Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 100

Episode Date: September 16, 2023

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at care.org slash Morocco. 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 going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Okay, you know, I really should have checked the calendar before I did before I tried to do this introduction where I referenced the thing that I'm saying came out last week, but might actually have come out like. No, no, okay, okay, I got it right. I got it right. I should never have doubted myself of it that we didn't tell, we got to the most of the part about what the theory

of inflation that the people at Trange better developed. We got to what it was. What we didn't really talk about was what happened next, which is a very, very interesting set of maneuvers that happened happened where this theory started spreading through a bunch of very disparate academic circles and, you know, sort 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 how how this sort of supply chain theory

inflation like spread through the worlds and all of this very very interesting somewhat bizarre stuff that happened next. We once again have Steve Mann and John Michael Cologne who are co-editors of Strange Metters. Yeah Steve, GMC welcome back to the show. Thanks for having us. Yeah, glad we could have you to 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, it's not easy to 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? Yeah. Like, last year, so last year when the first of these pieces came out, Notes, Torda, 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 e-con stuff on Twitter and 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 served like the people you thought would be super transitory. Or the people who thought it was like purely a monetary phenomenon or something like that. Like having that option. Spark to good conversations. And it eventually led to some writers approaching us who were sort of inspired by those conversations. And particularly, a few of them really wanted to follow up on specific key, like either points from the paper or follow some of the implications as far as 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 along supply chains first, and then through supply chain networks, secondarily. And so it's saying, it's essentially that that's how it propagates. It starts in supply chains. Things like bottlenecks, long production processes have give the price

centers who are people at companies, socially acceptable reasons to eventually if they need to raise prices. But they generally pricing managers refrain from raising prices, unless like every other lever they've pulled essentially has not worked. So people took that theory and wanted to follow up on it. So one author who did that was Alex Vicolo, who approached us and he essentially wanted to do an updated version of the pricing manager survey that we found really helpful in writing those initial pieces. So in my piece, that sort of theory of inflation, I relied upon a wealth of pricing manager surveys that were they asked 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 30s and going into the 90s and 2000s. 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. So you wanna 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 2020s. So are they still concerned about some of the same things? Are they not? Are there innovations in pricing that we should know about? And so Alex McCullough, who's a financial journalist, by trade, he went and interviewed 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 market pricing as kind of their bedrock. And from there, they develop some innovations, such as like so-called dynamic pricing, where they have the, like if you're a larger company such as so-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 with they have like everyday low prices, that type of thing. And if you're a grocery store and one of your competitors is Walmart, sort of on the flip side, you might start developing indexes of prices set by Wal-SmallMart or like one of the other big like behemoth chains, knowing how important they are to the overall supply chain network. And knowing how important they are for the demand for groceries,

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 Walmart, or Costco, or Sam's's Club or who have you? Yeah, and that was something that's I think interesting in terms of like the difference between the way that economists think about sort of price and 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 like the 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 force people, force your like downstream or like upstream suppliers to like sell it to you at lower prices because you have this enormous sort of like, you know, amount of buying power that like, you know, if you're like a smaller thing, you don't necessarily like, you know, like the same company

will charge like another grocery store more for like the same thing because Walmart has an ability to sell it at lower price than if I'm remembering this right I'm getting I'm getting strange looks yeah well it's it's it's important not to mix up two separate things one is Walmart's relationships with suppliers and the other one is relationships with 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 products because Walmart is such a big customer. If you get the Walmart contract and you're a small producer or a medium-sized producer, like you're set, right? Because like, you know, 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 Walmart dictates otherwise, they'll just tell you to to to 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 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's supply the chickens for the chicken McNuggets, 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, 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 vocolo's piece, is the relationship to competitors. So obviously, Walmart's able to keep things cheap all the time in their famous everyday low prices because basically they have economies of scale. There's this notion, I think common sense for 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 be. 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 inputs and less labor. 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 the nice things, right? Through Amazon, warehouses where people aren't allowed to take bathroom breaks or through coercive measures that they can do because they've found a nice little spot in the economy that lots of people are depending on them and they can dictate terms. But whatever it is, 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 this, and they're able to survive, is that they do Walmart's 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, which means that they're basically advertising themselves to customers as the slightly more expensive but more local, you know, more, 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 convenience is they're kind of like justifying, although in the suburbs, the competition is basically just all other all-gopolistic firms on Walmart scale. Like, you know, Wegmans or in Florida, it'll be something like Publix, you know, and that kind of thing. So generally, Vakola was discovering was,

I 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 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 marked up over costs. Or beyond that, some kind of strategic decision being made in pursuit of a certain strategy. But if some studies had verified that, but then other studies refuted it, then you would have a situation like psychology where, you know, the psychologists are always saying,

all human beings really have a next 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 the human beings don't have a neck fetish, you know. And I'm being rude to psychology, but this is a real crisis that happened there called the replication crisis.

Now, friendly, the economists who started this along this track, in his famous book, Post-Kinsey and Price Theory, found 71 pricing studies, and they form a appendix called appendix B in his book which ought to be legendary but it's not because all this stuff is very obscure. The 71 studies from very different like book-like studies 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 Some of them are by like Marxist economists, some of them are by neo classical economists.

Like, and they all converge no matter what the biases of the people involved upon this 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 30s to roughly the 90s. Like, you know, he's talking about the 2020s. 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.

So 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 economist court who wanted 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 that they're the ones who have to prove their case, not the other way around. What's it called when you've got the, I think the presumption of the burden of proof. Thank you. The burden of proof is on their side.

Yeah, and so, something else I think is really interesting from the column pieces that, 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, it's like, okay, so Uber has a couple of things.

One, they don't have, like, the thing that 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 third thing I should really interesting about is that like, that kind of pricing, like, Shane, really a B, they don't make any money, they never make money, they will never make money. And the third thing that's really interesting about it is that that kind of pricing, like, if you have some people who go in ideologically

and are like, we're gonna build an algorithm to like, try to have pricing respond to demand or whatever. It like, it fucking sucks and 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. Most people who have to deal with actual, the normal things that a business do, don't do.

And the only people who do it are the insane tech people who are like, I don't know, I almost want to call it intensely ideological and also assholes and also don't make any money, which is, I don't know, 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 new classical like pricing theory, it sucks and everyone hates them. Yeah. And Vikolu kind of summarizes like the several different pricing procedures that he witnessed and to just say like on both determining your company's costs and determining what market you should have. So the cost plus markup, you need to figure out both of those pieces.

It's anything but automatic. Yeah. It's a very manual process. And even, it goes 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 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 loss leaders and have 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 they buy those and then overall they made a more of a profit because they use some things that negative margin on them. things that have 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 like dynamically price things up and down based upon events like a baseball game or something they're going on in a city so they can get more revenue, that was still a, it was a group of people in a room in a very extremely manual process.

Coding is extremely manual still. And like, liasing with like sales, marketing, finance, people, all at once. Yeah, which you, what's that? 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 the amount of people who want something and the amount of people and the amount of stuff that there is, right?

Which is a lot of different situations. But the specific supply demand price theory that's at the core of neoclassically 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 as sales and like The uh 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. Like if you 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 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 everyday low price of strategy, just keeping prices down in general, so you don't do sales and discounts, or you don't move the dial much. But like, that's a strategic pricing decision that you've chosen to make because you think that it might move the dial in some way, and you experiment it with it and see if it works,

or whatever. That's not the automatic law-like functional relationship that is supposed to exist according to neoclassical theory between supply, demand, and prices. People will say that the algorithm is about supply, demand, but that's not really how it works. It's not the same thing as the theory, right? It's just a pricing 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 what you're producing to be able to get some last-minute sales if you do a discount or something like that. Or, or like Steve was saying, like, you know, there's a there's a game today. So you can do surge pricing because people are going to, you know, that a bunch of people are going to want to get in the game. So you're basically just price-couging 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 mechanism of neoclassical theory and also as Makolo like you know finds out it attempts to do this are very very mixed in their success at best you know

basically people who are trying to do it are like, yeah, maybe it could work and then they try it and nine times at a 10, it doesn't work very well. So they go back to some variation on a cost plus model, you know, or a price leader ship model or something like that. You know, the kinds of methods that lead discusses. Yeah, I mean, the customer goodwill 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.

Absolutely. The only reason they can maybe get away with it has been because they have access to infinite finance. But yeah, I mean's another thing that's interesting. Like, you know, this is just something like a different economic question, but like you do at some point have to ask the question like 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 continue to be headed piles of money by the same seven billionaires that they've conned. And that's like a, 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 Do you have a game? Yeah, well, it's actually very funny that you say this because one of the people that Vocalo talks to is this guy Cohen, um, I can't find his first name right now I don't want to scroll up but um somebody whose last name is Cohen, uh, is quote-unquote more skeptical of the Somebody whose 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 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 willing to. These dynamic models need commonsense judgment attached to them, which is not always necessarily available. Now, this is a very diplomatic statement by somebody who is formerly of Sears Canada. Now, I find this very funny, because there's a kind of subtext here. If a caller doesn't get into it, but Sears Canada, obviously kind of related to Sears, in the 90s, Sears Canada, obviously kind of related to Sears. In the 90s, 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 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 which is true. There's no, there's no free market. It's all a planned economy. You know, which is true. There's no market exchanges in there.

Like, it's all allocations like, okay, we have this goal. So we're going to allocate these workers to this place and bubble blah blah. You know, and Emre and, and, and, you know, anything at 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, bought, and this is kind of like mad scientist experiment done on this like very old American corporation.

But somehow, I guess it was the 90s, you know, people were coked up on this kind of thing, they tried it and it was a catastrophic failure. It's actually generally seen as contributing to the end of sears as a major player in retail. And it's like, so I think that the fact that this person very diplomatically from Sears is like, I mean, this doesn't work. I might be born of more experienced than not. Yeah, okay, we have to go to an ad right before we do that. I want to tell one more insane 90,

like people in the 90s really, really had market brain in a way that's like difficult to understand. Now, you would 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 army joint, she's a staff brought in like a group of economists who were, you know, like you were doing the whole.

Like, how can we make, how can we use the market to make the army run more efficient? And the first repulsal they put on the table is, we're going to have each department, each like, each section, what's the type of technical term? We're gonna have each branch of the military bid for control of who gets control of 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 is kicking them out. And that was the end of the flight. But that was like peak, absolute peak 90s brain of like, these people thought you could solve terrorism by like having futures markets on like a wedded 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 going to now hear ads for. And we're back from these fine products and services. If you're, if the thing you were doing right now is you have your finger on the button. We are about to message Sophie about the fact that we have gold ads again. Like, please don't. Like, please leave Sophie alone. Oh my God. I think we've gotten, we've gotten a little, we've gotten sort of into the weeds of like, as like, the kind of research stuff has been produced. 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 and kinds of sort of work that's been produced out of this? Yeah, so Vakola's piece, I think, was very, very accomplished and it adds to this proud tradition of pricing surveys, like you've been saying. But the piece that I would say ended up having the biggest impact in the sense that it really kind of started getting followed up on by a lot of people, and a kind of a lot of attention, was Tim Demitzio's piece. So 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. Long-gong?

There we go, University of Wallongong, yes. And he's a political economist. He 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 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.

There's a bunch of dissident heterodox schools. And there's a whole bunch of these. And one of them is called the Capital as Power School, which is named after a book called Capital as Power by these two professors called Bickler and Knitzen and it has a lot of things to say about a lot of subjects. So Capitalist Power is a book that says a lot of things 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. That's very heavy stuff. It tends not to have to do what we're going to be talking about, but it informs the perspective that Demetcio comes from. Now Demetcio saw Steve's brilliant essay on the Supply Chain Theory of Inflation was reinspired by it because there are certain affinities between the framework that we're coming from in this kind of research and the capitol's power framework. They don't agree 100% 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, a friend leaves administrative prices theory, 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 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 rate is a price. You know, it's a very important price too, because we should, we should back up for a second and explain when you say the interest rate, you should explain what that is because it's under-explained. Yeah, 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, like of the currency under discussion, that is basically an interest rate 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 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 it's probably just a more nuanced version of this. But that's the basics. 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 cost

just like anyone. One of their principal costs is the rate of interest that they pay on deposits of their customers in order to get them to get new customers in. Like that's one of the main services that they provide is 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 to raise its federal,

it's the federal funds rate, it's a principal policy rate up to what they have now, 5.5% or so, when it was less than 1% only a year ago. In order to compete with all of the other products, which are based upon this so-called risk-free rate of return, that the central bank offers, that governments use to sit the rate of things like treasury bills and stuff. Like eventually if you're a bank, you have to start charging higher and higher interest

rates. Sorry, you have to start offering higher and higher interest rates on your savings accounts. And likewise, 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's the other thing. So like the costs of the cost structure of 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

for where to keep their deposits in a way that they previously they weren't because there was no sort of differential and interest rates at all it was just being held steady. and interest rates at all, it was just being held steady. Yeah, absolutely. So the key thing to understand, and by the way, up to now, Steven, 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 its interest rate,

effectively what that means is that this whole supply chain of people lending to other people who lend to other people, the cost of lending has essentially increased, which will eventually lead to a rise in the cost of lending to people downstream until for end consumers, which is basically like firms and households trying to get alone from the bank, those loans are going to be more expensive. And conversely, if the feds interest rate goes down, those prices will tend to go down as well. But like, crucially, none of it is just automatic.

