It Could Happen Here - The Moral Economy of Inflation or Why Trump Won

Episode Date: December 12, 2024

Mia looks at both what caused the inflation that defined the Biden administration and how the reactions to it were driven by an American moral economy and the sense of injustice it invokes. https://strangematters.coop/supply-chain-theory-of-inflation/ https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/157973/1/bna-259_20090522_nb_casp_full_indexed.pdf https://www.jstor.org/stable/650244 James' Links for Syria:  www.defendrojava.org www.freeburmarangers.org www.heyvasor.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We want to speak out and we want this to stop. Wow, very powerful. I'm Ellie Flynn, an investigative journalist, and this is my journey deep into the adult entertainment industry. I really wanted to be a player boy, my doll. He was like, I'll take you to the top, I'll make you a star. To expose an alleged predator and the rotten industry he works in. It's honestly so much worse than I had anticipated.

We're an army in comparison to him. From Novel, listen to The Bunny Trap on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturne. Tales from the Shadow of the Sun. Join me, Danny Dre, 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 iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey everyone, it's John, also known as Dr. John Paul. And I'm Jordan or Joe Ho. And we are the BlackFatFilm Podcast. A podcast where all the intersections of identity are celebrated.

Woo chat, this year we have had some of our favorite people on including Kid Fury, T.S. Madison, Amber Ruffin from the Amber and Lacey Show, Angelicaasso and more. Make sure you listen to the Black Fat Fam podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, girl. Ooh, I know that's right. Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid.

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Tune in and join the conversation. Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline Podcast, and we're kicking off our second you get your podcast. brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to better offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Hi everyone, it's me James and I'm coming at you today with one of these little requests that I make sometimes when there's something that we would like you to do, when it's very important to do so.

Today, I want to talk to you about Syria and specifically, northeast Syria. So with the world's eyes fixed on Syria, many are rightly celebrating as the brutal dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad comes to an end. But for Kurdish and other minority communities, recent days have brought violent attacks, ethnic cleansing and occupation by Turkey's back jihadist groups. In an attempt to take advantage of the chaos by crushing the Rojava Revolution, Turkey and its mercenaries are openly committing war crimes against the region's autonomous communities.

Many thousands have already been forcibly displaced and thousands more are in danger. To make matters worse, this remains largely absent from the mainstream media reporting on Syria. If you'd like to show your solidarity with the people of northern and eastern Syria please call on Congress to take urgent action by passing emergency legislation to stop the violence, hold Turkey accountable and commit US support to the Syrian Democratic Forces and the diverse communities under their protection. If you want to take action today you can go to DefendRajabah.org. That's D-E-F-E-N-D-R-O-J-A-V-A.org. If you are able

to, the most effective action we can take right now is to call a couple of representatives, one representative and one senator. The representative would be Gregory Meeks. He's from New York. He's a Democrat. He is a ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. His phone number is 202-225-3461. Liaison will be Senator James Risch. He's an Idaho Republican. He is a ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His phone number would be 202-224-2752. If you'd like to have some talking points, you can find those on DefendVirajabha.org. If you'd like to donate financially instead, especially to the humanitarian aid effort for the tens of thousands of people who have been displaced by the SNA's advances, you

can donate to two organizations that I would suggest. The first would be Have Your Saw, the Kurdish Red Crescent. That's H-E-Y-V-A-S-O-R.com. You'll want to want to go slash en if you want to see their website in English you can donate there. The other one will be the free Burma Rangers who are currently working in Raqqa. I was talking to my friend Habat who works with them. You can donate to them at www.-A, rangers.com. We will put all of this in the show notes, all the URLs. So if you're driving, you don't have to write them down. Those are the concrete

ways that we can help right now and what is unfolding as a very terrible situation in North Syria. Thanks. I hope you enjoy the episode. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where I, your host Mia Wong, talks about inflation. We have covered inflation on this show extensively, and now it is once again time to return to it as we head into a world where concerns about inflation and the economy are the most cited justifications for people voting for one Donald Trump. But unlike our other, oh god, so many episodes about inflation, this one is going to be a bit different.

