It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 40

Episode Date: June 25, 2022

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Robert, what podcast is this for? Ah, Moira, that's a perfect way to open this episode because it could happen here. The podcast about things falling apart and putting them back together sometimes. Not often enough because I'm a hack and a fraud. Keep going along, motherfuckers. This is Robert Evans and my guest today is Moira Meltzer-Cohen. Moira, you are my lawyer and you are my editor. You edited After the Revolution, a book in stores now. So you're many, many things to me. And today, you're going to

help me understand the Supreme Court. Well, that's a lofty goal. Let me be a little more specific about why we're chatting today for the internet's sake. The Supreme Court last week issued a ruling, and there may have been another ruling by the time you hear this, but this specific ruling was about a case that had to do with what's called a Bivens action. Bivens action. If you have seen people talking about this Supreme Court ruling online, it has probably been with them sharing an image of the United States that shows the 100-mile zone where Border Patrol is able to operate and being like, now, because of this ruling, Border Patrol can come into your house with impunity and do whatever they want to you. There's been a lot of like stuff said about this ruling. And as is often the case when people are get really up in arms about the niche aspects of a court ruling, they're not entirely correct about what the

ruling does. The 100 mile zone is absolutely a real thing, and the feds can do all sorts of fucked up shit to you in your house. But that is, yeah. Let's talk about this. Yeah. Sure. So I think the first place to start is people are always asking me, when can the feds kick in my door? My girlfriend always says when it's closed. What I say is whenever they want to. Right. What might change from case to case is how they rationalize it in court later. Right.

And so this is really a case that further reinforces the fact that for many, many years, federal agents, in particular border control, have been able, have had a lot of power to conduct searches if they rationalize those searches with respect to immigration, or in this case, the even more hype term, national security. security. So this is not new. The federal statute outlining the powers and duties of border officers was passed, I think, in 1952. And I believe always said that border agents can conduct searches within, quote, a reasonable distance of the border i think case law has determined that that reasonable distance is a hundred miles yeah we're not really looking at anything particularly new here um so the one of the things about this hundred miles is people keep saying oh the fourth amendment doesn't exist within a hundred miles of the things about this 100 miles is people keep saying, oh, the Fourth Amendment doesn't exist within 100 miles of the border.

It does. This is not considered to be a violation of the Fourth Amendment because a search within a reasonable distance of the border is considered a reasonable search. Right. The Fourth Amendment protects you from unreasonable searches. And this is statutorily considered a reasonable search. Right. The Fourth Amendment protects you from unreasonable searches. And this is statutorily considered a reasonable search. Right. So I feel like a lot of the media around this particular case is kind of an exercise in extreme point missing. It's both an overreaction to some things that are outrageous, but are in no way new. Everyone's sharing these maps like you said and again it's one of those things where it's like we're not saying there's not a lot of that

this is not a problem that there aren't problems with the hunt there isn't that the hundred mile zone isn't a problem the border patrol there's not a lot of messed up stuff that they do it's it's the idea that like this ruling came out and suddenly there's no more Fourth Amendment, right? Which is how some people have interpreted it because the internet is a machine that devours context. That's right. Social media, I should say.

Sure. So this case is called Egbert v. Boole, which I just think is a marvelous case name. Oh, and these are all incredible the original bivens case uh is bivens versus six unknown named agents which i also like a lot six unknown narcotics agents yeah um oh i mean there's a lot of sort of wonderful case names um my favorite of course is uh alien v predator um yeah you see what i did there i did i did i i just showed garrison uh aliens last weekend so i was oh for the first time yes marvelous uh so i don't know i think what's happening here is that even

among people who kind of have a sense of history or an analysis, there's maybe this lingering belief that the legal system is supposed to protect us or that maybe at some time it did protect us. And it just like persists like a vestigial tale of, of like hope. Yeah. But I kind of love this case i did read this case and um at least as clarence thomas describes him the plaintiff in this case who's bull is basically the viewpoint character from a steely dan song like he like appears to have sort of sprang fully formed from the head of Donald Fagan and he drove off with his vanity plate that says smuggler. Honestly, I'm sure you're going to tell me it was something problematic, but sounds like a cool dude to me.

Well, he spent years playing both sides of this game. He would get paid by people to smuggle them across the Canadian border and he'd make them, he'd like extort money from them. He'd make them buy a room at his hotel, even if they weren't going to stay at his Canadian border. And he'd make them, he'd like extort money from them. He'd make them buy a room at his hotel, even if they weren't going to stay at his hotel. And then he'd charge them money for every hour that he spent driving to pick them up and take them across to Canada. And then he would turn around and get paid by the feds

to snitch on the people who had just paid him to smuggle them across the border. Jeez. Yeah. All right. Now I to smuggle them across the border. Jeez. Yeah. All right. Now I don't think this guy's cool. Yeah. So he basically ends up getting in an altercation with a federal agent.

Oh, he's back to being cool. Okay. Yeah. And then when he makes an administrative complaint to the agency, the agent sticks the IRS on him. This is, I mean, all right. It's not good behavior. Right. Right.

But now after years of doing dirty work for the feds, bull is outraged because he never thought tigers would eat his face. Yeah. So he sues the agent under Bivens, which is a case that sort of a little bit, maybe sometimes gives individuals a very narrowly tenuous, circumscribed opportunity to sue federal agents for certain civil rights violations. And it's not a very strong right. And it has been getting ever more eviscerated since 1980. Yeah. And really what Bivens does is it gives you, you know, in the very unlikely event that you win a Bivens claim,

it gives you money damages. It doesn't give you better law. It doesn't give you better police practices. It doesn't make you safer. It's not nothing, but it's not like it's money, which is what the law can give you. So unless you're harboring the delusion that there is a sort of direct connection between being allowed to try, usually unsuccessfully, to recover money from the federal government and the self-control or good behavior of federal agents, Bivens is not actually a particularly useful mechanism for pursuing anything that resembles like a well-developed vision of justice. Yeah. Right. It's not nothing. I don't, I don't want to dismiss

the utility of Bivens, but it's, you know, it's not like, it's not a strong right. Right. It's not a reliable right, you know, to sue. It's not very effective. One of my beloved colleagues described it. He said Bivens is such a bad doctrine that it point that trying to use it and trying to invoke it can actually end up just being counterproductive, as it is in this case. Right? Yeah. We have a very unsympathetic plaintiff, and we have a really weak doctrine. So he sues under Bivens, it goes up and down the courts, it winds up in the Supreme Court, which issues a sort of a bunch of sort of fragmented opinions. But ultimately, all the justices mostly agree, this is not a super controversial question, at least within the context of the court itself.

Yeah. So the first thing is they all say you don't there's no right to sue for money damages under the theory of First Amendment retaliation, meaning Wool had sued the agent for basically for punishing him for making a complaint. He's saying, I exercised my first amendment right to make a complaint to the agency you work for. And then you punished me by sticking the IRS on me. Right.

Which I see why that's questionable in the actual like legal documentation. Yeah. So, um, I see why that's questionable in the actual legal argumentation. Yeah. So, you know, the justices say, no, that's not a right that exists. And then they have some differing thoughts on whether or not you can sue for excessive force. But ultimately, the big decision that is made here isn't about the border. It's not about the relative impunity of border patrol, which has long operated with relative impunity, just like the rest of the federal government. Yes. I remember that impunity when they were firing tear gas at us. successful or effective way. And if suing them had ever had a meaningful impact on their behavior,

I guess this opinion would be a real loss. But all this opinion really does, as far as I can tell, and I've spoken with my colleagues, and we all agreed that the sort of uproar over this particular case is a little baffling because all it really does is further remove what was already a really inaccessible and pretty weak remedy. And yeah, no, sorry, sorry. Well, you know, and then everyone lost their minds and started sharing the ACLs, ACL use map of the of what a hundred miles of border looks like and getting really mad on Twitter. Yeah. And again, the hundred mile border zone, I think it's fair to say that that's a problem. I don't like that's a bad way for things to work.

The Border Patrol, as we talked about in our two-parter on the Border Patrol, has a lot of massive issues with it. But I feel like kind of what's happening here is some of this is like a little bit of collective PTSD because of the shock of the imminent kind of demise of Roe. And so I think maybe there's this kind of expectation that every ruling issued by the Supreme Court, because fuck it, is going to be this kind of like earth shattering, like end of a fundamental right. And in this case, it's really just like, no, this is more or less like this is not a massive sea change. Yeah. More of the same. I like to say about this kind of thing, it's appalling, but it's not surprising. I do want to note just for your listeners, I do want to note just for your listeners, this case does not in any way touch our right to sue state level police because there is federal legislation called Section 1983 that gives us permission to sue the police. And for some strange reason, the federal government has not passed similar legislation allowing us to sue them. That's really surprising. I wonder why. I know. So in any case, one of the things the court says in the Buhl opinion is that if the feds wanted to be constrained by the citizenry,

Congress would have given us the right to constrain them. So I think this particular case that people have been looking out about is a great sort of example of the way that the sort of the zeitgeist moves inexplicably to make much of things that are maybe not all that much, while also kind of failing to notice things that are really significant. And so I'd like to sort of highlight some of those things. I think there actually are real reasons to breathe and prepare and gather our courage based on what the Supreme court has done this term. And I love to talk to you about some of those things. So I do think there are real reasons that they said to breathe and prepare. And some of those without getting too in the weeds,

I guess I want to talk first about the shadow docket, which is kind of a more recently coined term. What it means is what it's referring to are the cases that are often heard. Well, they're not heard. They're decided by the Supreme Court on the basis of the record below often without oral argument and they're often issued as holding decisions without written opinion so they're often not justified or rationalized or you know the reasoning for the decisions that are made is often not made transparent to the public.

Okay. Yeah. And these are cases that are sort of highly procedural or they're not super complicated questions or they're questions of law where there's like maybe a circuit split and they just need to resolve, you know resolve what might otherwise be repugnant views of the law. Yeah. And the shadow docket has recently included just penalty issues. Yeah. The deciding something of such grave importance with decisions that are not explained by an opinion where the justices do not make clear

their reasoning. This is, I mean, in my opinion, it's problematic by the Supreme Court, to me, I think requires a really intense degree of transparency. I think that the amount of transparency that is incumbent upon you to have is sort of inversely proportionate to the amount of power you exercise. Yeah, that makes sense. And so the Supreme Court has just, I mean, literally life or death power here. Yeah. And so for them to be making decisions on the shadow docket about death penalty cases and death penalty jurisdictions is just wild.

It's troubling. It's frightening. is just wild um it's troubling it's frightening you know i i think i i can't remember if i talked to you before about um how about banjari yeah maybe in the show about it but i certainly talked to you about it we might need to do it it's probably a good idea at some point to do a show about it but yeah um one of the things that makes grand jury so anonymous is that they they aren't public right and that to me like this is anathema well not to me it is in terms of the sort of um received wisdom about the American legal system, to have secret proceedings is anathema to the underlying principles of due process, which involves, well, notice and a hearing. But really, there's a commitment to publicity, right, in the American legal system

that is undermined and trampled upon by federal-planned juries. Right. And I think that there is a similar thing happening here with the shadow docket. We know at least what the cases are. We know what the opinions are, what the holdings end up being. But to have these kinds of cases being decided without oral argument, to have these cases being decided without written opinions is troubling. So that's a move toward an exercise of power that I would characterize as authoritarian and that I find very concerning.

One of the things that we're seeing, and I think it's sort of not unrelated to that, is that they seem to be dispensing what the doctrine of stare decisis, which is precedent, right? The idea that previously decided cases are binding and if you overturn one, you really have to be very clear that that's what you're doing

and you have to explain why. And we see that with the Least Row draft. Where they have, you know, if indeed they... Issue it, sure. Because, yeah, and this is like an originalism thing, right? Like you can throw out precedent

if you're saying all that matters is this interpretation you're saying that's based on the original intent of like some dead dudes. Is that more or less an accurate way to say it? You can overturn precedent. Sure. Overturn precedent. Yeah.