That's, yes, absolutely true. Just because it's a bank doesn't mean it's any different than the story that Fakola was laying out for retailers. 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 in 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 the central banker But of course all these firms are making their own decisions based on their own reasons So you know that they can make all sorts of decisions based on their priorities and based on 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 and each step of this process in much more detail, you should check out Perry Merlin's work on this, and there's even 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 to name the names. 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 amount of money in the economy basically determines the price level. More money that there is circulating, the less fat money is worth because there's too much of it, so the price of it goes down.

The price of money basically determines how much your money is able to buy. Now people have been moving away from that towards theories that get more realistic, but still retain the basic structure where the money supplies the mean thing that matters. And they'll say, for example, that it's the amount of money circulating and people's pockets relative to the amount

of goods being produced, such that 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 to be bid upwards. And that's called the demand pull theory. It's the dominant theory that most economists, you know, classical mainstream economists that you talked to today,

will pedal to you. But once we're not Orthodox monitors, they still believe in this, which means that they still think that you have to, when there's an inflationary event, you have to attack the money supply. Now, 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 That basically the only way that you could do it is by putting people out of work, right? You know you buy because then they don't get the wages, which they would have spent on stuff that, you know, the factory 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 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 full version of this is like the crash of 2008 or 1929, where suddenly a whole bunch of people are unemployed, 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 just put the squeeze on the economy and get some companies put out of business and some people unemployed on the dole so that people don't have money in their pockets so that the supposed pressure 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 is that there's a law-like relationship between demand and prices, such 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 that it's a religious orthodoxy and then different economists justified in different ways. But that's why they're trying to raise interest rates

so that basically people get thrown out of work and that will 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 cost increases 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 talked

to people at these different companies. I might, we, I don't mean strange matters. and looked at the news stories that, you know, and talked to people at these different companies, I might, we, I don't mean strange matters, I mean, like, you know, journalists or whatever. And like, you know, that's what they say. 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 prices down. What do I say? And they can't even get that right. That's right, they haven't actually get on in place. They haven't been able to get unemployment up either. So, it doesn't work in either direction.

Exactly, well, and what's really funny is that Demuzio basically says, okay, why do people believe this? They believe it for a lot of reasons, but they think that it worked in the 70s. That's the myth, right? You ask Larry Summers, why do you think this shit will work? And Larry Summers will say, well, you might not like it. And I think you actually said things like this like a couple weeks ago. You might not like it,

but this is how we got out of the crisis of the 70s. If we hadn't done the Volker shock, which is basically the same thing they raised interest rates through the up the Azo. You know, like we hadn't induced that unemployment or whatever, prices would never have come down. But you see, Demonsio't induced that unemployment or whatever, prices would never have come down. But you see, Demonsio did something that you're not supposed to do, which is that he actually checked up on the relationship between interest rates and prices. And what he found was that basically, there's either... The way that I explained his essay is that there's a strong version of his argument

and there's a weak version. The weak 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 raise interest rates, they raise interest rates, the prices keep going up. 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 the war in the Middle East between

Israel and Egypt and all of the other places caused OPEC to raise their prices in order to fuel. Yeah, I'm going to point in the thing, which is that the actual story behind that is slightly more complicated, which is that like, okay. So to be completely, 100% accuracy about this, OPEC 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 tacked their explanation on

to the back of the price increase they'd already decided on. Okay, you know what I mean? Yeah, so this is the thing that like, I don't know, 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 is true that like one of the things behind keeping OPEC together so that it could increase the price of oil was the opposite.

What was their sort of solidarity in the face, the opposition to the war, but also it's slightly more complicated than that. And I want to put that on the record just because the oil knowers will get mad at us. If we... Yeah. So that's the version of it that 99% of accounts will give you. It's just slightly not quite exactly what was happening. Yeah, I got a rule.

Yeah, I think it was, God, I don't know what book. I think it was in, I think it was in carbon democracy. Maybe 80% sure. Sorry, I read like four books about oil and coal in like incredibly rapid succession, like several years ago, and sometimes I was troubled remembering exactly which one which thing is from, but yeah. So 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 pretty clear that raising the interest rates directly like did not immediately didn't wasn't the thing that brought down prices. I think there's like an interesting, there's like a weird thing going on there too because the like almost like when economists tend to look at this, what they tend to look at with the interest rate rises was what was happening the US economy. And the other thing the Volker shock did was it raised the interest rates on it raised

raising interest rates in all of these adjustable rate loans that like all of these countries like all over the world had. And those economies got fucking obliterated. And that actually, I think, I think actually that there is an argument that like, 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 pricing beset by raw material producers rather than by countries that do production.

And this is the kind of separate thing, but I think the moral of my story with this before we get back to this sort of like, I don't know, the other occupants about this is that that moment was such a fucking 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 that we've ever had. And yeah, and it could be because like, it did, like the Volkershock did a lot of things that weren't what Volkershock did. Or not, honestly, not what Volkershock did,

but it did a lot of things that aren't what economists talk about when they talk about what the Volkershock 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 do you mathematically model the collapse of the non-aligned movement and like the third world movement?

You can't, right? And so they just sort of wave their hands and pretend that it was just directly, it caused more unemployment in the unemployment-protein inflationary down. Yeah, it's interesting to think of the global effects of the vulcars shock is like you have countries who are dependent upon USD finance suddenly are facing a much stronger dollar. So if they didn't already have dollars, that's a huge problem. Yeah, and again, and again, also just like like just literally the interest rates on their loans like increase by like 20%

And that's like, you know, like You're it doesn't really matter what your economy is you can't Who I don't know it's it's unbelievable difficult to survive something like that Yeah, and on the forex dimension and just on regular lending terms, in dollar lending anyway, it's going to get way tougher. Yeah. Even domestically, to do it to superimposes the oil price onto the inflation and the inflationary crises of the 70s and early 80s, it was a double, it was a double, if you remember. And so like the first time the Fed chairman who proceeded Polvokr, uh, 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 monetarist had like their one moment after that to say like they were they became more than simply an academic movement and became briefly hegemonic with the vulgar interest rate arise. That happened in 1975 or so when the oil price was about $15 per barrel. That's when inflation and the oil price start to move closely in conjunction with each other going into 1980, which is also when the interest rates are being raised more like give or take nine, 18 months or so, and the economic historians, the Neoclassical Economic Historians will forget about the supply chain pressures 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 tin during our current inflationary crisis, this exact debate was taking place again. Yeah, which like, I 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. And the worst part, the worst part is that the interest rate correlates The worst part is that the interest rate correlates positively with prices. This is the exchange rate.

So like the interest rate when it's high, theory expects that prices will be low, but actually, and even if you adjust for like a delay where maybe the prices get low afterwards, like no, that's not what happens. It's like, the interest rate goes up, and prices go up too. Prices go down, and the interest rate goes down.

You know, like, like, like, yeah. And like, and Demutio's like, eventually he superimposes oil price Fed funds, federal 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 lock step, and then oil goes back down, and then interest rates go back down, and then prices go back down. Yeah, I think the price is first before interest rates. Let me see. I can't remember. Oh yeah, yeah.

Like inflation, Chris, like, somewhat concurrently with the federal funds, and then the oil price eventually falls like, surely thereafter. Yeah, and this 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 I, I, increasing the increasing the interest rate actually increases prices. It's not what happening. It's like, you get into this mess, you, you have to

figure out the, the neoclassical explanation right is that like, okay, well, the, the reason it looks like the fund rate increasing increases prices is because you do that in, 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, you know, it's like, okay, well prices go up and then the Fed panics. And so they raised their rate. And it doesn't, and you know, like, it's, this is one of those things where like, the new classical economists have invented a mechanism that allows them to explain their

own actions in a way that's plausible enough that they can call anyone that they've gotten enough hedge money. They can say anyone who says they're wrong is just nuts. Right. And also, it's entirely possible that not only are they not right, they're literally perfectly exactly wrong. Yeah. And that, yeah.

They try to out the, like, the econometric jargon, long and variable lags when people say, when are interest rates going to cause unemployment to rise? When are interest rates going to cut down on inflation by themselves and not some other supply chain phenomenon? And they say, like, well well the monetary transmission mechanism has long and variable lags Which means that like 9 to 18 months for now it will settle down and then we'll know it's from interest rates trust us Right and the things that like even their purported explanations are demonstrably false So theoretically the mechanism by which this happens is that the money supply will go down. Well, M2 is our best estimate for the money supply, and it's not even a perfect one.

Interest rates go up, interest rates go down, M2 keeps going up. And this is over the course of, like, from the 70s to the 90s, you know, like, like, another graph of Dematios. That's another important point that like the money, it doesn't even get the money supply down. Yeah. So like, it's quite questionable whether this interest rate adjustment thing even works at all on its own terms, because all the evidence says that there's at least, and this is what I mean by the weak version of the museum's argument, the all the evidence says that there's at least, and this is what I mean by the weak version of the museum's argument,

the all the evidence shows that there's at least no relationship between interest rates and the price level, that there is no relationship, whatsoever, it basically just is useless for controlling prices one way or the other. Now, the strong version of the museum's argument is he takes 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 businesses choose to respond to it by raising their prices? You know, what if you actually, by raising the interest rate, are contributing to inflation? Now, this is kind of how we framed the whole article in our title. Editors make titles, not writers. Do interest rate hikes worsen inflation? And I remember showing this to some of my friends who were finance bros, and they were like, what are you talking about? This is a crazy idea. But it makes a lot of sense because if you look at things

as a supply chain, at the very least, 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, 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. Yeah, and the general price. Yeah, and that, and that, and that, like, the fact that they're correlated is 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 does, it has no effect, but like, you know, they've got to press the panic button. Yeah, I think I'm, for a variety of reasons, I think I'm a weak form demutzeist on this point. And I think like, especially these days, there's so many other like a relatively small percentage of commercial and business credit is variable, right? To begin with these days. More of it is fixed rate. And like, especially for mort, well, certainly for mortgages.

Like, it's like 80% plus approaching, 85% 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 and large scale businesses like though, you know, you can go to the capital markets, private equity or the stock market and get the funding you need that in ways that don't depend upon what the federal fund's rate is doing or only weekly depend upon it. So there's just like, there's so many other liquidity sources, especially like in the last 30 years or so. Like, well, since since the vulgar shock, basically, they've like all of these like private equity and other capital markets methods for liquidity 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, I'm like, all right, well, maybe it doesn't increase prices, but at the very least it's like non-correlated. This caught a lot of people's attention. Like once the currency had 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, you can only call this a blog, and not a magazine. It ended up being taken up by another capital as power, influence to economists, Blair Fix, who found yet more empirical evidence that there is no relationship whatsoever between interest rates and the general price level. And to the extent that there is, it's only because you induce a recession that puts people out of work, in which case you've basically, in order to deal with a paper cut, you've cut off your hand, right? And even then, 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 they got even more attention. Cory Doctoro, the science fiction writer and futurist and kind of left-wing all-around public and intellectual, he found both Demetia'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 heterodox economics international organization called Rethink Economics, which is all about like, you know, inciting pluralism in the discipline. And in their Australian blog, because they're all over the world, an economist called Matthew Harris, Australian blog because they're all over the world and economists called Matthew Harris

You know took up took up the controversy and basically sided with with Demudcio like and JW Mason writing in barons also basically Sided with us in an essay called the Fed can't fine tune the economy JW Mason's a very important heterodox economist who is often the cutting edge of a lot of these kind of theoretical developments. Interestingly, the first fellow, though, Matthew Harris 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 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 company. So that's why economics and business schools are two separate schools. Yeah, it is. Because the business is real.

This is like a real, like I remember this on campus. This is like, this is a real thing where like if you're, if, so the business school, if I remember incorrectly, the business school is like is most, I think it's, I think it might only be a grad school for hot and so let me look this up. Yeah, that was my memory of it. Yeah, so this is a real thing because because the University of 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 these like inferior,

like fly by night people who don't care about like the sort of deep, like the deep math or like the deep sort of like, you know, like intellectual like political pursuits 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, it's not like the business school

is like a bastion of leftist or whatever, but they don't agree on stuff a lot because they're like, like 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 people who become economists. And so like it's actual sort of ideological purpose is specifically, it's a school that trains other economists, right? It's a school that teaches the ruling class what to think. Whereas the business school is like the school that teed, and this is a very, very, very explicit. It's something that when you're there,

you can watch in practice the fact that these aren't the same thing and the fact that they're going to produce different conclusions because they're going to produce different conclusions because, you know, the like, because they're actual like purpose is different. One is ideological. The other one is like making money. Yes, and this is a great case study of it because these folks at the business school their names are Neal's 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 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 bid down, right? Theoretically, the mechanism by which this works at the individual firm is that the firm sees 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. In other words, basically, there's no real effect. So, I go around and do business service.