It's going to start out somewhat similar in that I am going to lay out a brief explanation of the sort of material causes of the inflation cycle and talk a bit about inflation theories, which is what we've been largely doing on this show for a while. And then I'm going to explain why none of that shit mattered, why none of what was actually causing inflation mattered a single bit, because ultimately our experience of inflation, and more importantly of price in general, is based on a sense of justice, or as the academics call it, a moral economy, and not on anything that's sort of going on. So let's begin with what is going on with inflation.

Now as we've discussed before on this show, most economists do not understand why inflation happens. People will take theories. Those theories are usually quite bad. There is no mainstream consensus on what is going on. As both me and my friends at the magazine Strange Matters have pointed out, former Federal Reserve Governor Daniel Tarullo said quote, the substantive point is that we do not at

present have a theory of inflation dynamics that works efficiently well to be of use for the business of real-time monetary policymaking. So again, this is a guy who used to be a Federal Reserve Governor who has admitted that they have no idea what the fuck is going on with inflation. Looking at the extent to which people don't know what's going on to inflation and how the various theories simply don't work is a large part of Steve Mann's notes

towards the theory of inflation, which is a Strange Manners article that a lot of this will be pulled from. And we've had Steve on the show talk about this before. So there are a lot of theories about inflation and none of them work very well. Inflation on a fundamental level is just prices going up. People have this tendency to think about inflation in terms of the value of money going down. But on a

pure level, all inflation says is that prices go up. Now, the most common theory of inflation is, you know, inflation is based on there being too much money in the economy. And the thing about those theories is that they don't work outside of like a very few specific examples of hyperinflation that loomed large over understanding of what inflation is, even though they have absolutely quantitatively and theoretically they have absolutely nothing to do with the inflation that we've seen over the past four years. So instead of talking about that shit anymore, Mann and the Strange Matters crew developed what they call the supply chain theory of inflation.

So I'm going to read the quote from notes towards the theory of inflation. As economist JW Mason recently remarked on his website, inflation is just an increase in prices. So for every theory of price setting, there's a corresponding theory of inflation. If inflation theory is downstream of price setting, this is still a quote from that article, but not the JW Mason quote. If inflation is downstream of price theory, then no account of inflation can begin with the macroeconomy at all, since prices are set at the micro level. Rather, you need to look at particular industrial sectors, their supply chains, and ultimately the pricing decisions of their firms. Only then are the true causes of inflation, both the internal failures of the industrial system and

external shocks to it which can cause price rises, revealed. Man's price theory is fairly simple, right? It flows from the basic observation that prices are set by guys in offices, not by something you know abstract as like market forces and supply and demand. In economic terms, what this argument amounts to is the argument that corporations are price makers and not price takers, right? There's a bunch of guys, they sit in offices and develop a strategy of what prices are going to be and that's, you know, how they're set. And what matters to the people who develop prices are things like goodwill, which is

to say, not pissing off their customers by raising prices, and things like their balance sheets, which reflect, you know, their incomes and costs. Price in this model is just cost plus markup. And we know this is how prices are actually set because, as man points out, people have gone through and done surveys of pricing managers and asked them how they set prices. And the answer is cost plus markup. So what would cause these guys in offices to increase their prices? Well, these are companies that are all part of a global supply chain, a very, very broad global supply chain and a very complicated global supply chain. This means that if the cost of the stuff they buy from other suppliers on the chain in order

to produce what they're selling, if those prices go up, because there is, to use a purely hypothetical example, a giant global pandemic, those cost increases eventually had to be passed down to the people paying the products so that the corporation can maintain its balance sheets and maintain its sort of price plus markup as something that, you know, covers their costs, right? This is what set off the giant inflation spike in the US and the Biden administration, you know, the cost side of cost plus markup exploded. But it doesn't really matter why the prices increased. For our purposes, and our purposes are looking at sort of why Trump won the election.

