It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 100

Episode Date: September 16, 2023

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. 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. Podcast. It's a podcast that you're listening to. It's It Could Happen Here. It's the show where things fall apart and sometimes you put them back together again. And actually, okay. I really should have checked the calendar

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, no. Okay, okay. I got it right. I got it right.

I should never have doubted myself. Last week, we did an episode about inflation. And we told maybe half that story. And the part of it that we didn't tell, we got to most of the part about what this sort of theory of inflation that the people of strange matter developed we got through what it was what we didn't really talk about was what happened next which is a very very interesting set of sort of maneuvers that happened where this theory started spreading through a bunch of very disparate academic circles and you know sort 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 things in very interesting directions. And to talk about how this sort of supply chain theory of inflation like spread through the world and all of this very, very interesting, somewhat bizarre stuff that happened next. We once again have Steve Mann and John Michael Colon who are co-editors of Strange Matters

yeah Steve GMC welcome back to the show thanks for having us yeah glad we could have you two back and glad we get to talk about the really really interesting somewhat strange things

that happened next which was yeah a lot of people started picking up your theories and starting to work with them. Yeah, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about, I guess, like how that kind of first started and how people first started sort of coming to you for stuff. Yeah. Last year when the first of these pieces came out, Notes Toward a Theory of Inflation, we got a really good response in general from it. And it was kind of provoking discussions between groups of economists and readers of econ 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 a lot different than what the people who thought it would be super transitory, or the people who thought it was purely a monetary phenomenon or something like that, the people who thought it was purely a monetary phenomenon or something like that, having that option sparked good conversations.

And it eventually led to some writers approaching us who were inspired by those conversations. And particularly, a few of them really wanted to follow up on specific key 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 along production processes give the price setters, who are people at companies, socially acceptable reasons to eventually, if they need to, raise prices. But generally, pricing managers refrain from raising prices unless every like every other lever they've pulled

essentially has not worked so like people took that theory and wanted to follow up on it and so one author who did that was alex vicolo who approached us and he essentially wanted to do an updated version of the pricing manager survey that um we found really helpful in writing those initial pieces. So in my piece, No Sorter Theory of Inflation, I relied upon a wealth of pricing manager surveys where they asked these pricing managers, under what circumstances would you raise prices? 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, we need more and more studies, right? That's a phenomenon across social sciences and elsewhere. So you want to have good replication studies. One way to do that is to have an updated pricing manager survey that talks to like sort of modern corporations in the 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 Vekula, 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, 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 so-called dynamic pricing,

where they have the... 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, where they have 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 Walmart or one of the other big behemoth chains, knowing how important they are to the overall supply chain

network and knowing how important they are for the demand for groceries. Wherever Walmart goes, many people have no choice but to follow them in terms of their pricing schedules. And so that's another thing that is going on. Like people are developing just entire price indices of like Walmart or Costco or Sam's Club or who have you. terms of like the the difference between the way that like economists think about sort of price and how it's actually getting set which is like a lot of it a lot of it very much seems to be like if you are if you are like the largest company in a market like if you are like walmart right you have this incredible ability to sort of downstream or upstream suppliers to sell it to you at lower than – if I'm remembering this right, I'm getting strange looks. Yeah, well, it's important not to mix up two separate things.

One is Walmart's relationship to its suppliers, and the other one is its relationship to its competitors. So the supplier bit, you were totally right on the right track. It's 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, you're set. Because then you can basically just – 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 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 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 Vokolo's piece, is the relationship to competitors. So obviously, Walmart's able to keep things cheap all the time, and they're 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 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. Like, you know, and that's something that happens through automation, but it's also something that happens through administrative innovation and through, and sometimes through less than nice things, right? Through, you know, Amazon warehouses where people aren't allowed to take bathroom breaks

or through sort of like, you know, coercive measures that they can do because they've found a nice little spot in the economy that lots of people are depending on them and they can dictate terms. But whatever it is, you know, as firms get bigger, it actually gets cheaper to make more of their kind of thing. So people in a bodega can't match Walmart's prices for everything from like hamburgers to detergent, right? Because for them, it's more expensive to produce or to acquire. So what they do instead, knowing 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 reliable or easier to get to. You can just walk to the corner store or whatever, you know, whatever conveniences they're kind of like justifying themselves with to the customer base. And in cities, this can be enough to keep, you know, small to medium sized, you know, sort of retailers in business. Although in the suburbs, the competition is basically just all other oligopolistic 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, what Vokola 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 supposedly how everything works. They believe in this thing called the price mechanism. The supply chain theory depends upon a story where the vast majority of prices in the economy are a markup over costs or, you know, beyond that, some kind of strategic decision being made in pursuit of a certain strategy. But like, you know, if some studies had verified that, but then other studies refuted it, then you would have a situation like psychology where, you know, the psychologists are always saying all human beings really have a neck fetish.

But then, you know, because some study of like some college students, you know, said this. And then six months later, it'll be like, actually, that failed to replicate this. It turns out that human beings don't have a neck fetish, you know, and I'm being rude to psychology, but this is a real crisis that happened there called the replication crisis. Now, Fred Lee, the economist who kind of like started us along this track in his famous book, Post-Keynesian Price Theory, found 71 pricing studies and they form an appendix called Appendix B in his book, which ought to be legendary, but it's not because all this stuff is very obscure. The 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 of them are by like Marxist economists. Some of them are by neoclassical economists. Like, and they all converge no matter what the biases of the people involved upon this same kind of similar cost plus administered prices model.

of the people involved upon this same kind of similar cost plus administered prices model. Vokolo 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 economists' court who want to defend the

supply and demand bullshit and the price mechanism bullshit to prove us wrong because, frankly, the weight of the evidence is so strong 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 – The burden of proof. Thank you. The burden of proof is on their side. that the presumption 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 that the color the color piece is that like you know there is a bit in there about firms that try to do this sort of like like in real time reacting to supply and demand stuff and it's like uber and if you look at uber it's like okay so uber has a couple 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 that's really interesting about it is that like that kind of pricing like you know if if you have some people who go in ideologically you're like we're we're going to 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.

Like most, most people who have to deal with actual, like the normal things that a business do don't do. And the only people who do it are like the insane tech people who have to deal with actual, like, the normal things that a business do don't do, and the only people who do it are, like, the insane tech people who are, like, I don't know. I almost want to call it, like, intensely ideological and also assholes and also don't make any money, which is just, I don't know. I think it's kind of a coincidence, but it is just very funny to me that the people who actually try to use the neoclassical pricing theory, it sucks and everyone hates them. Yeah. different pricing procedures that he witnessed into just say like on both on both determining your company's costs and determining what market markup you should have so the cost plus markup you need to you need to figure out both of those pieces it's anything but automatic yeah it's a very manual process and even i would i would go so far as to say like walmart has teams

of tech people yes but they're liaising heavily with the finance department and sales and marketing to determine what is an appropriate margin based on historical like in industry and sub-industry trends and like what is our historical cost structure for each product down to the product level? And they have so many different products that they might actually say, well, because we're selling everything to everyone, maybe some things can just be what are called lost leaders

and have a negative margin because they get people in the store and then those people are there and they see other things which have higher markups and then they buy those. And then those people are there, and they see other things which have higher markups. And then they buy those. And then overall, they've made more of a profit, because they use some things that have negative margin on them.

And it's a really complex process. And even if an algorithm is being developed by, say, Uber, to dynamically price things up and down based upon events like a baseball game or something that are going on in the city so you can get more revenue. It was a group of people in a room in an extremely manual process. Coding is extremely manual still. Liaising with sales, marketing, finance people all at once.

The other thing is that it's like supply and demand is a phrase that gets thrown around anytime that there's any kind of interaction between like the amount of people who want something and the amount of people and the amount of stuff that there is, right? Which is a lot of different situations. But the specific supply-demand price theory that's at the core of neoclassical economics is this price mechanism story whereby 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 prices strategy, just keeping prices down in general so you don't do sales and discounts, which don't move the dial much. But like, you know, that's a strategic pricing decision that you've chosen to make because you think that it might move the 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 and 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, and usually not as the primary thing, whether or not, for example, there is 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 like Steve was saying, there's a game today, so you can do surge pricing because you know that a bunch of people are going to want to get in the game. So you're basically just price gouging, uh, 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 as Vukolov finds out, attempts to do this are very, very mixed in their success at best. Basically, people who are trying to do it are like, yeah, maybe it could work. And then they try it, and nine times out of 10, it doesn't work very well. So they go back to some variation on a cost- model, you know, or a price leadership model or something like that. You know, the kinds of methods that Lee 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 Uberber 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 uh they have access to infinite finance but yeah how long is that gonna last yeah like and that that's another thing that's interesting like you know this is this is to some extent like a different economic question but like you do at some point have to ask the question like to to what extent can you learn things about the economy based on companies that don't have a revenue model or the revenue model is they will continue to be handed piles of money by like the same seven billionaires who they've conned and that's like a – I think there's an interesting interplay of how dependent you are on actually making – like actually having revenue be the source of like the continuing existence of your company and how ideological you can be about running the firm.

Do you have a game sheet? Yeah. Well, it's actually very funny that you say this because one of the people that Vokolo talks to is this guy Cohen. I can't find his first name right now, and I don't want to scroll up. But somebody 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 and time,

which I don't think human beings are going to align to. These dynamic models need common sense judgment attached to them, which is not always necessarily available. Now, this is a very diplomatic statement by somebody who is formerly of Sears, Canada. Now, I find this very funny because there's a kind of subtext here. Vokola doesn't get into it,

but 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. Yeah. 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 blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, and, you know, anything that the company owns, they just use it to pursue their goals.

He wanted everything inside the company to have a price so that everything could just be, you know, 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 nineties, 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, as a major player in retail. Um, and it's like, like, so it shows, so I think that the fact that this person very

diplomatically from Sears is like, maybe this doesn't work you know i might be born of more experience than than than not you know 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 and you can even see this kind of through obama like they really have market brain and like i think the most market brain thing anyone ever did was the – I think it was the Army Joint Chiefs of Staff brought in like a group of economists who were, you know, like – who were doing the whole like, okay, like how can we make – how can we use the market to make the army run more efficient? And the first proposal they put down on the table is we're going to have each depart each like like each like section like what's the type of time to go? We're going to have each branch of the military bid for control of who 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?

And that was the end of like that was was like peak, absolute peak 90s brain. These people thought you could solve terrorism by like having futures markets on like 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 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 a little, we've gotten sort of into the weeds of like the kind of research stuff that's been produced. But I wanted to move on, I think we've gotten a little – we've gotten sort of into the weeds of I guess like the kind of research stuff that's been produced. But I wanted to move on I think to some of the other like kinds of – 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 it caught a lot of attention, was Tim DiMizio'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.