Sorry, go ahead. Companies, they do a good amount, if not perhaps most, of their capital investment from cash on hand before going, before seeking out finance. Yeah. And that, and that, and that like, and that means that it doesn't have an effect. And then even if you need financing, there are non debt finance, so there's like equity finance, either private or public, that you have as an option alongside the debt options. Exactly.

So we go from a situation where we published this article in 2022, 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, the cause, inflation to get worse or even just don't matter for inflation. But then suddenly, like, you have a bunch, once it gets taken up by, you know, larger discussion, you have a bunch of quite reputable 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

writes in the Guardian, 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 Reserve's monetary tightening has already curtailed housing construction, even though more supplies 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 cost of doing business

onto renters. In other words, higher interest rates can actually induce price increases as the higher interest rates induce 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, a deep recession would tame inflation, but why would we invite that? You know, Jerome Powell and his colleagues seem to relish cheering against the economy. Meanwhile,

their friends in commercial banking are making out like bandits. Now that the Fed is paying 4.4% interest on more than $3 trillion of bank reserve balances. This little known economist writing for the Guardian is Joseph Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize in economics. 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 header docs? No. He basically presents it as if it's his own idea. Now maybe he did have this idea six months after we started to come across this. Stinglitz not had a single idea in like 15 years. Like that man,

that man is a transparent, parent medium through which the stuff that he reads appears on a page. I'm gonna be meed. I'm sick of the sink, I'm just doing this bullshit. 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 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, 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 unfortunate thing because since the, the neoclassicals control the discipline, they control advancement through the ranks

of the economists. So they're always wrong and never right, but they're never punished for it, and they control all the levers of who gets to be an economist. So they're always wrong and never right, but they're never punished for it, and they control all the levers of who gets to be an economist. So it's this sort of like continual sad unfortunate thing. But on the bread 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 no, 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 a talking point that I don't think would have existed if haven'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, which is basically a research program that now the magazine is put out there in the world that and is continuing to build up on that actually makes it make more sense. Yeah, and I want to just sort of like take a second to highlight like how impressive it is that this happens because like again like like a year and a half, I even like, like, like even like, I don't 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, like, like, volleys of tomatoes, like, they would have, like, like, you would have gotten 16 contracts to be a professional clown. This was a thing that you couldn't even suggest this. And within a pretty rapid span, suddenly, Stinglitz is being like, I want this. Maybe this is a plausible thing. It's like, I don't know.

I think 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 expeditio reality that actually like lines up with it has been able to change like as it, I'm able to actually just sort of like change what the discourse at like the highest levels of power

and sort of like what, what actually been happening in in the economy like has shifted and that's wild. Like I would not have guessed that that that was a thing that was even remotely possible and and yet we are now here. Yeah. The over 10 window has shifted so far that the idea that interest rates just don't seem to have any discernible effect upon the price level is becoming the base case. The entire spectrum of shifted to reduce the strong form of Demius 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 that you, but like, it's like manageable now.

I mean, you can always point to that argument from authority, but Stiglet says it might be so. So, you know, it's like, and then stick to question Stiglets. He wanted a Nobel Prize. Really? No more prize too. Can we do it? Can we say a bit about the Nobel Prize? I've been cheating myself. Yeah, I'm really wanting to. This is a whole bit. Oh God. The so-called Nobel Prize in economics is not actually the Nobel Prize in economics. It's, there's Nobel Prize in science and 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 60s, like I think some 70 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 just, it's basically like peeling off the skin of the face of the Nobel Prize and then wearing it, you know, and saying, we have a Nobel Prize too. And it's totally fake. base of the Nobel Prize and then wearing it, you know, and saying, we have a Nobel Prize too.

And it's totally basically, it's not an open place. And you know, it puts the lotion on its skin and it also gets the hoes again. You know, they did this specifically. There's a story in of economics. Oh my God, what the hell is his name? It's the more heath than like guy. He's, oh my goodness. I cite him in the friendly thing,

and I can't hear him. Oh, I feel more outskied. Marowski, that's the guy. Yeah, okay, so he actually 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 neoclassical economists,

and they mostly have, so sometimes they've diverged, but mostly they've done it to very reactionary economists in order to promote neoclassical economists in Europe, because it 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 you know, the central bank should not need to operate under a political a democratically controlled, you know, legislature that says actually 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 that kind of thing. So, you know, that's the story of the Soquel No Well Prize. It's really the fake novel. So I always call it the fake novel. 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 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 actual genuine prodigy was doing like, like was doing like graduate level like math in high school. And if you talk to these people and you talk to like

math professors about the Nobel Prize, they will like yell about it for like 20 minutes because the math is so bullshit. It's like, yeah, this guy, the math involved in these Nobel Prizes are like, they figured out 2 plus 2 equals 4, and they gave them this fucking fake Nobel Prize. You look at the fields metal,

and it's like, I don't know, 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 you get people having a Nobel prizes for saying shit like the economy can't miss,

like the market can't miss price, like assets that are like the price of houses and then the entire housing market immediately implodes because it was all mispriced. It's a disaster. It has been, I don't know, we should, everyone at all times should be doing anti-fake Nobel Prize propaganda against the economics Nobel Prize

because it's fake and bad and we should all say it more. You know, on the heterodox side of things, there's some really promising uses of mathematical economics to create input output matrices. Yeah. And to model, do an IO model of the economy, that the math is very much subservient to empirical data that is coming in that trains the model. And then so much of economics is, well, data fits the model, data fits the model and then like, like so much of economics is,

well, data fits the model, data fits the model, like over and over again, when it should be the other way around. Yeah, absolutely. Does the model fit the data? Because if it doesn't, then you gotta throw it out. Like, this whole like raising interest rates is kind of control prices bullshit.

When has that even happened? Because theoretically it happened in the 70s, but then you look at it and it doesn't tell you that story. So, you know, I just don't know. They throw it out. No. Like brief, brief call back to Fred Lee's table, table B. Was it? Oh, yeah, appendix B. Yeah, is the blinder study in there? I forget. Yes, yes,

yes, that's like an instance. That's an instance where Alan Blinders and Eoclassical Economists who like he messed up and did real science. And what he found was was the administer price theory. Yeah, he made the terrible mistake of thinking that his bullshit theory would be vindicated and then it turns out that it was not. 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. actually do real science for a change and like find things like cost plus markups happening.

And he tries so hard to explain it away, you know, he's like, well, supply and demand exists. 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. They can't, they can't change the stickers Completely insane

So 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 from Eoclassical economics would suggest And then I went to look for the stickers and he couldn't find it. He couldn't find the cost. 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. Okay, so we should start wrapping up because 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? So one thing we've started to work on and we've discussed a little bit on this podcast, I believe. Yeah. Well, back was the importance of Forex, for an exchange for all sorts of microeconomic things, like inflation being one of them. Like if you're a small country

that does not 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 do development work? And we're developing a theory of Forex essentially that is, it's an extension of the chartless framework that informs MMT, but with some important criticisms about how the central MMT insights 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 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 like, I don't know, like Trilonka, for example, have this product. If you're Trilonka or Mexico or whoever, most of the world basically, you need to maintain and augment your balance of the major trading currencies, US dollars, yen, the euro, to name three, and have balances of those. You need to maintain your balance of payments and your balances of specific currencies in order to meet the bio-physical obligations that your, whatever your development strategy necessitates. Because in most instances, not all, but most, you're going to need to, like, no one's going,

if you're Sri Lanka, no one's going to want to transact in your currency for major purchases of, like, staple goods. You're going to need to use dollars or euros or yen or the yuan, perhaps, who knows? Exactly. One of the major trading currencies. This also raises the question of how a currency becomes a major trading currency, and that almost invariably takes you into directions.

One, 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 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 and imperialist great powers. And it turns out that the nexus that's created between imperialism, development, 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 Stephen 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 is a hugely political question that all the major great powers in their interior imperial conflict are constantly

fighting over. So right now, it appears that China is attempting to make a bid for a global U-on. First, they tried to do it through the digital U-on. Now they're seemingly trying to do it through bricks by getting the other bricks countries to agree to a kind of U-on gold standard, mirroring the Bretton Woods agreement that was basically the dollar piggybacking off of gold to reach global preeminence. 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 U on, at least in a certain currency zone, be used as the main 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 They have to get it in that currency, which means the suddenly the US which is basically been able to print Forex to print The international means of payment for some 50 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 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 You is it is it Uber is it is it is it Amazon is it is it all these like Fortune 500 companies and whatever no I mean it's one of the Fortune 500, 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 Lakers that's usually reserved for less developed countries than the US. And this is exactly the kind of thinking that is important because, you know, obviously the other thing that would happen to Dollar General and it is that it would be huge economic crash in the US.

Like suddenly the cost of importing anything that we're in that zone would skyrocket and it would mess up, you know, our balance of payments and it would cause inflation. Depending on how quickly it happens and how much or how little time firms have to adjust their supply chains and stuff like that. So 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 I'm hoping that Stephen 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 about inter-imperial conflict into economic questions, so that there's

no longer a kind of division of labor between economics, which denies the existence of imperialism, and then the people who study imperialism as historians or political scientists or whatever. Stay tuned for more theories and dropping at some point in the future. 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 Strangematters.co. up, and also please consider if you have the ability to subscribe or donate. Subscribers start $5 and it really helps because all the money that we get that doesn't just go to our capitalist overlords for basically 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.

Yeah, we'll put a link to the magazine in the description. Yeah, Steve Jimsy, thank you so much for being on the show and for yelling at me. You got no more a price with me. It's been a pleasure. It's been great, man. Thank you. Yeah. And you can find us at it can happen here. What that happened here, pod on Twitter and Instagram. Yeah, we have a website where we post our sources.

It's coolz on BD.com and other stuff there. You should go there. And yeah, go go into the world and make life worse for mainstream economists. Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, I'm Penelope Sferas. I'm a film director. I want to tell you a story about a friend of mine. Back in the 70s, Peter Ivers moved to LA to start his music career. He scored Ron Howard's directorial debut. I didn't know one thing about Peter Ivers. I just said, okay, let's meet him. And even hosted LA Night night cable TV show. It showcased LA punk bands in all their glory. The crowd started getting bigger and bigger,

and then there was Beverly Danzelow. There was John Balucci. But then, it all went to hell. It was murdered. Peter Ivers was murdered on March 3rd, 1983, and it raised a question that 40 years later we still don't know the answer to. Who killed Peter Ivers? Listen to Peter and the Acid King on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

or wherever you get your podcasts. This is In Retrospect, a podcast about pop culture from the 80s and 90s that shaped us. I'm very much a product of the pop culture I consumed. Yeah. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I'm Jessica Bennett, a New York Times writer and bestselling author. I'm Susie Bette-Kerrem, an award-winning TV producer

and filmmaker. Every week, we'll revisit a moment in cultural history that we just can't stop thinking about. From tabloid headlines to illicit student-teacher relationships, and one, very memorable red swimsuits. I found myself in Pamela Anderson's attic, as you do. I put that red swimsuit in a safe because it seemed everybody wanted it. We're digging deep to better understand with these moments taught us about the world and our place in it.

I want you to really smell the axe body spray that emanated during this time. It was presented more as kind of like a crime topic. Okay, and that's not a long story. Not a long story. It had been branded on the uteruses of every single woman from C to shining C. Listen to In Retrospect on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Sonoro and I Heart's My Cultura Podcast Network, present, Princess of South Beach, Season 2. Gas Cruz Back. Did you miss me? The present, Princess of South Beach, Season 2. Gas crews back. Did you miss me? The Caledons are back with a new season of lies, scandals, and skeletons in the closet. And speaking of closets.

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It, it, it could happen here. It's, it's the podcast that's called it could happen here. I think things fall apart and put them back together again, etc., etc. We're slightly rushing this intro because Gears and Edelwee and like 10 minutes, not 10 minutes, et cetera, we're slightly rushing this intro because Gearsen had to leave in like 10 minutes, not 10 minutes, but that's the way. That's not so. Yeah, so we've spent a lot of time covering the sort of various aspects of the trench and aside.

The aspect, the anger we haven't covered that much is the New York Times. And partially that's my fault because if I, every time I tried to write something with New York Times, it's devolved into about seven Every time I tried to write something with New York Times, it's devolved into about seven hours and be reading every single time the New York Times wrote an article, those pro-Hitler. So, you know, it's difficult to be what you would describe

as reasonably objective when you're talking about these people and not just start yelling about the Iraq war. However, comma. 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 and some developments on one of their stories. We are talking to Evan Irkhardt of a signed media who has published a very, very good story about some real nonsense that the New York Times' eternalist have gotten up to.