What was important, you know, about inflation wasn't even the price increases, it was the narratives around inflation and how we understand the economy at a moral level. And for that, we're going to turn to one of the most popular accounts of inflation, so called greed inflation. Now, as we've said, price is cost plus markup, and you can raise prices because of cost. You can also do this because you want to increase your markup. And this is something that happened during the inflation search. Companies realized that consumers were willing to accept higher

prices without the usual goodwill hit because they thought the prices were, you know, going up because inflation was happening and because they were willing to accept the higher prices and not, you know, try to shop somewhere else. Corpor corporations went fuck it, let's just keep jacking the prices up. And this really, really pissed people off. It still does. And this is something that was true across the entire political spectrum, right? People were very, very angry about this sort of inflation thing. And that rage is more important than the technical details of why inflation happened. Because the way we understand inflation is not through conventional

economics, we understand it through the moral economy. And when we come back from a different kind of economy, which is to say this ad break, we are going to examine what the moral economy is, how it differs from our sort of regular economy, where it came from, and why it's relevant to our situation now. We want to speak out, we want to raise awareness, and we want this to stop. Wow, very powerful. I'm Ellie Flynn, and I'm an investigative journalist. When a group of models from the UK wanted my help,

I went on a journey deep into the heart of the adult entertainment industry. I really wanted to be a playboy, my doll. Lingerie, topless. I said, yes, please. Because at the centre of this murky world is an alleged predator. You know who he is because of his pattern of behavior? He's just spinning the web for you to get trapped in it. He's everywhere and has been everywhere.

It's so much worse and so much more widespread than I had anticipated. Together, we're going to expose him and the rotten industry he works in. It's not just me. We're an army in comparison to him. Listen to The Bunny Trap on the iHeartRad app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. 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. No. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturne Tales from the Shadows as part of MyCultura podcast network, Hey everyone, it's John, also known as Dr. John Paul. And I'm Jordan or Joe Ho. And we are the BlackFatFilm Podcast. A podcast where all the intersections of identity

are celebrated. Oh chat, this year we have had some of our favorite people on including Kid Fury, T.S. Madison, Amber Ruffin from the Amber and Lacey Show, Angela Carrasso and more. Make sure you listen to the BlackFatFilm Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, I have a podcast or whatever you get your podcast girl. Oh I know that's right. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call in podcast, Therapy Gecko.

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I live with my boyfriend, and I his pizzeria in our apartment. I collect my roommates' toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it.

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You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. New episodes every Thursday. And we are so back. Alright, let's talk about the moral economy. The moral economy is a concept developed by the British historian E.P. Thompson in the early 1970s. Thompson was attempting to explain the previous century and a half of bread riots by what he termed the English crowd by applying anthropological principles to their actions. I'm just going to read from Thompson's The Moral Economy of the English Crowd here. It is of course true that riots were triggered off by soaring prices, by malpractice among

dealers or by hunger. But these grievances operated within a popular consensus as to what were legitimate and what were illegitimate practices in marketing, milling, baking, etc. This in its turn was grounded upon a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic function of several parties within the community, which, when taken together, can be said to constitute the moral economy of the poor. An outrage to these moral assumptions, quite as much as actual deprivation, was the usual

occasion for direct action. Now, the moral economy of the English crowd in the 18th century is about a very specific period in British history, which is to say the 1700s, and about how people thought bread should be sold. British history, which is to say the 1700s, and about how people thought bread should be sold. Peasants and the new urban workers had very specific ideas about, you know, bread, about how bread should be produced, about who should be allowed to sell it, about where and when they should be allowed to sell it, about how it should be sold, how it should not be sold. And because of this, and you know, because of their experience in sort

of previous systems that before the sort of imposition of the free market system, or quote unquote free market system, they have a very specific series of hatreds. They hate middlemen, they hate grain hoarders, they hate all of the aspects of the new quote unquote free market that impose additional costs and burdens on them. And they also believed that elites have a kind of moral duty to the masses based on the norms and traditions of their society. And when they welch on that deal in a way that makes people's lives worse, people get extremely pissed off. These peasants and urban workers particularly hated price increases, and they hated price increases so much that this frequently turned into riots. But the actual contents of these riots are very interesting. Instead of simply seizing all of the grain, they do something else entirely. Here's Thompson again, quote,

The central action in this pattern is not the sack of granaries and grain or flour, but the action of quote setting the price from a few lines later, they might then order the farmer to send quote convenient quantities to market to be sold quote, and at a quote reasonable price. The justices were further empowered to quote set down a certain price upon a bushel of every kind of grain. So if you follow this year, right, what's happening in these British bread riots is that the revolt isn't just about there, you know, being a price to grain. It's that people have a very, very specific moral understanding of what the price of grain should be. And they take direct actions that are designed to set the

price of grain to the level they thought it should rest at. And this kind of action is extremely common sort of across Europe in this entire time period, right? It's also a hallmark of the French Revolution. You can see in this, right, in this sort of rage over price in the sense of justice, the outlines of our current moral economy. You have, you know have staggering outrage as price increases seen as unjust, which is greedflation, or just inflation in general,

because people are just mad about the concept of the price going up, paired with rage at the elites, which manifests in sort of hatred of Joe Biden and the Democrats for being the people who presided over these price increases. We also have our own rage about price gouging. In immediate market

terms, and this is something that the most annoying libertarians and the defenders of the market love to point out, there's nothing actually wrong by market economics about say, Martin Shkreli jacking the price of medicine up until you can't afford it anymore. Or you know, other things that we find extremely terrible, like people jacking the price of water when people need water, like bottled water, drink hurricanes, we are all outraged. So why do we feel morally strong about it? And that is the moral economy, baby. This is something that you know, these these reactions, right, the emotional reactions we have to this, the sense of injustice that we feel, are almost

entirely outside of the realm of what you would call traditional economics, right? And that's because we're functioning on something that is in some senses older than that kind of economics. But there's something else going on here at a fundamental level. And what's important about, you know, price and the reaction to inflation is that it's an outrage based on a sense of justice, right? This rage is not a measure of direct exploitation necessarily. I think it was the political scientist James C. Scott who wrote his own book called The Moral Economy of the Peasant. And Scott argues that, you know, and E. B. Thompson also argues this, that it's the moral angle that causes people to revolt, not the direct level of

exploitation. You can, in fact, you know, inflict hideous exploitation on people as long as they think that it's just. But when you violate these moral principles, that's when people really lose it. But it also means, right, the fact that the sort of sense of outrage is not necessarily directly tied to the exploitation level, it means that rich people can be bad about inflation, even though they're completely fine, because these people also still have this sort of sense of justice about what prices should be. Now, it's also worth noting here that it is possible to have high inflation rates and have everyone be fine.

In fact, we have discussed scenarios like that on this show. In my episodes about the rise of Lula, the current president of Brazil, we discussed how military dictatorship in Brazil produced an economy that was, you know, you had 20% year on year inflation, right? But also you had 40% yearly wage increases. And so everyone was like kind of fine with it, because the amount of money you're making was going up every year. So nobody really cared about even things like the military dictatorship itself There was not an enormous amount of opposition to it but then Brazil's trade unions figured out the government had been lying about inflation numbers and

This started off a series of protests that you know would send Lula like into his beginning of his political career and eventually this is one of the sort of dominoes that leads to name is political career. And eventually, this is one of the sort of dominoes that leads to knocking down the military dictatorship. And that's because you know, the level of exploitation people were living under hadn't changed. But the deal that they had made, right, the sort of deal with with the military government of like, we won't do anything, our wages will continue to go up and inflation will continue to be

work at a certain level, such that we're still getting paid. That deal was violated and that sense of injustice was powerful enough to really kickstart an extremely powerful Brazilian labor movement and kickstart the fall of a dictatorship. Now, one of Thompson's arguments was that the success of Adam Smith and his cohort and Smith is moving around and making his arguments about what the free market is in the period where we're dealing with all of these sort of grand crises. His argument is that the success of Smith was moving economics out of the domain of morality where it was born. Economics was originally an aspect of moral philosophy, right?

