05):
These lists of people sound like, you know, you're singing
Washington bullets is because these are all countries that we
have destabilized in one way or another, saying we qua
the United States, not we as call zone media, we
were spirectually stabilized regimes.

Speaker 2 (02:35:21):
We've only destabilized two or three countries. Yeah, and we're
proud of it. Yeah we don't.

Speaker 4 (02:35:28):
Yeah, we don't.

Speaker 2 (02:35:28):
Uh, we don't hide it.

Speaker 13 (02:35:30):
But yeah, we took our shot at Canada, you know. Yeah, yeah,
but we've taken a good couple of swings in a Tamadore.
I think we land some punches, but who knows, time
will tell. So, yeah, it's people from like I think
often the migration is constructed as quite unquoite Mexican, which
is definitely not the case. I spoke to one family

(02:35:51):
from Mexico yesterday. But like, even if you look at
border patrol statistics, about four thousand out of fifteen thousand
people apprehended in the San Diego sector in July this
year of Mexican nationality.

Speaker 14 (02:36:03):
That's laura than I would assume, to be honest.

Speaker 13 (02:36:06):
Yeah, I mean, it's just a number of things, right, Like,
it's these countries, Like climate change is definitely getting worse,
so migrass is happening from there.

Speaker 2 (02:36:15):
I see a lot of people from Vietnam.

Speaker 13 (02:36:18):
I don't have the language skills to speak to them
in depth, like I was speaking to someone when We'll
get onto this through Google Translate from Vietnam. But hard
to conduct a full interview, especially when folks are guarding
their phone charge, which they are because exactly the same
as last time, they need the phone to do CBP one.
They need the phone to interact with their families, let

(02:36:39):
them know they're safe. Some of their families, I guess
don't know that they're traveling. I was helping people charge
phones yesterday.

Speaker 2 (02:36:47):
So we can talk.

Speaker 13 (02:36:49):
Let's talk a little bit about the mutual aid response,
and then we'll get onto the border patrol, you know.
So there are two groups down there right now, and
I think it's very impressive the services they're able to
provide because because border Patrol all claim these people are
not detained, that means that they are therefore not obliged
to provide any services to them. Right So that would

(02:37:09):
mean they don't have to give them water, they don't
have to give them food, they don't have to give
them shelter or like salitation, which salitation is the one
that's really hard to cover because everything has to go
through a fist sized gap in the fence. So that's
still like an unmet need. But these two groups free
Ship Collective, they're a free Ship pebe on Twitter, and

(02:37:33):
also American Friends Service Committee. I've spoken about them before.
They're a Quaker group that they're really great, like in
terms of turning up and helping people who need help.
They're constantly there and they they're a good place to
send your money even if you're not a Quaker yourself,
like check out their Twitter.

Speaker 3 (02:37:50):
Like.

Speaker 13 (02:37:50):
Actually, they're probably aligned with a lot of people who
listen to show on a lot of things. I think
they're prison abolitionists. So those two groups were there and
they would At first there was myself, one person from
American French Service Committee, and two older volunteers who had
come in about one hundred and fifty to two hundred people.
So most of the ideas kind of helped because I

(02:38:11):
think in that situation is more important out than necessarily
get the best audio for your podcast. So we handed
out water, handed out food, handed out those emergency survival blankets, and.

Speaker 2 (02:38:25):
It was about all we had.

Speaker 13 (02:38:26):
At first, some like medical stuff people had medical and
a bit later free ship people came and Xavier came.
I'm not sure what Zavier's org is, but I will
tweet it when I find it. I'll put it in
the show notes to He's great. I've spoken at his
events before that he holds down by the Border. We
had a border media round table. He turned up with

(02:38:46):
a massive generator, so that was great. We're able to
charge phones. And what's really I think like notable is
how much the people in between the fences are able
to participate in distribution of goods and helping each other.
So like they have a person who volunteers to be
the coordinator for the water distribution, and one who volunteers

(02:39:08):
to coordinate for the organizing people into lines and making
sure people don't cut the line right, and then one
person who was the phone captain who was doing like
an incredible job of they'd get the cell phone right
right the name of the person and then sign them
a number in the line, and that person would also
have that name and number written on their hand, and
it's written in duct tape that's taped to them and

(02:39:29):
taped to the phone. And then when their turn to
charge comes, he would shout the name of the number.
They would come from wherever they were in between the walls.
They'd come and we would charge the phone, and then
once they've got above fifty sixty percent, we'd switch it
out and he'd call them again and they come get
their phone. So lots of that is stuff that was
learned in May and has been like implemented again much

(02:39:49):
more like. It's less chaotic than it was before, and
fewer people are able to provide better help, which is
really good that it doesn't mean that those people don't
need like donations, because they do. I know, the free
ship people came with dozens of blankets, but there weren't
enough blankets for everybody, so we were prioritizing families with
children and pregnant women to have a blanket. It was

(02:40:11):
cold yesterday, it was raining, and people didn't have anything
to shelter under. There were a few tarps, but not
very many, and it's a pretty like there were very
young babies there. Right, it's a pretty difficult place to
sleep with like, people were very keen to get their
hands on cardboard boxes to lie down on to sleep.
That gives you a sense of how kind of underserved

(02:40:33):
they are. There's obviously no toilet facilities because you're just
in a dusty kind of desert area by the border.
So if people are familiar with Las Americas, the Discount Moll,
we're like maybe a mile west of there along the
dirt road and it's just kind of dusty field, so
very rocky, very difficult people to sleep, very exposed to

(02:40:56):
the elements. Right, it was hot today, like I was
out earlier, and it's ninety one, so they won't be
having any shade today.

Speaker 2 (02:41:03):
They didn't have any shelter from the rain or or ways.

Speaker 13 (02:41:05):
To keep warm last night. They're not allowed to start
fires either, even if they have them means to do so.
So the situation of these people I think is something
worth discussing because it's not exactly super duper clear what
role this plays in the immigration process. And there were

(02:41:25):
a couple of examples to illustrate that. So I was
able to talk to one person. They presented themselves from
like they came into the parking lot walking and they
looked looked very concerned, and so I approached him as, hey,
do you need anything?

Speaker 2 (02:41:39):
Can we help you?

Speaker 13 (02:41:40):
And they had experienced some kind of medical condition and
been taken to hospital, which Customs and Border Protection will
do that, right, Like, if those people are there and
they're having an emergency, they'll open the gate, take that
person out and transport them to hospital somewhere in San Diego.
That person had then been released from hospital to a taxi,

(02:42:04):
which hospitals in San Diego have a habit of doing this.
They'll dump homeless people.

Speaker 4 (02:42:08):
Right.

Speaker 13 (02:42:08):
If you anyone in San Diego will have seen this,
you'll be familiar with like people dumped out of hospital
in Hillcrest wearing a hospital gown and maybe having very
little other possessions. Maybe it's every single day this happened. Unfortunately,
people have passed away on being released by the hospital
before in Hillcrest. So they release these folks and I

(02:42:30):
guess they often give them a bus pass or they
pay for a taxi. In this case, they paid for
this person's taxi. They asked for a taxi to the border.
The command of English was pretty limited, so they asked
for a taxi to the border. They were taken to
like the formal border crossing at Seni Shudur, which is
a mile and a half east of where we were.
And then they walked down the dirt road to where

(02:42:51):
we were. But obviously because there was a fence in
between us and the people being quite detained, then they
weren't able to access that area, right. So that leaves
them in a conundrum, right that they're now in the
United States without without any status, they were able to

(02:43:11):
want Body of Troll agent advise them to return to Mexico.
Obviously that would constitute an entry to Mexico in between
ports of entry. Right, you'd be illegally entering Mexico. It's
not Bord of Patrol's job to enforce Mexican laws. But
that person was in the United States and presented a
claim for asylum.