So, effort, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm always glad to talk about nonsense. Yeah, it's been a real time. Also here is Garrison. Yes, it's been, 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 Reed. So I guess I wanted to start there. Can you talk a little bit about who Jamie Reed is and how the New York Times and a bunch of other very

less reputable somehow newspapers got involved with this. Yeah, so I mean, there are certainly reputable newspapers that have looked into the allegations of former gender clinics staff member in St. Louis, Jamie Reed. And those organizations including local papers have found that her allegations didn't hold up. This was 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 with these harmful treatments.

Horrifying stuff that if true would be just a major, major scandal, if true would be just a major, major scandal, if true. And allegations fell apart pretty quickly. Numerous parents and patients came back, came, you know, forward saying this is nothing like what we've experienced. 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 endocrinologist 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 of therapy. I wish you

could do that. No, right. Right. I mean, it was very wild and very discredited. And then for some reason, apparently back in May, as Ian Geraci 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

that Jamie Reed is not accurate and not on the up and up, but the story that she came out with is really, really weird. And I think the thing that is the most, or at least before the most recent rounds of incredibly bizarre stuff, the thing that's the most infuriating to me about the sort of Jamie Reed story is that. The thing that had come out by the time the New York Times is writing about it was that it. It looked a lot like if you look at the stuff that Jamie Reed 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. I talked to 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 Reed 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 on hormone therapy. And so after the allegations came out, this parent got in touch with the clinic, Jamie Reed 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 fall or future. And just, you know, trying to help educate the kid about their body and their

Options years and years before they never need anything 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 or decide that like you don't get a get treatment. And that's awful. And is one of them, I mean, you know, even in place, even in parts of the US at clinics that are good. That is a thing that can just happen to you is you get these 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 healthcare, they did this, they, you know, there's this turned into this like, like full court press against, wait, Gary, you, you all right? No, I, I, I, I have to close my door because the air conditioner is way too loud.

And the cat's screaming at the door. But now I open the door and they don't want to come in. It's like all the thresholds just like staring at me like make a choice. Come in or come out. And I think we're leaving this in. It's great content. They're out. they're gone. They had their chance.

They blew it. Yeah, what happens instead is this 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 as an example of like why, why we have to like stop. Like we have to shut down clinics and stuff. All while children's hospitals are getting bomb threats. Yeah, constantly,

every day, mostly due to kind of prodding by ghouls of the daily wire who are hunting for clicks. And yeah, also a big part of this is like this tactic of attacking like healthcare centers and clinics proved to be a pretty good 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. I said, hey, 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, 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, threatening to bomb the children's hospital. Yeah, and the exact allegations were really devastating for these families. I mean, I thought 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 fuel gender

affirming care bans. You know, I mean, that is like really damaging for like 17, 18-year-old who's just trying to like live her life in kind of a conservative town. 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, they always scream at them. They're not allowed the time.

They always scream at them. They always scream at them. We've finally got an actual hypah violation. And, ugh. Yeah, I think the hypah thing has been, I mean, you know, a zinger ratio could have gotten that story, I feel like. I mean, I think it's been really undercovered. My understanding is that health care 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, 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. Yeah, and I mean, I mean, the thing it reminds me the most of is the is the original like vaccines

caus autism story, where you have someone who is incredibly politically motivated, who is incredibly unreliable, who's debauchably 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 up lies about, about like about their patients. And then also it turns out like has abused their patients or in this case, it's not has abused their patients, but in this case, it's 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 they see is sort of this story and they just sort of latch on to it and then they spread all of this stuff. And it reminds me a lot of that. We're still dealing with the consequences of just the completely fake bullshit about like, vaccines supposedly causing autism, which...

And again, that's something that never would have gotten mainstream. fake bullshit about like, vaccines supposedly causing autism, which... And again, that's something that never would have gotten mainstreamed if the media hadn't picked it up and ran with it. And yet, every single time one of these absolutely politically motivated frauds gets up on the stands, there's the New York Times doing the article about it. And 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 the, you sort of yarn and string. Um, and now it's, it, it actually has been relegated to the New York Times. The, the, the sort of, the sort of coverage they're doing over these types of like moral panics around healthcare.

Um, I think like, if they, if you think if you look at like Fox News 20 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. And it's this 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.

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 the mother of a trans girl who went to the reporter and said,

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, it's not lying, but it is so totally distorting the truth that it feels like lying. It feels worse than lying on us. Yeah, especially because there's like, you know, it's not lying, but it is so totally distorting the truth that it feels like lying. It feels worse than lying on us.

Yeah, especially because there's 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, ha ha, J.K. It's not good enough. It's not good enough. Yeah, and I think this gets into the part that, so you very recently talked to the mother of one of the girls who was, you know, who Jamie Reed has been lying about. And I'm just going to three of the parents

who, who Azine had talked to. Yeah, and you discovered some very disturbing and incredibly bizarre stuff that Azzeen was doing to get parents to stay in the story after reads and like this was in your follow up story after a bunch of people came out and were like, hey, this is like not correct. This person has in fact been lying about this. Yeah, so could you could you go into it? What you found about this? Yeah, so could you go into what you found about this? Yeah, it was truly, truly bizarre. I mean, I, going in, there were some parents that contacted me because they'd spoken to Azeen Grachy 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 what I got. So this parent had been very suspicious of Azean, because of Azean'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 saved our daughter's life. So 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 Azine reassured her, calmed her fears, and so they were going forward, but cautiously. And then this mother sees Azine at a courthouse

where Jamie Reed was testifying about the allegations in Missouri, and just sees the warm relationship between Azeen and Jamie Reed. She thinks something isn't right here. I helped her catch this person in a lie, but they're all buddy-buddy, that seems weird. So she first went up to Jamie Reed and confronted her. She said, I'm liver toxicity mom. She again noticed that Jamie Reed is kind of saying, how can I help you?

What do you want? And like looking to a zine like saved me from this crazy person. And so that's when the mother said, we're out. We're not, we're not going to be part of this story. And a zine did not take that for an answer. Yeah.

Yeah. It's nuts. She followed them to their car. She's not in the car. 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, please keep talking, keep talking. I don't know exactly what she's saying, but I need you in the story.

And the mom says, no, Zeen, we're out. Could please step away from the car and they drove away. And then, Azeen called them and called them. And they picked up. And Azeen managed to convince them to let her come over to their hotel room. This is the night before the New York Times article published. And so now Heidi and her husband and Azeen are in this hotel room. And Azeen is going paragraph by paragraph telling her everything that's in the story trying to convince her that it's not a piece on the clinic. And the family isn't buying it at all. The family

is like, no, you're describing a piece on the clinic. 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, Azim 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, 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 gonna be used in this way, they felt they had no choice but to stay in. Yeah, and then like the way that it ends the article like is, is basically, like the article is like completely supportive of Jamie Reed, even though again, debaucherably in the article, she is lying.

Such a weird article. You find someone's lying, but you're still spending all of your words saying, well, she's sort of she lied this one time, but she's basically credible, just bizarre. Yeah, and then, you know, and the New York Times is responsive to this. This is like the piece you're referring to

with rigorously irreported and edited and thoughtful and sensitive to the moment, the time stands behind publication. Never is there for me. 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. Like, these people, like, these people have published things that, like, a, a, like, these, these people have published stuff about the Iraq war that like British tabloids wouldn't publish. So like yeah, it's not, it's not, I don't think it's that surprising to me that like the New York Times was like this, Pasha editorial standards, but that's because

again, the New York Times back Hitler and like deliberately for some entire country, it's starting a war by straight up lying about a bunch of stuff they knew was fake. 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 camel flages, the ridiculous nonsense, and lets them get it through when they go on a tear, when they go on a crusade against, you know, against someone. Yeah, and I mean, it's, it's they, I don't know, the, the art times, they, are times, 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, this person knows that their sources lie is devastrubly 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 scene of someone who up until this point, like, seems to it, like, like from everything, I had been a

whir of a scene from... A scene did really good, um, me two reporting. I believe I'm the science, the astronomy. Yeah, in astronomy, which I like, I think 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 small amount of time where I wanted to do astronomy. And so I knew a bunch of the people in that scene

as he had a very, very good rep there as the person you could go to to talk about to do a B2 story, which makes it even more weird that, I guess this is just, I don't know, I'm hesitant to just brush this off as sort of trans-brain where like, a sister-poor starts covering trans stuff and just completely loses their mind. But it's a really startling and disturbing like shift from this

person who 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. Who could have thought that a radical feminist could be trans exclusionary? It's just crazy. People are complicated. I think has to do with who she feels sympathy for

and women in science or maybe people that she feels sympathy for and who she, for 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 that ability to. Or the kids themselves apparently. I mean, as a trans person, I never expect a reporter to have empathy for me.

But these white parents, these middle class, why do parents please, you must take them seriously? The other thing I think I wanted to talk about was the impact that this reporting has had on the broader. So we alluded to this a little bit. But yeah, I wanted to talk a little bit about the way that right wing, sort of, I mean, right wing lawyers, like right wing politicians have been using,

like specifically this coverage, and also sort of like the fear mongering around gender clinics as something they're using to support, like to support healthcare bans on trans youth. Yeah, Jamie reads 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 bam was passed. And it would be bad enough if they found a bad clinic,

but there's nothing miraculous about doctors who treat trans people that makes them incapable of being unethical. 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, it's just a really tough blow. Yeah, I mean, like, you know, like I have friends there and it's, it's, it's, like, it's bleak right now. And I, I think I've been really, you know, I mean, I don't know

why I would expect it these people to sort of like even remotely feel a single emotion about the fact that directly the stuff that the actions that they did led directly to a bunch of kids losing their health care. But there's been no reckoning with this, right? As best I can tell, neither New York Times nor any of the journalists involved, any of the editors and the publishers, none of these 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 This 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 round of journalists to find some absolute crank who they dug out of some derain subrubing mcmanchin somewhere to push and other one of these stories because right now, this appears to just be an established path that you can use to sort of like from both ends, right? It's the thing you can use as a journalist or adventure career is the thing you can use as like a crank to be suddenly on the talk show, so you're going to go to a bunch of money. It's just lying about all of this stuff. Yep.

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 says since people are necessarily going to start listening, it's just, you got to put it out there. Yeah, 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 sister-in-list listening to this. What kinds of things would you recommend to them to like, to make sure you, A, don't fall down this rabbit hole on B

to make sure that if you are attempting to write a story, that is good, that you get things right? Yeah, so the Trans-Generals 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. And I think that the kind of connected pitfall is just a where they're smoke their

fire. Like, well, there must be more to the skeptical side than there really is. So while I always try to butter journalists up by saying you can make up your mind and you know, look at the evidence, like really engage with trans people who are not just telling their stories, but who are science reporters 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 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 masks or anti-vax or whatever. And it's just because trans people are marginalized that I think people are kind of falling for into with, you know, masks or antivacs 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. You are not able to conspiratorial things.

Yeah. Well, this is something, this is something I'm gonna talk about at length more in a, one day, the like 65,000 word thing that I've been writing about the lab leak stuff is gonna come out. And, you know, one of the, oh god, I've, I have spent so many hours talking to epidemiologists, you have no idea.

But one of the things that comes up there and it comes up also just in general science, because spiritualism is, if someone's 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 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, I, 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 if journalists realized that, like, actual scientists don't talk about science in a way where they're like, ah, the medical establishment is censoring me. I would love for that to happen. I don't know. I'm skeptical that it will happen because it's, you know, it's a great story. 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'm sorry, which times those are. So slow your role, don't envision

Pulitzer's and get grounded on what the basics are instead of thinking that you know better than the people who spend their lives researching this. Is in treaty to journalists who maybe don't realize how transphobia might be playing a role in their wanting to believe certain things. Yeah, 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. Yeah, so a few months ago, I started working with some other people in the trans community, most of whom are staying anonymous on a resource to try and help people who, we're really envision people who are in good faith, but trans issues are not their main thing. Not as ingorasi, but maybe as ingorasi of five years ago.

The person who is 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 legitimate. So this is the Trans Data Library, upcoming, hopefully by the end of the month, is going to be a kind of Wikipedia for the user, not Wikipedia and not like editable by the community because that's very bad idea for Trans stuff.

Yeah. A resource on 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 credentials, you will find that out. If someone has said things that are discrediting, you'll find that out.

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 people who are already on a tear, and to democratic politicians who similarly are sympathetic but might need an extra source of information. 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 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 basic information on some of these groups and some of these bad actors. I think that's definitely a good thing because there is a lot of information out there on the connections between the right-wing grifters who come out of the woodworks talking about this stuff and their sort of demonstrable links to far-right extremist groups, to the proud boys, to the right-wing think tanks. But that's stuff that like the, the, the, 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, having, having a thing we can put into their laps being like, hey, these are all the people who are getting paid by the Alliance defending freedom and stuff. Yeah, that's what I'm hoping to make. So the URL is probably gonna be transdata library.org. It is a little broken right now. Go to asidemedia.org. You follow me, follow my Twitter, follow my project,

and watch that space for the TransData library, because I'm hoping you can do some good. Yeah, I'm excited for it. And yeah, just do you have anything else do you want to say before we close up? I think that's it for me. Thank you so much for having me on. This was really fun. And, uh, yeah. Yeah, thanks for coming and thanks for reporting on this story because Lord knows the rest of the media wasn't quite to do it. That's why I started doing it.