It was part of that discipline. But, you know, Smith and his people move it out. And this is why liberal economists find the anger about inflation so incomprehensible. They see it in purely statistical terms and go like, look, the economy is great. Why is everyone mad? And, you know, I could get into here a bunch of arguments about whether or not this is actually true.

I mean, I'm going to return to my sort of classic argument about like, well, yeah, okay, even if you believe all of the economic indicators are great for cis people, like I'm trans, for me, the economy is it has an unemployment rate of like 1936 us Great Depression. So, you know, there are a lot of people for whom the economic outlook is not good people for whom, you know, even the wage increases that they got in this period still leave them in sort of hideous and crippling poverty. And none of that shit matters. Because the

statistics that these people are trying to use to try to get everyone to calm down, are not operating in the inside of the moral economy, they're operating outside of it, because they're from a tradition that is specifically about not working inside the moral economy. And the people that we're interacting with are in the moral economy. But why is it like this? Right? Why Why do we have a moral economy that functions this way? In the case of the peasants and you know, the working people of the 1700s across Europe, and you know, this goes on to the 1800s, too, right? We can trace the moral economy to a very, very specific set of conditions and traditions and expectations rooted in how people traditionally bought bread. But what are the conditions of the modern American moral economy?

To understand that, we need to turn to the concept of price itself. But first, do you know what guarantees low price? Actually, I probably should not say the word guarantee. That is probably staggeringly illegal. You know what probably has low prices? It's the products and services that support this podcast. We want to speak out. We want to raise awareness and we want this to stop. Wow, very powerful.

I'm Ellie Flynn and I'm an investigative journalist. When a group of models from the UK wanted my help, I went on a journey deep into the heart of the adult entertainment industry. I really wanted to be a playboy, my doll. Lingerie, topless. I said, yes, please. Because at the center of this murky world

is an alleged predator. You know who he is because of his pattern of behavior? He's just spinning the web for you to get trapped in it. He's everywhere and has been everywhere. It's so much worse and so much more widespread than I had anticipated. Together, we're going to expose him and the rotten industry he works in. It's not just me. We're an army in comparison to him. Listen to The Bunny Trap on the iHeartRad app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome, I'm Danny Trejo. Would you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

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 Nocturne Tales from the Shadows as part of my cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, everyone, it's John, also known as Dr. John Paul. And I'm Jordan, or Joe Ho. And we are the BlackFatFilm Podcast. A podcast where all the intersections of identity are celebrated.

Oh chat, this year we have had some of our favorite people on including Kid Fury, T.S. Madison, Amber Ruffin from the Amber and Lacey Show, Angela Carrasso and more. Make sure you listen to the Black Fat Film Podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Alpha Podcast or whatever you get your podcast girl. Oh I know that's right. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast,

Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake Gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot matter of fact Here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show I live with my boyfriend and I found his pizjar in our apartment.

I collect my roommates toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It's the one with the green guy on it. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson-Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions.

Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. We are back. So let us now turn to price. The political economists, Shimshong Bickler and Jonathan Neetson argue that price is the unit of what orders capitalist society.

Price is like the fundamental unit of political economy. It's the thing that orders and structures the entire society. If you want to know more about this, read their book, Capital is Power. It's quite good. I am mentioning them because I'm about to misuse their argument completely in tandem with a quote from Marx that I am also about to misuse. And I am going to do this to make a different point. So I agree with Bickler and Neitzin that price is the unit

that orders capitalist society. But what I'm interested in is price as what's called a social hieroglyphic. Now social hieroglyphic is a term that's a one off term that Marx used once to talk about how price like mystifies the nature of value, whatever. I don't care about that. I care about it because there's something very interesting about price itself. And there's something interesting about the notion of a hieroglyph. Now, Marx is using hieroglyph in the term of it's something you have to be decoded, right?

Because he's writing in the 1800s. This is everyone's obsessed with hieroglyphs. I am using hieroglyphs because hieroglyphs are also a method of encoding complex information into a single character. Price as a social hieroglyph is important because price is the mechanism through which we understand and often through which we fail to understand the world. Our entire lives in the eyes of the people who rule this world, our entire lives are

captured in a single number. Everything you do at work is ultimately just a price on a corporate spreadsheet. The entirety of the labor process of producing a good, every hour worked, every drop of sweat, every tear, every broken body and shattered city and trade union is lined up in front of a firing squad, appears in the end as a simple number. Price To express it another way, here's Daniel Cahn and the Painted Bird from their song The Butcher's Share.

Let's take a walk around the old bazaar where every little thing has trefied far. Every pair of pants and grain of rice contains this horror story in its price. A story of the power people wield. A story about factories and fields. A story of which you'll never have to be aware, just as long as the butcher gets his share. Price, this single number, is how we understand the world. And it causes us to treat price, and thus inflation, as a matter of morality and not economic rationality.

Because price is the way that our society causes us to interact with people. It's the way we interact with objects. It is the thing that structures the way we all behave and understands the world. But price has another function. It is the gatekeeper of capitalist society. Because price and a man with a gun is what's standing between you and the ability to live your life. Outrage at the moral economics of price increases

are similar but not identical to the impulses behind looting. Everything that you've ever need and have been unable to get is, when you walk into a grocery store, just sitting there right in front of you. But between you and it is a number and a man with a gun. And the man with a gun fucking hates you. So the moment you're free, you just take it. Price and the entire economic system behind it is organized very specifically so you don't do this. E.P. Thompson argued that the moral economy was pre-political.

The movements that it produced could be extremely well organized, but they fundamentally were not the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. In 2020, we, for a brief moment moment saw the outlines of that movement. The uprising was brutally crushed. In its place, we saw the emergence of pre-political concerns about price, right? We saw once again, a massive panic about inflation. And this is not to say that, you know, inflation didn't hurt people. It did. It was in large extent a fiasco. But look at the politics for a moment, this has produced, right? What

the media understands is economic anxiety. And what I think we can now better understand as the moral economy that is a result of the fact that our entire economic system is structured by price, and that we encode all of the information in our life into prices that we sell ourselves for and that we in turn are sold things for. Those prices going up, the product of it was Trump, right? And there's I think a reason why these sort of pre-economic explanations are preferred

to the answers and you know to the actions that people saw in 2020. Four years later, Portland, one of the centers of the uprising, now has almost every grocery store at the exit of it is armed guards with guns. And these guards are there to maintain the price system. They're there because for a very brief moment, people started thinking something dangerous. They started thinking, what if this didn't have a price? It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonedmedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It

Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. We want to speak out and we want this to stop. Wow, very powerful. I'm Ellie Flynn, an investigative journalist, and this is my journey deep into the adult entertainment industry. I really wanted to be a playboy, my doll. He was like, I'll take you to the top, I'll make you a star. To expose an alleged predator and the rotten industry he works in.

It's honestly so much worse than I had anticipated. We're an army in comparison to him. From Novel, listen to The Bunny Trap on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow Cross. Join me, Danny Dre 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 Notorno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, it's John, also known as Dr. John Paul. And I'm Jordan, or Joe Ho. And we are the BlackFatFilm Podcast. A podcast where all the intersections of identity are celebrated.

Ooh, chat, this year we have had some of our favorite people on including Kid Fury, T.S. Madison, Amber Ruffin from the Amber and Lacey show, Angelica Ross, and more. Make sure you listen to the BlackFatFam podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or whatever you get your podcast, girl. Ooh, I know that's right. Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid. Join your favorite hosts, me, Weezy WTF, and me, Mandi B, as we dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often taboo topics surrounding dating,

sex, and love. That's right. Every Monday and Wednesday, we both invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, we share our personal journeys navigating our 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engage in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that'll resonate with your experiences, Decisions Decisions is going to be your go to source for the open dialogue

about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections. Tune in and join the conversation. Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into Tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline

is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from.