Wollongong? There we go. University of Wollongong, 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 in economics is this one school called the neoclassicals who believe in the supply and demand stuff along with a whole bunch of other dogmas. Then 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 Knitson. And and it has a lot of things to say about a lot of subjects. But so Capital as Power is a book that says a lot of things and a lot of things to say about a lot of subjects. So Capitalist Power is a book that says a lot of

things on 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 heady stuff. It tends not to have to do with what we're going to be talking about, but it informs the perspective that DiMuzio comes from. Now, DiMuzio saw Steve's brilliant essay on the supply chain theory of inflation was very inspired by it, because there are certain affinities between the framework that we're coming from in this kind of research and the capital'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 Fred Lee's administered 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. So the interest rate is a price. It's a very important price too because –

We should back up for a second and explain. When you say the interest rate, you should explain what that is because I think it's underexplained. 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 that control like of the currency under discussion right 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. 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 and probably has 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, banks have

costs just like anyone uh one of their principal costs is the the rate of interest that they pay on deposits of their customers in order to get them to to get new customers in like that's one of their main services that they provide is checking checking accounts and savings accounts and like so how much interest are you is a bank willing to set on its savings account is like an important decision that's like what part of its cost structure but where people if the federal reserve were to raise its federal it's a 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 set the rate of things like treasury bills and stuff,

eventually, if you're a bank, you have to start offering higher and higher interest rates on your savings accounts. 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 moneymakers, like mortgages and home equity lines of credit and that sort of thing. And so 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 a narrowing pool of qualified mortgage applicants. And also for people who are willing to shop around for where to keep their deposits in a way that previously they we regard as the real world, like everything that we've just described. We can see it in action, rise in the cost of lending to people downstream until for end consumers, which is basically like firms and households trying to get a loan from the bank.

Those loans are going to be more expensive. And conversely, if the Fed's interest rate goes down, those prices will tend to go down as well. But crucially, none of it is just automatic. That's absolutely true there's even just just because it's a bank doesn't mean it's any different than the story that vicola was laying out for retailers that's exactly right the the feds rate is a very important rate because it's basically the first um the first one 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 the central banker, but of course all these firms are making their own decisions based on their own reasons.

So they can make all sorts of decisions based on their priorities and based on their own reasons. So, you know, 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 at each step of this process in much more detail, you should check out Perry Merling'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. Yes. 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 idea that the amount of money in the economy basically determines the price level. The more money that there is circulating, the less that money is worth because there's too much of it. So the price of it goes down and the price of money basically determines like how much your money is able to buy. Now, people have been moving away from that towards theories that get more realistic, but still retain the basic structure where the money supply is the main thing that matters. And they'll say, for example, that it's the amount of money circulating in people's pockets relative to the amount of goods being produced, such that if too much money is chasing too few goods, like there isn't enough supply to meet the demand.

And that causes something, although people disagree on what, that causes prices 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 talk to today will peddle to you. The ones who are not orthodox monetarists, 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. still think that you have to, when there's an inflationary event, you have to attack the money supply. Now from them, from their point of view, it doesn't have to do with the absolute amount of money circulating. It has to do with the amount of money in people's pockets relative to the amount of stuff that can be bought. So if there's too much money in people's pockets, how do people

use their money? They spend it on goods and services that are produced by firms. So if you reduce that amount of money, that basically the only way that you can do it is by putting people out of work, right? Because then they don't get the wages which they would have spent on stuff that, the factories and 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 and a whole bunch of companies are empty. They don't want to go all the way with that, but they want to kind of get part of the way to that.

They want to put the squeeze on the economy and get some companies put out of business and some people unemployed on the dole so that people don't have money in their pockets, so that the supposed pressure of too many people spending money on goods that are not being produced enough to meet that demand, the demand pressure goes down. So therefore, it equilibrates and inflation prices, inflation ceases because prices go down too. Because the idea 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 will vary depending on the thing. They basically accept it as a religious orthodoxy and then different economists justify it in different ways. But that's 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 talk to people at these different companies.

And by 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. They can't even get that right. That's right. They haven't actually been able to get unemployment. 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 Demutio 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 he 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 Volcker Shock, which is basically the same thing, they raised interest rates up the Yazoo, and hadn't induced that unemployment or whatever, prices would never have come down. on the relationship between interest rates and prices. And what he found was that basically there's either – the way that I explain 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 war in the Middle East between Israel and Egypt and a whole bunch of other places caused OPEC to raise their prices in order to – I'm going to point in a thing, which is that the actual story behind that is slightly more complicated, which is that like – Okay. So to be 100% accurate 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 oh okay which is yeah so this this is this is the thing that like i don't know there there was a uh 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 it is true that like one of the things behind keeping opec together so that it could increase the price of oil was like the like 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 i want to i want to put that on the record just because i the oil knowers will get mad at us if we yeah yeah although that that that's the

version of it that like like 99 of accounts will give you it's just slightly not quite exactly what was happening yeah i gotta I got it wrong. God, I'm trying to remember what book. I think it was in Carbon Democracy. Maybe. Like 80% sure. Sorry, I read like four books about oil and coal in like incredibly rapid

succession like several years ago and sometimes I have trouble remembering exactly which one which thing is from but yeah although i i want to say sorry i guess i want to say one other kind of interesting thing about that that makes specifically trying to use the interest rates arguments about like i think it is it is pretty clear that raising the interest rates directly would like did not immediately did wasn't the thing that brought down prices i think there's like an interesting there's like a weird thing going 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 in the u.s economy and the other the other thing that the volkschalk did was it raised the interest rates on – it raised the interest rates on 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 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 absolutely annihilated any kind of political movement to have pricing be set is I think I think the moral of my story with this before we get back to sort of like the I don't know, the other arguments about this is that like that moment was such a fucking shit show. 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 like we've ever had and yeah and because like it it it did like the volker shock did a lot of things that weren't what volker or not not necessarily what not what volker was trying to do but it did a lot of things that aren't what economists talk about when they talk about what the Volcker Shock did.

It had all of these incredibly powerful political ramifications that they just don't put in the equations because it doesn't – how do you mathematically model the collapse of the non-aligned movement and like third world movement like you you can't right and so they just sort of like wave their hands and pretend that it was just like directly a cause and it caused more unemployment the unemployment brought the inflation rate down yeah it's interesting to think of the global effects of the vulgar shock is like you have uh um countries who are dependent upon usd finance uh suddenly are facing a much stronger dollar so if they didn't already have dollars that's a huge problem yeah and again yeah and again also just like like just literally the interest rates on their loans like increased by like 20 and that's like you know like you're it doesn't

really matter what your economy is you can't like you're, it doesn't really matter what your economy is. You can't, I don't know. It's, it's unbelievably difficult to survive something like that. Yeah. On, on the Forex dimension and just on regular lending terms in dollar lending anyway, it's going to get way tougher. Yeah. Even domestically, like the superimposes the oil price onto the inflation, and, like, the inflationary crises of the 70s and early 80s, it was a double dip,

if you remember. And so, like, the first time the Fed chairman who preceded Paul Volcker was blamed for not raising interest rates during an inflationary crisis because the emerging theory said that maybe that would be a good idea. And so like the monetarists had like their one moment after that to say like

they, where they became, uh, more than simply an academic movement and became like briefly hegemonic with, with the, the Volcker, uh, interest rate rise that happened to like 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 9 to 18 months or so and the economic historians the neoclassical economic historians will um 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 110 during our current inflationary crisis, this exact debate was taking place again.

Yeah. There's like all 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 positively with prices. This is the insane thing. So like the interest rate, when it's high, theory expects that prices will be low. But actually – and like even if you adjust for like a delay where maybe like the prices get low afterwards, like no, that's not what happens. It's like the interest rate goes up and prices go up too.

Prices go down and the interest rate goes down. You know, like, it's like... Yeah. And like, Demutio's like, when he, 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 lockstep. And then oil goes back down. And then interest rates go back lockstep and then oil goes back down and then interest rates go back down and then prices go back down yeah i think prices first before interest rates let me see i i can't remember oh yeah yeah like inflation crests like yeah somewhat concurrently with the federal funds and then um the uh oil price eventually falls like shortly thereafter. Yeah. And this gives you a disaster, right?

Because you like, okay, so you will get neoclassical economists who are like, oh my God, oh no, all these idiots are saying that increasing the interest rate actually increases prices. It's not what happening. It's like you get into this mess. You have to figure out the neoclassical explanation, right? Is that like, okay, well, the reason it looks like the fund rate increasing increases prices is because you do that in response to the inflation happening, right? But like you can also just very easily look at this as like a panic index, basically. Like where, you know, it's like, okay, well, prices go up and then the Fed panics.

And so they raise their – it doesn't – and like it's – this is one of those things where like the neoclassical economists have invented a mechanism that like allows them to explain their own actions in a way that's plausible enough that they can call anyone that they've gotten enough hedge money. They can say anyone who says they're wrong is just like nuts but they're not right and also it's it's it's entirely possible that not only are they not right they're literally perfectly exactly wrong yeah and that yeah they have they trot out the like the 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, well, the monetary transmission mechanism has long and variable lags, which means that nine to 18 months from now, it will settle down. And then we'll know it's from interest rates. Trust us. Is it like nine to 18 months from now it will settle down? And then we'll know it's from interest rates. Trust us. Right.

And the thing is that 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 from the 70s to the 90s. I'm going to get another graph of Demetrios. That's another important point that 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 Dupin's argument. All the evidence shows that there's at least no relationship between interest rates and the price level, that there is like no relationship whatsoever. It basically just is useless for controlling prices one way or the other. Now, the strong version of D'Amancio'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 what if you actually by raising the interest rate are contributing to inflation now this is this is kind of how we framed the whole article in our title editors make titles not not um not 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? 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 between interest rates and the general price level. Yeah, and that like – the fact that they're correlated is just a panic index on behalf of the Fed that they just get scared and do this thing. And it has no effect, but 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 Demutius on this point.

And I think especially these days, there's so many other... A relatively small percentage of commercial and business credit is variable rate to begin with these days. More of it is fixed rate, certainly for mortgages. It's 80% plus approaching, 85% even fixed rate, which will not be affected. And then businesses have so many other means of liquidity other than loans these days, particularly the medium and large scale businesses. You can go to the capital markets, private equity or the stock market, markets, private equity or the stock market, and get the funding you need in ways that don't depend upon what the federal funds rate is doing or only weekly depend upon it.

So there's just like, there's so many other liquidity sources, especially in the last 30 years or so. Well, since the Volcker shock, basically, all of these private equity and other capital markets methods for liquidity have opened up. And a good deal more of the debt as a percentage of total debt is fixed rate. So on that basis, I'm like, all right, well, maybe it doesn't increase prices, but at the very least, it's non-correlated. This caught a lot of people's attention. Once D'Amencio 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, Investopedia cited it as a source, even though they called us a blog and not a magazine.

a source, even though they called us a blog and not a magazine. You know, like it ended up being taken up by another capital as power influenced economist, Blair Fix, who found yet more empirical evidence that there is no relationship whatsoever between interest rates and and like the general price level, you know, and to the extent that there is, it's only because you induce a recession, 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 by raising rates. So what use is that even if you accept that mechanism? So they found more evidence, and they got even more attention. Cory Doctorow, the science fiction writer and futurist

and kind of left-wing all-around public intellectual, he found both Demetria'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 inciting pluralism in the discipline. And in their Australian blog, because they're all over the world, an economist called Matthew Harris took up the controversy and basically sided with D'Amancio.