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Today, today we're talking about the falling apart sort of thing and our, you know, continuing coverage of what we like to call the crumbles here today leads us to a little state called New Mexico 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 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 been a pretty over the last,

specifically the last year, a pretty dramatic increase in the number of shootings. From 2021 to 2022, the number of shootings in albacurkey, or murders, I should say, most of which are shootings, also about 84%. The number of murders in albacurkey 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 50% higher than the normal rate.

Now, as you might guess from the fact that you've probably watched Breaking Bad 15 years ago or whatever, the drug trade, drug trafficking, drug deals gone bad have something to do with this. But I think this year, about 17, something like that, 17, 20% of the homicides in Albuquerque are drug related, but a much higher number above 70%. The police have given the sort of 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, right? 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

9th, I think it was, and 11 year old boy was shot and killed in 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 17 shots into the car. The 11-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, and this is by the way, 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, for example, a citizen legally carrying a firearm or somebody.

Although in the state of New Mexico, you are allowed to carry 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-raids shooting, wasn't illegal shooting. It was it because the guy was a drug dealer. He had illegal drugs on him, all that stuff. But yeah, it's messy. So in-re-in response to the governor's proclamation, 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 a right to do. And governors do not have the right to overrule that sort of thing on public health ground. 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 well as a gun owner. Lucas, welcome to the program. Thanks Robert, good to be back. Sort of, as always. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is a messy one. Yeah, so that was a good, a good summary of what got us here. The executive order was dropped Friday afternoon and I immediately went to my work chat and said, hold on, this is going to be a wild weekend. As you can imagine, it was, there has been incredible responses from everybody on the on the sort of, yeah, despite political ideologies, the responses have been swift and ranging in their loudness, let's say. And it's created, 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, and, you know, it's made it to Alex Jones and that kind of ilk. Yeah. But then, of course, you know, and so obviously there's that there's that far end of the spectrum. And, you know, then there's the response here in the state, which is ranging from supportive to indifferent to angry to 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 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 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 has ruled very differently on the issue of concealed firearms. And so that's a problem, because regardless of what you think about how the law on concealed carrier firearms should be, the idea of a governor overturning a right like that access to a right like that based on what they call a public health emergency

is deeply concerning, you know, which is why you've had, you know, the surprising people come at against this, including David Hogg, who's one of the Parkland kids and a gun control advocate, who said, you know, the governor simply doesn't have the right to do this, which is kind of more or less where I land. Um, yeah. And, you know, and just to, just to be clear, right, I'm, I'm not an attorney, but I, yeah, I am a gun owner and, and have exercised that right since I was legally allowed to do so at 18, which was very long ago at this point.

So yeah, I've been, I have been in New Mexico gun owner paying attention to things and how those laws affect me for quite a while. One of the, yeah, one of the interesting things about the executive order and you sort of touched on it is that the, 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 there's a ban on carrying, unless you're going to 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 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 of your home. There is, there basically is no law about having a car, a 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, but the second you step off the bicycle, now you're in violation of the law, unless you have a permit. So, you know, there, 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. alone, whatever the maybe you know, the federal implications are.

Yeah. And I think, you know, one of the things that is kind of concerning about this to me is and that should be concerning about this to people is that I, I don't see how I can see an argument for saying we want to restrict the unlicensed carry of firearms and vehicles, right? Because a significant number of these shootings seemed to have involved that, although it is a little bit unclear, we don't know who carried out the most recent road-raid shooting. So we don't know if that person was legally allowed to possess 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 would appear to be a dealing like a setup of, you know, had a dealing amount and what appeared to be a dealing like a setup of, you know, it was parceled out in the baggies marijuana on him, which 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, I haven't seen evidence that like that's a major driver of gun violence.

But number two, if a decent number 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 a is a 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 resistance 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.

Yeah. I mean, I think one of the reasons why being on your show to talk about this is is worth thinking about. The last time I was on was earlier in the year when there we discovered that there was a GOP operative who had committed acts of violence that there was a GOP operative who had committed acts of violence in the form of shooting at Democrat elected Democrats up in the Bernalillo County area as an active political violence. And worth thinking about is that, you know, he was charged with firing a fire arm from a moving vehicle, which is a crime. Like it's a specific crime. Which it also like very valid crime. You should not be you should never shoot from a moving vehicle. Like that's correct.

That's correct. So the right. So we, you know, again, yeah, again, not a lawyer. However, it seems duplicative to have a law on the books that already, it is a crime to fire your gun from a car already. 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 question. However, for the purposes

of this conversation, however, if somebody is just driving down the street and has a gun in their car, does that create, you know, are they, you know, are they committing a crime that feels conflicting and harmful? 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 would 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 don't obey, like people who are committing gun crimes are not obeying

the law by definition. They're 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 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 think that there is a difference between those two kind of situations on a pretty fundamental level. Yeah, I would agree. And the disingenuous knee jerk response from the far right over this while completely expected. That's exactly what they're doing, right?

They're equating this ill-informed, poorly worded. I don't, however you want to say it. They're taking this thing and using it as a pretense for all their far right propaganda extremes, calling to impeach the governor because she's intending to violate the constitution or some silliness like that. Which is, yeah, which is just, yeah, that's just far right conspiracy, masturbation in my opinion. And it has galvanized them, right? There's been the 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. Well, and, and yeah, and I think that that's actually maybe something that for this podcast and for your audience, for those long time 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, yes, so yesterday, the Bernalio County Sheriff who 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 he'd barely gotten a heads up from the governor, but he did admit that,

you know, she sort of like reached out to him, said, hey, I'm going to do this thing. I know you probably won't agree. And he's like, yeah, I don't agree. And she's like, okay, well, we'll figure it out. And he was like, okay, I guess we will. And she's like, okay, well, we'll figure it out. And he was like, okay, I guess we will. Anyway, yeah, so this, he came out, made this announcement. He's not gonna enforce it. The chief of police from the Albuquerque department has more or less made the same intonation

with support from the very progressive democratic mayor of Albuquerque, 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, 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 order at the protest on Sunday. Yeah. So it is one of those like, why would you, right? Like that's such a, yeah.

So the most recent thing this afternoon is that the state's attorney general, 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 already been filed since Friday. So, yeah, there basically seems to be this complete lack of support from the parts of government that are supposed to do the things. Yeah, absolutely. And it begs the, yeah, for those of us that think about these things, it begs the question of, yeah, how far does this go?

What is the next 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, who works in this field professionally, like we've spent a lot of time in the last 48 hours, like asking ourselves those questions, it's tough.

It's there, there isn't an easy answer on this one. 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 is the rise of those 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 70s and 80s is when a lot of this stuff started cooking. But this belief that has kind of formed over, you know,

particularly the last 20 years, that the sheriff constitutionally is the 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 is 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 of the election, bullshit on the right where like you have 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 some certain things around the counting of votes. You know, there was a lot of real like 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's departments, not that being part of a police hierarchy in a traditional sense provides much restraint, but sheriffs are completely fucking out there, right? Like, they are, they're 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 into year and then you can carry a concealed handgun wherever because cops get that right, you know, right? Right. Yeah. Yeah. So I just want to be clear because what you're talking about and how it pertains to New Mexico is, is both 100% correct and has, and has, and has happened here. It could happen here.

But is, but in the case of this issue right now, yeah, Bernalio County Sheriff took office this year. He is a Democrat. He's a man of color. Not, this is not me making excuses for cops. But I just to be clear about this. And he is generally disliked by the right. And has been seen as, you know, whatever soft on crime stuff, which he hates and has tried. He's tried real hard to sort of buck that position. And, and so, and that, which makes this all the maybe worse, right? That, yeah, a, a Democrat elected in a Democratic county with a, you know, the city, the, the state's largest Democratic municipality, right? Like, for

that guy to be like, yeah, I'm not going to, I'm not going to do this. And, and I also, there's something that needs to be said here. You, you cited some great at all tragic statistics about my state, and specifically about albacurkey earlier. And, and this is a public health crisis, right? Good by the, absolutely. Yeah, it's out of hand. When you're seeing the number of homicides, basically double, you know, the space of a fucking year, that, that is a, that's a cry something needs to be done, right?

Right. Right. Yeah. 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, if we all agree that it is a crisis, a 30 day ban is not going to, it's not going to do anything, and it's certainly not going to address the 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 order. It's not a lot. You know what I mean. So that's another thing, right? Like this is, you're you'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, the quote unquote drug problem. And, and let's be very clear here, when the governor issued her order on Friday, she issued two orders. One is called, with a 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 for her, these things are related. And she's trying to time together. And I think we all know that given the last 40 years of American history, dealing with drugs via law enforcement has not done anything to help the problem. And so that just again, this is one of those 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 has a democratic majority in her legislature, 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 scrambling. It's, it's, 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 pattern of sort of conservatives backing sheriffs against, like 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, 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 completely unnest it, it's complete. It, it, it does not address the problem. And the problem is, is, is very like extremely serious. And so I, I find this kind of distracting from realistic solutions here, you know, which, which, by the way,

can, you know, probably do, um, to some extent involve restricting, you know, uh, certain, the ability of people to carry in certain situations, to carry in certain ways in certain situations. I think, or one of the, yeah. Oh, yeah. I don't know. Yeah. Well, I just, 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. I grew up buying guns out of the backs of cars. Wild stories about that. But that was a fully legal thing to do. We had private sales in the

state. I bought a lot of car guns. Yeah, yeah. And it is fun, but we should probably probably, probably, that's not probably this should be probably. And especially for those of us that don't have anything restricting us from purchasing firearms, there's no reason to not just do anyway. 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 not secured and then commits a crime with it, then the owner of that firearm is then held liable.

And it has been used now twice into fairly high profile tragic shootings in the state. I should note here, a decent number of the recent spike in homicides have been children getting access to a firearm zone by adults. Yes. Yes. Yes. Either accidentally or purposefully using them to shoot and kill people, right?

Yes. As you, yeah. The law is called the Benny Hargrove Act, which was named in honor 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, yeah, and as again, as a 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. 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 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 everybody's got this like knee jerk thing and everybody wants to talk about crime. I'm using big air quotes, crime.

Which is in direct counter, you know, counterins to the idea that this is a public health crisis. So, you know, we have a lot of reservations about 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, you know, we've done a lot to protect people from the car cereal system in this state, which is a hell of predatory. 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. That's the reason.

The reason why shootings have increased is because we let people who've been arrested for petty theft or something out of jail. For some reason, that's why crime is up. I don't know. It doesn't make sense. But anyway, so it's even with the solutions come more problems. But yeah, there does seem to be 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. So I kind of want to close probably by talking about and by 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 here that is also a big part of a surgeon violence and a number of states nationwide, which is that like people are a lot of a significant chunk of this 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 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 as why a lot of these crimes involve guns, but there's just been this rise in anti-social violence, 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 increase in political violence we've seen because the decent amount of it does arise out of that. This is part of what I think is kind of disheartening about the governor's response here is that this is a very serious problem. The kind of knee jerk reactions don't help it, but also like, I don't know what does. 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 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. Yeah, I, oh man, you said it out for a bit. Yeah, yeah, I think that, you know, I'm thinking about the first time I was able to go to a school function of my daughters after COVID orders were lifted. And I remember I was with a family member and they were, you know, they were 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. And you're in a half. And, you know, and like specifically,

like some of these little kids that are running around, they, they maybe have never been to a function like this. You know what I mean? Like by the time, by the time most of your 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 and listen to the thing, right? Like you're just sitting on your phone. Anyway, so yeah, yeah, I definitely agree with you. I think in New Mexico, we're not isolated from other states in the sense that we have a rise in drug use and related crime. We're not isolated in the sense we have a rise in, you know, our houseless population in lack of job or at least good jobs. And all of those things come together to make life hard,

and when life is hard, it impacts people and they make bad decisions. The thing that I think does hurt New Mexico and is maybe what makes New Mexico unfortunately sort of stand out from some of its issues is, we are a very rural state. We have one fairly large city in Albuquerque, but even then the surrounding parts of Albuquerque just like the rest of the state are very rural.