You would have, I think the just outcome or whatever. But would have, we, we, that's, I think the just outcome or whatever. Um, but, but I think there, there's many reasons that you can overturn precedent. Um, but they seem to be doing it for sub-salentio,

right? They're not, they're not always, the leaked roadmap did, was pretty clear and transparent about it. Um, but I think there are some other things that are going on um there was a sixth amendment case where um they just just sort of didn't mention all of the countervailing precedent um You know, there's some stuff happening. There was a

case in Texas that was a Sixth Amendment case where the Supreme Court sent it back down to either the District or the Court of Appeals. I don't remember. Either the District or the

Circuit and said, look, this guy who's on death row did absolutely receive ineffective assistance of counsel yeah whether it be as prejudiced and um the texas court just just ignores them. And that's one of those ones that people freaked out about that was like, yeah, I think folks should be very unsettled by this. Right. And then the court was like, they didn't, the court, the Supreme Court just didn't, they just let them get away with it. Yeah. And so there's this sort of weird push and pull happening, not only strategically ceding power to certain lower courts in a way that's unusual.

Yeah. transparent. They are not following precedents. They are not enforcing the hierarchy of the courts, which does sound like an odd thing, I think, for me to complain about. But one of the things that we want to know is that, you know, one of the ways that we can anticipate what the law is or make reliable legal arguments is that the law has to be consistent with, you know, the law of the lower courts has to be consistent with what the Supreme Court has said. And if we can no longer rely on that, it's, you know, chaotic, potentially really bad for our clients, apparently, particularly clients who are facing the death penalty, which is a particular concern.

This court does seem pretty intent on knocking over the entire Sixth Amendment. And then I think yesterday or the day before, they issued a really important immigration case on the class actions that were brought um by or on behalf of um people who were detained in immigration detention for like months and months and months without earrings without bond hearing yeah and essentially what the court held was um that lower courts don't have any authority to lower code stuff, have any authority to demand that the federal government do or not do certain things because their claim is that the Immigration and Naturalization Act does not

give them that authority. And so there's a lot, I think the big trend here is there's a lot of protecting the federal government from any kind of accountability. Yeah. Accountability that's being imposed

by lower federal courts who are so concerned with states' rights. They have a cool way of showing it. I don't know what else to say about it, because it is one of those things where when we talk about or when I talk about like frustration at people kind of sharing information about stuff the court is doing or about changes to how our rights are being interpreted by courts that are incorrect it's not because like there's not a problem it's because it's really important to be aware of like the it's really important to like see the the problem accurately um and to see it like it's this it's this broad assault like like you said the

fact that the fact that you have this kind of high level attack on the fifth amendment is, is really frightening because that's one of like, theoretically our primary protections. Yeah. There's also, I think there's going to be a Miranda case. Oh boy. I'm not looking forward to that. I'm a little bit anxious about that.

Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I think the general thing. So, you know, I think the thing that I would like to highlight here is paying attention to what rights the Supreme Court is trampling on is obviously pretty important but it's pretty likely to be kind of more of the same particularly for quality targeted groups of people right like the law is in certain respects fictional right like the lie is an abstract concept um sure absolutely yes it's not you know like i don't want to get all post-modern here it's not like a lot of fictional things have have real impacts sure um exactly like uh Sure. Exactly. Like, it has real impact, obviously, but I think that the impact of court ruling, you know, it's very serious, it's very important. But it doesn't sort of immediately transform the world. I think it just sort of changes what kinds of solutions we look to. Right. And like, I'm not particularly inclined to look to the court to protect me or anyone. I don't trust the law or court enough to really want them to be the arbiters of things like free speech.

Yeah, absolutely not. I mean, obviously, I want the right counsel. My hope is that we can take care of each other enough to make the course irrelevant, which I realize is a doe-eyed type thing. But I guess the thing, especially with Roe, and I was talking to Margaret, our mutual friend, about this. The thing that is going to change if Roe is overturned is really going to be what solutions are available to us and how much courage will it take to pursue them and what are the potential consequences, right? What kind of resources do we need? Right? Yeah. What kind of resources do we need? I think in the face of these Supreme Court decisions, some of which are genuinely terrible, and some of which are just reinforcing things that have long been the truth. Yeah.

You know, our grief and our outrage and our bitter toast are not practiced. They are not necessarily useful. Right. And even getting super in the weeds of, you know, what does this opinion actually say? I mean, I think that is interesting, but it's, and it's good to know, and it's good to at least have somebody around, you know. time focusing on the real nitpicky language that's being used by the unelected god things of the United States, maybe we should start thinking a little bit more about what are the material impacts that that might have and what are tools that maybe aren't legal tools, or at least that aren't only legal tools that might be useful in securing the things that we value.

And I think that's both an important note and a good one to end on, Moira. I will run one thing by you real quick so i have a plan and i i want to i want your advice on the constitutionality of this i would like to acquire fort bragg so i'm thinking what i do is i go in a third amendment case right and say that well i mean if look can't, what if we just extended the quartering act, right? Like in the, you know, could we, could we push it even further so that nobody can host soldiers? And then all those military bases are going to be, there's going to be a fire sale. You can't keep soldiers on them. Government's not going to keep running them. And then I get to own Fort Bragg. How are we doing? Is that, is that legal?

Is the whole end goal that you own Fort Bragg? That is one of the end goals. I think you should probably talk to your contacts at Raytheon. Okay, okay. Because, yeah, you're right, they're probably going to outbid me anyway. That's really what I'm thinking. Okay. But constitutionally, I'm on solid grounds with the third, right?

That's bulletproof. You know, like many of the questions you asked me, the legal questions you asked me, I think the answer is nobody knows. Nobody knows? Okay, I'm going to do what the NRA did with the second, but with the third amendment. It's going to take a couple of decades, but I feel, I feel good about this course of action. Thank you for putting up with me, Moira. You had some stuff you wanted to plug at the end of this episode here. I do.

I would like to plug the Repro Legal Defense Fund of If, When, How, because if we're going to talk about Roe at all, the Repro Legal Defense Fund, because if we're going to talk about Roe at all, the legal defense fund, which can be found at reprolegaldefensefund.org. They have a donate page. They're doing amazing work. I'm just incredibly impressed with them. They are also at Repo Legal Defense Fund on Instagram

and probably also on Twitter. But I don't really understand Twitter, so I'm not going to swear to it. That's for the best. Well, check that out. They are at twitter.com ReproLegalFund. So please donate to the Reproductive Legal Fund, twitter.com ReproLegalF legal fund by the time this episode drops we may have

the row thing so i know everybody's gearing up uh but you know this is definitely uh uh it's it's good to help out we all need to be like pulling because we're not going to yank this back on course through just hoping that eventually the Supreme Court gets better. Well, we can wish really hard. It would be nice. It would be nice. But I think organizing is probably a more effective thing to do in the immediate term. So, yeah, I Thank you, Moira. And that's the episode.

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 Sonorum. 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 Nocturnne Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, it could happen here, which is the podcast that this is. I'm Robert Evans. With me are other people. Hello, other people.

Hi. Hi. Hey. Hello. So this podcast, things falling apart, putting back together, yada, yada, yada. So this podcast, things falling apart, putting back together, yada, yada, yada. Today, our guest, well, not our guest, our host is the inimitable Andrew. Andrew, hey, how's it going?

What are we talking about today? What are we learning? I'm good. I'm good. Today, hoping to tackle another book, kind of. This one's not fictional like the past two, though i do hope to like explore some of those in the future because i think some good conversations come out of those uh this week we're going to be talking about paulo freire and the pedagogy of the oppressed oh yes for those who don't know paulo freire is a Brazilian educator and one of the leading advocates of, well, was a Brazilian educator and leading advocates of critical pedagogy.

Pedagogy is basically like the study of education, philosophy of education. his experiences kind of led him to that path because during his childhood and adolescence he was falling behind in school because he was poor his poverty and his hunger affected his ability to learn and so as he got older and he got opportunities and he was able to study and so on he basically realized he needs to do more to uplift the lives of the poor, improve the lives of the poor in order to facilitate better educational outcomes. As he says in one quote, I didn't understand anything because of my hunger. I wasn't dumb. It wasn't a lack of interest. My social condition just didn't allow me to have an education. Experience showed me once again the relationship between social class and knowledge.

So as he progressed in his studies and his writing and stuff, he eventually contributed to a philosophy of education, which blended classical approaches stemming from Plato and modern Marxist and post-Marxist and anti-colonial thinkers. When I was reading the book, it really sort of struck me. I got a lot of, I got a lot of Franz Fanon vibes from his work. He died in 1997, in 1997 um r.i.p um but his greatest contribution um to me at least and to most people is his book the pedagogy of the oppressed in the book he sort of explores a detailed marxist class analysis um in the relationship between like the colonizer the colonized, the oppressor and the oppressed. And he talks about the banking model of education that traditional pedagogy espouses because it treats the student as this bank,

this empty vessel to be filled with knowledge. Instead, he argues for a form of education, of pedagogy that treats the learner as a co-creator in knowledge as far as i'm aware um and i guess it kind of is illustrated in the book itself but as far as i know fair wasn't an anarchist or libertarian socialist of any variety but he still ended up coming to some anarchic conclusions with regard to the education system and learning and stuff i mean anarchists have been writing about you know like youth liberation and the school system and even experimenting with new models of schooling for a long time um the frer movement for example experimented with implementing

modern schools in the US and in Spain Emma Goldman was very much involved in that process and I don't think that the experiments were necessarily free of error but I think they did a good job of trying something new

trying something a bit more liberatory in the sphere of education because i mean for the past several hundred years now um we've kind of been going with this sort of um prussian model of education this very strict very regimented very divided model of education that arose um to sort of foment nationalism and division, class divisions and stuff within the populace. So I think that any experimentation in the more libertarian direction is a positive. In the preface, Freire sort of goes into why this book came about. He's talking about his experience as a teacher in Brazil, the observations he made while in political exile.

And so what he realized as a teacher when he was teaching his students is that they had a sort of a fear of freedom. It's not like a real fear of freedom. It's more of a fear of the risks associated with freedom because of the experiences and stuff that they've had. What he considers the most vital, however, to the education system is sort of establishing a conscientious vow

or a critical consciousness within students. A consciousness that commits to social change and human liberation according to freer the educational model can only really be successful if people are radicalized through it if people are able to see the issues in their current society think about them, stew upon them, criticize them, compare them and look at ways to solve them. And if they don't come out with that sort of critical consciousness then it's all for naught basically the education system is kind of spinning on top of mud. I find it especially interesting that I ended up reading this when I did because as we've seen in the US, a lot of conversations are now attacking anything even approaching critical consciousness

with this whole debate going on about critical race theory and this sort of... Even though critical race theory is not being taught in primary or secondary education, this attack, this full-fronted attack on anything that resembles critical thinking and critical study of history and of the present so in chapter one Freer makes a case for why the pedagogy of the oppressed is necessary. He says that humankind's central problem is how we affirm our identity as human beings.

Everyone is trying to reach that sort of affirmation, that sort of human identity, that sort of humanness. But oppression and systems of oppression interrupt that process. They prevent people from expressing and establishing their full humanity. Whether you're talking about racism, keeping people from reaching their full potential, or sexism, preventing people, or, you know, cis-hetero-patriarchy with the whole limitations and such puts upon people's sexuality and gender expression and gender identification. puts upon people's sexuality and gender expression and gender identification.

All of these systems of oppression are put in place to restrict and confine and bound us below, you know, our full potential. And so a lot of that and a lot of the, you know, cultivation and forging of one's awareness of, you know, the systems around them and how to operate within them takes place in the education system. And so the education system is, should be one of the critical junctures in which we wage our fight for oppressed people. or fight for oppressed people. There's a sort of dehumanization that occurs as a result of oppression, whether it be in the form of comparing people to animals,

as racists often do, whether it be in the form of degrading people to this sort of childlike status, which itself is a form of oppression because the fact that, you know, childlikeness and youth is considered to be something less than, is considered to be something less than. It's just another way in which people are oppressed and another way in which people are prevented from asserting their autonomy and their humanity. Oppressors, they tend to treat people as objects, to be possessed. They see freedom as threatening and in turn, oppressed people end up becoming alienated from each other through oppression and begin to see the oppressors as something to strive towards. Ferrer talks about how the oppressed, their whole vision and their whole understanding of what being human is, is being like oppressors.