And J.W. Mason writing in Barron's also uh, also basically, uh, sided with us in an essay called the Fed can't fine tune the economy. JW Mason's a very important, uh, heterodox economist, uh, who's often on the cutting edge of a lot of these kinds of theoretical developments. Interestingly, the, the, the first fellow though, uh, Matthew Harris, uh, 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, this is real. This is like a real like, I remember this on campus. This is like, this is a real thing. We're like, if you're if so the business school if i'm remembering correctly the business school is like is most i think it's it i think it might only be a grad school so let me let me look this up

yeah so 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 sort of like these inferior, fly-by-night people who don't care about the sort of deep math and the the deep sort of like you know like intellectual like political pursuit of economics they just want to like go be a business person and this has really interesting effects because it means that like you know like the business school i guess it's not like the business school is like like a bastion of leftists or whatever but they don't agree on stuff a lot because they're like like the university of chicago economics program it 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 uh 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 is specifically it's a school that trains other economists right it's a school that teaches like the ruling class what to think whereas the business school is like the school that

this is a very very very explicit it's something that like 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 their actual purpose is

different. One is ideological. The other one is making money. Yes, and this is a great case study of it because these folks at the business school, their names are Niels 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. You know,

in other words, like basically there is no real effect. So yeah, go around and do business surveys 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 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 aside alongside the debt options exactly so we go from like 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, cause inflation to get worse or even just don't matter for inflation?

worse or even just don't matter for inflation. But then suddenly, like you have a bunch, once it gets taken up by a larger discussion, you have a bunch of quite 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 U S federal reserves 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. You know, so in other words, like maybe 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 you know, parenthesis, like the kind of they're trying to induce, uh, that's my parenthesis, uh, back to the quote, a deep recession would tame inflation, but why would we invite that? You know, uh, 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 a 4.4% interest on more than $3 trillion of bank reserve balances, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now this little known economist writing for the Guardian is Joseph Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize in economics. Now, does he cite our article whose 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 heterodox? No. He basically presents it as if it's his own idea now maybe he did have this idea six months after we started a conversation in like stinglets has not had a single idea in like 15 years like that man oh that that that man is a transpedic parent medium through which the stuff that he reads appears on a page i'm i'm to be mean.

I'm sick of this thing that's 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 like figuring out the reasons why it's not

true and presenting an alternative model. It's denied at first, but then increasingly it's just plagiarized, perhaps accidentally, probably not. And then it's presented as if actually this is what the theory has always been all along. And how can anyone think differently? And it's this unfortunate thing

because since the neoclassicals control the discipline, they control advancement through the ranks of the economists. So they're always 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 bright side we were right we were right early a bunch of people picked it up and our talking points ended up making it to very very distant and well-regarded places to the point where now it's it's a viable alternative that exists out there in the world in terms of like you know why keep raising rates it's not doing any good it could even do bad. And that's a talking

point that I don't think would have existed if it hadn't been for Demozio'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 has put out there in the world 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 happened because like, again, like a year and a half ago, even like, I don't know, 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 you, they, they would have like, like you wouldn't,

you would have gotten 16 contracts to be a professional clown. Like this, this was the thing that like, you could not, you couldn't even like suggest this. And, you know, within a pretty rapid span,

suddenly like stinglets is being like huh i want this maybe this is a plausible thing it's like oh my like i don't know i i think it's i think it's it's really it's really impressive watching how fast i don't know like how fast the combinations of like reality and having an explanation of reality that actually like lines up with it has been able to change, like, as, as able to actually just sort of like change what the discourse at like the highest levels of power and sort of like what,

what has actually been happening in, in the economy, like has shifted. And that's wild. Like I, 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 Overton window has shifted so far that like the idea that interest rates just don't seem to have any discernible effect upon the price level is kind of like becoming the base case. Yeah, yeah. So like the entire yeah yeah the entire spectrum has shifted yeah it's very strong form demetrius and have like uh i'm starting to use that phrase now by the way and um okay people won't be throwing a ton of they'll still throw some things at you, but it's manageable now. I mean, you can always point to that argument from authority, but Stiglitz says it might be so.

So, you know, it's like... And then Stiglitz, who could question Stiglitz? He won the Nobel Prize. Really weird Nobel Prize, too. Can we say a bit about the nobel prize i've been i've been containing myself but i really want to this is a whole but the the the so-called nobel prize in economics is not actually the nobel prize in economics it's

there's nobel prizes in science and in you know uh literature and all the stuff that's administered by the alfred nobel organization and 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. It's not a Nobel. And, you know, it puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. And they did this specifically this historian of um of economics uh oh my god what the hell is his name um the uh it's it's the it's the more heat than light guy he's uh oh my goodness uh i cite him in the fred lee thing and i can't remember his name

murawski that's the guy yeah okay so he actually like went and like studied the origins of it and it turns out that they specifically did it as a scheme to only give the nobel prize to people who are basically like neoclassical economists um 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, a 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 you know that's that's the story of the socal nobel prize it's really the fake nobel so i always call it the fake nobel yeah which is also really funny if you talk to other people like specifically one of the things that like 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, like actual genuine prodigy was doing like, like was doing like,

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 prizes, they like, they will like yell about it for like 20 minutes because the math is so bullshit. It's like,

yeah, this guy is like the, like the math involved in these Nobel prizes are like, they figured out two plus two equals four. And gave them like this fucking fake nobel prize you look at like the fields medal and it's like i don't know like it's it's it's it's it's it's really nonsense all the math people are really mad about the fact that the econ people think that they know math because they don't and the consequence of this is you get these like you get people handing out 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 economic Nobel Prize because it's fake and bad and we should all say it more. You know, there's, on the heterodox side of things, there's some really promising

uses of mathematical economics to create, like, input-output matrices. Yeah. And to model, like, do an I.O. model of the economy that the math is very much subservient to empirical data that is coming in that trains the model. And then, 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've got to throw it out. This whole raising interest rates is going to control prices

bullshit. When has that even happened? Because theoretically it happened in the 70s, but then you look at it and the data doesn't tell you that story. So, you know, do they throw it out? No. Brief callback to Fred fredley's table uh table b was it oh yeah

uh yeah is the blinder study in there i forget yes yes it is oh that's like an instance that's an instance where alan blinder is a neoclassical economist who, like, he messed up and did real science. Yeah. And what he found was the administered 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. And he tries so hard to explain it away. You know, he's like, well, supply and demand exists. 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 they can't they can't change the stickers you know it's completely insane it's like the cost of admit there is a cost to administering prices themselves and that's why they don't change prices like the price mechanism for neoclassical economics would suggest. And then he 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 we should we should start wrapping up because this has been this has been a very long episode already but i wanted to ask before we go uh what what what are you all doing next and what other incredibly funny economics discourses can we expect to have giant like craters 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, a while back, was the importance of forex for an exchange for all sorts of macroeconomic things, like inflation being one of them. If you're a small country that does not have hegemonic monetary authority like the U.S. does to get people to use its currency and you have to go out and import things in 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 an extension of the chartless framework that informs MMT, but with some important criticisms about how the central MMT insight is 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 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. Like Sri Lanka, for example, had this problem. 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 those, you need to maintain your balance of payments and your balances of specific currencies in order to meet the biophysical obligations that 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 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, like, dollars or euros or yen or the yuan, perhaps, you know, who knows? One of the major trading currencies. And this also raises the question of how a currency becomes a major trading currency. And that almost invariably takes you in two directions. One is which countries are powerful and able to industrialize and make capital goods that nobody else has that everybody wants a piece of. And two, which are the powerful imperialist great powers. And it turns out that those are – the nexus that's created between imperialism, development, and the balance of payments, those three things can't even be discussed independently of each other. And the politics of what is going to be used as the – what Steve and I are tentatively calling the international means of payment. 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 inter-imperial conflict are constantly fighting over.

So right now, it appears that China is attempting to make a bid for a global yuan. First, they tried to do it through the digital yuan. Now they're seemingly trying to do it through BRICS by getting the other BRICS countries to agree to a kind of Yuan 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 the yuan, at least in a certain currency zone, be used as the main way of doing imports. And if the U.S. suddenly needs an import from that zone, which hypothetically, if it existed, right, they couldn't use dollars anymore. Or maybe dollars would be at a high disadvantage 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 that suddenly the US, which has 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. 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. Is it Uber? Is it Amazon? Is it Amazon?

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 language that's usually reserved for less developed countries than the US. And this is exactly the kind of like thinking that is important because, you know, obviously the other thing that would happen if dollar hegemony ended is that it would be a huge economic crash in the US.

Like suddenly the import, the cost of importing anything that were 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, how little, how much or how little time firms have to adjust their supply chains and stuff like that. So it's, 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 Steve and I, through developing the theory, will create a general framework that can be used to tie discussions that people usually have in purely political terms 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 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.coop. And also please consider if you have the ability to subscribe or donate. Subscriptions start at $5 and it really helps because all the money that we get that doesn't just go to our capitalist overlords for basically like, you know, paying for the services that we use to keep the website going and the magazine going, all of it goes to our writers and we try to pay them above market rate for little magazines of our size. Uh, so if you want to see more of this stuff and more arts, philosophy, anthropology, history, uh, all the other kinds of stuff, poetry that we publish, uh, definitely please consider. Yeah. We'll, we'll, we'll put,

we'll put a link to the magazine in the description um yeah steve jimsy thank you so much for thank you so much for being on the show and for yelling at the econobo price with me it's been a pleasure it's been great man thank you Yeah. And you can find us at It Could Happen Here, but that Happen Here pod on Twitter and Instagram. Yeah, we have a website where we post our sources. It's coolzonemedia.com. There's other stuff there.

You should go there. And yeah, go into the world and make life worse for mainstream economists. artists. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora, an anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

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Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel.

I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian. Elian, Elian. Elian, he looks so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation.

Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It could happen here. It's the podcast that's called It Could Happen Here.

Things fall apart and put them back together again, et cetera, et cetera. We're slightly rushing this intro because garrison had to leave in like 10 minutes not 10 minutes but yeah we're away yeah so we've spent a lot of time covering the sort of various aspects of the transgenocide we haven't the aspect the angle we haven't covered that much is the new york times and partially that's my fault, because if I every time I've tried to write something with the New York Times has devolved into about seven hours of me reading every single time the New York Times wrote an article that was pro Hitler. So, you know, it's it's 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 a 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 Urquhart of Assign Media, who has published a very, very good story about some real nonsense that the New York Times journalists have gotten up to. So, Evan, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. Always glad to talk about nonsense. Yeah, it's been a real time. Also here is Garrison. Yes, thanks for having me. Always glad to talk about nonsense. Yeah, 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? clinic 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. And the allegations fell apart pretty quickly. Numerous parents and patients came back, came, you know, forward saying this is nothing like what we've experienced. 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. Like, no, come on. Right. I mean, it was very wild and very discredited. And then for some reason, apparently back in May, Azeem Ghoreshi 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 the thing that that is the most. At least before the most recent round of incredibly bizarre stuff, I think it's the most infuriating to me about the sort of jamie reed story is that the the thing that had come out by the time the new york times was writing about it was that it it looked a lot like if 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 health care because she personally didn't believe in it i talked to a parent a parent who was also talked to by the new york times who um 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 um sorry uh 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 far future and just, you know, trying to help educate the kid about their body and their options years and years before they'd ever 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 and decide that like you don't get to get treatment and that's awful and is one of them i mean you know even even in place even even in parts of the u.s at clinics that are good that is the 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 health care they did this they you know this turned into this like like full court press against wait gary you you all right I have to close my door because the air conditioner is way too loud in the other room there's the cats sitting there but now the cats start screaming at the door

but now I open the door and they don't want to come in so they're just like on the threshold just like staring at me like make a choice come in or come out we're leaving this in this is great content. They're out. They're gone. They had their chance.