And there is a certain amount of, we just as a state, we are lacking resources and always have. 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 or, you know, a meal to get, a job to go to, recreation that they can afford, things like that. I mean, it is tough. It is just tough out there. I'm privileged and I get to, you know, I'm raising my daughter in a home that, you know, we want for very little, but I see it even in my pure group, I see people who are struggling all the time. And yeah, it's just tough out there, you know, 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-populated. I think we're both at around four million people if I'm not mistaken. Oh, New Mexico's only like two million. Oh, you're two million. So yeah, even less. So low-population states that have one big city that kind of dominates politics, but a very conservative kind of rural area and a lot of ways outside of that. And in both cases that urban

area has seen recent massive spikes in interpersonal violence and then fatal issues due to drug use. Now one of the things, obviously one of the things Oregon has coming through is because of all of the retiree recent stuff here, like a much higher tax base. So there's theoretically more resources, although I tend to argue very incompetently applied. So most of this don't actually get out. But you do, you do have this kind of, this, this is one of these places where this urban rural divide is, is, is both a lot structure and where this state that is the majority of the population and is dealing with such severe issues is also kind of the political center of or this, the city is also the political center of the state.

Well, yeah, that and just yeah, you absolutely hit on something there. Albuquerque has been historically 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 things like that. Like retirees are basically our third-highest generation, you know, generative revenue. I have agriculture probably in there too, but you know what I'm saying, they're very high portion. Yeah. And the albacurkey that I grew up going to visit all of my family and going downtown, going

down to the international district, going near the university, 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, not that I feel danger to my, to my person as a, you know, this, as a white sys head dude with a beard, like walking around, like I usually feel pretty safe in my person. But, um, yeah, I can't say that I would, I have reflect that from everybody that I know that lives there and, 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 albacurki out into these more rural places, it makes it harder to get to, you know, get to groceries, get to jobs, 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. Yeah. Well, Lucas says everything else you wanted to get into today. Oh, 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, I'm a long time listener of this show. And, and when this issue came up, I, I really was thinking about some of those topics you brought up, but, you know, way back in the, the first run of it could happen here. And thinking about the,

that 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? Yeah. Yeah. So this will continue to be a topic of vibrant discussion. So I'm sure we'll have you back in the very near future. Yeah. Yeah.

Happy to come back for that. Yep. All right, everybody. This is the, this has been an episode of it. Could happen here. You know, go, go. Yep. Yep. All right, everybody. This is the, this has been an episode of it could happen here, you know, go go. Yeah, Luke, is you have any pluggable supply before you roll out of here? Oh, yeah. Sure. I mean, if you were interested, I'm on Twitter at Lucas Herndon. And if you're curious about, you know, New Mexico politics, progress now in New Mexico, on all the socials. Most excellent. All right, everybody. this has been an episode. Go how?

I'm Penelope Sferas. I'm a film director. I want to tell you a story about a friend of mine. Back in the 70s, Peter Ivers moved to LA to start his music career. He scored Ron Howard's directorial debut. I didn't know one thing about Peter Ivers. I just said, okay. Let's meet him. And even hosted LA Night Cable TV show.

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And we're at the Llanco. Family with white bracelets. Family. You're at the Llanco. You're at the Llanco. Family. You're at the Llanco. You're at the Llanco.

Family. Family. Family. Family. Family. Family. Family. Family. Family. Family. Family. me, James. And I'm joined by Shrine 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. Hi, Shrine and Robert. Hi, James. Hello, James. Thank you, Robert. Thank you, Shrine. It's lovely to have this form on introduction time. Okay, so yeah, we're gathered here to get 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 they like to do seemingly 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 border fences in San Isidro just about 15 minutes south of where I live. It's probably worth grounding this discussion in the various claims and counter claims. So there are about 200 people in between the two board defenses right now. People I spoke to were from Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Turkey, China, Vietnam, Honduras, Guatemala. Yeah, like the reason that sometimes 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 are the United States, not we as cool-zone media. We aspire to destabilize regimes. We've only destabilized two or three countries. And we're proud of it. We didn't hide it. We took our shot at Canada. You know, yeah, yeah, we've taken a good, good, good couple of swings at a time of the door. I think we learned some punches, but who knows? Time will tell. So it's people from, like I think often, the migration is constructed as quote unquote Mexican, which is definitely not the case.

I spoke to one family from Mexico yesterday, but like even if you look at border patrol statistics, about 4,000 out of 15,000 people apprehended in the San Diego sector in July of this year were of Mexican national time. That's lower than I would assume to be honest. Yeah, I mean, it's a number of things right? Like it's these countries like climate change is definitely getting worse. So my question is happening from there. I see a lot of people from Vietnam and I don't have the

language skills to speak to them in depth. I was speaking to someone when we get on to this through Google Translate from Vietnam, but hard to conduct a full interview, especially when folks are guiding their phone charge, which they are because exactly the same as last time they need the phone to do CBP1, they need the phone to interact with their families, let 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, so we can talk, let's talk a little bit about mutual aid response and then we'll get onto the border patrol.

So there are two groups down there right now and I think it's very impressive. The services are able to provide because because border patrol claim these people are not detained. That means that they are therefore not obliged to provide any services to them. Right. Yeah. So that would 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 a sanitation, which sanitation is the one that's really hard to cover because everything has to go through a fist size gap in the fence. Salitation is the one that's really hard to cover because everything has to go through a fist size gap in the fence. So that's still like an unmet need. But these two groups, free-shake collective, they're at free-shit PB on Twitter. And also American Friends Service Committee,

I've spoken about them before, they're a Quaker group, but they're really great, like in terms of turning up and helping people who need help, they're constantly there. And they, they're good places in your money, even if you're not a Quaker yourself, like, like, check out their Twitter, they're probably aligned with a lot of people who listen to show on a lot of things.

I think they're prison abolitionists. And so those two groups were there, and they were, at first there was myself myself one person from American French service committee and two older volunteers who would come And about 150 to 200 people so mostly I just kind of helped because I think in that situation is more important to help than necessarily get the best audio for your podcast So we handed out water handed out, handed out those emergency survival blankets, and that was about all we had at first, some medical stuff. People who had medical. And a bit later, a free-ship people came and Zavia came, I'm not sure what Zavia's

August, but I will tweet it when I find it, I'll put it in the show notes too. He's great. I've spoken at his events before that he holds down motherboard. We had a board of media roundtable. He's done it with a massive generator, so that was great. We were able to charge phones. And what's really, I think, notable is how much the people in between the fences are able to participate in distribution of goods and helping each other. So they have a person who volunteers to be the coordinator for the water distribution and one who volunteers to coordinate for the organizing of 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 an incredible job of they'd get the cell phone, right? The name of the person and then we assigned him a number in the line. And that person would also have that name a number written on their hand. And it's really in duct tape that's taped to them and 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 got above 50, 60%, 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 implemented again, much more, it's less chaotic than it was before, and fewer people are able to provide better help, which is really good. 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 cold yesterday. It was raining. And people didn't have anything to shelter under. There were a few tops, but not very many. And it's a pretty, like, there were very young babies there, right? It's a pretty like they 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 till I down on to sleep I think that gives you a sense of how kind of uh underserved they are there's obviously no toilet facilities because you're just in a dusty kind of desert area by the border so and if people are familiar with Las Americas, this count

more, 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 the elements, right? It was hot today, like I was out earlier in 1991, So they won't be having any shade today. They didn't have any shelter from the rain or always to keep warm last night. And they're not allowed to start fires either. Wow. They have the 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 a couple of examples to illustrate that. So I was able to talk to one person. They presented themselves from like they became into the parking lot walking and they looked very concerned. And so a pro-sumist, hey, do you need anything? Can we help you? And they So approach to him, I was like, hey, do you need anything? Can we help you? And they had experienced some kind of medical condition and been taken to hospital, which bought a customs and bought a protection.

We'll 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, which a somewhere in San Diego. That person had been released from hospital to a taxi, which are hospitals in San Diego have a habit of doing this. They'll dump homeless people, right? If it is for you, anyone in San Diego will have seen this. You'll be familiar with people dumped out of the hospital in Hillcrest, wearing a hospital gown and maybe having very

little other possessions. It's every single day that's happened. Unfortunately, people have passed away on being released by the hospital before in Hillgrest. So they release these folks, and I guess they often give them a bus pass or they pay for a taxi in this case, they pay for this person's taxi. They ask for a taxi to the border that command of English was pretty limited, so they ask for a taxi to the border. They were taken to like the formal border crossing at San Isidro, which is mile and a half east of where we were, and then they walked down the dirt road to where we were. But obviously because there was a fence in between us and the people being detained, then they weren't able to access that area. Right?

So that leaves them in a conundrum, where they're now in the United States, like without any status, they were able to, one, but of total agent advice them to return to Mexico. Obviously, that will constitute an entry to Mexico in between ports of entry, right? You'd be illegally entering Mexico. It's not what it throws job to enforce Mexican laws, but that person was in the United States and presented a claim for asylum, right? They had a cell phone and they were using Google translate, and they literally, I could see it, I was like, I'm afraid to go back to my country. I'm afraid I'll be hurt if I go back there, which is like a pretty textbook asylum claim. I would like to claim asylum, right? And on making that claim,

a board of patrol agent returned them to the area in between the fences, right? Which would suggest that like this is a holding facility to board a patrol for people. I just want to read the statement that the border patrol made to me this morning. This was like, you know, a couple of hours from one recording this recording this on Tuesday. CBP has built and retrofitted 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 wraparound services, all to better support ensuring getting people

appropriate care as quickly as possible. Border patrol has prioritized a quick transportation of migrants encountered in this environment, which is partially dangerous, particularly dangerous or in current weather conditions, to border patrol facilities where individuals can see from medical care through the 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 migrants in between defenses

that Daniel's going to drop in right after this. You have a Monday? You got one? Just go sit down. Go sit down. It's a little bit more. It's a little bit more. Go sit down. Listen, we take as soon as we can. Listen, there's too many of you. We can't do this fast enough. The one guy I see here in talks to you

the last time we have to take people. So go sit down. We're not designed to have to take people so they're just now? But we're not designed to take hundreds of people, we're working as fast as we can, as we patient, I can tell you. They're shouting at them, they're shouting 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, then people will have heard that in the intro too, that they were taking people with white bracelets.

Those have a day, right? The day that you entered. So like it might say Monday or Sunday or today, obviously it's Tuesday, so they were going to bracelet, which has a color and a day. And they post those people in order of priority priority for the people who arrived on Monday, first sale process on a company of minors. I didn't see any, obviously, this is some 18-year-old

people. It could be hard to tell how exactly how old they are, but 17, whatever. But I didn't see any people that young on their own. After that, they will process single mothers with children. And after that, they will process single mothers with children. Sorry, a few of those, quite a few of those. After that, they will process like a family, which they define to consist of like a man or woman and children. After that, they will process men on their own. As a woman on their own, then men on their own.

They had initially separated people. They had people just like they had last time, 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?

And I guess the claim of one of the controllers that these people could go back to Mexico, I'm not sure how, because obviously that they're in between these 30-foot walls, right? You could go around the end. That's how people come north, but that's quite a hike, especially if you haven't got any water and food and stuff. So yeah, this is what they've claimed. It's worth noting that like Border Patrol, a number of representatives from the Hispanic caucus like requested Border Patrol clarify this after what happened in May.

And their letter, they noted that the conditions via their agency guidelines for detention, which they do, and that Border Patrol isn't supposed to hold people in its own custody for more than 72 hours, which some people were held for long given 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 or were not constrained from further movement. At the time of this incident, the US Border Patrol San Diego sector facilities were experiencing capacity issues and some transportation challenges, which have since been remediated. Border Patrol agents encountered and apprehended these migrants as

soon as they were 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 not factually correct to suggest that they had not come into contact with Border Patrol. I have video of it, I've published video of our Twitter, we've used audio of it on the podcast, it's just not true. So Border Patrol 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 and services. Oh, yeah. Fucking magic. Look at that. Taking a victory lap. I'm quitting now.

Never bogg us again. I enjoy these adverts. Yeah, it's me. I'm back.. I never podcasted again. I enjoy these adverts. Yeah, it's me. I'm back. Everyone else is still here too. Now we're talking about the mutual aid response to what's happening at the border, right? And as I said, a border patrol aren't providing anything. And as I said, at least when I left, I left after I got dark quite a long time after it got dark last night. It was after 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. Like I would say maybe the majority was Spanish speaking, but a lot of people with Vietnamese,

I was speaking to some Francophone African people, various nationalities right before I left. Like I said, lots of people from like Tijikastana, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, 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, about what's happening to them. Can they expect to be separated in some case, just as they can? Can they expect, how long can they expect to be there? We don't really know. I heard one board of patrol agents 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, or two days, right? So all of the services that 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. We haven't come back with that granola bar this time. And I think it's really worth us, like taking a moment to consider the scale of what, like 200 people,

there's not that many people, but it was more than 2000 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 a little talk here about like how we do in mutual aid because That only thing that enables like little babies to have like a blanket is someone Messaging someone else on signal and being like, hey, this is happening again. Do you have stuff? Can you come down 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 dust. I think it's really, it's admirable, I think, and it's something that like, like, how to say this, that we should take into consideration when we're discussing things like religion and then, like, doing discourse. And like, it can be really easy to get, like, until, like, four reddit atheist

mode, I'm not a person who believes in religion, particularly, but, like, I, the only people who are helping at some point are people who are at least part of religious organizations. 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 asking for anything in return, including the ability to prostilize. Then I don't give a shit what that is, right? Like, I don't care if they're from a church. I don't care if it's like,

you know, 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 could be a church

that was mosques that last time, I'm sure, that they were like synagogues and a few, and fucking kudos to those people, right? Yeah, I know, like that's good. Glad they're there. Yeah, those, yeah, those people are doing anecdotes and do, 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, I guess. And so 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. Yeah, it was. I 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 who had to go to hospital had become dehydrated. Like that's how they needed because you don't, when people were come, when we first, at least when I first got there, people were very hungry and very thirsty and like really 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 in May is there again. Yeah.

So you mentioned that there's no shade, like no shade in areas. So when it's triple digits, like there are kids and babies and just everyone's outside. Yes. That is just, I mean, it's terrible regardless. But like that in particular, that's like brutal. Yeah. I mean, I think I've shared these pictures with you guys before but like in in Hacumba in May People were making little kind of a frames and lean twos out of osu-tios and cacti and stuff just trying to get out of this

Because it was very hot then out there You sent recently there's like a there's a photo you sent with the child's hand like coming out of the The fence and it made me emotional. Yeah, it makes me emotional, honestly. I think I've said this before, like in interviews, and I didn't interview a thorough peck trust about this, but I would rather go somewhere dangerous and have dangerous things happen, then see a little kid have to be cold, not be able to help them, or just be sad. Like it's not a fun place for children. And that fucks me up in a way that like that's yeah, I would I would

so much rather be like physically uncomfortable or in danger than like being a perfectly safe place where you're watching kids suffer. Like that's the rough thing. I've been to a lot of where you're watching kids suffer. Like that's the rough thing. 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 an active combat zones

and don't take the wrong thing out of this but like the kids who have been stuck in a camp with like no chance of ever getting out seem like more depressed in a camp with like no chance of ever getting out seem like more depressed in a lot of ways than the kids who every day, you know, they're in, you know, part of the city, even though like the city is a dangerous place to be, 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 and depresses them and traumatizes them is, and again, I'm not saying like it's better for kids to be in an active war zone, but like that is trauma as well. And I think in a lot of ways, in 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 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, really. I think that's the really like, it strips people of that agency, which is a really degrading thing to do, right? Like you're forcing people. Yeah, they can do everything right. Like that person presented

a perfect affirmative asylum claim, you know. And you know, yeah, it doesn't matter. And I think that's very hard, especially, but I imagine it's very difficult. I'm not a parent, but I imagine that like, if you are a parent, you know, you like if you are a parent. Oh, God. Yeah. You know, you just want your kids to have a 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. It was in 2018 with the migrant caravan, when like I had been, there was one little child who I speak about a lot, but she was obsessed with my hair if people haven't seen pictures of me have long hair. And 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 handing out water bottles or talking to people doing what I could do. And I saw that girl every day for months, right? And I remember when it was coming back to a Christmas party and just wanting to fucking scream at everyone. It's a juxtaposition from being seeing this little kid deprived of so many things that children should have,

warmth and shelter and good food and a safe place to be, and then going home, 20 minute drive, cross the border, drive home and see people just like going about their lives. It's a really challenging, like, duality. We can't stop it, right? Like, it's not enough power to stop this, but like, and it is in our power. One of the things, I hope people being like, it's like, welcome to America. America. Like it's pretty fucked up way to be welcome to America, right? But like I like I'm an immigrant. My my arrival here was very different. I'm like, Cherine, you you came here when you were younger, right? I was I didn't immigrate myself. I was born here a month old. Move back. My parents immigrated. Yeah. So you you can be president.

That's important. Oh, yes. I can be president. You can be president, but not James, which is good, which is good. Yeah, yeah. That was locked by the sound. Yeah, Shereen. But it's turning general. Yeah, that is my goal for you, James. Yeah, I can see I'd really crush it in that way. I do love a good law. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Chareen can take out tech crews who is not eligible. You can be Chareen's John Mitchell. No. It's a fun little water gate, you know, for every fucking year. Yeah, I would be hiding Chareen's secret meetings.

I'm hoping for a hold them in myself. That's the guy to be. I want to go back further like further than that, you know, like when presidents were chads and like Roosevelt got shot five times, it's always a little bit of speech. I can see Cherine having that kind of energy. Wow. Wow.

Yeah. I'll leave into that. Yeah, we're all in on Cherine. Maybe get a vest too. Yeah. Don't shoot, Cherine. A book was enough for Teddy Roosevelt, but bullets have changed. Yeah. Return. A book was enough for Teddy Roosevelt, but bullets are changed.

Return. No, a joke society came to America very differently from this and recently became a citizen after a long time. And you always feel very precarious when you live here and you're not. So I just want to,, one thing that I noticed was that so many of the folks down there, at one point all of us, at one point I didn't know, were all the sort of people who had come here themselves

and had different stories. When we talked about, 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, he go. Bottle of water. Cheers. Like someone of fucking talk to you and like how is your day? Or like what's your favorite football team?

Like like that can be a really valuable way of being like like I understand that the government is treating you like shit right now. And that's not with my consent. Like I, yeah, I want human connection because they're not treated like humans. So it's like nicer. Remember that's like, oh, I'm like, yeah, I'm totally seeing me. Yes, exactly. And just being like a 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 spent a lot of money on soft toys for kids over the years, but I never want to only clear it out at Costco with a two-one and like had the morning

the bed of a pickup truck and they were like trying to fly out as we drove down the freeway. It was a good time. But yeah, it's, I think that common humanity is super important. And if people have language skills and they want to help, like, you know, there are always organizations to help migrants. American Friends Serbs 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 just nice people. There are so many languages,

apparently, that need translating. It's not just Spanish. I think a lot of people assume we would just be like, I don't know Spanish, I'm not going to go. But it's so many other languages that would be helpful. Yeah. I speak French. And I honestly spend as much time at the board speaking French as Spanish. I have a possible communication in Haitian Creole

and then can sort of, some people speak more formal French who I can speak to them., I don't speak Tajik or Uzbek or Russian or Vietnamese. So, like, yeah, those people are there for it's hard 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 the hospital was Vietnamese and was just doing a stalwart job of like obviously they were to the 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, you have to be in this line if you want this, and this line if you want that. And that was nice. And it's always great to see people empowered by that process, they're not just asking for stuff. They're also helping get other people stuff. And I think that helps both parties. So this means, I guess people call me too

like solidarity, not charity, which, I guess, like, people call me to lead 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 not, not to like, again, some comic reward or whatever, like, and people. And I think that's a really laudable thing is something we should all participate in if we can. I have to stand on everyone's near the border, but like, yeah, we can't change this. We're also 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. And I sincerely believe he will be a piece of shit to

migrants if he is elected again. So yeah, you can't fucking change this by voting for someone. I wish you could. I wish it was that easy, but like a savvy requires your active participation. And yeah, I'm just constantly impressed by people who will like the people from free should collect if they bought their entire family, right? I send them a message, they were like, yeah, we're on a way, what do you need? Blankets, okay, we have like a hundred blankets and a generator. And within an hour, at least some of those people 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, it's not enough. So yeah, I think there's something we can

all do in our own communities, but yeah, right now, again, I guess Biden's administration are back on the bullshit of the border. And it's important that people just pay attention to it, right? I guess you could write your Congress people, but they didn't do shit last time. They were to shit this time. But people could show sort of a directing anyway or lend their language skills. I think now it's a really important time to do that. Yeah, it's shit's frustrating because the border in general just becomes a political talking point, right?

Like Biden uses it for his benefit and then it's like, I'll pick it up when I need it again. Whatever it is, it's pretty infuriating. It gets fucking a naught. Yeah. It's incredibly infuriating for me to see like a guarantee right. I was down there yesterday, one 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 the working knowledge of like what's happened since title 42, which is that apprehensions have dropped, by the way,

like travel across the border has got a lot lower since title 42, which is what we were told, that opposite of what every op-air told us was going to happen because I mean, people maybe should not be rang about a border when they live in DC, on New York. But yeah, Biden will come back to the border next time he gets attacked by Republicans on border stuff. And until then, these people will be treated as if their numbers or if they don't

matter. And like each of them has a story and a reason for being here. And yeah, they're not to just numbers. They're all people. And every time someone dies trying to come to this country to be safe, it's a tragedy and it's a preventable tragedy. It's one that the Democrats adjusters complicit as a Republican's in. We spoke a lot about groups you can go to, right? We spoke about border kindness. We spoke about borderlands relief collective. There are a million or one ways to help or it 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 to, when people are like, hey, what's gonna happen? You have to be like, well, we don't know. But like, you might be separated from your family, you might be detained. They're probably gonna take most of your clothes, they might take your belt off, you have to be like, well, we don't know, but like you might be separated from 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 shoe laces. And then you just go into the fucking abyss of processing, right? It might be

years till you get your court date and you might not have a right to work until then, but it might cost you 10, 12 grand to get a lawyer to represent you. How do you get that money? Fuck to my no, you know, and yeah, it's deep, I feel really ashamed, but yeah, all we can do is just try and help her if we can. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Yeah, sorry, that was really depressing. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, sorry, that was really depressing. Was it? No, no, I mean, no, no, no, it's good. That's the truth. 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, that's valid. It's, both things can be true.

I can be helpful and I can also have perspective on it. So. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it helps to help me. It helps other people to feel active, not like active upon. And that's why folks who are migrants want to also participate in migrant aid, right? Like even folks are in between the war right now, they're organizing the phone charging queue because it helps to not just feel active upon and remove dev agency. Yeah. And so yeah, do you mutual aid if you can? Yeah. Be nice. Yeah, be nice.

Be nice. Fuck the border patrol. Mm-hmm. I think that that more or less covers it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's our message that's Shereen's presidential slogan. Yes. That's my campaign. I'll work on that. Okay. Yeah. Bye. I'm Penelope Sferas. I'm a film director. I want to tell you a story about a friend of mine. Back in the 70s, Peter Ivers moved to LA to start his music career. He scored Ron Howard's directorial debut. I didn't know one thing about Peter Ivers. I just said, okay.

Let's meet him. And even hosted LA Night Cable TV show. It showcased LA punk bands in all their glory. The crowd started getting bigger and bigger and then there was Beverly Danzelow. There was John Baloofery. But then it all went to hell. Peter Ivers was murdered on March 3rd, 1983.

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Go to realdealonfentinal.com. This message is brought to you by the ad council. It's another union episode of it could happen here in the podcast where we do a lot of things, but one of one of which is talking about unions, one of which is not doing great intros is me and me a Wang. And today I'm here to talk about a union and a strike and a bunch of other stuff. And with you to talk about this is Tyler Fellini, who is an organizer with Portland Childs with Justice

and also a former New Seasons worker and Alex Gage, who's an organizer and store rep for the New Seasons Labor Union shop in Arbor Lodge. Yeah, both the YouTube, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having us. Happy to be here. Yeah, both YouTube. Welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having us. Happy to be here. Yeah, 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 the certain new seasons union was formed and what that sort of

process looked like and how it's been going since then? Yeah, I can speak to that. 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 1st, the same day that Amazon Labor Union went public and won their election. So there's like a really inspiring moment for us that spurred a conversation on the shop floor, the couple co-workers, 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 set with the attendance policy, the way that new seasons was treating us and had been treating us during COVID. We're also upset with our pay, which is obscene and does not keep up with the cost of living in Portland, Oregon, which is a very expensive city. And so, and we are 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 are a lot of people who've seen just the downward decline. So those early meetings went really well. We talked to co-workers 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 shout out to them. They are an amazing space for a lot of burgeoning independent unions to have some of their early meetings. So we met there with more members at our store at the Seven Corners location. And I think we had like 30 people there, which is a huge turnout for first showing a meeting. Yeah. 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 really unheard of. Yeah, that's amazing. Especially for a grocery store union. That is wild. Yeah. Yeah. 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 by the end of the summer, we rolled into, we had our election I wanna say in September. And by the end of the summer, there were multiple stores that had gone public and announced.

And here we are. It's barely been a year since our first election win. It's barely been a year since then, and we have over 900 members, almost 1,000 members in this very new union. That's incredible. That gets into another thing I'm interested about, which is That's incredible. That gets into another thing I'm interested about, which is Portland, Portland is a city that has been in the last, I mean, I would say it probably last five years, but especially in the 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 independent unions. There's been an enormous number of them, the actual number of workers being organized is really high. And yeah, I mean, you talked about having this bar as a sort of space you could do meetings. Has there been any other stuff, I mean, from other independent unions, from other, I mean, just from the fact that there's so many things happening that have changed the dynamics of how these union organization drives have been going?

change the dynamics of how these union organization drives have been going? Yeah, so early on, we were weighing our options as far as like, did we want to join an existing union or go independent? Like, what did we want to do there? 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 burger-vill workers union. They offered a talk, yeah, they were great.

They were some of their early folks to reach out and help us. We were also able to talk to some of the folks at IOW, local five that represents pals, workers, and and many others and get some support there. Portland is definitely a labor town and the solidarity that we felt kind of across the board is great, you know? Especially like early on when we had a lot of questions and we didn't have any answers and we didn't have many resources to, you know to hire a lawyer and ask them.

So I want 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 other, not just new seasons shops, but have you seen other shops that decide to start organizing after you all came out? I think that there is a general energy among the rank and file that some of the old ways that unions are organizing were not the most representative of the workers, which is in part the 80s, right? And so kind of why we've seen sort of union representation

stagnant, but we're seeing a major shift, right? We've got a lot of educated workers doing low wage jobs, which that condition existed in the 1930s and led to a major explosion in militant unions. So I think there's a major parallel there. And it's not just Amazon Libre unions also, you know, the Starbucks workers United of the Black Campaign was huge, right? And those are workers who, service workers, restaurant workers,

historically have been left out of labor or underrepresented, similar to healthcare workers and just care workers generally. And that I think is kind of the stereotype of like the working classes like a trad white guy in a factory. And you're seeing that to really upended right now, which is really exciting. Yeah, but that's another dynamic that I think 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 But 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 very clearly people want to organize, there's been a lot of conservatism on the part of the sort of like larger, just in unions. You don't really want to like throw an enormous amount of money into these organizing drives, which means, you know, if this stuff is going to happen, it's the independent unions. And yeah, I don't know. I think you're pointed about sort of, I think you're pointed about both the highly educated workers thing and the way that,

sort of what's traditionally considered a worker and what unions are willing to sort of throw money at or tie 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, at very least not since like the 80s. 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. 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 get desertified within a matter of week. But we haven't had any of that yet. Yeah, which is really impressive. And you know, that's another thing I've mentioned. 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 been the wall that the existing units hit and we're like, this is too hard,

we're gonna go do something else. And I've been wondering how y'all have been dealing with the turnover problem 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 interested in what your sort of strategies to manage it have been. I think it's a matter of passion. I think Tyler is a great example.

Like, it 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 we stick around and we're doing this for free. We're not getting paid for it. We're doing it because it's the right thing to do. When Arbor Lodge and Grant Park had their walkouts on Labor Day weekend, there was a customer at Grant Park who called out to us that we should just go open up

our own workers co-op. And my response to him was that if we leave, there's just another batch of workers that are going to go through these conditions. The goal is not that I wanted to be great for me. I don't even work in New Seasons anymore. I wanted to be great for my former co-workers who are still there. And for the people that I don't know who are going to come behind them, and that's how you get around the high turnover pieces,

like the passion and dedication, and the drive to make conditions better for the people coming after you, which is really antagonistic to the way capital is and wants us to be very individual oriented, right? We just care about ourselves and our day to day, but that's the really great thing with the worker power, right?

Is that collectively we are so much stronger. Collectively we can actually stand up to the boss and win, right? And that means just reorienting how we think about the world, right? Like this job sucks. How can I make this job better? I can just quit and go get a better job. But if I change this job, then the people who are still here also get better working conditions.

Yeah, and I think that there's a kind of flip side of that too, which is that even if you turn over just is inevitable, to some extent, even if you have people who want to stay and fight, people are just going to have to leave. But on the other hand, if you're in a unionized workplace, and if you're in a union that has, and if you're specifically, if you're in a union that has this sort of militant culture, what you're doing, is you're changing the actual class itself, right? Because now you're a worker who, I don't know, is moving to Arizona or something, right? They are now also much more militant

and have this sort of experience of organizing that they may know I've had before. And this, you know, it's like you're any individual movement you're doing in one place is building up the entire class. 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 wanna get in on the beginning of this. And we've seen like a big push of that recently. And people who we, they wanna go organize, you know, organize their next workplace, you know, regardless if they were fired or whatever, they want to keep it going. So, and I think to build on that too, 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 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 out to get a job. They don't need the money motivator. They just want to fuck shit up, right? They want to change things and 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 rocks at pop, right? That's kind of in the culture of Portland. And so there is this orientation towards struggle that does exist. And right now that energy, you know, 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, 10 people now kind of talking. It's all of this new energy. And for the most part, most of Portland 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? The folks in their 50s or 60s, they're towards retirement, right? And so it's a younger folks coming in

that are gonna change it, you know? Yeah, and I think there's an interesting dynamic with this too, which is that, you know, okay, one of the sort of conditions of the last sort of like 40, 50 years of capitalism, like is this sort of high turnover rates and also is this, you know, is this thing where you are, like you as an individual worker shifting jobs really, really quickly. And that, you know, that's in some sense an issue, but it also means that like, I don't know, like if you have a bunch of people who, you know, spent, like, spent a hundred days fighting the feds and, you know, still, still may have developed

just like the sort of middle to hatred of the cops and, you know, developed sort of an into capitalist politics. Yeah, you get more of the sort of salt stuff you're talking about because like, you know, screw it. Like, you know, if you're gonna be working like a shit job, anyways, you might as well like go work one where you're salting and starting a union because there's not actually like, I don't know, it's not like you're like getting career advancement in the service job, right?

And yeah, I mean, you know, that seems to be driving like, at least some of the sort of how this kind of like, into how the independent union like union organizing in Portland has been moving. Yeah, 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 it's always had a reputation of like being a great place to work. They're really inclusive or whatever. So that's what 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 way I can turn to trust my employer. And how do I preserve what little dignity that I do have at this workplace?

Because generally speaking, our jobs are pretty okay, minus the corporate business side of things. Most people enjoy going to work, maybe, but they want to enjoy going to work. So having that kind of double-edged sword has been a catalyst for us. Just build on what Alex said too. I think it's really interesting that a lot of the surge in new independent union stuff has been new seasons, Starbucks to a degree, REI, Trader Joe'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 high because your wages were high and really, dude, most of us can't afford to live in the city, right? Most of us are using cool, really tricky. Yeah, and it's just not true, right? And so, it's workers who get jobs at these progressive places that drink the similar social cool aid that the customer's drink level, assuming that these businesses have good business

practices. And what's happening is that they're just getting greedy, right? This is the case everywhere. It just hits a little bit different when your employer pretends your friends and then stabs you in the back. Yeah. Not all workplaces have this kind of like, oh, we're like progressive sort of vibes thing. 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 how hypocritical 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, you're making how much money? Yeah, and I think, yeah, I don't know, I'm interested like how effective has that been for you sort of like leveraging that? I think it's been really effective. I mean, you know, and not just as I think a really good example of exactly what we're talking about, right, is the shareholders at 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 backroom. They make sure it's not public-facing. Anything we can do to attack their public image, like it hurts. I 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 local, friendly, the alternative to corporate fast food. And they had security guards and strike busters literally fighting with picketers in the past and it tanked the reputation. And so new seasons management has clearly looked at what burgerville management did and been like, we're not going to do that. I mean, I don't stop them from being pretty. They're just, they're more polite when they're pretty to us.

They're still just a shitty, they're just, they smile while they stab us in the back. Yeah. So on the subject just of stabbing 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 but 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 It started in January

Yeah, so we We've known that eventually it's gonna get to a point where we're gonna need to show some force So you know, we go in there with good faith and little by little we find out that the the smallest ask It's gonna be impossible and 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 the one catalyst is they changed the attendance policy for non-union workers and non-union stores workers and non-unit stores to 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 to bargain. They didn't have a response. We brought it up in bargaining at the bargaining table. They said 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 we're Dylan Goodfaces saying like, OK, 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, a memorandum of understanding saying, you will give us that same policy. We filed a ULP saying, 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. So they never did. Then we did a rally. And we showed up at the headquarters with, I and made a scene and told them they have one more chance to sign the MOU. They didn't sign it. So then we organized the strikes at the two stores and gave them one more chance to sign the EmoU they didn't sign it.

We already knew they weren't going to. So yeah, we shut down those doors for the rest of the day at Grant Park and for one hour at our bar lodge. And it was powerful. We had a lot of support. A lot of people showed up. Yeah. we had a lot of support. A lot of people showed up. Yeah, and to build on that too,

there's things coming up that we can't talk about yet, but I would say that Alex, do you wanna talk about the practice picketing? I feel like we could talk about that. Okay, so we actually can talk about, we've just filed a ULP last night for bad faith bargaining. Yeah, ULP is an unfair labor practice. Yes, thank you. I get in contact with the jargon.

So we just filed that last night for bad faith bargaining because they gave us the most ridiculous policy for attendance. It's basically regressive bargaining, which is totally unfair. Yeah, do you want to explain what that is? 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, don't screw around, don't waste each other's time. The goal is to move towards some sort of compromise and 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. It is no better.

I think it frankly takes the shittiest things of the past two policies and put some together. So it seems pretty clear to us that it's regressive and that we can argue that new seasons is not acting in good faith. They are acting in bad faith, which is illegal according to the NLRB. 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, it looks really bad. And so, again, going back to, like, me and 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. And a ULP makes it pretty clear, hey, this person's being a jerk, this company's being a jerk. So, the more ULP is that we get filed,, like we win on, the bigger case we can paint that new seasons is actually being really unfair to us. Yeah, 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 gonna just lay back and let them take over. So, we're gonna do some practice pickets and I'm just 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 be active. So we're looking at practice pickets as a way to get people involved in a really low risk activity. Can you explain how that works? Yeah, so what we're going to do is each store will do a picket, but that picket will not

be a strike, that picket will not encourage shoppers to leave or discourage shopping in any way. We're not calling for a boycott. We're just simply doing logistically what doesn't look like if we do a picket at each store in the most peaceful way possible. And then we do that at every store and we kind of gauge like, you know, how ready are we? And by doing that too, it's a show of force to the company, right? 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 that participate in it. However, they will absolutely see that we are prepared to do it. The teamsters recently did this for UPS. A lot of teachers, unions have done similar things. It's a really good show of force to leverage your people power

and show the management that you're ready. Yeah, and it has another effect too, which is something that, you know, the kind of basic cultural understanding of, you know of what unions are, how they function, what you need to be doing in any given scenario, like they're just physically how to do pickets, what you just need to do. That stuff has all sort of faded from the height of union culture in the 60s and 70s. And that's something that you have to rebuild because, you know,

and this is something that's both in terms of the people in the union, that sort of knowledge, institutional 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 for unions is really high, but people don't understand exactly what, like, you know, people who don't understand exactly what, people who don't understand exactly what a union is doing in any given time or how it functions and things like that. This seems like a really good way to like, hey, this is a picket. This is what happens when there's a picket.

This is an informational picket. We're going to give you information. Yeah, so it seems like a good thing for building up that culture on both ends. It's a really good opportunity to talk to customers, get them involved. That's the thing is that new seasons kind of tagline is the friendly store in town. And the way that they built that reputation though was by really encouraging workers to develop deep relationships with customers. And so we're using that to leverage against the company, now I'm saying,

like, hey, you like me, you know me by name and I know you by name, you don't know the CEO by name. Like, let's talk about 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? When we had the walkouts on Liberty Weekend, we did a debrief and we're kind of like, how do we engage with people where we can hold onto our values

and still feel like we're being effective and Randy, a worker at ArborLodge, his solution instead of calling people who cross the picket line scabs and like, you know, harassing them that way, 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 gonna cross the picket line, I don't need a hurl insult to you. I'm just gonna guilt trip you and let you know that, like, I'm just a pointer to 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. We just got to make sure that like it vibes with what we're about, you know. Yeah, and that's another, you know, I think 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 stripping people's a good way to do it because yeah, you know, like sort of, especially,

especially sort of like 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. make you think they can see. Yeah, I think if they can see themselves in us too, they will relate and they won't want to go against their own values, which is our values, because that's the culture of Portland, generally speaking. Do you have anything else that you want to make sure to get in before we wrap up?

Yeah, we would love to push our GoFundMe. Yeah, yeah. That can be found at our website, which is really hard to find. Is it at SLU.org? It is, but yeah, you have to type it and you can't just Google it. Okay, well, we'll just put a link to it in the description. Okay, yeah, perfect. Yeah, 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. 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? We did all of this in our volunteer time. None of us are lawyers. None of us had never been in a union before or had very limited experience. We built 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 Ogletree Deacon, who is one of the largest anti-union law firms in the country. That's who new seasons 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 an 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 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. I have a lot of experience with leftist street activism, but I think that for anybody who wants to be involved in this struggle and is also looking for ways to make inroads and develop community, like labor's where it's at, right? We all work and

to a degree, we all hate our jobs and have something to complain about. 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, it's by design, right? The capitalist want us fighting against each other. And the labor movement is a way for the work in class to unite because it's about class four, 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 is nothing sort of magical or special about the people who do 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 ass

and get better, you know, get better working conditions and get better things for you and your entire class in the process. Yeah, 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, we're 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. Yeah, and I think on that note, yeah, this, this has been naked happened here. Go into the world and fight. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much, Mia. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of CoolZone Media. For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website CoolZoneia.com, or check us out on the I Heart radio app,

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