And so a lot of people, and you see that even today, when they strive for freedom, they strive to become entrepreneurs. They strive to become business owners. They strive to become billionaires and CEOs and all these sort of images of what being human looks like, because people are striving to be free. And if the only way you can get a measure of freedom is by becoming an oppressor yourself, then it makes sense a lot of oppressed people are going to try to do that. Of course, as Freire himself says, the oppressors themselves are not fully free either because by denying the oppressed people their humanity, they rob themselves of humanity. The fight for liberation, as Ferrer argues,

must consist of two stages, reflection on the nature of oppression and a concrete action needed to change it. And that sort of, reading that line, I'm paraphrasing, but it reminds me of the process of prefigurative politics, where not only are you bringing about the consciousness of people to recognize these systems of oppression and understand how they operate but the concrete action to change it is one that is intended to reflect the society that we wish to establish

in the future. Frere does warn that you know leaders and stuff must engage in dialogue with oppressed people rather than becoming like oppressors but as the book goes on i think he relies a bit too much on this concept of leaders as well he warns against them existing above the people but he still sort of upholds that distinction between the leaders and the people. As the book progresses, he begins to compare the concept of the banking model to the concept of the problem-posing model of education, as he calls it. In the banking model, quote, the teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable, or else he expounds upon a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students.

His task is to fill the students with the contents of his narration, contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them, and could give them significance. disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity. Irony being that sentence is quite verbose, but... On the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole. The teacher teaches and the students are taught. The teacher knows everything and the student knows nothing.

The teacher thinks and the students are thought about. The teacher talks and the students listen meekly. The teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined. The teacher chooses and enforces his choice and the students listen meekly. The teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined. The teacher chooses and enforces his choice and the students comply. The teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher. The teacher chooses the program content and the students, who were not consulted, adapt to it. The teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority which they set in opposition to the freedom of the students the teacher is the subject of the

learning process while the pupils are mere objects i think um frederick needed to incorporate some more gender neutral language in that so i had to kind of correct him there um but that quote that that quote in full it really reminds me of my schooling experience as some people may know I was actually homeschooled for the majority of my learning experience I actually didn't know that oh well now you know yeah so I was I was homeschooled for I would say the majority of my education experience and then after I went into college and stuff but before then I did um make it through the school system and even though it was really long time ago my memories are still crystal clear of that process you know um I remember seeing students being disciplined. I myself was kind of a teacher's pet, but.

That does not surprise me. Yeah. In the best possible way. I'm not sure how to take it, but I'll take it in a good way. Because me too, Andrew. Not me. Oh, that also doesn't surprise me. Teachers are cops.

Oh my God. Yeah, this is my pre-Anarchist days. I wasn't jumping out the boot canal with a black flag, unfortunately. ACAB includes the person who tried to get me to read Catcher in the Rye. Catcher in the Rye was a good book. It was a good book. It's a perfectly fine book. I'm just being an asshole.

But, like, Andrew, what are you alluding here is that, like, stoicism is something that is weaponized in the education system? Stoicism? Stoicism? something that is weaponized in the education system stoicism stoicism being like no emotion delivering like right right right because i was thinking the philosophy oh yeah no but like yeah yeah you're like a vessel for quote-unquote facts and knowledge to be like injected into you for you to like hold as, as, yeah, it's,

we're seeing a resurgence in this type of thing. All the, albeit probably a little bit less eloquently stated in some of like the, um, anti-schooling anarchist literature that's been coming out the past few years, or at least has been gaining more traction the past few years. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Cause this this and that's kind of that's kind of the funny thing about it because most people in their schooling experience can recall it being in some ways negative even if they look at it in a positive light we can at least even if they don't go in that fully radical direction most most people can look at some of the elements of their schooling, of their education, and say that that wasn't right. You know, there's something messed up about that. Even something as simple as having to, like, ask, you know, the teacher to go and use the toilet.

It's just, it's those sorts of little ways of control. So, like, as I was saying, in my schooling experience, back when I was in primary school, I was very adorable. I'm sure you could guess. But I remember seeing these students being disciplined. They had, the bell had rung for,

you know, the end of break and you're supposed to, you know, file back into class. But I think there was a school next door that was having some kind of event and they were playing like music and so a bunch of students in my class not me but a bunch of students in my class were you know um dancing at the side of the school enjoying the music having a good time or whatever um they heard the bell and they didn't go because they were you know they were having a good time they were like six seven eight um but then afterwards the teacher after you know i sit down and stuff teacher goes and finds them and brings them in and this is

prior to at least to my knowledge prior to the corporal punishment being phased out of school so I just remember seeing them having to you know like lay out their hand and receive punishment for daring to have joy after hours you know daring to enjoy

themselves when it was supposed to be class time when they were supposed to be in class I'm sure people have similar experiences what was supposed to be class time when they're supposed to be in class. I'm sure people have similar experiences, here at least, of that kind of punishment and control. I mean, this is not the same kind of punishment,

but I think to your point of being controlled, like even just like not even being aware of it, just like being forced to stand up and say the Pledge of in america for example it becomes this like repetitive culty thing every morning that you're expected to do and if you don't do it um personal experience if you refuse to do that you have to go to the principal's office and explain why and it happens over and over again and i think it's like uh you're you're questioned and you're punished even for like thinking not like differently or questioning not even thinking just questioning reality yeah yeah yeah yeah and in syria when i was i went to school in syria when

i was really small and me and my sister ate really slow and we would get hit with a ruler on our hands because we didn't finish lunch fast enough um so yeah yeah mine isn't that intense but the school I went to when I was a little kid in Oklahoma number one they paddled us that was legal as a public school but my first grade teacher was obsessed with the fact that like it was bad to be left-handed and you know she couldn't she couldn't do the shit that they used to do right they used to like fuck kids up for using their left hands but she would every single day like chide me and tell me that i should use my right hand to write and stuff that it wasn't like proper that it was like bad that i because if you if you if you're not aware if you're not left-handed when you're like do stuff with a pencil and you're left-handed you get a bunch of

like yeah pencil stuff on your on the side of your hand right it's just like a because of the way that unless you're using like those weird left-handed notebooks and shit which no one ever has um and she would like she gave me so much shit for being dirty because like i would get stuff on my hand it was just like when I tell people that it's like, really, this was like the nineties. Yeah. There's,

there's a few of those folks left. I think she was extremely Catholic. Um, and I know nuns used to go fucking shit on that stuff. I didn't know that Catholic people cared about the left-handed thing. I don't know. Catholic schools. Oh,

schools. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. I wouldn't say that Catholic schools used to be. Oh, schools, sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I wouldn't say that like it's, I don't think there's anything in like the catechism about not being left-handed. Right. Right.

I mean, like in some very strict Muslim culture, a lot of it is like phased out. But for example, your left hand isn't meant to be used as the primary hand because it's like a dirty hand, like the one you wipe yourself with. Yeah. Yeah. Or the one you clean yourself with. Yeah. There's a lot but like we have i know you were left-handed though yikes oh yes yeah yeah yikes thank you thank you you should be concerned i have to make a number of things frustrating like shearing sheep anyway whatever well everything is designed for right handed people for sure like guitars everything yeah it is you try to speak it up sounds but we

are the master right okay sorry speaking of hands speaking of hands just out of curiosity did you all have the hand up hand out experience hand out what's hand out basically um it's just sort of a tool used to just sort of a repetitive kind of follow instructions kind of thing so like if the class is getting too rowdy it's like hands up hands out hands up hands out and the teacher does not stop saying it until everyone is quieted down and it's just like like a robot just raising and lowering their hand. That's so culty. I don't think I've experienced that. And I mean I did um I was an assistant teacher at one point and for very very young children I'm talking like four to five year olds and I understand the frustration of like you're just trying to get something done and everyone's just kind of wilding out. They just had snacks or whatever and everyone's kind of wilding out.

But I think that says more about like the methods we're using than about the children themselves, you know? That's for sure. It's more about like, you have to, you should adjust more to like their cycles and their needs at their stage. Rather than trying to force and shove them into this sort of like robotic yeah yeah no totally it's yeah they're not allowed to actually develop naturally or like be themselves in a setting like that yeah exactly i think what happens that kind of throws me is that when people have these experiences you know traumatic and not as dramatic in the education system a lot of people but some people they come out radicalized by it and other people end up

being the like most strange and most passionate advocates of it like Like even this Catholic school teacher you're talking about, Robert. At some point, she was also in the education system. And it really makes me wonder what she went through to come up with that kind of mindset. Yeah, I mean, I think she'd grown up in Oklahoma too, so it must have been a nightmare, like everything in that state. Yeah.

Like, why does it have a panhandle? Anyway. I mean, there is a reason for that, and it's not fun, but okay. I'm assuming it's slavery. Any fucked up geographic thing going on in the South, the reason is generally slavery. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right, right, right.

And so he spends a lot of time talking about this banking model, and we could go on and on about it. I spend a lot of time just talking about the education system and all my problems with it. And at some point, I would like to do an episode about the Frere schools and how those sort of transpired. But what frere proposes as an alternative is the problem-posing model, which is basically through dialogue, the teacher and the students cease to exist. The teacher of the teacher and the students cease to exist the teacher of the students and the students of the

teacher cease to exist so instead of there being these two separate categories they are teacher students and student teachers there's no separation anymore between the one who teaches and the one who is taught rather there's a dialogue between the two as they become part of this process where all of them can grow you know you let go of this sort of authoritarian um arrangement and allow people to teach and be taught, to learn and be learned, to really draw out what it is that we have to gain from each other. Rather than being sort of docile listeners, the students and the teachers, the student teachers, teacher students, they become co-investigators in dialogue. They become critics.

They become radicals who are able to open up and demythologize the way that reality works, the way that reality works, the way that human beings exist in the world. Banking education tends to inhibit creativity and try to domesticate our consciousness. Throwback to when I was talking about human domestication the other day. But in contrast, the the problem posing model tries to it really bases itself on

creativity and stimulates rather than domestication a sort of a full flourishing of what someone could be unbound and unshackled so in summary banking theory is immobilizing, it's fixating, it doesn't acknowledge people as people, but rather as objects, whereas the problem-posing model, it takes people's historicity, it takes people's humanity as their starting point, upon which they can grow and learn from each other. I think that's what frustrated me the most about the education system in the time that I was in it. And even when I got back in it in college, even though it was not as bad in some ways. Because, you know, in college, they tend to emphasize dialogue a bit more in certain classes.

they tend to emphasize dialogue a bit more in certain classes. But I find the issue is that there's this assumption in, you know, the earlier sections of schooling, secondary school and primary school, and even preschool, that the children and the youths, you know, they're not there to have anything to add. They're just there to regurgitate, to study and to repeat what they've studied for approval, which is something I definitely did back in the day. If what's lacking is dialogue, a dialogue that requires hope and trust and critical thinking,

then liberation would you know, would also be lacking. There can't be dialogue without love for the world and for people and for knowledge and for bringing that knowledge out to people. So as Ferrer says, you know, love is at the same time the foundation of dialogue and dialogue itself. On the other hand, dialogue cannot exist without humility. The naming of the world through which people constantly recreate that world cannot be an act of arrogance.

And I remember encountering a lot of arrogant teachers and lecturers and stuff in my time through the education system. I remember being condescended to on multiple occasions. And that's the thing. Nobody likes being condescended to. But condescension is kind of the default way in which we engage with young people just sort of there's this projected ignorance upon them as if they have nothing of value to add or to share and on the contrary you know we all have something to contribute if we are closed off and

if we are closed off to the you know contributions of others we can't engage in dialogue with them if we are fearful if we are um considering people to be like inferior in some ways if we cannot embrace people as equals and how can we engage in dialogue with them? I think there's a beauty in the way that he reflects on dialogue. He goes on and on about it for quite a while. At one point he says that dialogue requires an intense faith in humankind. Faith in their power to make and remake, to create and recreate. Faith in their vocation to be more fully human.

Which is not the privilege of an elite, but the birthright of all. And so finally, when he's talking about action and how this sort of change is brought about, he divides cultural action into two kinds, dialogical action and anti-dialogical action. While oppressors use anti-dialogical action to protect their power and to separate people, radicals can use dialogical action to bring people together in the struggle for freedom. There are different methods of anti-dialogical action. Through conquest, through divide and rule, through manipulation, through cultural invasion, oppressors were able to put the oppressed

in the predicament that they're in. You know, the oppressed wouldn't be the oppressed if not for the oppressors oppressing them. That's kind of self-explanatory. But in contrast, radicals from among the oppressed, using dialogical action, using cooperation, unity, organization, and cultural synthesis, are able to rise above and push back against this oppression and to allow education to flourish among all. education to flourish among all and so I think that's the

beauty of the text the hope that it imbues in people to really bring about these changes and I think it was a good read 5 out of 5

excellent and it's not very long, right? It's like under 200 pages from what I read. Yeah, it's like four short chapters. Relatively short. I know, back when you were talking about how people are,

sectors of the right specifically, are so set on attacking anything related to critical theory or critical race theory, the book was banned over a decade ago from the Arizona schools for teaching students that they are oppressed. Well.