They blew it. Yeah, what happens instead 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 hospitals are getting bomb threats

uh yeah constantly every day mostly due to kind of prodding by ghouls at the Daily Wire who are hunting for clicks. And that is also a big part of this, is this tactic of attacking 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 the New York Times certainly took notice of as well. Is that, hey, this is a way to drive a lot of attention towards our website.

That is just another angle about 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 a children's hospital. Yeah. And the exact allegations were were really devastating for these families. her daughter's personal medical history was misrepresented shared with the world shared in a million articles and used to um to fuel gender affirming care bans you know i mean that is like really damaging for a 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 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 literally all the time they always finally got one we finally got an actual HIPAA violation and yeah I think the HIPAA thing has been I mean you know a Zingarishi 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 cause autism story where you have someone who is incredibly politically motivated, who is incredibly unreliable, who's demonstrably unreliable, who is not someone who's, you know, who's someone who in the field everyone's like what what is going on here this is complete nonsense who like misrepresents and just straight up lies about about like about 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 he'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 all they see is sort of this story and they they just sort of latch on to it and then they spread all of this stuff and it's like you know it reminds it reminds me a lot of that we're like we're still dealing with the consequences of just the completely fake bullshit about like vaccines supposedly causing autism, which. And again, like that, that's something that never that never would have gotten mainstreamed if the media hadn't picked it up and ran with it. And yet, you know, every single time one of these absolute like politically motivated frauds like gets up on the stands like there's there's the New New York Times doing their article about it.

And this used to be Glenn Beck's territory who would bring out a chalkboard and make a crazy wall with yarn and string. And now it actually has been relegated to the New York Times. The sort of coverage they're doing over these types of like moral panics around healthcare. I 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 the same sort of stuff now that's propagated by people like The Daily Wire and then picked up on by even more kind of mainstream publications. 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. journalism. They represent this as being the finest that the Times produces. And here is, you know, the mother of a trans girl who went to the reporter and said, I can prove to you, I have medical records, I have emails to prove to you that what is in this allegation is about my family and isn't true. The reporter takes that and kind of sticks it in at the end, you know,

like it's not lying lying but it is so totally distorting the truth that it feels like lying it feels worse than lying yeah especially because there's like like thousands of people who will just read the headline they're not going to scroll to the bottom of the thing and read it read a little disclaimer being like haha jk it's like there's a line on everything that's not good 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 Reid has been lying about. I talked to three of the parents who Azeen had talked to. Yeah. And you discovered some very disturbing and incredibly bizarre stuff that Azeen was doing to get parents to stay in the story after reads. And like,

this was in her followup 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 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 azine goreshi 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 Azeen because of Azeen'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, you know, I'm willing to talk to you. I'm willing to give you this information about this person who lied about our daughter's history. But if you're going to turn that into a hit piece on the clinic, we don't want to be part of it. And Azeen, you know, reassured her, calmed her fears. And so, you know, they were going forward, but cautiously. And then this mother sees Azeen at

a courthouse where Jamie Reed was testifying about the allegations in Missouri and just sees the warm relationship between Azeen and Jamie Reed. And she thinks something isn't right here. I helped her catch this person in a lie, but they're all, you know, buddy, buddy, that seems weird. So she, you know, she first went up to Jamie Reed and confronted her. She said, I'm liver toxicity, mom. And, you know, she again noticed that Jamie Reed is kind of saying, oh, how can I help you? What do you want? And like looking to Azeem, like save 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 the story. And Azeem did not take that for an answer. Yeah. Yeah. It's nuts. She followed them to their car as they're trying to leave. She stood in the car door so they couldn't drive away saying, you know, please keep talking, keep talking. You know, I need I don't know exactly what she's saying, but like, I need you in the story. knocking, you know, I need, I don't know exactly what she's saying, but like, I need you in the story. And, you know, the mom says like, no, Azeen, 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 hit piece on the clinic. And the family isn't buying it at all. The family is like, no, you're describing a hit piece on the clinic.

Yeah. But they're left with this horrible, horrible conundrum, because if they actually pull out of the article, which as far as I can tell, they really did have this agreement. Again, Aziz 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, there's no evidence that this woman lied if we pull out of the story so they felt that they had kind of no choice even though they felt completely betrayed completely devastated that their story was going to be used in this way they felt they

had no choice but to stay in yeah and then like the and the way that like it ends the article like is is basically like the article is like completely supportive of jamie reed even though again demonstrably 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 sort of she lied this one time but she's basically credible just bizarre yeah and then you know and the the new york times's response to this is like the piece you're referring to was vigorously a reporter and edited and thoughtful and sensitive to the moment. The Times stands behind its publication unreservedly. It's like, well, yeah, of course it meets the New York Times' incredibly demanding standards for journalism.

These are the people who published the yellow cake uranium story. Like these people, like these people have published things that like a like 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 I don't think it's that surprising to me york times backed hitler and like deliberately forced the entire country into 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 camouflages the ridiculous nonsense

and lets them get it through when they, 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 New York times, it's they, I don't know, the New York 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 demonstrably lying to them. I just, I don't know. The thing that was interesting to me about the story, too, is that Azeen is someone who, up until this point, like, seems to have, like, from everything, I had been aware of Azeen from... Azeen did really good Me Too reporting, I. Yeah. The science community, the astronomy community.

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, there was a small amount of time where I wanted to do astronomy.

And so like, I knew a bunch of the people like in that scene is he had a very, very good rep there as like the person you could go to, to talk about like, like to, to, to do a B2 story, which makes it even more weird that,

you know, I guess this is just, I don't know. I'm, I'm hesitant to just brush this off as sort of like trans brain where like some, like a cis reporter starts covering trans stuff and just completely loses their mind.

But you know, it's a really startling and disturbing, like, shift from this person who had a very, very good rep on, 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 don't want to be involved in a story where she's lying about them. Who, who could have thought that a radical feminist could be trans exclusionary. This is crazy.

People are complicated. It has to do with who she feels sympathy for. And women in science are 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 white 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 we alluded to this

a little bit but yeah i wanted to talk a little bit about the way that right-wing lawyers, right-wing politicians have been using specifically this coverage and also the fear-mongering around gender clinics as something they're using to support healthcare bans on trans youth. like health to support health care bans on trans youth? Yeah, Jamie Reed's allegations directly resulted in a ban on gender affirming care in Missouri. You know, there were families that were going to the legislature week after week and were keeping it at bay. And then these allegations came out and it fell apart and the care ban was passed. And, um, you know, it would be bad enough if they found a bad clinic, but, you know, there, 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 is it's just a really tough blow yeah i mean like you know like i i have

friends there and 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 i expected these people to sort of like even remotely feel a single emotion about the fact that they're directly the stuff that the actions that they did led directly to a bunch of kids losing their healthcare. But you know, there's been no, there's been no reckoning with this, right.

As, as best I can tell, neither New York times, nor any of the journalists involve any of the editors, any publishers, none of these people seem to care at all about the fact that their 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 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 know like from from both ends right it's a thing you can use as a journalist to advance your career and it's a thing you can use as like a crank to be suddenly on the talk show circuit to get 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. You know, this is what I do every day and I'm going to keep doing it. But I'm under no illusions that says 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, OK, so on the off chance that there are cis journalists listening to this, what kinds of things would you recommend to them to make sure you, A, don't fall down this rabbit hole, and B, to make sure that if you are attempting to write a story that is good, that you get things right? Yeah, so the Trans Journalist Association recently published an updated style guide, which I would absolutely suggest people check out because it's much more in depth than anything that I can say. But I think that the biggest pitfall people have is thinking that they understand more than they do. they understand more than they do. So, and I think that the kind of connected pitfall is, is just a wow, there's smoke, there's fire, like, well, there must be more to the skeptical side than there really is. So while I, you know, always try to butter journalists up by saying you can make up your own mind and, you know, look at the evidence, like 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 you know masks or anti-vax 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 yeah to conspiratorial thinking yeah well this is this is something this is something i'm going to talk about at length more in one day the like 65 000 word thing that i've been writing about the lab leak

stuff is going to come out and you know one one of the i've i have i have spent so many hours talking to epidemiologists you have no idea but i one of the things that you know comes up there and it comes up also just in general science conspiratism is if 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 realize 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 i would love for that to happen i 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 am sorry, which times those are. So slow your roll, don't envision Pulitzers, and get grounded on what the basics are instead of thinking that you kind of know better than the people who spend their lives researching this is my, um, entreaty to journalists who maybe don't realize how transphobia might be playing a role in their wanting to believe certain things. Yep. And I guess the last thing I wanted to ask you about, uh, yeah, I wanted to ask you about

the trans data library, because I'm very excited about this. This sounds rad. Uh, yeah, I wanted to envision people who are in good faith, but trans issues are not their main thing. You know what I mean? So like, not somewhat, not Azeem Gureshi, but maybe Azeem Gureshi of five years ago, you know what I mean? 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, you know, legitimate. So this is the Trans Data Library upcoming, hopefully by the end of the month, is going to be a kind of, you know, Wikipedia for the user, not Wikipedia and not like editable by the community, because that's a 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 already on a tear, and to Democratic politicians who similarly are, you know, sympathetic, but might need an extra source of information. And, yeah, it is, it is coming. I want people to be aware of it so that they can start spreading it and sharing it when it does so that we can hopefully try to, you know, just get some basic information into the hands of people who I think desperately need it. They may not know that they desperately need it, but desperately need 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, you know, the sort of right wing grifters who come out of the woodworks talking about this stuff. And, you know, the they're they're they're they're sort of demonstrable links to far right extremist groups, to the Proud Boys, to, you know, sort of right wing uh think tanks but that's stuff that like 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 this is these are all the people who are like getting paid by the alliance defending freedom and stuff yeah yeah that's what i'm hoping to make um so the url is probably going to be transdatalibrary.org it is a little broken right now go to assignedmedia.org follow me, follow my Twitter follow my project and watch

that space for the Trans Data Library because I'm hoping it can do some good yeah I'm excited for it and yeah do you have anything else you want to say before we close out? I think that's it for me. Thank you so much for having me on.

This was really fun. And yeah. Yeah. Thanks for coming. And thanks. Thanks for reporting on this story because Lord knows the rest of the media wasn't going to do it. That's why I started doing it. All right.

This has been, it can happen here. You can find us on Twitter, Instagram. It happened here pods. And yeah, go, go into the world and be better about this.

The New York times, which is not an enormously high bar, but it's a bar they consistently failed across. So you too could be superior, have superior journalistic ethics than the New York Times. This is what I tell myself every day. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

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on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother

trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation.

Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, everyone, back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and sometimes stuff that's slightly less depressing than that. But not today. Today, today we're talking about the falling apart sort of thing. And our 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. 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 Albuquerque – or murders, I should say, most of which are shootings also, about 84%. The number of murders in Albuquerque almost doubled. I think it's – and I think still it's gone down a little bit this year, but there's still about 50 percent 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 percent of the homicides in Albuquerque are drug related. But a much higher number, above 70 percent, 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?

about, what was this? Yeah, on September 9th, I think it was, an 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 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 rage shooting, wasn't a legal shooting. It was because the guy was a drug dealer. He had illegal drugs on him, all that stuff. But yeah, it's messy. So in response to the governor's proclamation, there have been quite a bit of people who 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 barriers 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 grounds. So this has become an increasingly contentious issue.

We're going to talk about some of the things that have followed from this, but I want to bring on our source for the day, Lucas Herndon. Lucas is a New Mexico-based activist, someone we've had on the show before, as 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 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, y'all, this is going to be a wild weekend. sort of everybody uh on the sort of yeah despite political ideologies um the responses have been swift and ranging in their um loudness let's say uh and it's created uh yeah national buzz um a number of right-wing talking heads from the state have now you know been brought into national talking spaces uh 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 um yeah but then of course you know and so obviously there's the there's that far end of the spectrum and you know then there's the response here in the state uh which is you know ranging from supportive to indifferent to angry to all you know all the different things you can think of yeah one of the things people may be kind of confused about this one of the things that's problematic about this is specifically the fact that it is restricting citizens who have concealed

carry permits from continuing to carry uh in in the county. States have a right to, at least currently, the Supreme Court has not 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 have unlicensed carrying a handgun in your car, right? In the state of Oregon, for example, you cannot carry a loaded weapon in your vehicle without a concealed carry permit. As far as I'm aware, there's not been any sort of constitutional challenge to that. There may be in the future. But the Supreme Court, you know, has ruled very differently on the issue of concealed firearms.

And so that's a problem because, you know, regardless of what you think about how the law on concealed carry of firearms should be. The idea of a governor overturning a right like that, access to a right like that, based on what they call a public health emergency, is deeply concerning, you know, which is why you've had, you know, surprising people come out against this, including David Hogg, who's one of the Parkland kids and a gun control advocate who said, you know, the governor simply doesn't have the right to do this, which is kind of more or less where I land. Yeah. And, you know, and just to just to be clear, right, I'm I'm not an attorney. Yeah. I am a gun owner and have exercised that right since I was legally allowed to do so at 18, which was very long ago at this point.

to do so at 18, which was very long ago at this point. So yeah, I've been, I have been a New Mexico gun owner paying attention to things 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, in, in the, in the order it specifically limits um having a firearm in your vehicle to traveling to any excluded place that she listed in the executive order right so so there's there's a there's a ban on you know carrying unless you're going to like x y or z specific places and that then is furthered that you can only have a firearm in your vehicle if you're traveling to one of 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.

You don't there is there, there basically is no law about having a car, a firearm in your car is an extension of your home. You don't, 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 they're those specific pieces of gun law and her executive order even in the state are at odds um let alone whatever the maybe you know the federal implications are yeah and i i think uh you, 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 seem to have involved that, although it is a little bit unclear. We don't know who 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 appeared to be a dealing like set up of, you know, it was parceled out into 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 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 is is something that can that's going to make the problem better. Right. Like it seems like you're 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. 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, you know, earlier in the year when there we discovered that there was a GOP operative who had committed acts of violence in the form of shooting at Democrat elected Democrats up in the Bernalillo County area as an act of political violence. And worth thinking about is that, you know, he was charged with firing of firing a firearm from a moving vehicle, which is a crime like it's it's a specific crime, which and 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 um yeah again not a lawyer however it seems duplicative to have a law on the books that already um there it is a crime to fire your gun from a car already uh and people who have people who have committed heinous acts of violence by violating that law um 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 if for the purposes of this conversation um 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 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, you know, between those two kind of situations on a pretty fundamental level. Yeah, I would agree. And, and the disingenuous

knee jerk response from the far right over this while completely expected. That's exactly what, you know, that's exactly what they're doing right they're equating this ill-informed uh poorly worded i don't however you want to say it they're they're they're taking this thing and using it as a pretense for all their uh far right propaganda extremes um you know calling to impeach the governor because she's, you know, intending to violate the Constitution or some silliness like that, which is yeah, which is just yeah, it's that's just far right conspiracy masturbation in my opinion. And it has galvanized them, right?

There's been 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 longtime listeners who've, 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 um so yeah so yesterday the the bernalillo county sheriff who is an elected official and it is his county that the that this executive order affects

um came out and said that he would not enforce it um he said that the uh he'd got he'd barely gotten a heads up from the governor um but he did admit that you know she she sort of like reached out to him said hey i'm gonna do this thing i know you probably won't agree 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 um anyway uh yeah so this he came made this announcement. He's not going to enforce it. The 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 oh

yes like like cops trying to enforce this law like that sounds like a recipe for disaster which is which is why you didn't see any cops enforcing the the order at the protest on sunday yeah um well it is one of those like why why would you right like that's such a yeah um yeah so the most recent thing this afternoon is that the the state's attorney attorney general um whose whose job it is to defend the state uh or you know officers of the state um has announced that he will not defend the governor in his official capacity uh from the three current lawsuits that have already been filed since friday um so so yeah there there basically seems to be this complete lack of support from the from the parts of government that are supposed to do the things you know yeah absolutely and and you know it it begs the yeah it for those of us that think about

these things it begs the question of um yeah how far does this go what is the next you know thing that a 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 whatever? So those are the questions that we're all asking ourselves here in New Mexico. And as somebody who works in this field professionally, we've spent a lot of time in the last 48 hours 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 underreported 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 longstanding 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 had a lot of sheriffs, you know, there was a lot of concern as to how they would respond to states and the federal government sort of enforcing, you know, or stopping, you know, the Trump administration from doing certain things around the counting of votes. You know, there was 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 sheriff's 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 – there are not – it does vary from state to state, but there's not any sort of like central requirement about like what it takes to be a sheriff or a sheriff's deputy. A lot of them are just dudes, right? Like that's what

you had. It was either in New Mexico or Arizona, like a small sheriff's department, basically selling to like celebrities. You can become a sheriff's deputy here, like work a week and a year and then you can carry a concealed handgun wherever, because cops get that right, you know? Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I just want to be clear because what you're talking about, carry a concealed handgun wherever because cops get that right you know right right yeah yeah yeah so i just want to be clear because what you're talking about and and how it pertains to new mexico is is both 100 correct and yeah has and has and has happened here um it could happen here but is uh but in the case of this yes issue right. I wanted to bring that up. Yeah. Yeah.

Bernalillo County Sheriff took office this year. He is a Democrat. Yes. He's a man of color. Not this is not me making excuses for cops. No, no, no. But I just to be clear about this. And he is generally disliked by the right.

Yeah. And has been seen as, you know, whatever, soft on crime and stuff, which he hates he hates um yeah and has tried he's tried real hard to sort of buck that position um and and so and and that which which makes this all the maybe worse right that that yeah yeah a democrat elected in a democratic county with a you know the the city the the state's largest democratic municipality right like for that guy to be like yeah i'm not gonna not gonna do this um 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 um and specifically about albuquerque uh earlier and and this is a public health crisis right gun violence absolutely yeah it's out of hand when

you're seeing the number of homicides basically double you know right in the space of a fucking year that that is a that's a christ something needs to be done right right right 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 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 to then go and enforce this arbitrary rule or order. It's not it's not a law. It's the, you know what I mean? So, so that's another thing, right? Like this is your, your, we're dealing with a public health crisis by putting the impetus on law enforcement, which is the whole problem with, you know, the way that this country deals with, you know, the, the, the quote unquote drug problem. And and and let's be

very clear here when the governor issued her order on friday she issued two orders one uh is called uh the one with the one with dealing with guns is declaring state of public health emergency due to gun violence but at the same time she issued one saying declaring state of public health emergency due to drug abuse. And, you know, for her, these things are related. And she's, you know, she's trying to tie them 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 it just again, this is one of those things where it feels counterintuitive for a governor who 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 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 a sort of intimating that he was that this sheriff is not particularly tied in directly to some of these longer standing weird constitutional sheriff things. But it does tie into this this pattern of sort of conservatives 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 dangerous, but also it's completely unnecessary.

It does not address the problem, and the problem is very, like, extremely serious. And so I find this kind of distracting from realistic solutions here you know which which by the way can can you know probably do 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 one of them yeah... Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, no, no. Well, I was just going to... I just want to, you know, for folks interested in, you know, what New Mexico has done,

things that have happened under this administration, there have been some advancements that as a gun owner, I support. One was closing private sales as a thing. You know, I grew up buying guns out of the backs of cars. I have some 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, yeah. And it is fun, but we should probably... Probably that's not great. Probably there should be some. Probably. Yeah.

And especially for those of us that don't have anything restricting us from purchasing firearms, there's no reason to not just. Anyway, so that being said, so New Mexico 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 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 in two 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 firearms owned by adults. Yes. Either accidentally or purposefully using them to shoot and kill people.

Right. Yeah. So as you, yeah, the law, the law is, the law is called the Benny Hargrove act, which was named in,

in honor of a, of a young man who was killed at a middle school by a fellow middle schooler with a gun that the guy got off of, you know, that the kid got out of a, you know, a bedside drawer. And 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, 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, counterance 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. conversations about what what might come out of a session like that um we would have to do a lot of work to protect you know some of the things um we've we've you know we've done a lot to protect people from the car serial system in this state which is um hella predatory um and so those are protections we want to keep you know keep in place but it's easy for the right of course to blame like that's the reason the reason the reason why shootings have increased is because um we let people who've been arrested for um you know petty theft or something out of out of jail

and for some reason that's why crime is up i don't know it doesn't make sense but um anyway so you know it's even even with the solutions come more problems. But but yeah, there does seem to be this the the the unintended consequences of this order seem to be the the not just the backlash, but then the sort of non support from folks who would otherwise be supporting her. I kind of want to close probably by talking about, and thank you for that, by the way, for that context, for talking about what I think is the underlying, a big part of the underlying cause here that is also a big part of a surge in violence in a number of states nationwide, which is that people are,

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. Somebody gets into an argument at a parking lot. There have been a number of shootings as a result of this. It's happened – this is a big part of the rise in gun violence in Texas, which is also tied I think to permitless carry to an extent.

But like it is broader than that too, right? This is not purely a – access to guns is why a lot of these crimes involve guns. A access to guns is why a lot of these crimes involve guns. But there's just been this rise in antisocial 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 a decent amount of it does arise out of that. And this is part of what I think is kind of disheartening about the governor's response here is that this is a very serious problem and the kind of knee-jerk reactions don't help it. But also like, I don't know what does, right? You can deal with aspects of this problem, right? Maybe if people aren't just able to throw a gun in their pants and legally be carrying, there will be less of these shootings. But that doesn't deal with

all of the underlying problem. And I don't really know what does. This kind of like increased willingness of Americans to resort to violence and interpersonal conflicts is a real issue. Yeah. Oh, man, you said it out loud there, Robert. Yeah. I think that, you know, I'm thinking about the first time I was able to go to a school function of my daughter's after, after, uh, COVID orders were lifted. And I remember I was, uh, was with a family member and they were, you know, they were the commenting on sort of people's bad behavior in, in the auditorium. And, you know, and I had to remind them, I was like, you know, the, these people have not been outside in a year and a half.

Yeah. 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 three or four year olds have are going to, I don't know, like a baseball game or a band concert, you know, they've at some point it's the first time but you know they get used to it they start to understand the rules of things um 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 used to sitting on your phone anyway so yeah I definitely agree with you um 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 our houseless population in lack of job or at least good jobs. And all of those things come together to make life hard, you know, and when life is hard, it, it, it impacts people and they make, you know, bad decisions. Um, the thing that I think does hurt New Mexico and, and, and is maybe what makes New Mexico, unfortunately sort of stand out from some of its issues is, um, you know, 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's a certain amount of, you know, we just, as a state, we are lacking resources and always have, you know, we rely so

heavily on one industry and without 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. And 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 peer group. I see people who are struggling all the time. And, yeah, it's just tough out there, you know. It is.

It is. And I honestly, you know, New Mexico and Oregon are similar in a lot of ways and that they're both very low popular. I think we're both at around 4 million people, if I'm not mistaken. Oh, New Mexico is only like 2 million. Oh, you're 2 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 in a lot of ways outside of that. And in both cases, that urban area has seen recent massive spikes in interpersonal violence and in fatal issues due to drug use, right?

Now, one of the things – obviously one of the things Oregon has coming through is because of all of the retirees and stuff here, like a much higher tax base, right? So there's theoretically more resources, although I tend to argue very incompetently applied. So most of those don't actually get out. But you do have this kind of – this is one of these places where this urban-rural divide is both a lot stricter 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 the city is also the political center of the state. Well,

yeah, that, and, and just, yeah, you absolutely hit on something there. You know, Albuquerque has been historically,

you know, decentralized due to gentrification for the last generation because of exactly what you said, which is that retirement community, you know, outside of oil and gas, and then the federal government in terms of like the labs and the universities and things like that. Um, like retirees are basically our third highest gender, you know, generative revenue. Um,

I have agriculture probably in there too, but you know what, you get what I'm saying. They're a very high portion and yeah. And, and, you know, the Albuquerque that I grew up going to visit all of my family in and like going, you know, going downtown, going, you know, down to the international district going near the university, you know, it never felt, it never felt, I hate to use the word dangerous, but it never felt dangerous. Right. It never, it never felt that way at all to me. Not that it does not that I feel danger to my, to my person, uh, as a, you know, as a white cishet 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 people make choices about where they go, what time of day, et cetera, et cetera. And a big part of that is because of the gentrification that has pushed the, the, you know, native population of Albuquerque out into these more rural places. It makes it harder to get to, um, you know, get to groceries, get to jobs, get to transportation. Um, yeah, all of those are factors in this and it's, and it's not just a one size fits all solution. Yep. Well, Lucas, is there anything 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 a,

I'm a longtime listener of the show and, and when this issue came up, I, I really was thinking about some of those topics you brought up, you know, way back in the first run of it could happen here and thinking about the, that 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, uh, 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, happy to come back for that. Yep, yep. All right, everybody.

This has been an episode of It Could Happen Here. You know, go, yeah, Lucas, you have any pluggables to plug before we roll out of here? Yeah, sure. I mean, if you are interested, I'm on Twitter, at Lucas Herndon. And if you're curious about, you know, New Mexico politics, Progress Now New Mexico on all the socials. Most excellent. All right, everybody.

This has been an episode. Go home. Go home. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. Presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network,

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible.

Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba.

He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez.

At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Traiga el brajante blanco. Family with white bracelets. Family with a white bracelet. Hello, everyone. It's me, James, and I'm joined by Shireen 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, Shireen and Robert.

Hi, James and Robert. Hello, James. Thank you, Robert. Thank you, Shireen. It's lovely to have this formal introduction time. Okay, so yeah, we're gathered here today to talk about the border. And the reason we are talking about the border is because Border Patrol are doing their thing, their thing that 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 counterclaims. So there are about 200 people in between the two border fences right now. People I spoke to were from Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Turkey, China, Vietnam, Honduras, Guatemala. Yeah. The reason that sometimes these lists of

people sound like you're singing Washington Bullets is because these are all countries that we have destabilized in one way or another. Saying we qua the United States, not we as Cool Zone Media. We aspire to destabilize regimes. We've only destabilized two or three countries. Yeah. And we're proud of it. We don't hide it. We took our shot at Canada, you know? Yeah, yeah. We've taken a good couple of swings at the top of the door. I think we landed 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 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 nationality.

That's lower than I would assume, to be honest. Yeah, I mean, it's a number of things, right? Like these countries, like climate change is definitely getting worse. So migration is happening from there. I see a lot of people from Vietnam. I don't have the language skills to speak to them in depth. Like I was speaking to someone,

and we'll get onto this through Google Translate from Vietnam, but hard to conduct a full interview, especially when folks are guarding their phone charge, which they are because exactly the same as last time, they need the phone to do 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 let's talk a little bit about mutual aid response and then then we'll get on to the Border Patrol shenanigans. So there are two groups down there right now,

and I think it's very impressive the services they're able to provide because Border Patrol claim these people are not detained. That means that they are therefore not obliged to provide any services to them, right? 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 food, they don't have to give them shelter, or sanitation. Sanitation is the one that's really hard to cover because everything has to go through a fist-sized gap in the fence. That's still an unmet need. These two groups, Free Shit Collective, they're at freeshitpb on Twitter,

and also American Friends Service Committee. I've spoken about them before. They're a Quaker group. They're really great in terms of turning up and helping people who need help. They're constantly there. They're a good place to send your money, even if you're not a Quaker yourself.

Check out their Twitter. They probably align with a lot of people who listen to this show on a lot of things I think they're prison abolitionists and so those two groups were there and they would at first there was myself one person from American French Service Committee and two older volunteers who would come and about 150 to 200 people so mostly I just kind of helped because I think in that situation, it's more important to help than necessarily like get the best audio for your podcast. So we handed out water, handed out food, handed out those emergency survival blankets. And that was about all we had at first.

Some like medical stuff, people who had medical. And a bit later, Free Shit People came and Xavier came. I'm not sure what Xavier's org is, but I will tweet it when I find it or I'll put it in the show notes too. He's great. I've spoken at his events before that he holds down by the border. We had a border media round table. He turned up with a massive generator. So that was great. We were able to charge phones. And what's really, I think, like notable is how much the people in between the fences are able to participate in distribution of goods and helping each other. distribution and one who volunteers to coordinate for the um organizing people into lines and making sure people don't cut the line right and then one person who was the phone captain who was doing like an incredible job of they'd get the cell phone right write the name of the person and

then assign them a number in the line and that person would also have that name and number written on their hand and it's written in duct tape that's taped to them and taped to the phone and then when their turn to charge comes you should he would 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 it got above 50, 60%, we'd switch it out and he'd call them again and they'd 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 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 tarps, but not very many. They were very young babies there. It's a pretty difficult place to sleep.

People were very keen to get their hands on cardboard boxes to lie down on to sleep. That gives you a sense of how underserved they are. There's obviously no toilet facilities because you're just in a dusty desert area by the border. If people are familiar with Las Americas, the discount mall, we're maybe a mile west of there along the dirt road. It's just a dusty of dusty field. So very rocky, very difficult people to sleep, very exposed to the elements, right? It was hot today. I was out earlier and it was 91. So they won't be having any shade today. They didn't have any shelter from the rain or ways to keep warm last night. They're not allowed to start fires either,

even if they have the means to do 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. There were a couple of examples to illustrate that. I was able to talk to one person. They presented themselves from... They came into the parking lot walking, and they looked very concerned. And so I approached them and said, hey, do you need anything? Can we help you? And they had experienced some kind of medical

condition and been taken to hospital, which Customs and Border Protection will do that. 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 hospitals in San Diego have a habit of doing this. They'll dump homeless people. 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.

Maybe it's every single day this happens. Unfortunately, people have passed away on being released by the hospital before in Hillcrest. 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 paid for this person's taxi. They asked for a taxi to the border. Their command of English was pretty limited.

So they asked for a taxi to the border. They were taken to the formal border crossing at San Isidro, which is a 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. So that leaves them in a conundrum. They're now in the United States without any status. They were able to... One Border Patrol agent advised them to return to Mexico. Obviously, that would constitute an entry to Mexico

in between ports of entry, right? You'd be illegally entering Mexico. It's not Border Patrol's 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 they literally i could see it it 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 border patrol agent returned them to the area in between the fences, which would suggest that this is a holding facility to border patrol for people. I just want to read the statement the border patrol made to me this morning. This was a couple of hours from when I'm 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 the quick transportation of migrants encountered in this environment which is is partially dangerous, particularly dangerous during current weather conditions, to Border Patrol facilities where individuals can receive medical care, food, and water. It is important to note that migrants who are between the border barriers are not in Border Patrol custody and are at liberty to return to Mexico if they desire. We have some audio of Border Patrol addressing the migrants in between the fences that Daniel's going to drop in right after this. Listen, we take as soon as we can. Listen, there's too many of you.

We can't do this fast enough. The longer I sit here and talk to you, the less time we have to take people. So go sit down. We're not designed to take hundreds of people. We're working as fast as we can. Just be patient. All I can tell you.

They're shouting at them. They're shouting at them. They're shouting at them in English. They're not really giving any clear. So the people obviously have questions, right? They've entered. Lots of them have been given bracelets. When he's talking about the bracelets, and people will have heard that in the intro 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 would get a day, right? The day that you entered. So like it might say Monday or Sunday or today, obviously it's Tuesday. So they would get a bracelet, which has a color and a day. And they process people in order of priority.

So the people who arrived on Monday first sell processed unaccompanied minors. I didn't see any, obviously like some 18 year old people, it could be hard to tell how exactly how old they are, 17, whatever, but I didn't see any people that young on their own. After that, they will process single mothers with children. I saw a few of those, quite a few of those. After that, they will process a family,

which they define to consist of a man, a woman, and children. After that, they will process men on their own. I guess women on their own, then men on their own. They had initially separated people. They had people just like they had last time in 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 um and I guess the claim of border patrollers that these people could go back to Mexico I'm not sure how um because obviously that they're in between these 30 foot walls right um right you could go around the end that's how

people come north um but but but that's quite a hike especially if you haven't got any water and food and stuff this is what they've claimed it's worth noting that Border Patrol a number of representatives from the Hispanic caucus

requested Border Patrol clarify this after what happened in May in their letter, they noted that the conditions violate agency guidelines for detention, which they do, and that Border Patrol isn't supposed to hold people in its own custody for more than 72 hours, which some people were held for longer than that in May. CBP responded, I'll just read it out, the individuals in question had not made contact with US Border Patrol personnel and were not constrained from further movement.

At the time of this incident, the U.S. 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 it was operationally feasible to do so. Again, 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 it on 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. 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 i never podcast again all right 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 right? And as I said, border patrol aren't providing anything. And as I said, at least when I left, I left after it got dark, quite a long time after it got dark last night. I was there for probably

seven, six or seven hours. And I saw more and more people arriving in that time. And it was a really wide dispersed group of people. I would say maybe the majority was spanish speaking but a lot of people were vietnamese i was speaking to uh some francophone african people of various nationalities right before i left uh like i said there are lots of people from tajikistan uzbekistan azerbaijan places like that um those 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 cases, they can. How long can they expect to be there? We don't really know. I heard one Border Patrol

agent saying that some of the people who arrived on Monday could expect to be taken out maybe by Wednesday. So that's at least two hours, two days, right? So all of the services 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 their granola bars this time. And I think it's really worth us taking a moment to consider the scale of what, like 200 people is not that many people, but it was more than 2,000 people in May. And that was provided for by mutual aid. And I think it's a really good getting off point for maybe us to have a little talk here about uh like how we do mutual aid because um the only thing that enabled 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, I don't know how to say this, that we should take into consideration when we're discussing things like religion and like doing discourse.

And like, it could be really easy to get like into like full 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 the perfectly consistent stance to have is that like if someone is showing up and providing people with uh necessary assistance and not not asking for anything in return including the ability to proselytize then i don't give a shit what right like i don't care if they're from a church I don't care if it's like you know some 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 there were mosques there last time.

I'm sure that there were like synagogues and Jewish groups. Fucking kudos to those people, right? Yeah. You know, like, that's good. Glad they're there. Yeah. Those, yeah, those people are doing anarchism too,

even if they wouldn't call it that or whatever. But 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. And 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. It was very hot over 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.

When people were coming, at least when I first got there, people were very hungry and very thirsty and really desperate for a drink of water because often they'd come from some of those other holding areas and walked down because this was the only place where they could access stuff. 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 shaded area. 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 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 hakumba in may people were making little kind of a frames and lean twos out of ossitios and cacti and stuff just trying to get out this because it was very hot then out there.

Even the photos you sent recently, there's a photo you sent with a child's hand coming out of the fence, and it made me emotional. Yeah, it makes me emotional, honestly. I think I've said this before in interviews. I know I did an interview with the Rory Peck Trust about this, but I would rather go somewhere dangerous and have dangerous things happen I've said this before, like in interviews, I know I did an interview with the Rory Peck trust about this, but like,

I would rather go somewhere dangerous and, and have dangerous things happen. Then like see a little kid have to be cold, not be able to help them or like, just be sad. Like it's not a fun place for children. And I don't know 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 be in a perfectly safe place 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 active combat zones. And don't take the wrong thing out of this, but the kids who have been stuck in a camp with no chance of ever getting out seem more depressed in a lot of ways than the kids who every day, they're in part of the city, even though like the city is a dangerous place to be, they've, they're, they're moving around. They're usually doing stuff.

Obviously it's a much more, a 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, an equivalent trauma,

even though the danger to their body is less, the trauma they face being stuck in a place and, 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 their agency which is a really degrading thing to do right you're forcing these people yeah they have they can do everything right like that that yeah person presented every perfect affirmative asylum claim you know

and uh yeah it doesn't matter and i think that's very hard especially i imagine it's very difficult i'm not a parent but i imagine that like if you are a parent oh god yeah 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 was in 2018 with the migrant caravan um when like i had been there was one little child who i speak about a lot but like she was obsessed with my hair if people haven't seen pictures of me have long hair um and like wanted to braid my hair every time i went there and so she'd come and she'd sit on my shoulders and I would just do shit. And she would braid my hair while I was handing out water bottles or talking

to people, doing what I could do. I saw that girl every day for months. And I remember always coming back to a Christmas party and just wanting to fucking scream at everyone. It's a juxtaposition from 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 across the border, drive home and see people just going about their lives. It's a really challenging duality. We can't stop it, right like it's not in our power to stop this but like um it is in our power one of the things i hear people being like it's like welcome to america like it's a pretty fucked up way to be welcome to america right but like i like i'm an immigrant my my arrival here was very different um like shireen you you came

here when you were younger, right? I didn't immigrate myself. I was born here, a month old, moved back. My parents immigrated. So 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.

Glad we've locked this down. But attorney general, that is my goal for you, James. Yeah, I can see I'd really crush it in that role. I do love a good law. Shireen can take out Ted Cruz, who is not eligible. You can be Shireen's John Mitchell. Wow. It's a fun little Watergate joke for everybody.

I will be hiding Shireen's secret meetings. I'm hoping for Haldeman myself. That's the guy to be. I want to go back further than that. When presidents were chads and Roosevelt got shot five times and sort of delivered a speech. I can see Shireen having that kind of energy.

Wow. I'll lean into that. Yeah, we're all in on Shireen. Maybe get a vest too. Don't shoot Shireen having that kind of energy. Wow. Okay. I'll lean into that. Yeah, we're all in on Shireen. Maybe get a vest too. Don't shoot, Shireen. A book was enough for Teddy Roosevelt, but bullets have changed. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Return. No, jokes aside, I came to America very differently from this and I recently became a citizen after a long time. And you always feel very precarious when you live here and you're not. So 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 also people who had come here themselves and had different stories. And 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 here you go bottle of water cheers like they just want to 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 look i understand that the government is treating you like shit right now and that's not with my consent like i yeah they want human connection because they're

not treated like humans so it's like nice to remember that's like oh it's like yeah someone seeing me yes exactly and just being like we are 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 uh i've spent a lot of money on soft toys for kids over the years but um i remember one time we cleared out at costco had the morning the bed of the pickup truck and they were trying to fly out as we drove down the freeway. It was a good time. But yeah, I think that common humanity is super important. If people have language skills and they want to help, there are always organizations

to help migrants. American Foreign Service Committee is a really good one. I don't think they would care if you were not a person of faith. I think lots of the people helping out with them are not. They're just nice people. There are so many languages, apparently, that need translating. It's not just Spanish. I think a lot of people assume it would just be like, I don't know Spanish, I'm not going to go.

But it's so many other languages that would be helpful. Yeah, I speak French, and I honestly spend as much time at the board of speaking French or Spanish. I have like possible communication in Haitian Creole and then can sort of, if some people speak like more formal French who are Haitian, so I can speak to them, but yeah, I don't speak Tajik or Uzbek or Russian or Vietnamese. So like, yeah, those people are there for, it's harder for them to access solidarity, right. And to talk to people and to be seen, like we can try our best with cell phone

apps. The person who had been taken to 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, like you have to be in this line if you want this and this line, if you want that. And like, so that was nice. And it's always like great to see like people empowered by that process.

Like they're not just like asking for stuff they're also helping get other people stuff and i think that that helps both parties and so like this this means of like i guess like people call me to like 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 to gain some karmic reward or whatever. I think that's a really laudable thing. It's something we should all participate in if we can. I understand that everyone's near the border, but we can't change this. We're all supposed to vote for Joe Biden because he wouldn't be a piece of shit to migrants, and he's been a complete piece of shit to migrants uh for the entirety of his time in office and i sincerely believe he'll be a piece

of shit to migrants if he is elected again so yeah when you can't fucking change this by uh voting for someone i wish you could i wish it was that easy but like if sadly it requires your active participation and um yeah i'm just constantly impressed by people who will, like the people from Free Shit Collective, they bought their entire family, right? I sent them a message. They were like, yeah, we're on our 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 um so yeah i think that's something we can all do in our own communities but yeah right now again uh i guess biden's administration are back on their bullshit at the border and um 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 won't do shit this time. But people can show solidarity in any way or lend their language skills. I think now is a really important time to do that. Yeah, it's frustrating because the border in general just becomes like a political talking point right like biden uses it for his benefit and then it's like i'll pick it up when i need it again whatever it is it's it's pretty infuriating it's fucking annoying yeah it's

incredibly infuriating for me to see like i guarantee you i was down there yesterday when other media uh folks will be there today Folks who haven't been there since May will roll up again, who haven't covered the border, who don't have the working knowledge of what's happened since Title 42, which is that apprehensions have dropped, by the way. Travel across the border has gone a lot lower since Title 42, which is what we were told, the exact opposite of what every op-ed told us was going to happen, because people maybe should not be writing about the border when they live in DC or 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 they're numbers or if they don't matter. And each of them has a story and a reason for being here and uh yeah they're not just numbers they're 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 uh and it's one that the democrats are just as complicit as the republicans in yeah and you know we've spoken a lot about groups you can go to, right? We spoke about Border Kindness.

We spoke about Borderlands Relief Collective. There are a million and one ways to help. I won't detail them all now. But yeah, it's something that we can't erase. I feel genuinely ashamed every time I'm down there to be american now but uh it's just hard when people are like hey what's going to happen you have to be like well we don't know but like you might be separated from your family you might be detained they're

probably going to take most of your clothes they might take your belt off you know you can wear one jacket one shirt your pants and your shoes they might take your shoelaces and then you just go into the fucking abyss of of processing right now 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 do i know you know uh and yeah it's deep i feel really ashamed but uh yeah all we can do is just try and help however we can yeah yeah all right yeah sorry that was really depressing wasn't it no no no no no it's good 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 it helps me it helps other people to feel active not like acted upon and that's why folks on who are migrants want to also participate in migrant aid right like even folks who are in between the wall right now like organizing the phone charging queue because it helps to not just feel acted upon and removed of agency yeah and so yeah do mutual aid if you can yeah be nice yeah be nice fuck the border patrol i think that that more or less covers it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's our message.

That's Shireen's presidential slogan. Yes. That's my campaign. Yeah. I'll work on that. Okay. Yeah. Bye, everyone.

Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though.

I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean.

He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez.

At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It's another union episode of It Could Happen Here, the podcast where we do a lot of things, but one of which is talking about unions, one of which is not doing great intros. One of which is talking about unions, one of which is not doing great intros. It's me, Amiya Wong, and today I'm here to talk about a union and a strike and a bunch of other stuff. And with me to talk about this is Tyler Fellini, who is an organizer with Portland Jobs 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 of you two, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having us. Happy to be here.

Yeah, I'm glad to talk with you two. So I guess before we get into the sort of current stuff, I wanted to talk a bit about how the 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 um so the uh initial uh unionizing effort started at the store that i was working at seven corners um and we actually the first conversation we had was uh april 1st the same day that amazon Labor Union went public and won their election. So it was like a really inspiring moment for us that spurred a conversation on the shop floor with a couple of coworkers, which quickly escalated to six of us meeting in a nearby

coworker's backyard. We talked about the issues and we were all hitting the same things. We were all upset with the tenants policy, the way that new seasons was treating us and had been treating us during COVID. We were 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 were also really upset with the healthcare that we have offered and how it's kind of deteriorated over the years, especially for new seasons as a company that has a lot of people who've been there for years. And so there were a lot of people

who've seen just the downward decline. So those early meetings went really well. We talked to coworkers on the floor discreetly and everybody was resonating with what we were saying. We made a lot of progress really fast. And then we had a meeting at a local bar here in Portland, Workers' Tap, which huge 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, the Seven Corners location. And I think we had like 30 people there, which is a huge turnout for a first showing of a meeting. Yeah. And then from there, we moved pretty fast

to getting cards signed for a 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, 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 keeping our store going and also helping other stores go. And by the end of the summer, we had our election, I want to 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. 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 Portland's a city that has been in the last, I mean, I would say probably the last five years, but especially in the last couple of years, it's been really, really active 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. You talked about having this bar as a sort of space you could do meetings. Has there been any other stuff from other independent unions, just from the fact that there's so many things happening that have changed

the dynamics of how these union organization tribes have been going? Yeah, so early on, we were weighing our options as far as did we want to join an existing union or go independent? 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 Burgerville Workers Union. They offered a talk. Yeah, they're great.

They were some of the early folks to reach out and help us. We were also able to talk to some of the folks at ILWU Local 5 that represents PALS workers 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 was great. Especially early on when we had a lot of questions and we didn't have any answers and we didn't have many resources to hire a lawyer and ask them. I wanted to go back a little bit to talk about the influence of the news about the Amazon labor union going wide and how that sort of worked. Uh, have, have you seen

a sort of similar thing with other, uh, like not just sort of not, not just new seasons, uh, shops, but have you, have you seen other shops that sort of like decided to start organizing after y'all came out? I think that there is, uh, a general energy among the rank and file, right. Um, that, uh, some of the old ways that unions are organizing were not the most representative of the workers, which is in part, you know, 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 labor unions. Also, you know, the Starbucks workers united 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 class as like a trad white guy in a factory. And we're seeing that severely 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 very clearly people want to organize, there's been a lot of conservatism on the part of the sort of larger existing unions. You don't really want to throw an enormous amount of money into these organizing drives, which means if this

stuff is going to happen it's it's it's the independent unions um and yeah i don't know like i i think i think your point about sort of i think your point about this or both both the highly educated workers thing and the way that you know sort of what's constitutionally considered a worker and what unions are willing to sort of throw money at are tied together because yeah I mean you know like the shops that you're working in the shops are getting organized just aren't the

kind of thing that anyone's been organizing for like ever at the 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 uh 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 uh as a grocery store we get deliveries from um 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 the they can get decertified within a matter of weeks but we haven't had any of that yet yeah which which is really impressive and you know that's another thing i'm interested i've been asking a lot of people because turnover is one of the big things that's been sort of you know it's it's been the wall that the existing unions hit.

And we're like, this is too hard. We're going to go do something else. And I've been, I'm wondering how y'all have been dealing with the turnover problem, because it's, I mean, it is definitely something that's difficult to deal with,

but you know, it's, it's, it's not something that makes it impossible. It's just hard and i'm interested yeah i'm interested what your sort of strategies to uh manage it have been i think it's a matter of passion i think tyler is a great example like is no longer a member but sees this as like the way that we can move our society forward in general like the labor struggle is the struggle

like there's no war black class war if we don't do this what are we doing here so we 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 um when uh 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 you know we should just go open up our own workers co-op and my response to him was that you know if we leave there's just another batch of workers that are going to go through these conditions like the goal is not that like i want it to be great for me like i don't even work in new seasons anymore um 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 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 uh antagonistic to the way capitalism wants us to be very individual like oriented right like we just care about ourselves and our day-to-day. But that's the really great thing with like the worker power, right? Is that, you know, collectively we are so much stronger collectively. We can actually stand up to the boss and win. Right. And, and that means just reorienting how we think about the world, right? Like, like this job sucks. 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 kind of – there's a kind of flip side of that too, right? Which is that even if you – like turnover just is inevitable to some extent even if you have people who like want to stay and fight, right? Like people are just going to have to leave. you have people who like want to stay and fight right like people are just going to have to leave but on the other hand you know if you're if you're if you're in a unionized workplace and if you're specifically if you're if you're in a union that has a sort of militant culture what you're doing is you're you know you're changing the actual like class itself right because you know like now now your worker who like you know i don't know is moving to arizona or something right they are they are they are now also much more militant and have to have this sort of experience of organizing that they may, that they may not have had before. And this, you know, it's like you're the, any, any, any individual movement you're doing in one place is building up the entire class.

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 want to get in on the beginning of this and we've seen like a big push of that recently. And people who leave, they want to go, you know, organize their next workplace, you know, regardless if they were fired or whatever, they, 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. You know, salting is a practice that traditional unions typically do to kind of change a workforce. And when you salt, usually you're paid by the union to go in there.

And so you're getting paid by the employer to be there and the union is paying you to organize. But we've seen a shift now where people are voluntarily salting, right? People come like out 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 like be antagonistic towards the boss. And I think to me, to go back to an earlier thing you asked about, like kind of like why up, right? They want to change things and like be antagonistic towards the boss. And I think to Mia, 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 throw some rocks at cops, right? That's

kind of in the culture of Portland. And so there is this, 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? You know, folks in their fifties or sixties, like they're, they're towards retirement. Right. And so

it's as younger folks coming in that are going to change it, you know? Yeah. And I think there's an interesting dynamic with this too, which is that, you know, okay. okay one of the one of the sort of conditions of of the last sort of like 40 50 years of capitalism like is 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 are shifting jobs really really quickly and that you know that's in some sense an issue but that also means that like i don't know like if you have a bunch of people who you know spent like spent 100 days fighting the feds and you know still still may like have have developed just like the sort of militant hatred of the cops and you know i've developed sort of an anti-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 it's not it's not like you're like getting career advancement in the service job right and yeah i mean that seems to be driving like at least some of the sort of of how this kind of like how the independent union union organizing in portland's 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 um 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 nowhere 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, like our jobs are pretty okay minus like the corporate business side of things.

Like most people enjoy going to work maybe, but they, they want to enjoy going to work so having that like kind of double edged sword has um been a catalyst for us to just build on what alex said too i think it's really interesting that a lot of the the surge in uh new like independent union stuff has been you know uh new seasons starbucks uh to a degree uh rei trader joe's all these places these progressive workplaces right and what's happened is that um 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 we're like dude like i most of us can't afford

to live in the city right most of Most of us are using public transportation. Yeah, and it's just not true, right? And so it's workers who get jobs at these progressive places that drank the similar social Kool-Aid that the customers drank of, 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 you're 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 um 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? Like,

yeah. And I think, yeah, I don't know. I'm interested. Like how, how effective has that been for you? Sort of like leveraging that.

I think it's been really effective. I mean, you know, and not just us, I think a really good example of exactly what you're talking about, right, is the shareholders of Starbucks are holding Howard Schultz accountable because he is wrecking that company, right? And so with new seasons, what it means is that they play a very sneaky game. They fight us in the back room. They make sure it's not public facing. Anything we can do to attack their public image,

like it hurts. I will say too that you know we're kind of standing on the shoulders of burgerville workers union here where burgerville was built on this reputation of like local friendly like we're the alternative to like corporate fast food um and they had uh security guards and strike busters literally fighting with picketers in the past and it tanked their 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 it doesn't stop them from being shitty they're just they're more polite when they're shitty to us they're still just as shitty they're just they smile while they stab us in the back yeah so on the subject 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 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 um it started in January yeah so we we've known that eventually it's going to get to a point where we're going to need to show some force so you know

we go in there with good faith and little by little we find out that the smallest ask is going to be impossible. And we find out that they're going to do whatever they can get away with every time they can. So they started with, I mean, they did all kinds of things,

but the one catalyst is they changed the attendance policy for non-union workers and non-union 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. DEI lens and they had to, um, yeah, yeah. And you know, all the things that corporations say to just delay it and kick the can down the road. So we're still in good faith saying like, okay, you know, go ahead. So then we did a petition where all the stores, um 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 like, this is illegal.

It's obvious discrimination. And then they just kept saying, okay, we're working on it. We're working on it. We're working on it. So they never did. Then we did a rally and we showed up at the headquarters with, I don't know, probably 200 of us. Hell yeah. with, I don't know, probably 200 of us. Hell yeah.

And marched up to the office and chanted and made a scene and told them they have one more chance to sign the MOU. They didn't sign it. So then we organized the strikes at the two stores and gave them one more chance to sign the MOU. They didn't sign it. We already knew they weren't going to. So, yeah, we shut down those stores for the rest of the day at Grant Park and for one hour at Arbor Lodge.

And it was powerful. We had a lot of support. A lot of people showed up. Yeah. Um, and to, to build on that too, um, you know, there's things coming up, uh, that we, we can't talk about yet, but I would say that, um, Alex, do you want to talk about the practice picketing? I feel like we could talk about that. Okay. So we actually can talk about the practice picketing i feel like we could talk about that okay so we actually can talk about we just filed a ulp yeah last night for bad faith bargaining yeah ulp is an unfair labor practice yes thank you i get caught up in the jargon so we just filed that last night for bad faith bargaining yep because they gave us the most ridiculous policy for attendance. It's basically regressive bargaining, which is totally unfair.

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, like, 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 puts them 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, 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, 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 ULPs that we get filed that 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, um, ready to assert our stance.

Uh, we're not going to just lay back and let them take over. So we're going to do some practice pickets. And I'm sure you've been 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. 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 um encourage shoppers to leave or discourage shopping in any way um we're not calling for a boycott we're just simply doing logistically what does it look like if we do a picket at each store in the most peaceful way possible. And 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? It's not, we're not doing anything illegal. It's effectively an informational picket. So legally there's nothing that New Seasons can do to any of the workers 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 kind of leverage your people power and show the management that you're ready. And it has another effect too, which is something that the kind of basic cultural understanding of what unions are, how they function, what you need to be doing in any given scenario, like just physically how to do pickets, what you logistically need to do. That stuff has all sort of faded from the height of union sort of culture in like the 60s and 70s and that's something that you have to rebuild because you know and and and this is this is something that's both 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 your support for unions is really high uh but people don't understand

exactly what like you know people don't understand exactly what a union is doing at any given time or like how it functions and things like that and you know then this is this seems like a really good way to like you know like hey this is a picket this is what happens when there's a picket this is an informational picket we're going to give you information. And yeah, it seems like a good thing for building up that kind of culture on both ends. And it's a really good opportunity to talk to customers, relationships with customers um and so we're using that to leverage against the company now and saying like hey like you know you like me like you know me by name and i know you by name you don't know the ceo by name like let's talk let's talk about like what we're asking for and what you as a customer can do to support us in a way that doesn't feel antagonistic, right? Like when we had the walkouts on Labor Day weekend, you know, we did a debrief

and we're kind of like, how do we engage with people where we can hold on to our values and still feel like we're being effective? And Randy, a worker at Arbor Lodge, his solution, instead of calling people who crossed the picket line scabs and harassing them that way, he was like, I just said, hey, I'm disappointed in you. And I think that, yeah, let's just... If you're going to cross the picket line, I don't need to hurl insults at you. I'm just going to guilt trip you and let you know that I'm disappointed in you and you will feel bad as you're shopping. And I think that that, 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, and that's, 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, again, that's another thing that has sort of faded. And yeah, like guilt-tripping people is a good way to do it because – yeah, you know, like sort of – especially sort of like middle and upper middle class progressive people, like really they're a lot of their politics is about wanting to feel good about themselves and you know making making well i think if they can see yeah i think if they can see themselves in us too they will relate and they they won't want to go against their own values which is our values because

that's the culture of portland generally speaking did you have anything else that you want to make sure to get in before we wrap up um yeah we uh would love to push our go fund me yeah yeah that our GoFundMe. 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 in. You can't just Google it. Okay, well, we'll just put a link to it in the show notes.

Yeah, perfect. Yeah, if anybody, you know, we're out here being an 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 a lot 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. tons of volunteer hours of our own time after work. And we have gone toe to toe with Ogletree Deakins, 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 our 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 for me, the labor movement has been a really

empowering place to come into. You know, I have a lot of experience with sort of like leftist, like street activism. But I think that for anybody who wants to be involved in the struggle and is also like looking for ways to make inroads and develop community, like labor is where it's at, right? I mean, we all work and to a degree, we all hit our jobs and have something to complain about. And like, that's a commonality that stretches across the aisle and allows for a lot of solidarity in a way that the culture war really doesn't want. And really, like, you know, it's by design, right?

The capitalists want us fighting against each other. And the labor movement is a way for the working class to unite because it's about class war. Yeah, hear, hear. Yeah, and this should go without saying, I'm going to say it anyways, you also, listener at home, can do this too. 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. Um, 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. 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 has been Naked App and 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 is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media,

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