Speaker 3 (02:43:28):
Right.

Speaker 13 (02:43:29):
They had a cell phone and they were using Google Translate,
and they literally I could see it. It was like,
I'm afraid to go back to my country. I'm afraid
I will be hurt if I go back there, which
is like a pretty textbook asylum claim.

Speaker 2 (02:43:44):
I would like to claim asylum.

Speaker 4 (02:43:46):
Right.

Speaker 13 (02:43:46):
And on making that claim, a Border of Patrol agent
returned them to the area in between offenses, right, which
would suggest that like this is a holding facility to
Border Patrol for people. I just want to read the
statement that Border Patrol made to me this morning. This

(02:44:07):
was like a couple of hours to one recording this,
recording this on Tuesday. CBP has built and retrofited facilities
along the Southwest border to enhance our capabilities in this regard.
CBP has also significantly increased the number of medical personnel
along the Southwest border and those providing other wrap around services,
all to better support ensuring getting people appropriate care as
quickly as possible. Border Patrol has prioritized the quick transportation

(02:44:30):
of migrants encountered in this environment, which is partially dangerous,
particularly dangerous uring current weather conditions, to border patrol facilities
where individuals can see medical care, food, and water. It
is important to note that migrants who are between the
border barriers are not in border patrol custody and are
at liberty to return to Mexico if they desire. We
have some audio of border patrol addressing the migratine between defenses.

(02:44:52):
So Daniel's going to drop in right after this.

Speaker 15 (02:45:04):
Bracelet listen. We take as soon as we can. Well,
so there's too many of you.

Speaker 2 (02:45:14):
We can't do this fast.

Speaker 15 (02:45:17):
Why sit here and talk to you the last time
we have to take people we're not designed to take
hundreds of people working as first as we can be patient.

Speaker 3 (02:45:28):
And I can tell you.

Speaker 13 (02:45:31):
This, they're shouting at them. They're shouting at them in English.
They're not really giving any clue. So the people obviously
have questions. Right they've entered, lots of them have been
given bracelets when he's talking about the bracelets, and people
will have heard that in the intro to that they
were taking people with white bracelets. Those have a day,
right the day that you entered, so like it might

(02:45:51):
say Monday or Sunday or today. Obviously it's Tuesday, so
they would get a bracelet which has a color and
a day, and they proscess people in order of priority.
The people who arrived on Monday. First sale process on
accompanied miners. I didn't see any obviously, some eighteen year
old people. It could be hard to tell how exactly

(02:46:13):
old they are, but seventeen whatever, But I didn't see
any people that young on their own. After that, they
will process single mothers with children, sat a few of those,
quite a few of those. After that, they will process
like a family, which they defined to consist of a
man or women and children. After that, they will process

(02:46:34):
men on their own. I guess women on their own,
then men on their own. They had initially separated people.
They had people just like they had last time, right
in like families and those with children, and then single
men were somewhere else. But it seemed like people were
able to come to travel in between the fences down
to the place where I was, because that was the
only place that they were able to access services, right,

(02:46:56):
And I guess the claim of border patrollers that these
people could go back to Mexico. So I'm not sure
how because obviously that they're in between these thirty foot
walls right right, you could go around the end.

Speaker 2 (02:47:09):
That's how people come north.

Speaker 13 (02:47:11):
But that's quite a hike, especially if you haven't got
any water and food and stuff. So yeah, it's this
is what they've claimed. It's worth noting that like Border Patrol,
a number of representative from the Hispanic Caucus like requested
Border Patrol clarify this after what happened in May, and

(02:47:32):
their letter they noted that the conditions violate agency guidelines
for detention, which they do, and that Border Patrol isn't
supposed to hold people in its own custody for more
than seventy two hours, which some people were held for
longer than that in May, and CBP responded, I'll just
read it out. The individuals in question had not made
contact with US Border Patrol personnel and were not constrained
from further movement. At the time of this incident, the

(02:47:54):
US Border Patrol San Diego sector facilities were experiencing capacity
issues and some transportation challenges which have thinks been remediated.
Border Patrol agents encountered and apprehended these migrants as soon
as there's operationally feasible to do so. Again, like they
were dropped off in May by Border Patrol vehicles in
the place where they were being detained, And it's simply

(02:48:15):
not factually correct to suggest that they had not come
into contact with Border Patrol.

Speaker 2 (02:48:21):
I have video of it. I've published video over on Twitter,
We've used audio of it on the podcast. I think
it's just not true. So Border Patrol.

Speaker 13 (02:48:30):
Essentially are claiming that this isn't happening when it continues
to happen, right, and this time they've taken that to
it's like they've already doubled down on that status. I
guess because they're not providing any services, which is probably
a good time for us to hear from some products

(02:48:50):
and services. Oh yeah, fucking magic. Look at that taking
a factory lap. I'm quitting now, gust again. I enjoy
these adverts.

Speaker 2 (02:49:03):
Yeah it's me, I'm back. Everyone else is still here too.

Speaker 13 (02:49:06):
Now we're talking about the mutual aid response to what's
happening at the border, right And as I said, a
border patrol arn't providing anything.

Speaker 2 (02:49:14):
And as I said, at least.

Speaker 13 (02:49:15):
When I left, I left after it got dark, quite
a long time after it got dark last night. It
was there for probably seven six or seven hours, and
I saw more and more people arriving in that time,
and it was a really wide dispersed group of people.
I would say maybe the majority was Spanish speaking, but
a lot of people with Vietnamese. I was speaking to
some Francophone African people at various nationalities right before I left,

(02:49:40):
Like I said, lots of people from Tadjikastan, Azbekistan, as Abijan,
places like that. Those people were pretty prominent. So it's
fairly hard for volunteers to communicate with all of them.
And they don't have any information right about what's happening
to them. Can they expect to be separated? In some
cases they can I can they expect how long can

(02:50:01):
they expect to be there?

Speaker 2 (02:50:02):
We don't really know, right.

Speaker 13 (02:50:04):
I heard one Border Patrol agent saying that some of
the people who arrived on Monday could expect to be
taken out maybe by Wednesday, So that's at least two
hours two days, right. So all of the services they're
being provided, they're being provided through mutual aid right now,
which is exactly the same thing that happened last time.
Right Sometimes, Border Patrol last time gave them a granola bar.

(02:50:27):
We haven't come back with their granola bars this time.
And I think it's really worth us like taking a
moment to consider the scale of what like two hundred
people is not that many people, but it was more
than two thousand people in May, and that was provided
for by mutual aid. And I think it's a really
good like getting off point for maybe us to have

(02:50:48):
a talk here about how we do mutual aid, because
the only thing that enabled like little babies to have
like a blanket is some one messaging someone else on
signal and being like, hey, this is happening again.

Speaker 2 (02:51:05):
Do you have stuff? Can you come down?

Speaker 13 (02:51:06):
And someone who I don't know, weeks ago I guess
was like, Oh, these people are doing nice things, let
me send them some money, because without that, those people
would just be sleeping in the in the in the dust.
I think it's really it's it's admirable, I think, And
it's something that like, I don't know how to say this,

(02:51:26):
that we should take into consideration when we're discussing things
like religion and then like doing discourse, and like it
could be really easy to get like into a like
full readit atheist mode.

Speaker 2 (02:51:36):
I'm not a person who believes in religion particularly, but like.

Speaker 13 (02:51:41):
The only people who are helping at some point are
people who are at least part of religious organizations.