Yeah, that's how you know. That's to be expected. It's a good book. Yeah. Yeah, so that's... Anyway a just a fun fun fact there yeah we can't we can't have kids knowing that uh they have shared interests as a group um and that adults are mistreating them comprehensively that's good yeah god you just reminded me of so many just moments

that me and teachers like really got into it or like the teachers that were condescending and that I hated. I have to really go through the Rolodex and try to vent this out now

after we finish recording. Yeah. Well, listen, if you're a child, Why are you listening to this? rise up in rebellion. Destroy the adults.

Their joints are terrible. Hit them in the knees. They won't recover. My joints are terrible. Yeah, exactly. Some fucking nine-year-old whacks you in the knee with like a shillelagh. You're down. You're out of the game. No, I know. My knee would break.

Embrace the ancient traditions. Make shillelaghs and go for the fucking joints. Yeah. Children of the world, you have nothing to lose but your bedtimes. Right, so. Wow. That's the episode. Thanks, Andrew.

Thanks, Andrew. 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.

I know you. Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Should we record this episode? Sure, let's start. All right. I'm ready. I'm sure we can use some of that as the opening. Hi, welcome to It Could Happen Here The podcast that is about medical ethics In the 1860s

Not today, but fair Yeah, no, today Today it's me, Christopher Wong And we're doing an episode about inflation Sick Oh, speaking of medical ethics Well, speaking of kinks, actually The moment I said that, I was like, I have opened myself up for a real broadside here.

That was some of the first weird internet porn I came apart. It was specifically the cast of DuckTales being like inflated. Okay, let's get to the topic of the episode. This episode is now about DuckTales inflation fetish pornography. That is enough pre-ramble. Christopher, what do you have for us today? Yeah, so we're talking about inflation.

We're talking about economic inflation, to be fair. Somebody was making money off of that inflation, I'll tell you that much. Oh, God. I mean, the one making money off of that inflation, I'll tell you that much. Oh, God. I mean, one thing, DuckTales actually does crossover because of Scrooge McDuck and his giant vault of money. And that is part of what's causing inflation.

That's right. I can tell you right now, that's not the only thing about him that was inflated. Oh, boy. Talking about his dick. Oh, boy. Talking about his dick. Okay. Let's keep it on track.

Okay. So, all right. Inflation, it's not good. It's pretty high. I probably should have looked up the inflation rate. Isn't it like 8%? Yeah. I think it's 8.6.

Yeah. But every time someone says it's this or it's that people are like well no but they also changed these these and these indicators yeah five years ago and these other ones 10 years ago so really it would be this and i have no way of there's judging who's so accurate about that this this is the thing i i didn't put this in the episode but there's a thing that if you study economics you will realize pretty quickly is that all of the like basically all of the econ statistics that we have are fucking bullshit and they're like are basically like they're they're really really fake like yeah like we like we don't like one of the big ones that you know is like one of the underlying things that makes all economics fake is that no one knows how to like actually

calculate the value of of just like a factory like like if you have like a bundle of goods right and they're not the same thing so i don't know you have two factories they make different things actually figuring out what the value of that is is like fucking impossible and they're like the the the the way that it's done in like if you look at like uh like there are these like the um produces statistical annals right and the the values that are in the like the un statistical annals are literally them guessing because because the thing is like the value depending on like the actual value of the thing changes right depending on where it is on like a supply and demand curve blah blah blah and so they literally just tell the the people who are doing the econometrics

you just like pick a rent pick a random pick a random price that they think is equilibrium. So it's completely bullshit. It's bullshit literally all the way down. It's nonsense. All of the indexes are wrong. Yeah. Unfortunately, the field of economics doesn't really care about this that much. So we're going to have to sort of take them seriously.

And the thing I specifically want to talk about today was there was a really interesting paper that was produced by two economists at the D.C. Federal Reserve, David Ratner and Jay Sim, about why inflation happens, which is called Who Killed the Phillips Curve? A Murder Mystery. Who Killed the Phillips Curve? A Murder Mystery. And we're talking about this for two reasons. One, because it's funny, because what is going to happen over the course of this paper is that the Federal Reserve has, Comrade Federal Reserve has discovered Marxism, and they are going to attempt to solve this mystery of inflation by applying Marx. And the second thing, the second reason i want to talk about this is that it reveals something that's very very important about the current political situation which is that both economists and like the rest of the ruling class in general do not understand

what inflation is or what well they sort of understand kind of understand what it is they don't know what causes it um and before we go on here i should like explain what inflation is because most people i don't know i the the way i got talked about i talked about about this with garrison like a few days ago about like like the way people get taught about inflation is that inflation is when like your money is worth less yeah when when the government prints more money so each individual dollar is worth less because there's more of them circulating yeah yeah and and this is like this is this is propaganda um that is not what inflation is inflation is literally just when prices go up and if you think

about it like okay that's kind of the same thing, sort of, because if prices go up, your dollars are worth less money, right? But mostly inflation isn't about the amount of money becoming less. Mostly it's about something happens that makes things cost more. And, you know, and luckily, yeah, like, it is possible for you to get inflation because the government printed too much money. But, like, that mostly… Well, and these things are, like, symbiotic, right? Government will print more money because prices are going up so that people need more money in circulation to buy things.

You saw this happen a lot with the COVID pandemic. So both these things kind of feed off each other and contribute to this overall problem. Yeah, sort of. But I think something that's important to understand about this is that if you look into the actual econ stuff, like supply of money like how much money there is in the world has very very little to do with inflation it only really has effects inflation when you're dealing with like i don't know like 1930s like 1920s germany or like china after world war ii where

just there's literally just like you know the government prints so much money that like like my my i have my family has a bunch of stories about like literally carrying around baskets full of money in China to like buy a train ticket because. Yeah. But like that's shit. Everybody knows about Weimar Germany, too, is like the wheelbarrows full of cash and stuff. Yeah. But this stuff, that's actually it's really rare. And it's like the reason everyone knows.

But when it happens, it's only happened. It's happened like four or five times. And mostly that's not that's not what why inflation happens and if you look at inflation right now for example there's the prices of like a whole bunch of stuff from like food to like microprocessors are going up because a it's harder to produce things because of covid b our supply chains are collapsing and c because russia invaded ukraine and like absolutely annihilated an enormous portion of the global food supply and this that stuff

causes prices to go up right because now it's harder to make a thing and because it's harder to make the thing that thing costs more and this has you know this has literally nothing to do with with the money supply right like it doesn't have any how much money there's in circulation um and there's another reason that that that we'll get into kind of at the end that inflation happens. That also has nothing to do with money, which is that corporations just do price markups because they know people will pay for it. And that's happening too. But having an explanation of like why inflation is happening is really really politically important even even if the explanation that you have is completely wrong it it allows you to do really powerful things politically um like one of

the ways that neoliberalism sort of took power is that in in in the 70s and 80s especially in sort of sort of the the the the 70s in particular but both in academia and the sort of politics writ large there's this problem where you have a bunch of these old keynesian economists who are like keynesians are like they're big on like using government spending to keep the economy running and like you get a lot of welfare programs but yeah it was like okay you can avoid crises by having the government do spending but the problem is that like they couldn't explain why inflation was happening in the 70s um and this was because the canyons were the keynesians are working off something called the phillips curve and we have to do a little bit of econ bullshit but it's not that complicated i promise uh i survived it so it'll be fine so the phillips

curve says that like the closer you get to full employment and like the lower the unemployment rate gets, the higher inflation gets. And this sort of really starts to kick in around from like 5% unemployment to like 4% to 3% unemployment. The inflation rate like spikes. And, you know, the reason this is supposed to happen is because the lower the unemployment rate is, wages start to rise because as there's less people who's unemployed, you have to pay them more money to get them to work. And yeah, so this is – and the theory behind this, right, is that like wages increasing is what causes inflation to happen because it makes everything cost more. Now, there's a simple and obvious – this is a very simple and obvious solution to the problem of why inflation happens. And like all simple and obvious solutions, it is also wrong. The Phillips curve does not explain inflation.

I'm going to refer everyone in the chat to this tweet that I made. I want you to look at Exhibit A, which is the Phillips curve. I want you to look at Exhibit A, which is the Phillips curve. And then I want you to look at Exhibit B, which is I actually plotted unemployment versus inflation in the U.S. from 1946 until 2021. And I want to get a description of what the second graph the next graph, we um what's not a curve what is instead inflation and unemployment graphed um except it's zigzagging everywhere like dark sides omega beams um it is not in fact doing a curve my my favorite thing about this is that um like multiple multiple like and this happens with both unemployment and inflation uh there are multiple unemployment rates that are

associated with different inflation rates and multiple inflation rates that have that are all that that generate two different rates of unemployment it's it's incredible it is it is it is it is a it is an is an absolute sort of monument to uh how much this stuff doesn't work there is a there is a really good reply to your graph tweet that says economists are the modern day court astrologers it's basically true like which is a funny way to look at i. I mean, court astrologers, though, were probably right more often. That's true. If you're simply guessing, is it a good idea to invade this country or not,

50-50 odds it works out for you, right? If you're trying to predict, like, I don't know, the S&P 500, there's a lot more variables. Yeah, and this is one of the things that, like, okay, if you can be the person who, like, walks into a lecture and goes, the emperor has no clothes, you can, like, attain immediate ultimate power,

because, again, this stuff is, like, it's so trivially and easily, like, falsifiable that, like, Milton Friedman is able to do this and you know okay so i should say about the false group the phillips curve that like i showed you that's like a curve is like a very simple one there's all of these really convoluted like modifications to it um there's you know if you look like the new the new keynesian phillips curve or whatever they've done they've done a bunch of math to it to try to like make it kind of work. Um, the problem is that it doesn't work.

Uh, there's, there's a, there's another Phillips curve that's been, that was like modified by the, by the neoclassical economists. And the neoclassical economists were like, this thing doesn't work. Okay, here's some modifications you have to put in. But that curve also doesn't work. Uh, and you know, and this is a real problem right because okay so if if if this inflation explanation of why inflation happens doesn't work like what is actually happening um milton friedman who sort of like takes the the economic scene by storm by like predicting a lot of the inflation in the 70s and like sort of having an answer to it is his his argument is that uh inflation is they they print too much money and there's inflation and this is kind of a gross oversimplification of of what his actual point is but it's it's it's

more true than any of like friedman's oversimplifications so i'm just i'm just gonna leave it at that and this is what the Federal Reserve and like Paul Volcker used to try to fight inflation in 1979 he what Volcker does is he just tries to massively reduce the money supply the problem is that this didn't work

like inflation is still like above 10% I think it spikes to like 15% or something like into like 1984. So. And just based on how much larger Huey, Dewey, and Louie got, sometimes two or 300%. Do you know who else wants?

Oh, boy. That's right, Garrison. All of our sponsors are into ducktales inflation fetish pornography this is it could happen here a podcast sponsored by the concept of masturbating to the cast of ducktales getting inflated by bicycle pumps oh we're back well i've done my part yeah so okay so so we're left off right there's there's a bunch of inflation happening i some of it is happening to ducktales characters most of it is happening to the economy uh paul volcker has tried to stop the inflation by like making there be less money and this has done nothing other than like dramatically increase the unemployment rate now the problem with again

friedman sort of explanation of of inflation is that inflation persistence of the 80s and it only stops after insert foreshadowing noise here uh reagan crushes the unions and uh we will come back to that is to solve inflation we should stop all unions that is your official position no wow okay but this this is part of the position of the federal of the marxist federal reserve so we will we will get there in a second so all right all right so so the thing i've been describing that that freeman is pushing about the money's way this is called monetarism and monetarism is like the fakest theory of inflation like it's it's a theory of inflation so fake that like even other like even other like neoclassical economists don't accept it like none of the other different neoliberal schools of economics like every single one of them look at this and was like this is nonsense like what what are you doing but you know so okay so so it's like it's like

the tiktok astrology compared to the neoliberal court astrology yeah it's it's it's all it's like the TikTok astrology compared to the neoliberal court astrology. Yeah, it's all – it's like – it's somehow an even faker explanation of this. But, you know, the problem is this brings us back to, like, where we started, which is that, like, okay, so if the monetarist stuff doesn't work and the Phillips curve also doesn't work, what is causing inflation? And the answer from inside of, like like the actual field of economics is that nobody knows um here's uh daniel k tralo who was the former federal resent who was a former federal uh reserve bank governor and was a member of the federal reserve board uh so he's a he's a very very high ranking like guy inside the sphere of people who try to apply econ shit and uh here's here's a quote that he gave about

it in 2017 quote the substantive point is that we do not at present have a theory of inflation dynamics that works sufficiently well to be of use for the business of real-time monetary policy making so what what are you saying there is like if you translate that out of econ speak and you don't even really have to translate that out of econ speak much what he's saying is that he no one has any idea why inflation works and none of the models work well enough to let you like try to deal with inflation if you're you know the people who control the money supply like the fed now economists like we've seen in the past if you've been following this stuff in the past like 10 years ish especially in the last five economists have been getting like increasingly desperate to explain what the fuck is happening and they're getting increasingly increasingly desperate right

now because you know hey inflation's back and that that brings us to the paper i mentioned at the top of the episode which is who killed the phillips curve a murder mystery which opens talking about two sort of massive recent failures of the like new keynesian we fixed we we added variables to the phillips curve until it like sort of kind of works ish maybe but you know one thing they're talking about two of its sort of like incredibly massive failures uh the first is in 2008 where there's you know there's a recession oh really what happened economically 2008 2008 there's a recession but what's interesting about this right is that okay so if you think about this, there's a recession, unemployment skyrockets.

This should cause deflation. Well, you know, because... You know what else happened in 2008? The official DuckTales video game came out. So I think this could...

We are... We are through the looking glass, people. You know, I mean, this is not any more bullshit than any of the other stuff they're doing. So, like... But, you know i mean this this this is not any more bullshit than any of the other stuff they're doing so like but you know okay but there's there's this there's this thing that happens where like okay the the like the inflation the inflation rate should have been

decreasing and it just stays the same and economists are like what and this is this is called the missing deflationary period there's there's a second thing where during the sort of like quote-unquote economic recovery in the last like 10 years ish i until basically until before the pandemic employment rates dropped really really low and this should have started this should have triggered inflation but it doesn't and you know okay and so the the the people who run the philip phillips group like the economists are looking at this and they're like okay what do we do and the fed economist solution is again and i shit you not marxism and more specifically the solution is neo-marxism um neo-marxism yeah yeah this is this is this is something else i'm sort of excited about which is that i finally get to

tell the world what a neo-marxist is because this is technically a thing it's just that none of the people who talk about neo-marxists have any idea what it is post-modern neo-marxism yes actually weirdly well i mean i guess you could have okay once we explain it i will i will talk about how you could theoretically have a post-modern neo-marxist but i don't think i've ever met whoa how welcome well i might have contradictory terms okay okay so i'm excited to hear this Oh, welcome. Welcome to Contradictory Terms. Okay, okay. I'm excited to hear this. Yeah, yeah. All right, all right.

So what is happening here is that there's an old joke in Marxist circles that like the most advanced bourgeois economist is 50 years behind the most vulgar Marxist. And this is this coming true. The Federal Reserve economists are developing, they're trying to make a new Phillips curve. And the new Phillips curve is what they call a Kaleckian Phillips curveips curve um because it's based for guys new curve just dropped yeah it literally is except this is this is this is this is the neo-marxist curve and it's based on the works it's kind of loosely based on him but it's just based on the work of a a polish marxist economist named mikhail khaleki and khaleki is a he's a very very weird mar Marxist. By Marxist standards, he's extremely weird. And to explain why this is, we're going to have to speed run Marxism 101.

So I'm going to attempt to explain Marxism in one page. All right. Let's go for it. Okay. Marxism 101, right? You have a worker. She has to go find a job and sell her labor to get food to eat because otherwise she can't support herself. So she goes to work at a factory that makes hospital stretchers.

Now, under capitalism – this is – the thing I'm explaining – this is the orthodox Marxist interpretation. So the people who are about to scream at me for a million years about how this is wrong – I'm explaining the orthodox position, damn it. You're not explaining Presbyterian Marxism yeah chris quick question what what what what what was marx so marx was a experiment a psychological experiment run by the by harvard university that was concluded in 1897 but he wrote he wrote a bunch of books and one of those books is capital and and in capital so okay so you you have you have your worker right and she she works to make hospital stretchers and the thing that makes the hospital stretcher have value is the amount of time that it takes a worker to make it so on under under this this sort of understanding of of what marxism is value is just labor time

right the the value of an object is how many hours of work it takes to make a thing now this labor time or you know like again like how long it takes to make the thing uh the the value of it it isn't measured by like how long it takes to make like an individual cot right it's measured by like how long on average it takes society to make so you know for example like you say this is in finland right it's based on how long on average it takes to make a hospital stretcher in finland not like you know how long it takes to make in like bolivia or something um and this is the technical term for this thing is socially necessary labor time. So our worker works through her day. And after six hours, she's produced enough value to support herself.

She can buy food. She can pay her rent. She can, I don't know, maybe buy a car or something. But she still has to work two more hours of the day. And during that time, the labor that she's doing just goes to the boss. And this is called surplus value. The amount of time that you're working where you're working for the boss and not to support yourself. This is called surplus value.

It is the objective root of exploitation in Marxism. Yeah, it's value that goes directly to your boss. Yeah, and it's value that goes directly to your boss that – and the reason that your boss can just steal this from you is because they have the factor and you don't. So if you want to produce something for them to survive, you have to go to him, and this is called the ownership of the means of production. Now, the price in theory of this hospital stretcher is based on value, on its value value or how many hours it takes to produce it um and how precisely you get from dollars as a unit of measurement from two dollars from time is a subject of an absolutely interminable debate called the transformation problem uh if you want to go read more about it i have wasted probably four years of my life reading about it i don't recommend it but the answer is you can sort

of kind of get it to work if you fuck with the numbers a lot uh but it's if you do it's unclear if they mean anything you can also bypass it entirely by arguing that it only works in the level of the entire world economy blah blah blah i don't care uh if you do care about this uh don't yell at me go read chapter six of uh bickler and neeson's capitalist power palmatics theory is critique fred mosley's uh money and totality and killman and mcglure's a temporal single system interpretation of marx's theory of value of marx's value theory and then google ducktales go big jenny winely and then send all of that all of your notes on both the the the texts and the ducktales send all that to i write okay on twitter um and they will get back to you please you you you will probably come out

of like you will come out of the ducktales stuff like more sane than you will doing the marxism stuff so yeah but i i've now covered my bases uh this this is this is orthodox marxism which is the stuff we've been talking about is based on another there's another assumption here that's important kind of technically which is that like so orthodox Marxists assume that like so you have a bunch of sectors of the economy right there are people who like make different stuff yeah there's people who do

make hospital journeys people who do more important work like make podcasts yeah yeah and everything in between and the assumption is that okay so you have a person who makes like podcasts right and the assumption is that okay so you have a person who makes like podcasts right and the other the people who make hospital structures figured out that making podcasts is more profitable than making hospital stretchers so they start moving all their capital into making podcasts but then because there's too many podcasts the rate of

profit goes down and eventually like eventually the the rate of profit across all sectors is supposed to equalize yes yeah so and and this means that like the and the combination of this and competition means that price is supposed to tend towards value or like the how much something costs in money is supposed to tend towards the labor time socially necessary to produce the commodity in a given place um this this is like the basic thesis of like what you call orthodox marxist like orthodox marxist political economy you would probably or marxian political economy whatever the fuck you want to call it um now in in starting in about the 1920s there was a new marxism and this is called neo-marxism uh neo-marxism's basic like i think i heard about that from dr jordan b peterson yeah

yeah all right now now now we're gonna get the inside scoop on on neomarxism so neomarxism their basic thesis is like what if profit rates don't equalize across like between different parts of the economy that make things and you know and because they don't do that what what if what if you don't get competition because instead of people being able to just freely move capital between sectors, what if you have monopolies? And if you have monopolies, instead of sort of price being like – price is just value, blah, blah, blah, blah, because everyone can keep moving their money around. Price is now derived from the power of a corporation because if you know if if you're a powerful enough corporation to like have a monopoly and stop anyone else from producing the thing that you do now you can now you can charge what are called markups and this is where mikhail kalecki

like enters from stage left um kalecki like he probably should have been the father father of like modern macroeconomics in the sense that like he invents a bunch of the shit that like canes does before canes did but the problem is that he's writing a lot of this in polish and so the the sort of like anglophone like economists are not reading it because he's in poland and he's a marxist and he's writing in polish circles but he invents a bunch of the stuff that like canes invents slightly earlier and he starts like looking at like monopoly and olig slightly earlier and he starts like looking at like monopoly and oligarchy theory and he starts trying to apply it to marxism and it's what you know his conclusion is that monopolies are powerful enough that they can charge these markups

which is just like additional price increase over like what the like value determined price is supposed to be because they can prevent anyone else from selling a thing and then you know one what once you have a monopoly in the market you can force people to just like fucking suck it up and pay it because they can't get it from anywhere else and this is actually this is like pretty similar in some ways to like a bourgeois economic like theory of how this stuff works which is like okay yeah in bourgeois economics like monopolies can increase the price over where they're supposed to be in a perfectly competitive market because they have power, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But there's something very different in Kalecki's work that is not in the normal bourgeois stuff, which is that what he argues is that trade unions – okay, so you have a trade union, right?

They represent the workers who work at a company, and these trade unions are fighting over over the product of the markup and this keeps the size of markups or these sort of like these price increases that monopolies are doing down because the larger the markup that these companies apply the more incentive there are there is for unions to sort of like fight for pay increases right because okay well the the the more expensive the goods are the the more money there like very clearly is on hand. And so the larger the demands you get from organized labor. And this is the insight that Who Killed the Phillips Curve, the paper I was talking about, jumps on. That unions fight over markups and thus that the strength of unions is part of what helps determine inflation.

And they point out that unions want lower prices for goods, and the reason they want lower prices for goods is that the higher the price is of something, the less people buy of it, and the less people buy of the thing, the less has to be produced, and that means that there's less people being employed. And so if you're a union,

you want the most number of people being employed as you can, and so that means that you want prices to be low because – yeah, because lower prices means more of the good being produced. The more of the good being produced means more jobs. And this is where we get to sort of the fundamental assumption behind the regular Phillips curve, and this is also true for this sort of like new like pseudo neo-marxist one right um their assumption is that inflation is driven by rising wages and you know even though the unions are trying to sort of like reduce the markup and like and reduce markups reduce prices to increase the number of workers firms are trying to increase prices so they can make back the money they're paying out in wages now when unemployment is like high this doesn't matter because wages still don't rise very fast because there's you know there's this enormous pool of people who are incredibly desperate for jobs you can pay them sort of like nothing and they'll come work for you because the

alternative is you know starving or getting evicted but when unemployment is low the bargaining power of workers increases and that's that that and that's where the class war starts. Yeah. I mean, you see this in 1941 with the screen cartoonists' strike that Scrooge McDuck brutally cracked down on and eventually had to cede ground to the Guild. But Scrooge McDuck brutal during during this time period post the 30s rise of unions that's right garrison and that's a big part of why huey dewey and louis had to track him down in his money room and stick a bicycle pump into his mouth while he was sleeping and begin to inflate him largely while touching themselves critical support to huey dewey and louis oh boy themselves. Critical support to Huey, Tooey, and Louie?

Oh, boy. So, as with... I don't even know how to transition that. I got none. I can't do it. Nobody does. I mean, really, the main thing is that the concentration of wealth in the hands of a small number of individuals will inevitably lead to inflation. Which is true, and this is one of the things that the economists are sort of talking about here, which is that like – okay, so once you get an actual – once you get like a real classwork going on, right?

classwork going on right where you're getting a classwork to the extent that like the bargaining power of workers and the bargaining power of of like capitalist firms are essentially are like very close to being equal um you get inflation now what's interesting about this is that when you have strong unions like when you have strong unions you get high rates of inflation during periods of sort of inflation shocks right because the unions are sort of like propping up wages and this theory but and this is the interesting part right you get way lower rates of unemployment and so okay let's just step back for a second so what's happening here is right if you have if you have strong unions and there's something else in the supply chain that increases costs say to to to pick a completely random example that never happened uh say for example you're in the 1970s

and the price of oil has quadrupled in one year, and that increases the price of everything. Now, when you have strong unions... But relatable. Yeah, this never happened. Don't Google the oil shocks. Actually, literally don't Google the oil shocks because almost everything written online about the oil shocks is a lie.