Speaker 1 (02:51:48):
Look, I think that the perfectly consistent stance to have
is that like, if someone is showing up and providing
people with necessary assistance and not not asking for anything
in return, including the ability to prostlytize, then I don't
give a shit what right, Like, I don't care if

(02:52:10):
they're from a church. I don't care if it's like
you know, some week, like, as long as they are
showing up and helping people in desperate need and not
demanding some sort of something from them, including like you
know them listen to a spiel. I don't really you know,
it could be a church. Who gives a fuck, right, like,
I'm glad they're there, you know, yeah, totally, it can

(02:52:30):
be a church. There were mosques there last time. I'm
sure that they were like synagogues, and yeah, fucking kudos
to those people, right, yeah, you know, like that's good,
glad they're there.

Speaker 13 (02:52:41):
Yeah, those Yeah, those people are doing anarchism too, even
if they wouldn't call it that or whatever. Like, you know,
the more we can create networks that look after each
other without trying to control each other, then the better
of a place we make the world. And that's what
those people are doing, and we should all celebrate that
and support them however we can. And I guess so

(02:53:03):
as of today, there are still people there, and they
still seem to be putting people in there. I think
it's not supposed to be too hot this week, like
we had triple digit days last week. I think over
the weekend was pretty hot.

Speaker 6 (02:53:17):
Yeah it was.

Speaker 13 (02:53:18):
It was very hot of the weekend. So like the
possibility for this to get much worse is still there, right,
the possibility for people to get the person I spoke
to you who had to go to hospital, had become dehydrated,
Like that's how they needed because you don't when people
were when we first at least when I first got there,
people were very hungry and very thirsty and like really

(02:53:40):
desperate for a drink of water because often they'd come
from some of those other holding areas and like walked
down because this was the only place where they could
access stuff. So like, yeah, I guess the potential for
this to turn into something as sad and completely unnecessary
as what happened May is there again.

Speaker 14 (02:54:02):
Yeah, so you mentioned that there's no shade, like no
shaded areas, So when it's triple digits, like there are
kids and babies and everyone's outside, Yes, that is just
I mean, it's terrible regardless, but like that in particular,
that's like brutal.

Speaker 13 (02:54:17):
Yeah, I mean I think I've shared these pictures with
you guys before, but like in Hacumber in May, people
were making little kind of a frames and lean to's
and out of osuitillos and cacti and stuff just trying
to get out of it. It was very hot then
out there.

Speaker 2 (02:54:34):
I mean the photos you.

Speaker 14 (02:54:35):
Sat recently, there's like a there's a photo you sat
with the child's hand, like coming out of the the fence.

Speaker 2 (02:54:42):
That have made me emotional.

Speaker 13 (02:54:44):
Yeah, it makes me emotional, honestly. Like I think I've
said this before, like in interviews, and I did an
interview with Roy Pecktrest about this, but like I would
rather go somewhere dangerous and have dangerous things happen, and
then see a little kid have to be cold, not
be able to help them, or like just be sad,
like it's not a fun place for children, And that

(02:55:06):
fucks me up in a way that like.

Speaker 2 (02:55:08):
That's yeah, I would.

Speaker 1 (02:55:10):
I would so much rather be like physically uncomfortable or
in danger than like be in a perfectly safe place
where you're watching kids suffer.

Speaker 2 (02:55:19):
Like that's the rough thing.

Speaker 1 (02:55:20):
I've been to a lot of refugee camps, and it's
always like, you know, it's weird because I've also seen
a lot of kids like in active combat zones. And
don't take the wrong thing out of this, but like
the the kids who have been stuck in a camp
with like no chance of ever getting out seem like

(02:55:43):
more depressed in a lot of ways than the kids
who every day you know they're they're in you know,
part of the city, even though like the city is
a dangerous place to be. They they're they're moving around,
they're usually doing stuff. Obviously it's a much more worse
situation in a lot of ways. But like the degree
to which being in this limbo messes with their heads

(02:56:05):
and depresses them and traumatizes them is And again I'm
not saying like it's better for kids to be in
an act of war zone, but like that is trauma
as well, and I think in a lot of ways
an equivalent trauma. Even though the danger to their body
is less, the trauma they face being stuck in a
place and not having any idea what the future is

(02:56:27):
and not having any ability to influence it. Really right
being you know, these kids up at this fence are
totally they have no control over their future or their lives.

Speaker 13 (02:56:35):
Really, I think that's the really like it strips people
of their agency, which is a really degrading thing to do.

Speaker 3 (02:56:43):
Right.

Speaker 13 (02:56:43):
You're forcing these people they can do everything right. That
person presented every perfect affirmative asylum claiming you know, and
yeah it doesn't matter. And I think that's very hard,
especially I imagine it's very difficult. I'm not a parent,
but I imagine that, Like if you are a parent's dad, yeah,
you know, you just want your kids to have a

(02:57:05):
safe place to grow up. And like, I don't know,
it's the first time I ever realized that I was
having a trauma response, and it was not a good one.
Was in twenty eighteen with the migrant caravan, when like
I had been there was one little child where I
speak about a lot, but like, she was obsessed with
my hair. If people haven't seen paces of me have

(02:57:25):
long hair, and like wanted to braid my hair every
time I went there. And so she'd come and she'd
sit on my shoulders and I would just do shit,
and she would braid my hair while I was you know,
handing out water bottles or you know.

Speaker 2 (02:57:37):
Talking to people, doing what I could do.

Speaker 13 (02:57:39):
And like I saw that girl every day for months, right,
And then I remember once coming back to a Christmas
party and just wanting to fucking scream at everyone. It's
a juxtaposition from being seeing this little kid like deprived
of so many things that chord should have warmth and
shelter and good food and a safe place to be,
and then going home, you know, twenty it drive across

(02:58:01):
the border drive home and see people just like going
about their lives. It's it's a really challenging yeah, duality.
We can't stop it, right, Like it's not in our
power to stop this, but like, and it is in
our power. One of the things I hate people being
like it's like welcome to America. Like it's a pretty
fucked up way to be welcome to America, right, But like, like,

(02:58:25):
I'm an immigrant. My my arrival here was very different,
Like Sharin, you came here when you were younger, right,
I was.

Speaker 14 (02:58:33):
I didn't immigrate myself. I was born here a month old,
moved back from my parents, immigrated.

Speaker 4 (02:58:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:58:38):
So you can be president, that's important.

Speaker 14 (02:58:40):
Oh yes, I can be president.

Speaker 2 (02:58:42):
You can be president, but not James, which is which
is good? Which is good?

Speaker 4 (02:58:46):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (02:58:48):
Yeah, in general that is my goal for you, James. Yeah,
I can see. I'd really crush it in that round.
I do love a good law Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:59:00):
Charene can take out Ted Cruz who you can. You
can be Charene's John Mitchell. Wow, it's a fun little
water gate ya for every I will be hiding Karen's
secret meetings.

Speaker 2 (02:59:14):
I'm hoping for Haldoman myself. That's the Oh, that's the
guy to be.

Speaker 13 (02:59:18):
Yeah, I want to go back for like further than that,
you know, like when presidents were chads and like Roosevelt
got shot five times. I can see Scharene having that
kind of energy. Sure, yeah, we're all in on Charen
maybe best too, Yeah, don't choose Serene.

Speaker 2 (02:59:38):
A book was enough for Teddy Roosevelt people. It's changed.

Speaker 13 (02:59:44):
Return no jokes aside, Like I came to America very
differently from this, and like, uh, I recently became a
citizen after a long time, and like you always feel
very precarious when you live here and you're not, so
I just want Like one thing that I noticed was
that so many of the folks down there at one point,

(03:00:06):
all of us one point I don't know, were also
people who had come here themselves and like had different
stories and we talked about. Like another thing I think
is really important, actually it's like just because people are
in a shitty situation doesn't mean that they are not
like people. Like sometimes it can be really easy to
be like bottle of water, by bottle of water, hego,
bottle of water, chairs, like let's want to fucking talk

(03:00:26):
to you, and like how is your day, or like
what's your favorite football team?