Yeah, I think I've talked about that before on the Neoliberalism episode. But yeah, it's all a lie. But basically, what happens here is if you have strong unions, you get a bunch of inflation, but people don't get fired. And when corporations are strong and you don't have unions, you get these shocks, and the inflation rate is much lower, but everyone gets fired. Your unemployment rate goes up to like 10 percent uh it's you know it's an absolute disaster so that's that's one thing to note about about the way the sort of phillips curve the sort of marxian phillips curve like analyzed the situation right but there's another consequence here which comes back to like what inflation is under phillips curve right inflation

in a phillips curve is literally just wage increases right so when union power is weak inflation stops but like what does this actually mean what it means is that uh wages aren't growing sure aren't yeah and this brings us back to like the sort of weirdness we saw in the in the earlier part of the episode right after 2008 right where there should have been deflation because the unemployment rate was really high and also like during the recovery period where uninflation rate just unemployment rates is super low but and there should have been inflation but there wasn't and the answer is why why wasn't there inflation it's well okay because no one had a union and so uh everyone's wages just stayed the same the whole time i have have another explanation for this. When I previously said

the DuckTales game came out in 2008, I was actually incorrect. 2008 was when Nintendo Power listed the DuckTales game as the 13th best Nintendo Entertainment System game. It was voted that in 2008. Now, it's important that 13 is a very unlucky

number. So by voting the DuckTales game the 13th best game from the NES in 2008, they could have basically caused a psychic rift in the fabric of the universe, creating the financial crash. That's fascinating, Garrison, because I was 13 in 2001 when I came across that AngelFire website with home-d ducktales inflation pornography wait so this caused 9-11 i think in a lot of ways yeah yeah that's all connected you know who else may have been a contributing factor to 9-11 the products and services that support this podcast i think that's right that's right we do not accept a sponsor unless it gets the explicit sign off of the king of Saudi Arabia, who, if you'll remember, did 9-11. All right. Yeah, I'm not going to I am not getting paid enough to properly transition this, so I'm not going to.

So it turns out that. Yeah. So the reason there wasn't been inflation is that there's no unions. And because we don't have unions, our wages all suck. the reason there wasn't been inflation is that uh there's no unions and because we don't have unions our wages all suck and uh this means that you know wages wages are stagnant and low and it means that they're not a drive the unions aren't a driver of inflation and also low wages aren't driver inflation because they you know like unions aren't around to increase wages now meanwhile the other thing that this suggests is that monetary policy and they okay i think their uh their exact analysis was like i think like

84 percent of like inflation shocks can be explained by looking at like union density um and but this also means to me what like monetary policy like how much money there is like in the economy has like basically no role in inflation whatsoever uh and and this is you know okay so like this has all been sort of one perspective from some economists of the federal reserve and we can ask the question like why does this matter right like why why why why does like sort of one like group of people on the fed like their response this matters and partly it matters because it's again extremely funny to watch the federal reserve turning to neo-marxists to like try to explain why inflation happens but it also matters because theories

of inflation dictate inflation policy um Jerome Powell who's the the chairman of the Federal Reserve was had a press conference on May 4th and it's too long to play the whole thing but he he has the speech and he lays out a few things that are interesting so he talks about a bunch of stuff that's causing inflation rising production bottlenecks increasing crude oil prices increasing commodity prices from like russia's invasion of ukraine all these lockdowns in china they're keeping factories like closed and like yeah okay those are all like reasonable things that cause inflation but then when you get to like what the fed is actually going to do he starts talking about how the job market is too good for workers right now and unemployment is too low and that's what's driving wages up so his plan is he's going to tinker around with monetary policy to reduce wages and decrease the

demand for jobs and this brings us back to like two things the first part is just the class war part of inflation right prices are rising right now because someone inside like prices are rising right now and someone inside if you want them to not to like cease to continue rising somewhat some part of like the company is going to have to take a hit to like their percentage of like the the sort of the markup right like their percentage of like the price increases the corporations do above like cost and okay so someone has to do this and the federal reserve like absolutely wants to make sure that the person paying for that is you the worker and the second part is something you might have picked

up on if you're paying close attention and this has been something that's been true of of both like the fed chairman and the fed economists do this too which is they do this but they talk about inflation they do this kind of two-step right they talk about a shock or something that causes prices to increase like you know a bunch of ukrainian wheat like suddenly being unharvestable because the russian army is squatting on it or like chinese factories shutting down reduces the amount of wheat or price of electronics or sorry reduces the amount of wheat or the amount of electronics being produced that drives up prices right they talk about like there's an inflationary shock

and then they start talking and instead of talking about that anymore they start talking about unemployment levels in the job market and monetary policy being what drives inflation and and i think this is this is a very like important piece of ideology because if you look at what's going on here right and if you know if you go back to the 70s it's not like inflation in the 70s is not the union's fault like the you know the the inflation in the 70s was like in in large part the original price increases were because the price of oil quadrupled in one year. But the Fed instead focuses on wage increases is what drives inflation, even if they're sort of like using Marxists to do it. And what they're doing here is shifting the focus from the actual shock that is like the immediate thing that is increasing prices, and they're shifting the focus from the shock to the people who are reacting to it.

And from there, the question stops being about like dealing with the shock itself and starts being about who's going to pay for these price increases. And in the 1980s, like Reagan's Reagan solution to this as well. OK, he's just going to make organized labor pay for it. So he just annihilates, he annihilates the unions. He uses the state to do it, just crushes the unions completely. And price increases, you know, prices stop increasing, right? And they stop increasing because the production costs of all of these goods like decrease because workers are no longer getting paid and they lose all their benefits.

But this is the thing. They never dealt with the actual source of the problem, right? Oil prices are still really high to this day. And we never transitioned off of oil. source of the problem, right? Oil prices are still really high to this day, and we never transitioned off of oil. And to look at sort of that problem, I want to briefly look at another theory of inflation, which is one presented by Steve Mann, who I think we've actually had on the show before. He's one of the people at Strange Matters, and he wrote this article called Notes Towards a Theory of Inflation, which is based on the work of a heterodox economist named Frederick Lee, who is – he's a cool guy.

All of his stuff is, like, completely out there from an econ perspective, but it makes more sense than most regular econ stuff. So the sort of, like, founding observation of, like, that, like, Frederick Lee's basing his stuff on is that, like, okay, prices are not set by, like, an abstract market, right? The price of something in a grocery store is set by a guy. Like, there's a specific guy, or there are, like, several specific guys whose job it is to set the prices for the firm. This theory of, like, well, it's not even a theory. Like, the fact that this is how prices are formed by just a guy who sits there with a notebook or, like, a computer is this is what the price is going to be.

This is called administered prices. And Lee, like, very convincingly argues that or like a computer is this is what the price is going to be this is called administered prices and lee like very convincingly argues that like this is how firm this is how both large and small firms actually set their prices right a guy calculates his expenses he adds a markup and he sets the price now steve mann argues that these prices don't generally tend to increase naturally because the price setters don't generally want to just increase the price randomly because if you increase the price randomly you will piss off your customers and the customers you know okay they'll tolerate like some small increases but if you raise the price enough they lose your goodwill towards your brand and they'll like they'll go off and try to find another brand and this is disastrous because even if you reduce the prices back down again like

the goodwill is lost and that sort of like you know the sort of like happy association that like you have in your brain between like i don't know like nestle chocolate or something or like whatever brand of thing you're buying like you get pissed off at them because the price is now like way higher so you know you don't go back to the same like grocery store because that they've increased their prices now obviously this is like there's like this is subject to constraints right like if if you need insulin and the monopoly that controls insulin production just jacks the price you're screwed right there's no sort of like there's no other place you can get insulin unless you're going to try to make it so your your solutions

are you either try to ration it and you die or you pay for the price increases and this this is bad and it does happen but most goods aren't like this and so price increases when they happen tend to be small and fairly infrequent unless unless the person and the reason this doesn't this wouldn't happen is if the person setting the price has no choice and the main reason that if you're a person setting a price that you would have no choice to but to increase like the price that that that you're setting the main reason you would do this because something happened to your supply chain um i don't i don't know if y'all see there was a tiktok going around from a farmer in iowa who was talking about like why why food prices are going to keep increasing the woman honestly i

bless her heart honestly thinks that food prices are not going to go up she thinks that this is the highest they're going to go i tried to explain to her that that was not the case, that they're absolutely going to go up even more. And I told her there are things that like we have to buy. There's something we had to buy that two years ago cost us $24. Last year was about 46. This year it is costing us $96. Okay. Local farmer, 50 head of cattle. It costing him eight thousand dollars a month to feed them please understand food prices are going to go up yeah and so you can see here what's happening is it like at some point down the supply chain prices are increasing either because of like climate change because of the war in ukraine because of covid because of like any thousand

sort of other factors and eventually the like the farmers who are setting the prices right they have to increase their prices because they don't have they don't have a choice right because because the each each person further back in the supply line as a charity right like they have to be able to pay a bunch of shit bills yeah and and this this sort of you know this is the uh steve calls it like that he calls it the the supply chain theory of inflation, right? And in this model, this is what's causing inflation, right? Each person successively down the line has to increase their markup because they have to cover the newly increased production costs. And this is important because unlike most models of inflation, inflation isn't being caused by some kind of giant macroeconomic thing.

Inflation isn't being caused by some kind of giant macroeconomic thing. It's not being caused by unemployment or monetary policy, but it's being caused by very, very specific microeconomic forces. There are literally specific people who, as a reaction to a specific thing happening that makes production harder, are increasing their prices. And this is a very different sort of – this is a very, very different theory of inflation than like any of the 17 mainstream ones, all of which are bad in various ways. And there's one other thing I want to mention though that kind of isn't talked about in this model that is absolutely happening right now. And that's something that is really one of the drivers of inflation, which is that corporations are raising prices because they think they can get away with it, and they're just pocketing the costs. And this isn't like a sort of speculative thing. Companies, when you ask them about it, are very, very open about it. Here's from a Business Insider article. What we are very good at is pricing, Colgate-Palm of Oil CEO Noah Wallace said.

Whether it's foreign exchange inflation or raw and packing material inflation, we have found ways over time to recover that in our margin line. We've been very comfortable with our ability to pass on the increases that we've seen at this point, said Kroger CFO Gary Millerchip in October. and we would expect that to continue to be the case and here's something here's from the wall street journal where more people talk about doing this we have not seen any material reaction from consumers procter and gamble finance chief andre shulton said last week referring to a string of price increases that went into effect in september so that makes us feel good about our relative position now those two articles like just those

two articles alone talk about prices raising like talk about companies that are just raising prices because they know consumers will pay for it because they think there's inflation happening and those companies just from those two articles alone include procter and gamble nestle verizon unilever colgate palm of oil coca-cola pepsi uh, Chipotle, AT&T, Verizon, Kimberly Clark Corp, Clorox, Reynolds, Kroger's and Albertson. And like that's just like the corporations in the article that are like specifically named as talking about having done this. Right.

And they can get away with this because normally, right, price increases would piss people off. They go free for brands. But if prices across the board are already increasing uh you can you can just like do basically like a price gouge increase and you can do and you can increase your markup and it doesn't it doesn't affect your goodwill because people just assume that inflation is already happening and that inflation happens sort of naturally is either because the wage like wages are too high there's too much money in circulation so oh there's just like inflation happening is this like abstract thing instead of what is actually happening which there are very specific like there are individual people with with names and addresses who specifically increase the price in order to screw you

and that that that's that's what's actually at stake here in having an explanation for why inflation happens it tells you who to blame for it like Like right now, Larry Summers, who's the former Treasury Secretary, who was responsible for – arguably responsible for 2000 – directly responsible for 2008. One of the people who completely annihilated the entire Russian economy in the 90s. He has apparently been on the phone with Joe Biden, and he is going around saying that in order to solve inflation, we have to cut wages and raise the unemployment rate to five percent like for five years like on average five percent for five years and so this means either you have five percent of five percent five years of five percent inflation two years of inflation at 7.5 percent or like one year of 10 unemployment and again unemployment right now is at like three percent so he's talking about millions potentially tens of millions of people losing their jobs in in order to in order to solve inflation because Summers – again, Summers is going back on the sort of Phillips model shit where inflation is caused by – it doesn't even matter what's actually causing the inflation, which is a bunch of – a combination of price gouging and supply chain disruptions.

And he's going, okay, his theory isn't about what is causing inflation. His theory is about who's going to pay for it. And his solution is, fuck you, you are going to pay for it. You are going to pay for both the price you're also going to pay for it by uh reducing your wages you're going to pay for it by getting fired and you know this is this is sort of the choice that we have right it's either we let the ruling class tell exactly the same stories about why inflation happens they've been telling 50 years that they know are wrong that they that they know are so wrong they are desperate enough to turn to fucking marxism to try to find explanations for it. Or we find a new explanation of why fucking inflation happens and we go back and we take the stuff that they've stolen from us and then we expropriate the bastards so they don't do it again. And that is what I need to do is if we organize as a people and as a people become the vacuum tube that we need to shove down the esophagus of Summers and other members of the ruling class in order to inflate their organs so that their asshole widens and we can collectively fuck them until they deflate is that more or less accurate chris

would you say economically sure i mean you know this is okay i would say like this is the thing that this is the thing about having an explanation for why inflation happens right it doesn't matter if it's true or not uh you can as long as long as you have a compelling enough explanation for inflation to cause people to do something you can you can i mean this this is one of the things for example uh like this is one of the things that caused tiananmen to happen is that there was skyrocketing inflation and the like workers had an explanation of inflation it wasn't right like yeah i mean their explanation for inflation had to do with like the the like china was taking in a bunch of loans and the ccp was spending all their money on sports cars and it's like it's kind of marginal whether it was like true or not but it doesn't matter right inflation

could be caused by the fact that we haven't fucking inflated uh enough yeah we haven't enough right on on that point and this is this is this is 100 true you can look this up online is by the fact that we haven't fucking inflated Scrooge McDuck enough. Yeah, we haven't inflated Scrooge McDuck enough. On that point, and this is 100% true, you can look this up online. So the original DuckTales game from 1989 was remastered

in 2013! And it was released on August 13th, 2013. The remaster of the DuckTales game, 1313. Both unlucky numbers. I think that could have just as much to do with our current economic problem around inflation

as basically anything else Chris has said here. Because August 13th, 2013, DuckTales getting released, Scrooge McDuck main character, that is too much to be a coincidence. Yeah, we are through the looking glass. I can see the fnords. Like, there's no getting away from this one. Look, all you have to do is you just got to go, you got to show up to the room where the fucking money is and you got to take it from them. gotta go you gotta show up to the room where the fucking money is and you gotta take it from them

you gotta show up to the fucking factories and inflate your bosses and you will inflation will come down yeah good work everybody welcome 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. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast about stuff falling apart, and perhaps how we could begin to put them back together. Today, I'm your host, Garrison Davis.

We've had a lot of doom and gloom the past few weeks here on the pod. So this episode will be more focused on the putting stuff back together side of the spectrum. We'll be talking with Elizabeth Blackburn of The First Collective, a group of volunteers, organizers, and activists in Columbus, Ohio, focused on direct grassroots action and mutual aid. But we'll be specifically talking about a volunteer-run homeless encampment that's currently serving around 20 to 30 people in the Near East side of Columbus. Here's some of the history from Elizabeth. The project started as a warming station at the end of January and has morphed into a autonomous encampment that's largely self-governed and managed by a loose network of mutual aid organizations that came together during the 2020 uprisings.

during the 2020 uprisings. This is as flat an organization as we can make it. And we're trying to make it flatter. And I just think it's important that people recognize going out with resources is great, but going out and finding out what resources people need is better. There are so many groups in our city that are supposed to be doing this work that are not.

And they're being paid to do this work. And it's ineffective. And all I want is for more people to try and do it their own way. To try and do what their community wants, you know, to the best of their abilities. We've seen lots of projects grow out of the mutual aid networks that were established in 2020. It's been interesting to see how people in the wake of the George Floyd uprising have built off things that started two years ago, what's changed in their practice, and how it's evolved since then. This past winter, in this area of

Columbus, Ohio, there was community needs not being met. People having to be out in the cold and not having a place to stay. This problem was recognized by people, but unfortunately, far too many people just look at problems and just be like, oh yes, here's a thing that sucks, well that's too bad. But today we'll be talking about how a collective of people didn't simply acknowledge a problem, but actually went past that point and decided that even with limited resources, they had the capacity to actually figure out how to solve this themselves and provide a solution for the community.

I think the first time I really tried something like that was in December. A friend of mine had reached out about a camp on the south side of Columbus that was being swept by the city. And they had needs. They needed new tents so they could set up elsewhere. They needed food and water like they always did. And they needed people to be there to keep, you um, to keep, you know, to prevent violence from occurring as much as possible. Um, so hearing about that, I started a, I set up on my street in, in a bougie part of Columbus, um, with a little sign and collected goods, whatever people dropped off. I collected money.

I raised about $2,000 and I think we ended up buying around 22 tents. Got other people there as well and tried to make sure everybody had what they needed so they could get set up elsewhere. But that was my first experience with that, doing it hands-on and seeing that that works, that encouraged me to do more. So then how has it grown and changed since then? There's still a need for people to stay. Um, it still gets pretty cold at night. Um, so how, but throughout, throughout winter, how did the project kind of morph and change? How'd you go about finding like places to actually like set up the physical spot right like that's that's a whole it's a whole other problem um it's all like the

is all like the logistical side of things yeah exactly um well we happen to have a space uh late last fall i was invited to join a collective first collective that was operating out of a church that's largely um falling into disair, but still operating as a church. And because we had that space, a couple members of the collective encountered some folks in the neighborhood who needed a place to sleep. They were sleeping in a bus stop on a snowy night. And we just decided to start giving them a place to stay because we had a place. It wasn't a super popular decision, but we had community backing. Conflicts from some people in the neighborhood who were more nimby-minded did obviously come up,

along with the complaints from the church that the First Collective was operating out of. For the community's part, when we were at the church, we were in a part of the neighborhood that had largely been gentrified. And so there was some resistance, some concern about the changing face of the community and about the safety of kids and so on and so forth. But we didn't have any real safety concerns, not inside, beyond a couple encounters that we had to deescalate and a few people that we had to remove based on their behavior.

But from inside the church, from the church organization, the conflict started pretty early on. They didn't really like how we operated and we got a reputation as a warming space with no rules. And so they felt like because couples could sleep next to each other, because people could go outside for a cigarette at night because they weren't locked in the building, that we were running a space that was out of control. Well, until we were kicked out of the church on March 29th, I think it was, the physical infrastructure was there. It was just a matter of getting cots and blankets and making sure that people had food. Most of that was either through just one-off donations to my

cash app or I bought it with my own funds. Once we were forced to move outside, it got a lot more complicated because at that point we didn't have any tents. We had to go out that night and purchase the day that we were removed, we had to go out and purchase, I believe, 10 tents to start and then had a couple dropped off. We now have around 20 to 25 tents. A lot of those were purchased by me or by donations that we received or had been dropped off by friends or people in the neighborhood. or have been dropped off by friends or people in the neighborhood. That has been, you know, the physical infrastructure is mostly tents and canopies, and most of them are being held up by pieces of old tents or large tree limbs

or whatever we can to survive the wind, because it's been nothing but windstorms for the past, well, since we got here. because it's been nothing but windstorms for the past, well, since we got here. Our first campsite was set up on a lot that was connected to the farm, a four-season city farm. Several of the members of the collective are former paid employees of the farm or multi-year volunteers. It's a large organization in this part of the town, Old Town East, with about 15, I believe, years of history and goodwill. So we set up next to their lot, but because they're on land bank land, we didn't want to interfere with their lease with the city. with their lease with the city.

So rather than risk the farm getting fined or having their lease broken, we look next door to a lot on the other side of a chain link fence, two lots actually. One is owned by the city. That's the one where most of our tents are. And then one is owned by a private owner who's a rather wealthy person in the neighborhood.

We've done our best to stay on the city lot and that has been good for us, but we're also maintaining both lots and doing our best to keep the trash to a minimum to make sure that we're not tearing up the ground as much as we can, though it's hard with all this rain, and just do our best to be good neighbors. And I think that has helped us a lot. In recent years, lower-class Columbus area residents lost 20,000 units of housing due to unaffordable spiking rent prices. An annual point-in-time tally this year

organized by the Community Shelter Board found the number of homeless people in official Columbus and Franklin County emergency shelters increased by more than 200 people since 2021. And online data from the Shelter Board, a non-profit organization that receives funding from the City of Columbus and other organizations, indicates that as of March 2022, there was a 7% drop in the rate of people exiting their program and moving into stable housing as compared to last year, going from 33% to 26%. A lot of times, more formalized shelters are not ideal for people to stay in. There's many issues with the formalized shelters regarding the specific rules of when you can get inside, how long you can be inside, whether you're locked inside the building, what stuff you can bring with you. At best, they are challenging to navigate. At worst, they're simply hostile to people looking

for shelter. I asked Elizabeth what her take on the homeless shelter situation is like in Columbus and the ways their encampment is different from the more official shelters. We have limited beds, and then the beds that are available are mostly under the governance of the shelter board. the governance of the shelter board. And the shelter board wasn't too fond of us either because we weren't following all their rules. And there are a lot of concerns about the way the shelters run. The people that stay with us, the people that come through, they feel safer here. There's considerably less drug use. There's basically no distribution. We try to keep a handle on that because it, you know, would bring problems to the camp should it happen there. We are a safe use space. We do have harm reduction materials and they know that.

And we do our best to, you know, just make sure that people have the care and the safety that they need. And that is kind of a dirty word. Well, all of those are kind of dirty words. And the shelter organizing community, I guess, care and making people comfortable. It's just not really the goal. It's just not really the goal. Next, I asked about what types of connections the encampment and First Collective have been making with various organizations for infrastructural support or daily needs, as well as inquiring about the relations the camp has with the city government. Here is Elizabeth's response. We reached out to the different harm reduction groups, the different houselessness groups, the emergency action groups, the different serve groups.

And we just asked them to bring what they could or to send people if they could, just whatever they could spare. And it's worked. People show up with whatever they have to offer from all over the city and just from around the corner, which has been wonderful. The grassroots community support has just blown my mind. I thought they were going to hate us. And here we are, like making friends with everybody. Our first goal is to make sure that we've met people's needs as best we can. You know, that involves right now keeping propane on site so that they can cook some of the food that's

brought. We get a lot of prepared meals, but we also get a lot of ingredients and there are quite a few people here that cook and have done pretty miraculous things with a couple of propane grills. Um, we try and have meals prepared every day, but it doesn't, doesn't always work out. And sometimes we fill the gaps with little Caesars or, or something else. Um something else, whatever can be scrounged up at the last minute. Some of our biggest allies so far have been the local Food Not Bombs. They've been wonderful, as well as some different church groups that run nonprofits like Community Kitchen. We get our meals provided six days a week by a church that's basically down the street and around the corner.

But as far as the city goes, for the first couple of days, there were a lot of roll-bys, a lot of city officials taking pictures, no one really talking to us, but there was clearly concern. It wasn't until a man who works for the city and outreach under the safety and security department, Sean Stevenson, came out and talked to us that we really started to see the possibilities of working with the city. And so much is the lettuce. He brought a city attorney, Steve Dunbar, and a gentleman from the mayor's office, Jason Jenkins, by to talk to our folks. And they listened. They listened to the people at the camp who explained to them why they were here, explained to them why the resources that are available didn't work for them. You know, it was a, it was a tearful conversation. And since then, they've largely left us alone. We wish that they would provide some of the resources that they talked about,

like a couple porta potties and a dumpster. But, you know, we, we do our best with our composting toilet and the good grace of some very kind neighbors. Police raids and sweeps are always an existential fear for those living in DIY encampments. Here's what Elizabeth had to say about sweeps and police interactions. What we've been told is that they've been told to leave us alone. We've heard this from the cops themselves. We've heard this from people who have talked to them. But the precinct that is in this area has been told not to mess with us unless there is a violent conflict that they need to do cop stuff at. There are a lot of sweeps that have been threatened around the city of different camps.