Speaker 2 (03:00:30):
Like like that can be a really valuable way of.

Speaker 13 (03:00:34):
Being like, look, I understand that the government is treating
you like shit right now, and that's not with my consent,
Like I are.

Speaker 14 (03:00:43):
Human connection because they aren't treated like humans. So it's
like nice to remember that's like, oh, I'm.

Speaker 13 (03:00:49):
Like yeah totally, someone seeing me, yes exactly, and just
being like we're in community, like we are here to
do whatever we can to make this a little bit
less fucking barbaric. Like I always think I should buy
like soft toys for the kids. I've spent a lot
of money on soft toys for kids over the years.
But remember one time we cleared out at Costco in Tiuan,

(03:01:09):
Like I had them morning the bed of a pickup
truck and they were like trying to fly out as
we drove down the freeway.

Speaker 4 (03:01:14):
It was a good time.

Speaker 13 (03:01:16):
But yeah, it's I think that common humanity is super
important if people have language skills and they want to help,
Like there are always organizations to help migrants, so American
Friends Service Committee is a really good one. I don't
think they would care if you were not a person
of faith. I think lots of the people helping out
with them are not They're just nice people.

Speaker 14 (03:01:37):
So there are so many languages apparently that need translating,
Like it's not just Spanish. I think a lot of
people assume it would just be like I don't know Spanish,
I'm not going to go. But so many other languages
that would be helpful.

Speaker 13 (03:01:48):
Yeah, Like I speak French, and I honestly spent as
much time at the board of speaking French as Spanish.
I have like passable communication in Haitian creole, and they
can sort of if some people speak like more formal French,
who a Haitian, so I can speak to them, But yeah,
I don't speak Taiji, ko Uzbek or Russian or Vietnamese,

(03:02:08):
so like, yeah, those people are therefore it's harder for
them to access solidarity right and to talk to people
and to be seen, Like we can try our best
with cell phone apps. The person who had been taken
to a hospital was Vietnamese and was just doing a
star Wark job of like obviously they were to the

(03:02:30):
north of the border, so among the volunteers basically, and
we were using our phones to talk and they were
helping us distribute shit right, and then helping explain to
the Vietnamese people, hey, like you have to be in
this line if you want this, at this line if
you want that, and like, so that was nice, and
it's always like great to see like people empowered by

(03:02:50):
that process, Like they're not just like asking for stuff,
they're also helping get other people stuff, and I think
that that helps both parties. So like this is means
of like I guess like people call mutilated solidarity not charity,
which I think that illustrates really well. You know, like
all these people are there to be in solidarity with
people who they consider to be members of their community,

(03:03:10):
not not to like gain some carmic reward or whatever
like people, And I think that's a really laudable thing.
It's something we should all participate in if we can.
I understand that everyone's near the border, but like, yeah,
we can't change this that we're all supposed to vote
for Joe Biden because he wouldn't be a piece of
shit to migrants, and he's been a complete piece of
shit to migrants for the entirety of his time in office,

(03:03:33):
and I sincerely believe he will be a piece of
shit to migrants if he is elected again. So you
can't fucking change this by voting for someone.

Speaker 2 (03:03:44):
I wish you could.

Speaker 13 (03:03:45):
I wish it was that easy, but like I sadly,
it requires your active participation. And yeah, I'm just constantly
impressed by people who will. Like the people from Free
Shiit Collective, they bought their entire family right them a message.
They were like, yeah, we're on our way, what do
you need blankets? Okay, we have like one hundred blankets

(03:04:07):
and a generator. And within an hour at least some
of those people, I had a warmer place to sleep.
Right before that, I was giving out the blankets I
had for camping in my truck. But I have two
sleeping bags in my truck.

Speaker 2 (03:04:19):
It's not enough.

Speaker 13 (03:04:20):
So yeah, I think that's something we can all do
in our own communities. But right now, again, I guess
Biden's administration are back on the bullshit at the border,
and it's.

Speaker 2 (03:04:31):
Important that people just pay attention to it.

Speaker 13 (03:04:34):
Right I guess you could write your Congress people, but
they didn't do shit last time, they won't do shit
this time. But people can show sort of diarity in
any way or lend their language skills. I think now
it's a really important time to do that.

Speaker 14 (03:04:48):
Yeah, it's SIT's frustrating because the border in general just
becomes like a political talking point, right, like Biden uses
it for his benefit and then it's like I'll pick
it up when I needed to get Yeah, whatever it is,
it's pretty infuriating.

Speaker 2 (03:05:03):
It's fucking not.

Speaker 13 (03:05:04):
Yeah, it's incredibly infuriating for me to see like a
guarantee you, I was stand there yesterday when no other
media folks will be there today. Folks who haven't been
there since May will roll up again, right, who haven't
covered the border, who don't have a working knowledge of
like what's happened since Title forty two, which is the
apprehensions have dropped, by the way, like travel across the

(03:05:25):
border has got a lot lower since Title forty two,
which is what we were told that to opposite of
what every op ed told us was going to happen,
because people maybe should not be righting about the border
when they live in DC.

Speaker 2 (03:05:36):
Or New York.

Speaker 13 (03:05:37):
But yeah, Biden will come back to the border next
time he gets attacked by Republicans on boarder stuff. And
until then, like these people will be treated as if
they're numbers or if they don't matter, and like each
of them has a story and a reason for being here,
and they're not just numbers, they're all people. And every

(03:05:59):
time someone dies trying to come to this country to
be safe, it's a tragedy, and it's a preventable tragedy.
And it's one that the Democrats are just as complicit
as Republicans in. Yeah, you know, we've spoken a lot
about groups you can you can go to, right, Like
we spoke about border Kindness, we spoke about Borderlands Relief Collective.

(03:06:20):
Like there are a million and one ways to help.
I won't detail them all now, but yeah, it's something
that like we can't erase the Like I feel genuinely
ashamed every time I'm down there, you know, to be
American now. But it's just hard when people are like, hey,
what's going to happen, you have to be like, well,
we don't know, but like you might be separated from

(03:06:41):
your family, you might be detained. They're probably going to
take most of your clothes. They might take your belt off.
You know, you can wear one jacket, one shirt, your pants,
and your shoes. They might take your shoelaces and venues
go into the fucking abyss of processing.

Speaker 11 (03:06:53):
Right.

Speaker 13 (03:06:54):
There might be years till you get your core date
and you might not have a right to work until then.
But it might cost you twelve grand to get a
lawyer to represent you. How do you get that money?

Speaker 2 (03:07:03):
Fucked you?

Speaker 13 (03:07:03):
I know, you know, And yeah it's deep. I feel
really ashamed, but yeah, all we can do is just
try and help however we can.

Speaker 2 (03:07:13):
Yeah, yeah, all right, Yeah, sorry that was really depressing,
was that? No, No, it's good.

Speaker 14 (03:07:23):
I really admire that instead of like kind of wallowing
in the shame, You're like, I actually want to do
something and it's okay that I feel shame.

Speaker 2 (03:07:30):
That's valid.

Speaker 14 (03:07:31):
It's both things can be true. I can be helpful
and I can also have perspective on it.

Speaker 13 (03:07:36):
So yeah, yeah it helps to help helps me. It
helps other people to feel active, not like acted upon.
And that's why folks on who are migrants want to
also participate in migrant aid right, like even folks are
in between the war right now, like organizing that the
phone charging queue because it helps to not just feel
acted upon and remove the agency.

Speaker 2 (03:07:58):
Yeah, so yeah, do you.

Speaker 13 (03:08:01):
Mutual aid if you can?

Speaker 10 (03:08:03):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (03:08:04):
Be nice? Yeah, be nice. Buck the border patrol.

Speaker 13 (03:08:08):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 2 (03:08:09):
I think that that more or less covers it.

Speaker 13 (03:08:11):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's our message, that Sharin's
presidential slogan.

Speaker 14 (03:08:16):
Yes, that's my campaign.

Speaker 2 (03:08:21):
I'll work on that.

Speaker 6 (03:08:21):
Okay, yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:08:23):
Five, it's it's another union episode of Vick had happen
here in the podcast where we do a lot of things,

(03:08:46):
but one of one of which is talking about unions,
one of which is not doing great intros, it's me
and Mia Wong and today I'm here to talk about
a union and a strike and a bunch of other stuff.
And with me to talk about this is Tyler Fellini,
he was an organizer with Portland Jobs with Justice and
also a former New Seasons worker. And Alex Gage, who
was an organizer in store rep for the New Season's

(03:09:08):
labor union shop in ourber Lodge. Yeah both YouTube, Welcome
to the show. Yeah, thanks for having us, happy to
be here. Yeah, I'm glad, glad to talk with you too.
So I guess before we get into the sort of
current stuff, I wanted to talk a bit about how
how the certain New Seasons union was formed and you

(03:09:28):
know what that sort of process looked like and how
it's been going since then.

Speaker 6 (03:09:34):
Yeah, I can speak to that.

Speaker 16 (03:09:36):
So the initial unionizing effort started at the store that
I was working at, seven Corners, and we actually the
first conversation we had was April first, the same day
that Amazon labor union went public and won their electional
so there's like a really inspiring moment for us. That

(03:09:56):
spurred a conversation on the shop floor with a couple coworkers,
which quickly escalated to six of us meeting in a
nearby co workers backyard. We talked about the issues, and
we were all hitting the same things, you know, Like
we were all upset with the tenants policy, the way
that New Seasons was treating us and had been treating
us during COVID. We're also upset with our pay, which

(03:10:17):
is obscene and does not keep up with the cost
of living in Portland, organ which is a very expensive city.
So and we were also really upset with the healthcare
that we have offered and how it's kind of deteriorated
over the years, especially for New Seasons as a company
that has a lot of people who've been there for
years and so there were a lot of people who've
seen just the downward decline. So those early meetings went

(03:10:39):
really well. We talked to coworkers on the floor discreetly
and everybody was resonating with what we were saying. We
made a lot of progress really fast, and then we
had a meeting at a local bar here in Portland,
Workers Tap, which huge shoutout of them. They are an
amazing space for a lot of burgeoning independent unions to

(03:11:01):
have some of their early meetings. So we met there
with more members at our store, the Seven Corners location,
and I think we had like thirty people there, which
is a huge turnout for a.

Speaker 6 (03:11:10):
First showing of a meeting.

Speaker 4 (03:11:12):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 16 (03:11:13):
And then from there we moved pretty fast to getting
cards signed for showing of interest, and so in less
than two months we were actually filing our petition with
the NLRB, which is unheard of.

Speaker 2 (03:11:26):
Yeah, that's amazing, especially for a grocery store union. That
is wild.

Speaker 10 (03:11:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (03:11:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 16 (03:11:33):
As soon as we went public, workers at all these
other stores reached out to us. Our Instagram blew up.
People were excited but wanted to figure out how to
do it at their store. So we were kind of
simultaneously trying to balance the plates of like keeping our
store going and also helping other stores go and you know,
by the end of the summer we rolled into we
had our election, I want to say in September, and

(03:11:55):
by the end of the summer there were multiple stores
that had gone public and announced.

Speaker 6 (03:11:59):
And here we are.

Speaker 16 (03:11:59):
You know, it's barely been a year since our first
election win. It's barely been a year since then, and
we have over nine hundred members, almost a thousand members
in this very new union.

Speaker 2 (03:12:10):
That's incredible. That gets into another thing I'm interested about,
which is Portland's the city that has been in the
last I mean, I would say probably the last five years,
but especially in like the last couple of years, it's
been really really active in terms of in terms of
union organizing, in terms of sort of especially especially independent unions,
there's been an enormous number of them. The actual number

(03:12:33):
of workers being organized is really high. And yeah, I
mean you talked about having like having this bar as
a sort of space you could do meetings. Has there
been any other stuff, I mean, from from other independent unions,
from other I mean, just from the fact that there's
so many like things happening that have like changed the
dynamics of how these union organization drives have been going.

Speaker 16 (03:12:55):
Yeah, So early on, you know, we were weighing our
options as far as like did we want to join
an existing union or go independent?

Speaker 6 (03:13:04):
Like what did we want to do there?

Speaker 16 (03:13:05):
And a lot of that information is hard to find
if you don't know the language that you're looking for,
it's not really accessible to the average worker. But we
found a lot of solidarity in folks who had been
involved in other independent union efforts. Specifically, we met with
Mark and Luis at a Burgerville workers union. They offered
a top Yeah, they were great. They were some of

(03:13:27):
the early folks to reach out and help us. We
were also able to talk to some of the folks
at ILW Local five that represents palasworkers and many others
and get some support there. Portland is definitely a labor town,
uh And the solidarity that we felt kind of across
the board was great, you know, especially like early on
when we had a lot of questions and we didn't

(03:13:49):
have any answers and we didn't have many resources to
you know, hire a lawyer and ask them.

Speaker 2 (03:13:54):
Uh. So I want I wanted to go back a
little bit to talk about sort of the influence of
the sort of influence of the news about the Amazon
labor union going wide and how that sort of worked.
Have you seen a sort of similar thing with other
like not just sort of not not just New Seasons shops,

(03:14:18):
but have you seen other shops that sort of like
decided to start organizing after y'all came out.

Speaker 16 (03:14:23):
I think that there is a general energy among the
rank and file, right that some of the old ways
that unions are organizing were not the most representative of
the workers, which is in part you know, the eighties, right,
and so kind of why we've seen sort of union
representation stagnant. But we're seeing a major shift, right. We've

(03:14:45):
got a lot of educated workers doing low wage jobs,
which that condition existed in the nineteen thirties and led
to a major explosion in militant unions. So I think
there's a major parallel there, and it's not just Amazon
liber unions. Also, you know the Starbucks workers know campaign
it's huge, right, and those are workers who service workers,
restaurant workers historically have been left out of labor or underrepresented,

(03:15:09):
similar to healthcare workers and just care workers generally, And
that I think is kind of the stereotype of like
the working class as like a trad white guy in
a factory and we're seeing that severely upended right now,
which is really exciting.

Speaker 2 (03:15:24):
Yeah, but that's that's a That's another dynamic I think
is really is really interesting, particularly in Portland, is that
it seems to be a lot of independent unions. And
it seems to be I think partially because even in
the midst of the fact that like very clearly people
want to organize, there's been a lot of conservatism on
the part of the sort of like larger distant unions.

(03:15:45):
You don't really want to like throw an enormous amount
of money into these organizing drives, which means, you know,
if if the stuff is going to happen, it's it's
it's the independent unions. And yeah, I don't know, like
I I think I think your point about sort of
I think your point about the sort of both both
the highly educated workers thing and the way that you know,

(03:16:08):
sort of what's constitutionally considered a worker and what unions
are willing to sort of throw money at or tied together.
Because yeah, I mean, you know, like the shops that
you're working in, the shops are getting organized just aren't
the kind of thing that anyone's been organizing for like ever,
it's very at least not since like the eighties.

Speaker 10 (03:16:29):
Yeah, and I think it makes sense why they don't organize.
It's freaking hard. It's a lot of work, and there's
a lot of turnover, and you don't see those same faces.
That's why we can get from having our first meeting
to filing for election in two months, because if it
doesn't happen in two months, it's never going to happen.

(03:16:52):
And we get it done, we get it done fast,
and then we see all these other like as a
grocery store, we get deliveries from Bigger Union, you know,
drivers and such, and we've seen what's happened with their
campaigns where if they're not like totally invested, they can

(03:17:13):
get decertified within a matter of weeks. But we haven't
had any of that yet.

Speaker 2 (03:17:20):
Yeah, which is really impressive. And you know, that's another
thing I'm interested. I've been asking a lot of people
because turnover is one of the big things that's been
sort of you know, it's it's been the wall that
the existing units hit and we're like, this is too hard,
We're going to go do something else. And I've been
I'm wondering how y'all have been dealing with the turnover problem,

(03:17:41):
because it's I mean, it is definitely something that's difficult
to deal with, but you know, it's it's not something
that makes it impossible. It's just hard, and I'm yeah,
I'm interested in what your sort of strategies to manage.

Speaker 4 (03:17:55):
It have been.

Speaker 2 (03:17:57):
I think it's a matter of passion.

Speaker 10 (03:17:58):
I think Tyler is a great example, like is no
longer a member, but sees this as like the way
that we can move our society forward in general, Like
the labor struggle is the struggle, Like there's no war,
black class war. If we don't do this, what are
we doing here? So wait, we stick around and we're

(03:18:21):
doing this for free. We're not getting paid for it.
We're doing it because it's the right thing to do.

Speaker 16 (03:18:29):
When our lodge in Grant Park had their walkouts on
Labor Day weekend, there was a customer at Grant Park
who called out to us that, you know, we should
just go open up our own workers co op, And
my response to him was that, you know, if we leave,
there's just another batch of workers that are going to
go through these conditions. Like the goal is not that
like I wanted to be great for me, like I
don't even work in new seasons anymore. I wanted to

(03:18:49):
be great for my former coworkers who are still there,
and for the people that I don't know who are
going to come behind them.

Speaker 6 (03:18:53):
And that's that's how you get around the high.

Speaker 16 (03:18:56):
Turn over pieces like the passion and dedication and I
have to make conditions better for the people coming after you,
which is really antagonistic to the way capitalism wants us
to be very individual like oriented, right, Like we just
care about ourselves and our day to day. But that's
the really great thing with like the worker power, right,
is that you know, collectively we are so much stronger.

(03:19:18):
Collectively we can actually stand up to the boss and win, right,
And and that means just reorienting how we think about
the world, right, Like, like this job sucks.

Speaker 6 (03:19:26):
How can I make this job better? I can just
quit and go get a better job.

Speaker 16 (03:19:29):
But if I change this job, then the people who
are still here also get better working conditions.

Speaker 2 (03:19:36):
Yeah, And I think that there's kind of there's there's
a kind of flip side of that too, right, which
is that you know, even if you like you know,
like turnover just is inevitable to some extent, even even
if you have people who like want to stay and fight, right, like,
people are just going to have to leave. But on
the other hand, you know, if you if you're if
you're in a unionized workplace, and if you're pecifically if
you're if you're in if you're in a union that

(03:19:57):
has the sort of militant culture, what you're doing is
you're you know, you're changing the actual like class itself,
right because you know, like now now you're worker who
like you know, I don't know, is moving to Arizona
or something. Right, they're they're they are now also much
more built and have have this sort of experience of
organizing that they made that they may not have had before.
And this, you know, it's like you're the any any

(03:20:19):
any individual movement you're doing in one place is building
up the entire class.

Speaker 10 (03:20:25):
Yeah, and we can see that we've like been attracting
people who are interested and becoming involved in a movement.
And you know, whether they just graduated from college or
they had some sort of distant relative who was in
a union, they come to new seasons thinking, oh, I

(03:20:45):
want to get in on the beginning of this, and
we've seen like a big push of that recently, and
people who leave they want to go, you know, organize
their next workplace, you know, regardless if they were fired
or whatever.

Speaker 16 (03:21:00):
They they want to.

Speaker 6 (03:21:02):
Keep it going. So and I think to build on
that too.

Speaker 16 (03:21:06):
You know, salting is a practice that traditional unions typically
do to kind of change a workforce. And when you salt,
usually you're paid by the union to go in there,
and so you're getting paid by the employer to be there,
and the union is paying you to organize. But we've
seen a shift now where people are voluntarily salting. Right,
People come like out that to get a job, they
don't need the money motivator. They just want to function

(03:21:28):
up right, They want to change things and like be
antagonistic towards the boss. And I think to me, to
go back to an earlier thing you asked about, like
kind of like why Portland, right, Like, I think one
thing about Portland is people in Portland love a protest, right, Like,
we don't need much of a motivation to go through some.

Speaker 6 (03:21:42):
Rocks at popped, Right, That's kind of in the culture
of Portland.

Speaker 16 (03:21:45):
And so there is this this orientation towards struggle that
does exist, and right now that energy you know, we
we went through the George Floyd uprising and a lot
of energy has been funneled into labor, and it's been
new voices in labor. It's not the same like you know,
ten people now kind of talking. It's all of this
new energy. And for the most part, most of Portland

(03:22:09):
labor is being very accommodating and making room for those
people to get in there and be heard because folks
recognize that they're on their way out right, you know,
Folks in their fifties or sixties, like they're they're towards retirement, right,
and so it's as younger folks coming in that are
going to change.

Speaker 4 (03:22:22):
It, you know.

Speaker 2 (03:22:24):
Yeah, And I think there's an interesting dynamic with this too,
which is that, you know, okay, one of the one
of the sort of conditions of the last sort of
like forty fifty years of capitalism, like is this sort
of high total turnover rates? And also is this, you know,
is this thing where you are, like you as an
individual worker are shifting jobs really really quickly, and that

(03:22:48):
you know, that's in some sense an issue. But that
also means that like I don't know, like if you
have a bunch of people who you know, spent like
spent one hundred days fighting the Feds and you know
still still may like have have developed just like the
sort of bilted hatred of the cops and you know,
I've developed sort of and into capitalist politics. Yeah, you
get more of the sort of salt stuff you're talking about,

(03:23:10):
because like, you know, screw like you know, you're if
you're gonna be working like a ship job anyways, you
might as well like go work one where you're saulting
and starting a union because there's not actually like I
don't know's it's not. It's not it's not like you're
like getting career advancement in the service job, right, And yeah,
I mean that seems to be driving like at least

(03:23:32):
some of the sort of of how this kind of
like how the independent union union organizing in Portland's been moving. Yeah.

Speaker 10 (03:23:41):
I think I'd also like to point out though that
like a lot of people for our union, specifically New
Seasons has always been like the progressive business and you've
always had a reputation of like being a great place
to work. They're really inclusive or whatever. So that's what

(03:24:05):
attracts like a certain crowd of people, and when they
get there and they realize that, like they're getting screwed over,
just like any other place that they've ever been at,
that like fosters this new feeling of like, well, I'm
vulnerable no matter what I do, Like there's no where
I can turn to trust my employer, and how do

(03:24:30):
I preserve what little dignity that I do have at
this workplace? Because generally speaking, like our jobs are pretty
okay minus like the corporate business side of things, like
most people enjoy going to work, maybe, but they they

(03:24:51):
want to enjoy going to work. So having that like
kind of double edged sword has been a cat for
us to just built.

Speaker 6 (03:25:02):
On what Alex said too.

Speaker 16 (03:25:03):
I think it's really interesting that a lot of the
surge in new like independent union stuff has been you know,
new seasons, Starbucks to a degree, Rii, Trader Joe. It's
all these places, these progressive workplaces, right, And what's happened
is that so often we've had interactions with customers where
they go, wow, I assumed that the prices were so

(03:25:24):
high because your wages were high, and really, dude, like
most of us can't afford to live in the city, right,
most of us are using Yeah, and it's just not
it's not true, right, And so you know, it's workers
who get jobs at these progressive places that drank the
similar social kool aid that the customers drink. But assuming
that these businesses have good business practices, and what's happening

(03:25:46):
is that they're just getting greedy, right, This is the
case everywhere.

Speaker 6 (03:25:49):
It just hits a.

Speaker 16 (03:25:50):
Little bit different when your employer pretends your friends and
then stabs you in the back.

Speaker 3 (03:25:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:25:55):
Not all workplaces have this kind of like oh, we're
like progressive sort of vibes. But I feel like businesses
that have that reputation are also more just more vulnerable.
It's not just that like their workers like realize howyocritical
it is. It means that they're It means that they're
more vulnerable to sort of like damage to their reputation
when people find out that, like oh my god, hold on,

(03:26:15):
you're making how much money? Like yeah, and I think, yeah,
I don't know, I'm interested, like how how effective has
that been for you? Sort of like leveraging that.

Speaker 6 (03:26:26):
I think it's been really effective.

Speaker 16 (03:26:27):
I mean, you know, and not just as I think
a really good example of exactly what you're talking about, right,
is the shareholders of Starbucks are holding Howard Schultz accountable
because he is wrecking that company, right. And so with
New Seasons, what it means is that they play a
very sneaky game. They fight us in the back room.
They make sure it's not public facing anything we can
do to attack their public image, like it hurts. I

(03:26:49):
will say too that you know, we're kind of standing
on the shoulders of Burgerville Workers Union here where Burgerville
was built on this reputation of like local friendly, like
we're the alternative to like corporate fast food, and they
had security guards and strikebusters literally fighting with picketers in
the past and it tanked the reputation.

Speaker 2 (03:27:09):
And so New Season's.

Speaker 16 (03:27:10):
Management has clearly looked at what Burgerville management did and
been like, we're not going to do that. It doesn't
stop them from being pitty. They're just they're more polite
when they're pretty to us. They're still just as shitty.

Speaker 2 (03:27:19):
They're just they smile while they stab us in the back. Yeah,
So on the subject just of stebbing us in the back.
So there's been a bunch of stuff going on recently.
I was wondering if you could talk about like the
I don't know, the recent unrest question mark need to
figure out a better way to phrase this.

Speaker 10 (03:27:36):
But yeah, yeah, so yeah, we've been building up. We have,
i mean since day one of bargaining, which started back
in like December or January.

Speaker 6 (03:27:48):
It started in January.

Speaker 10 (03:27:50):
Yeah, So we we've known that eventually it's going to
get to a point where we're going to need to
show some force. So, you know, we go in there
with good faith, and little by little we find out
that the smallest ask is going to be impossible, and

(03:28:12):
we find out that they're going to do whatever they
can get away with every time they can. So they
started with I mean, they did all kinds of things,
but the one catalyst is they changed the attendance policy
for non union.

Speaker 3 (03:28:30):
Workers and non union stores to.

Speaker 10 (03:28:34):
Make it more lenient, which was one of the issues
that we campaigned on was the attendance policy because it's
ridiculous and people get fired all the time. So we
demanded the bargain. They didn't have a response. We brought
it up in bargaining at the bargaining table. They said

(03:28:57):
that they would work on something that we could implement
before we ratify the contract, but they had to put
it through their DEI lens and they had to yeah, yeah,
and you know all the things that corporations say to
delay it and kick the can down the road. So

(03:29:18):
we're Dylan good faith saying like, okay, you know, go ahead.
So then we did a petition where all the stores
individually had people sign a petition. We got hundreds of signatures,
and then we did a march on the boss asking
them to sign this MoU that a memorandum of understanding

(03:29:42):
saying you will give us that same policy. We filed
a ULP saying like this is illegal, it's obvious discrimination,
and then they just kept saying, Okay, we're working on it.
We're working on it, We're working on it.

Speaker 2 (03:30:00):
So they never did.

Speaker 10 (03:30:01):
Then we did a rally and we showed up at
the headquarters with I don't know, probably two hundred of
us hell yeah, and marched up to the office and
chanted and made a scene and told them they have
one more chance to sign the MoU. They didn't sign it.

(03:30:25):
So then we organized the strikes at the two stores
and gave them one more chance to sign the MoU.
They didn't sign it. We already knew they weren't going
to So yeah, we shut down those stores for the
rest of the day at Grant Park and for one
hour at ourbor Lodge.

Speaker 2 (03:30:48):
And it was powerful.

Speaker 14 (03:30:50):
We had a lot of support, a lot of people
showed up.

Speaker 6 (03:30:55):
Yeah, and to build on that too.

Speaker 16 (03:31:00):
You know, there's things coming up that we can't talk
about yet, but I would say that, Alex, do you
want to talk about the practice picketing?

Speaker 6 (03:31:08):
I feel like we could talk about.

Speaker 10 (03:31:09):
That, Okay, so we actually can talk about We've just
filed a ULP, yeah, last night for bad faith bargaining.

Speaker 2 (03:31:18):
Yeahs an unfair labor practice.

Speaker 10 (03:31:20):
Yes, thank you. I get caught up in the jargon.
So we just filed that last night for bad faith
bargaining yep, because they gave us the most ridiculous policy
for attendance. It's basically regressive bargaining, which is totally unfair.

Speaker 2 (03:31:39):
Yeah, do you want to explain what that is?

Speaker 16 (03:31:42):
Basically, the NLRB, the National Labor Relations Board. They oversee
unions and the relationship between unions and employers. They demand
that both sides come in good faith, basically like don't
screw around, don't waste each other's time.

Speaker 6 (03:31:57):
The goal is to move towards some sort of comp and.

Speaker 16 (03:32:00):
An agreement, and regressive bargaining is when you backpedal and
you offer something that is worse than what was offered.
The attendance policy is, in my opinion, definitely worse.

Speaker 6 (03:32:11):
It is no better.

Speaker 16 (03:32:13):
I think it frankly takes the shittiest things of the
past two policies and put them together. So it seems
pretty clear to us that it's regressive. And then we
can argue that New Seasons is not acting in good faith.
They are acting in bad faith, which is illegal according
to the NRB. And so what we are allowed to
do is file an unfair labor practice, which basically, you know,
it doesn't hold a lot of weight materially, however, symbolically

(03:32:37):
it looks really bad. And so again going back to
like Mia, what you were saying about kind of like
their image, right, Like these kind of progressive corporations, they
don't want to look like the bastards they are.

Speaker 6 (03:32:49):
And a ULP makes it pretty clear, Hey, this person's.

Speaker 16 (03:32:51):
Being a jerk, this company is being a jerk. So
the more ulps that we get filed that like, we win.
On the bigger case. We can paint that New seasons
is actually being really unfair to us.

Speaker 3 (03:33:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (03:33:02):
So then based on that, we're getting strike ready. We're
making sure everybody can show up and be ready to
assert our stance. We're not going to just lay back
and let them take over. So we're going to do

(03:33:25):
some practice pickets. And I'm sure even hearing that a lot,
which is great for I mean, and if you want
to bring it back to like the higher turnover rate
and like, you know, the general apathy that you see
in any union, people are just kind of afraid to

(03:33:47):
be active. So we're looking at practice pickets as a
way to get people involved in a really low risk activity.

Speaker 2 (03:33:57):
Can you explain how that works? Yeah, So what we're
going to do.

Speaker 10 (03:34:00):
Is each store will do a picket, but that picket
will not be a strike.

Speaker 3 (03:34:07):
That picket will not.

Speaker 10 (03:34:10):
Encourage shoppers to leave or discourage shopping in any way.
We're not calling for a boycott. We're just simply doing logistically,
what does it look like if we do a picket
at each store in the most peaceful way possible, and

(03:34:30):
then we do that at every store and we kind
of gauge, like, you know, how ready are we.

Speaker 16 (03:34:38):
And by doing that too it's a show of force
to the company, right, Yeah, it's not We're not doing
anything illegal. It's effectively an informational picket. So legally there's
nothing that New Seasons can do to any of the
workers who participate in it.

Speaker 6 (03:34:50):
However, they will absolutely see that we are prepared.

Speaker 16 (03:34:52):
To do it. The team Staris recently did this for ups.
A lot of teachers' unions have done similar things. It's
a really can go a force to kind of leverage
your people power and show the management that you're ready.

Speaker 2 (03:35:06):
Yeah, and it has another it has another effect too,
which is something that you know, the the kind of
basic cultural understanding of you know, what unions are, how
they function, what you need to be doing any given scenario,
like me just physically, how to like do picketts, what
you logistically need to do. That stuff has all sort

(03:35:26):
of faded from like the height of union sort of
culture in like the sixties and seventies, and that's something
that you have to rebuild because you know, and and
and then and this is this is something that's both
both in terms of the people in the union. That
sort of knowledge isituitional knowledge has to be rebuilt, and
it also has to be rebuilt in the public because
people sort of just don't you know, like you support

(03:35:48):
for unions is really high, uh, but people don't understand
exactly what like you know, people, people don't understand exactly
what a union is doing any given time, or like
how it functions and things like that.

Speaker 4 (03:36:01):
And you know, then this is this.

Speaker 2 (03:36:02):
Seems like a really good way to like, you know, like, hey,
this is a picket. This is what happens when there's
a picket. This is an informational picket. We're gonna give
you information. And yes, it seems like a good thing
for building up that kind of culture on both ends.

Speaker 16 (03:36:15):
And it's a really good opportunity to talk to customers
get them involved. That's the thing that's that you know,
New Seasons kind of tagline as the friendliest store in town.
And then the way that they built that, Yeah, the
way that they built that reputation though, was by really
encouraging workers to develop deep relationships with customers. And so

(03:36:35):
we're using that to leverage against the company now and
saying like hey, like you.

Speaker 6 (03:36:39):
Know you like me, like you know me by name,
and I know you by name.

Speaker 16 (03:36:42):
You don't know the CEO by name, like let's talk
Let's talk about like what we're asking for and what
you as a customer can do to support us in
a way that doesn't feel antagonistic. Right, Like like when
we had the when we had the walkouts on Labor
Day weekend, you know, we did a debrief and we're
kind of like, how do we, like, how do we
engage with people where we can hold onto our values

(03:37:03):
and still feel like we're being effective. And Randy, a
worker at our lodge, his solution instead of calling people
who cross the picket line scabs and like you know,
harassing that way, you know, he was like, I just said, like, hey,
I'm disappointed in you, and I think that like like yeah,
like let's just like we're gonna just like if you're
going to cross the picket line, I don't need to
hurl insults at you. I'm just going to guilt trip

(03:37:23):
you and let you know that like I'm disappointed in
you and like you will feel bad as you're shopping.
And I think that like that's sort of how we
can align the progressive values that attracted people to New
Seasons to work there in the first place with how
we do actions while still being militant, right, we don't
want to be soft.

Speaker 6 (03:37:39):
We just got to make sure that like it vibes
with what we're about, you know.

Speaker 2 (03:37:45):
Yeah, and that's that's another you know, I think this
this also gets back to the sort of culture part
of it, which is like, yeah, like rebuilding the standard
of do not cross a picket line is a thing
that has to be done because that's again that's another
thing that has sort of faded. And yeah, like guilt
tripping people is a good way to do it because yeah,
you know, like sort of especially especially sort of like

(03:38:08):
middle and upper middle class progressive people, like really really
there are a lot of their politics is about wanting
to feel good about themselves and you know, make make.

Speaker 10 (03:38:19):
You they can see Yeah, I think if they can
see themselves in us too, they will relate and they
they won't want to go against their own values, which
is our values, because that's the culture of Portland generally speaking.

Speaker 2 (03:38:40):
Did you have anything else that you want to make
sure to get in before we wrap up?

Speaker 10 (03:38:44):
Yeah, we would love to push our gofund me.

Speaker 6 (03:38:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (03:38:48):
That can be found at our website, which is really
hard to find.

Speaker 2 (03:38:53):
Is it a slut or but yeah, you have to
type it in.

Speaker 16 (03:38:58):
You can't just google it.

Speaker 2 (03:39:00):
Okay, well we'll put it. We'll just we'll just put
a link to it in the okay, cool.

Speaker 10 (03:39:04):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 16 (03:39:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (03:39:07):
If anybody you know we're out here being independent union.
We have no money. We're just looking for maybe some
sort of strike fund for those in need when we
are strike ready, and also you know, materials, whatever people
can donate would be amazing.

Speaker 16 (03:39:26):
Final notes I would say too, is that you know
when we started this, I mean, we're an independent union
of grocery workers, right.

Speaker 6 (03:39:34):
We did all of this in our volunteer time.

Speaker 16 (03:39:36):
None of us are lawyers, none of a lot of
us had never been in a union before or had
very limited experience. We build this all from the ground
up with tons of volunteer hours of our own time
after work. And we have gone toe to toe with
Ogle Tree Deacons, who is one of the largest anti
union law firms in the country. That's who New Seasons

(03:39:57):
has retained. We've gone toe to toe with them. We
have a lawyer now who is really graciously kind of
letting us write her in IOU for the time being,
But even before her, we were still able to hold
her own against a major anti union law firm. Right,
there is power in workers coming together collectively. It's not

(03:40:19):
as easy as it should be to find that information,
but it is out there and there are people who
want to share it, and I would say that, like,
for me, the labor movement has been a really empowering
place to come into. You know, I have a lot
of experience with sort of like leftists, like street activism,
but I think that for anybody who wants to be
involved in the struggle and is also like looking for

(03:40:42):
ways to make.

Speaker 6 (03:40:42):
In rigs and develop community like.

Speaker 16 (03:40:45):
Labors where it's at right, I mean, we all work
and to a degree, we all hit our jobs and
have something to complain about, and like that's a commonality
that stretches across the aisle and allows for a lot
of solidarity in a way that the culture war really
doesn't want and really, like you know, it's by design, right,
the capitalists want us fighting against each other, and the

(03:41:07):
labor movement is a way for the working class to
unite because it's it's about class far.

Speaker 2 (03:41:11):
You know, yeah, here here, yeah, and you know this
this should go without saying. I'm going to say it anyways,
you also listener at home can do this too. There
is you know, there there there there. There is nothing
sort of magical or special about the people who do

(03:41:32):
union organizing other than the fact that they decide to
organize a union. So you can do this too. You
can form an independent union and yeah, you can go
hand your bosses a fucking gass and get better, you know,
get better working conditions and get better things for you
and your entire class in the process.

Speaker 6 (03:41:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 16 (03:41:49):
I would say Labor Notes is a great resource for
early information. The Coalition of Independent Unions is on Instagram
and workers from around the country have reached out to
them for advice. You know, on Instagram you can ask
us questions. Reach out to independent unions and ask them questions.
This is a labor movement made up of the workers
for the workers. We want more workers to organize.

Speaker 2 (03:42:11):
Yeah, and I think on that note, Yeah, this has
been Nike to happen here. Go into the world and fight. Yeah,
thank you, thank you so much.

Speaker 1 (03:42:19):
Maya Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every
week from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 2 (03:42:28):
It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 14 (03:42:31):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts,
you can find sources for It could happen here, Updated
monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

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