They've received notice or notice of notice. So they don't know exactly when, but it's supposed to happen sometime. But as far as we're concerned, we haven't really had that problem. Cops have come through. There are a couple times when they've been called by people, disgruntled residents or by neighbors. But for the most part, they talk to us and then they leave.

We do our best as volunteers to get between the police and other other groups that come out um even even the outreach groups that we know are are here to help just because those interactions can can quickly get volatile if you know if people aren't sure about other people's intentions so i would say that the one of the best interactions i've had with the cops is they did come through here once and talk to a few folks. And a sergeant from the police department said roughly that they couldn't make us leave because this was city land and they didn't have anywhere else to send us. So I'll take it. I'll take it. I've got the audio, so I'll take it. I've got the audio, so I'll take it.

Elizabeth does hope that one day the relations between the church that First Collective was previously operating out of could be mended and once again work to utilize the space to serve the wider community. She also discussed the possibility of moving into vacant buildings and helping to restore them, while also having a place to provide more stable housing. So where the church is concerned, I haven't given up hope. We aren't in the building now. I don't have a key. But I go to church every Sunday. I'm not a Christian. I don't believe in God. But I do like the messages that I get there.

And I wanna continue to use this really wonderful building as a part of the community. You know, there are a lot of goals that we as a camp have, and some of them include the church. And we'd love to get back into that space and fix the two bathrooms in the basement that are just sitting there, build some showers, laundry facilities, a free store, kitchen. There's so much that we could do if we could utilize that building in addition to the infrastructure that we have here.

But when it comes to building something more, we're currently working on a proposal for the city for some of the relief funds that have been received but not dispersed with the goals of ideally building little cabins on platforms on the lot that we're on now, just to start to get people out of tents, to start meeting some of the code requirements, to improve the sanitary and living conditions. And then from there, we'll ask them to give us a building to restore. There's a lot of really skilled people out here and they want to work and they want to work on all of these old buildings that have been allowed to fall apart all over the city. There are so many rooms available. There's so many units that they could work on,

that they could live in. And that's what they want to do. So that's what we're going to try and help them do. The camp functions under a sort of direct democracy, with residents and first collective volunteers, some of whom are also residents, hold regular community meetings where camp occupants vote to make decisions about camp guidelines. There's been a couple instances of violence, a couple particularly scary moments that we had to try and de-escalate.

And there's some times that we didn't handle things as best we could, but we try. And we try to talk through the way that it goes down with the residents, among the volunteers. We try to be transparent about, you know, why we make some of the decisions that we do. And for the most part, we leave it to the community. There have been some really great community meetings that go so long, but they talk about everything. They talk about, you know, shared concerns,

about safety concerns, about how they want to live together and what would make them feel safer, and establish guidelines, and occasionally vote to remove people, though we've managed to resolve some of those conflicts before they went that far. we've managed to resolve some of those conflicts before they went that far. I initially talked with Elizabeth in May 2022, but I was able to catch up with her a few weeks ago to hear about what's been going on the past month. I just wanted to kind of fill you in on what we've been up to over the past month or so.

It's been busy. We've been to a lot of area commission meetings for the different areas of the city to try and make some allies and talk to people about what we think is a solution to a problem they don't know how to solve. We did get some unwanted attention. A local station, 10TV, came through with a bit of an agenda. Right now, the city of Columbus has a problem and it has to do with homelessness. A camp set up on city property along East Mountain Street in the middle of the near east side neighborhood is raising questions tonight about whether the 20 people who live there should be allowed to stay or forced to go. 10 TV's Kevin Landers has been working the story all day. Today Today he went to the camp and spoke to those who live there and got answers from city leaders about addressing

concerns from neighbors who say that camp has got to go. This unhousing community is located on East Mound Street. The people who live here, the city says, are technically trespassing. The city says they're going to let them stay here until they can find housing, but not everybody wants them here. They wanted to talk specifically about our sanitation situation and nothing else. We told them we'd been waiting on the city since April 15th for the dumpster,

the port-a-johns that they'd offered, but they were still looking into it, so we took it into our own hands and with all that attention we needed to do something so we contacted a port-a-john company who is currently donating uh to port-a-johns and servicing it once a week um which is great uh we had a compost toilet before and this is so much better. And we went out of pocket to pay for trash service. So we're getting our own trash service now once a week.

It's not quite enough, but it certainly helps. We see code enforcement go by all the time. They've been driving by. I've seen them at least five or six times today. People are waiting for something that they can latch on to, but so far, so good. With Columbus facing 100-degree heat waves, what started as a warming station in winter now serves as a cooling station this summer for its few dozen residents. As gears shift and new seasonal materials are required, the camp has been exploring alternative methods of funding to sustain the level of resources and services

they've been able to provide the past few months. We did launch a GoFundMe and we've had pretty good luck so far. We've raised $7,500. This is just for operating funds. There's a lot that we would like to do here. There's a lot we'd like to do with the land. But for now, we're just fundraising to keep going. The camp still serves around 25 people, so resources end up getting distributed across a large collection of individuals. All the donations received have been used to provide necessities to survive,

including but not limited to shelters like tents, food, water, medical supplies, bedding, clothes, bus passes, medical services and prescriptions, harm reduction supplies, funds for individuals' immediate needs, and assistance to pay with residents' phone bills. Sometimes funds are also used to compensate residents for extra labor put towards maintaining the camp, like cleaning up the campsite, cutting up firewood, and providing extra services like haircuts. The response has been really good. I think people understand what we're trying to do and are being really receptive to it. I can't say the same about the city,

though. We met with Councilwoman Shayla Favor from the city on Monday and presented a proposal. We asked for $181,500 over the next six months to continue operation, to pay a small salary to the three volunteers that are here all the time for healthcare, for a small stipend to give to each resident of the camp every, every week. Additional operating funds just, additional operating funds.

We came to them with this ask and they didn't really seem to get it. So we're going to keep trying. They felt like they can't really support a tent city in their minds. They couldn't give money

to support people who were residing in tents because tents are an adequate shelter. But I mean, I can test that not having a tent is also an adequate shelter. The city of Columbus relies almost completely on the community shelter board and the Community Shelter Board to manage its problem with homelessness. Community Shelter Board has a revenue of around $44 million a year. They pay their director half a million dollars, just under, and a few other executives receive ample compensation. But their success rate for the entire county is labeled at 15 percent if you go through their data

they have managed to get 15 percent of the people who come through their shelter into some sort of housing for the zip code that we're serving it's seven percent which equates to eight people over the past year so what they're doing is not working at all. And they know it, but they don't know what else to do. Whenever we talk to the city, someone tells us to talk to this one particular person. Her name is Emerald Hernandez-Pera. She is the Assistant Director of Special Projects for the Department of Development. If you have a problem with a homeless camp in the city, she is the person that the city wants you to talk to, no matter what. If you're homeless, that's who they want you to talk to. She's under the Department of Development.

Her main focus is economic development. She's just special projects, which means she helps clear the way by getting camps out of the way for development projects. That's her role. And she is the city's liaison. No matter who we talk to, she's the one that we keep coming back to. So I think it's pretty cynical and upsetting that this isn't under the purview of the Department of Health. You know, any other department would be a little bit better than the Department of Development. It just shows how much we care. We're planning to go back to the city, of development to show so much we care. We're planning to go back to the city, regardless of what they say about this initial proposal, because there's a lot that we'd like to build here. And we think they'd be amenable if they understood. We're drafting a second round proposal,

taking inspiration from Dignity Village in Portland. It's an autonomous village of unhoused people that's existed since 2000. And I think there's a lot of good that we can learn from them for modeling this in a way that the city might better understand. We believe that what we're doing here is transitional housing, and the people who are here want to be involved in building that transitional housing for themselves and then for the people to come after. So that's what we're hoping to get the city to sign off on. When we met with the councilwoman, one of the things that she said was, they at the city, they don't have a model for serving the population that we're serving. They don't know how to handle people who don't want to move inside, who don't want to move into the shelter system for whatever reason. And so all they can really do is move them around.

they can really do is move them around. We're trying to tell them that we do have a model and we think that we can help the city as long as they stay pretty hands-off and give us money for it. So fingers crossed. I'm not going to hold my breath, but fingers crossed. The city of Columbus has been much more openly hostile to some other encampments providing cooling and shelter in parts of the city. We're not the only unhoused encampment in Columbus. There are a lot more. And there's one that is at a place called Heer Park on the south side. We have a lot of friends there um our organization works with their organization uh they were served a 14-day eviction notice um on the first and they have until june 14th to move out so we're doing whatever we can to support them but um it very

much feels like we're being treated like they're the good camp and they're the bad camp right now. So we're trying our best to make sure that the city knows that we're with them. You know, I'm, whatever they think about us, we support those people no matter what, and we'll do whatever we can to help. We're trying to give them advice about the things that have worked for us to keep the city away. And hopefully, if they do have to move on the 14th, they'll be able to set up somewhere where the city will give them a break. Here is some audio of a press conference given at the Here Park camp just last week. The city is not out here giving out water.

The city is not out here making sure that people don't get heat exhaustion or heat stroke, right? They're nowhere to be found. So we are here to remind them they have $135 million in American Rescue Plan funds. Where is this money going? why do we not have housing this weather is just a little taste for many of us of the conditions that our unhoused neighbors out here can look forward to enduring for the entire summer the city of columbus was planning on evicting our people today june 14th. They delayed that eviction. It is a human right. So we are here to assert our human rights to housing.

They're hoping that we're going to get hot and tired and wear out. Are we going to let up? No! The Heer Park camp eviction was pushed back to June 21st due to a massive heat wave. And by June 21st, the temperature was still in the upper 90s, but the city followed through on their threat and swept the camp. At least 20 Columbus police cruisers, city attorneys, people from the Department of Development, and other city employees were on site for the eviction. Bulldozers and massive machinery crushed people's tents and personal belongings. Some folks, forcibly displaced, have lived in

the Heer Park for nearly a decade. For wrapping up this episode, I had just one more question for Elizabeth. For people who would be interested in trying to create similar projects or hopefully similar projects in their area, what would be some advice you give to people who want to try something similar? What's the kind of stuff that you've learned the past few months that you were kind of surprised by? And if you could do anything different, what's the kind of stuff that you would approach to make the process smoother or slightly more improved? Well, I would have looked for more funders first. Um, the, one of the most painful parts for me has

like just personally has been holding the purse, um, being the person that everyone knows to ask for cash if they need it for something. It is a real strain on compassion. Sometimes, you know, compassion fatigue is real and it can be really hard day in, day out, having to field requests from people who you know need these resources. But you can't always give everything. It's hard to say no. Learning to say no has helped. But diversifying our funding sources is also helping a lot. funding sources is also helping a lot. I've learned that I can't do it all and that I need to take breaks and that being here 24 seven is, is what I want to do, but it doesn't mean I need to

always, always do it. Sometimes you've got to step away. I wish that I had spent a little more time with my family rather than, you know, throwing myself completely into this. But two months ago, my fiance, my ex-fiance asked me to leave. So I've been living at the camp too. Um, so I, I, it's, it's been a pretty stark jump to go from having a big house and some retirement funds to living in a tent and having none. But I mean, I wouldn't, I wouldn't change it and I'm going to keep doing it. It's because I can, because I could. And that's really what I want people to see is that if they can do something, they should. It's the best job I've ever had. Nothing is more rewarding than going to work and hanging out with your friends all day, like helping them get jobs and find apartments and meet friends. There's so many wonderful people here and me and the other volunteers, we love all of them and we want nothing more than to see them succeed.

We love all of them and want nothing more than to see them succeed. So yeah, I just advise people to do what they can, to ask people what they need and try and provide it. Anyone who wants to know more about the First Collective and what they're doing, you can go to first-collective.org. You can find links on Elizabeth's Twitter account at Innate Optimist. You can find links on Elizabeth's Twitter account at innateoptimist. And even if you disagree with some of the organizational or structural choices, I hope you at least learned something or got something productive out of this example of people putting in effort to fill in the gaps in their local community.

That does it for us today. See you on the other side. 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, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow.

Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of latin america listen to nocturnal on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast