It Could Happen Here - Why Our Supply Chains Suck

Episode Date: October 20, 2021

Why are our supply chains suddenly breaking down? We take a deep dive into the history of logistics and class politics to find out. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee 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 iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast podcast all right chris you go so welcome welcome to iten Here, a podcast that I think for the first time is just me and Robert. Uh-huh. This is the very first time that this is happening. You're all here at a moment of legendary significance and historic importance. So try to face it with the requisite awe. That's all I ask.

Yes, and another thing that... man, this is a terrible transition. Something else we're facing with requisite awe is weird shortages of goods and price increases. It's fucking rad. I was just at the Asian market today, and they did not have the snack chips that I most prefer. Oh, no. This is now officially a calamity. We've entered crisis, Phil. Of historic proportion.

Yeah, I don't think we're going to live through this one. Nope, we're doomed. We can't live without the Asian snack chips. We're done for. It's the ones that are like pieces of seaweed, but that have been fried in tempura batter. Ooh. Oh, that sounds really good.

Completely out. Tragic. Absolutely tragic. I think there's a couple of things i mean you've got a script so i'll probably just let you do that in the not too distant future but one of the things that's frustrating to me although maybe it shouldn't be because i i'm probably partly responsible for this is that this is being um this is often kind of being talked about with, by people online as like, oh, it's a sign that like society is,

is, is crumbling. And what they mean by that is that like, oh, we just don't have stuff. Like we're, we're not able to like keep up with, with demand and like the ability to produce these things is crumbling.

And it's actually much more complex than that. And a lot less rooted in a lack of specific resources and more decisions made under capitalism about how the supply chain would work. And it's – I don't know. I think it's important because it is – you can say it still is like a situation where this is an example of the system falling apart. But it's not falling apart because we don't have the paper to make toilet paper with. It's falling apart because decisions were made in order to increase the stock prices of companies by reducing the amount of products that they kept on hand

and that's uh led to an incredibly fragile system that that did nothing well but maximize profits and i think well okay i think there's there's a couple of things with that that we should talk about yeah because there's a lot of different explanations that are floating around for why it's happening and i think some of them are good but i think a lot of them are missing part of the story yeah and and i think it's important because okay so like like my grandma like called me yesterday like like called our family to like talk about the the the the supply chain problem because someone had like she'd been like fed a conspiracy theory that like the shortages were because american dock workers like didn't want to open containers from china yeah it's like yeah like i mean this is not what's that's not right but it's not like

if that had happened it would be like well okay yeah that yeah it does scan like yeah and i think yeah yeah and like i think this this is a moment where yeah you know okay think think things are not working how they're supposed to and there's a lot of sort of competing stories about some of which are good some which are bad and i think most of the conventional accounts and robert was talking about this uh you know even the really good ones they they start with sort of the the 80s wall street takeover of corporate america and the transformation of sort of all corporate management into an attempt to like raise short-term stock prices yeah and you know part of this is is lean in production and this is true and this is sort

of true but this misses about half of the story and and the part of the story that it misses that's really important and i think is is the sort of it's it's the broader like frame in which all of this is happening in is essentially the story of how the working class essentially loses the class war in the 60s and 70s and weirdly it's also a story about Foucault's boomerang which hell yeah ah yeah this is a uh this is a long... Throw in the music clip that we've all decided is going to be the one we put in whenever someone talks about Foucault's boomerang. Yeah.

Which is probably just going to be another time machine noise. Real quick. Foucault's boomerang noise. Credit to Cody. Okay, continue. Brief refresher on what that is. Basically, Foucault's boomerang is that if a government does something credit to cody um okay continue brief refresher on what that is so basically it because we were saying is that okay if you if if a government does something like repressive like technology

repressive technique or passive technology like in a colony like in a war somewhere eventually it'll come back and be used against like the citizens of that country and yeah a great example would be fingerprinting was invented for the british like policing um insurgents in malaysia and is now has come back to every you know colonizing nation now uses fingerprinting which is also deeply flawed as a technology but anyway yeah yeah and you know and i think most people tend to think about this as our armor personnel carriers but uh we will eventually get to this the the boomerang technology here is actually shipping containers hell yeah which have done like irreparable damage to the mankind all right

all right i'm ready for this i don't know much about this hit me all right bear with me with this because we're we're gonna talk about two threads they're going to seem like they have nothing to do with supply chains and then they're all going to tie together it turns out is literally all supply chains so in the 60s and 70s you have you know in very very broad general strokes you have two kinds of class war the first kind is what i'm sort of very broadly calling the war in the factories and this is this is an enormous series of sort of strikes and outright uprisings a stretch from sort of detroit to turin to tokyo and you know the most famous of these is the student sort of worker uprising in may 68 in france and they you know they're they're close enough taking the country that like french president charles de gaulle like flees in a helicopter to uh in in

secret and like flees to germany in secret and you know and that that that's like a big event but it sort of it sort of fades what doesn't fade is may 68 in italy and you know it doesn't fade there because italy italy has been in the middle of a strike wave since 1962 64 it's the whole 60s that basically just put strike waves there and you know they have their own 1968 and unlike in france where peter's out in italy you get the just incredibly named hot hot autumn of 69 which is oh yeah my favorite name ever yeah it rules yeah i'll bet it was a hot autumn. Yeah, it's great.

And so basically what happens is you get hundreds of thousands of workers go on strike. They start seizing control of their factories. Most of this is playing out in the Fiat factories. Yeah, these giant car factories in Italy's industrial triangle. And, you know, I mean, they're there for like, they're there for a long time. They're like 1970 and eventually they lose but you know italy is

just sort of rocked by conflict and sort of class war stuff and all of this sort of culminates in yet another enormous uprising in 1977 this one driven like in large part by people who are basically just like fuck this i'm not working in the factory anymore it's awful which which i think is something that like you know if you're looking at the modern political landscape you have a bunch of people who are going like fuck this i'm not going to go like die in these factories anymore and yeah those people all have in a lot of cases uh safer employing situations than many people today yeah yeah yeah it's like it's starting to get worse than which is why people are frustrated

but like there were pensions yeah yeah yeah you know and this is sort of interesting because there's a kind of like vicky osterweil we've had on here, calls it the monkey's paw thing, where it's like people in the 70s in Italy wanted autonomy and freedom from work. And so what capitalism gave them was like, oh, we'll give you autonomy. We'll just make you all contract workers. And now, yeah, you don't have to wake up every morning

and go to a job in the factory and leave at five or whatever. But now you're a contract worker, so you just have no stability whatsoever, and that's your autonomy but you know this this is this is really bad for the italian ruling class like they almost lose control of italy three times in 10 years and after 1977 they're just like fuck this and they i mean they start just start doing mass arrests they imprison like tens of thousands of people. They torture a bunch of people. And, you know, but it becomes clear that pure political repression is not going to be enough to just destroy the section of the working class movements that, you know, God help you

thinks that you should run production for themselves. And so they start looking elsewhere for answers. for themselves and so they start looking elsewhere for answers and the place they find these answers weirdly enough is in the second set of wars that are going on in this period which are the sort of national liberation wars and you know these are the national liberation wars these are full scale like these aren't sort of metaphor class war metaph. These are, you know, this is Guinea-Bissau, this is Algeria. And, you know, importantly for our purposes, the U.S. fights two of them, which is Korea and Vietnam. Now, Korea and Vietnam are strategically really bad places for the U.S. to fight wars. Like, they're on the other side of the world, which, which you know it makes it more difficult to do war

crimes because you know if you're firebombing a village right you have to be able to move fire bombs jet fighters and like oil and rations to the other side of the world and this is hard as it turns out a lot easier when they can commit war crimes and like i don't know duluth yeah yeah well even even like you know you got to commit a war crime in mexico it's like okay you just sent a bunch of people over the border oh it'd be so easy to commit war crimes in mexico yeah and really really up our war crime quotient well i i always say we do do a lot of war crimes in mexico it's just that like yeah they're done basically by proxies that's true like but i mean we've killed like

we've killed like a million people there in the last like 20 years in the war on drugs but yeah you know so the u.s you know the u.s okay so it has this logistics problem and logistics problem is that it can't do war crimes enough and so it comes up with a couple of solutions to them all right one of them is essentially they rebuild the whole Japanese economy in order to use Japan's industrial base to fight the war in Korea and then after the war in Korea ends they rebuild the South Korean economy in order to fight the war in Vietnam

and this works but it doesn't solve the problem that you know okay even if you're you know you have an industrial base in Japan right you still need to be able to efficiently move things by sea to Korea.

And, you know, you still need to still supply as you need to move from the US. And so the solution for this is containerized shipping. And containerized shipping, this is the pivot point upon which the entire history of the

20th century and everything that's happened in the 21st century hinges on. This is the pivot. And I... This isn't even really an exaggeration. Because it turns out that the ability to have uniform boxes that you can stack on top of each other like

Legos and put on a ship is like... it's like comparable to the nuclear bomb in in terms of how important it is which is really weird used to the only way to get things from a to b was a big wooden ship filled with doubloons like pile bags and stuff yeah yeah i don't know how did we like global commerce work before shipping containers what did we what did we like global commerce work before shipping containers what did we what did we literally like you just like sometimes sometimes you would just like physically people would just pick up the items and put them on the ship or they would

like sometimes they put them in boxes or like you would like strap them to like the top of the ship and so with the trains a lot they would just like strap like machinery like onto a train car and this was like not this is like really inefficient it's really slow yeah and so the u.s in order to like do war crimes in korea and then it you know it's just like oh hey what if we just make metal boxes and then they get they progressively get better and better at it because they have to go do more war crimes in Vietnam. But by the time you're getting to the end... It was a busy time.

Yeah, yeah. Look, lots of war crimes to do. You need good logistics networks to do all of these war crimes. I mean, it makes sense that that's where we got shipping containers, but I didn't realize... I had just assumed it would have come out

of the shipping industry as opposed to like we got to get more missiles over to these places yeah well this is the interesting thing we'll get to this in a bit but basically like a lot of the logistics revolution stuff either comes out of the military or is developed by ex-fascists and and a lot of the reason for this is okay i mean this is you know the 60s and 70s there's still r&d happening like there's still actual research and development but the military is doing just an enormous amount of the research and development for all of global capitalism and you know and and the the other thing that's what's happening here in

the you know this this is the sort of fukui's boomerang thing, is that the containerized shipping logistics stuff that had been used to just obliterate the global south suddenly starts spreading into broader shipping. Because people look at this and they're like, oh, this is efficient. And then the contracting companies the US is using. This turns into the solution to both sort of the war in the factories i was talking about in in in europe and the u.s and in like japan itself and then also to the solution of the national liberation movements and sort of like communism in east asia because you know okay so you have this question right the u.s like we kind of fight to a draw in korea like we kill a enormous number of people but you, about 20% of the North Korean population.

Yeah, but we don't really win. We can't actually defeat the Chinese army. And we lose Vietnam. And so the question is, okay, so how are we going to stop communism? And the answer, it turns out, is to just integrate the communist countries into the capitalist supply chain and i mean there's a lot of examples of this like margaret thatcher for example is like very good buddies with nikolai chochescu oh that's nice it's nice that they could be friends despite their the fact that they uh well i guess they weren't really that different as people. No, not really. Basically, the difference is that Ceausescu lost and thus got murdered on state television.

And Margaret Thatcher won and got a state funeral. Yeah, she should have been the Ceausescu treatment. That's my official stance. They should have Ceausescu'd her. Fair stuff. We will talk about in a bit. But yes, the archetypal example of this is actually china and you know there's a lot of very sort of skilled diplomatic work by kissinger and also the u.s like throughout the 70s just like they're just like sending entire factories

to china like like they'll like they'll they'll take an entire factory break it down put it in boxes and they just like ship it to china great it's a time and yeah so so yeah they're just like sending technology to china and the end result of this is that you know china goes from like fighting american troops with like like doing bayonet charges like yeah like mass human wave shit like yeah yeah nightmare yeah i was just like yeah to to you know being an american ally in like invading vietnam as a way to like stick it to the soviets basically and so you know so the u.s essentially just integrates china into the global supply chain and they eventually do the same thing to vietnam which again is another country that they couldn't

defeat militarily but what they you know what they actually to beat them with is the shipping container and before the shipping container this would have been impossible right like basically it was too inefficient and too expensive like the cost of shipping was too high to have all of this production you know like some half your parts made in china some of them made in india some of them made in like japan some of them made in korea and then ship all around the world, which is how the modern system works. But with containerized shipping, suddenly, shipping is really cheap. And it becomes much cheaper to pay shipping costs than it is to pay labor costs. start making too much noise about pay or like again god forbid start talking about like taking control of factories and running them democratically like some kind of anarchist monsters corporation could just move the factories overseas and this becomes an incredibly effective way to just destroy the labor movement because anytime you know organized labor starts making demands

you can be like well okay sorry we're just going to pack up and we're going to you know we're going to go to china we're going to go to somewhere else We're going to go to somewhere else. And this coincides with the thing that gets talked about a lot in the conventional accounts, which is the Wall Street sort of corporate takeover. Well, the Wall Street takeover of corporate America, which is something I think that sounds really weird to us now. But the whole story here is really interesting and extremely long and if you want to like have a very detailed account of how this all played out uh the book liquidated by karen ho is in just incredible uh like ethnography and history of wall street she

like yeah she's karen ho's an anthropologist and she like went and worked on wall street she like yeah she's a karen hosen anthropologist and she like went and worked on wall street and like did ethnography there for a bit and it's just very interesting stuff but it's kind of outside of our scope so the the the very very very short version is that the wall street bankers basically figure out a way to just like buy out corporations to like raise a bunch of money and just entirely buy out corporations and then once they have the corporation right what what what what you know is this is corporate rating so they're they're they loot all the assets they sell it off and they try to sell off their stock at a higher price the process of this is sort of complicated but the net result of this is that wall street completely takes over the corporate world the way they hadn't before like the wall streets the wall street like finance people are now you know they're the people making all the decisions and you know and and their their

only goal is to raise the stock price like that's that's the only thing they care about they don't they don't even care about making money right if you lose money and your stock price still rises like you don't care and those guys start looking at a lot of the things that had existed in corporations before that things like pensions uh particularly things like research and development they look at it and go okay why are we spending money on r&d like this this doesn't this doesn't raise our stock price this doesn't have any immediate short-term value so they cut it right they start cutting pensions they start essentially just destroying the unions and you know and because this is happening at the same time as corporations

really like get the ability to outsource for the first time you know they they lean into it and they start essentially we're just slashing the amount of people who work for the company right and so you know and so instead of having direct employees they start working with contractors and they start moving the contractors overseas. And, you know, and this is where we get to sort of this whole outsourcing wave because, you know, something I don't think is talked about enough with outsourcing is why actually are the labor costs lower in the countries that these people are moving their factories to and part of it is you know people talk about development like they're moving to undeveloped countries and you know a part of part of part of development is just you know how much technological capacity their manufacturing system has right and that you know but but the

other part of it is that if you move your production to say columbia right or that you know but but the other part of it is that if you move your production to say columbia right or like you know you're investing in sort of like cocoa bean farming in columbia and people try to do union organizing you can hire death squads to murder them yeah and yeah yeah it's like you can basically just sort of like you can you can outsource the violence and you can you can you know the the corporate term for it is reducing labor costs but really what you're doing is just, like, murdering people with death squads and terrorizing them. And, you know, that does lower labor costs, right?

But, you know, and I think there's another example of this. Like, this is a lot of what, like, the killing at Tiananmen was really about. It was, you know, not so much in Tiananmen Square itself. I've talked about this elsewhere, but, like, the workers that they kill outside of the square like a lot of the reason they're doing i know very little about tiananmen square other than like protesters china government bad the guy stands up to tank and then yeah yeah i i yeah i i've talked about this elsewhere more like the the very short version is so there's a bunch of students in the square, right? And the students in the square itself, basically, they kind of want democracy.

Mostly, they want market reforms to go faster. But then outside of the square, Beijing's whole working class shows up. And there's these enormous demonstrations. They basically start barricading blocks and blocks blocks and like this radius outside of the street you get this sort of like mini commune thing and those guys are like you know like they're they're advocating for democracy in the factory like they're you know they're they're talking about things like like they're like you know they they they they have their like marks out and they're talking about how like they're they're calculating the rate of surplus value that's being extracted

from them by the capitalists and those are the people like almost everyone who dies at tiananmen is is from those guys like those are the people that they just get massacred and you know and and the reason that happens is that the ccp is looking at this and is like okay this this is this is like this this is sort of this is the return of organized labor and we need to destroy it before it like gets anywhere and so they do and organized labor in china just implode i mean it was already pretty weak because you have a lot of state-controlled unions but i mean now it's just nothing. And, you know, and I mean, there have been attempts to do labor organizing in China sort of recently. And like, yeah, this is to be just to rest everyone.

Right. And so, you know, this is how this is. This is the price of cheap labor. Right. It's just incredible state repression. But this is also, you know, and this is this is a sort of like macro scale thing of why the supply chains suck. Because everyone talks about like the efficiency of the chains, but the supply chains aren't efficient. They make no sense.

If what you're trying to do is move something quickly from point A to point B, they make no sense. Because these supply chains are spread all over the world. Individual parts are being made in six countries. supply chains are spread all over the world like in individual parts are being made in six countries right you have like people will like for tax dodge purposes like they'll have one part of a component built in one country and then they'll move it to another country to have another part of it and then they'll ship all of it to mexico and they'll ship it across the border and they'll have the whole thing be assembled in the u.s so they can say it was made in the u.s like there's all of these things that are just just nonsense right they're not they're not efficient at all it's completely ridiculous it's it's this just you

know it's just completely absurd web and and the the the reason why it's designed like this is as as a giant sort of kind of uncertainty thing like the the the reason the reason supply chains are are just bad is because they're you know they they they're not designed to move things they're designed as an instrument to just like solve the problem of of of class power right they're they're they're they're designed to destroy unions they're designed to make sure that nobody ever sort of like gets any ideas about wages to make sure nobody gets any ideas about like taking anything and so you know but and this this this can work for a while the problem is again like they're not efficient like it's it just it just it is not efficient to like move have everything made in like six countries and then

you have to send them somewhere else yeah and so And so, you know, it's efficient in the sense that it efficiently maximizes the value of stock prices for like stock buybacks and stuff. And that's generally what is meant by like efficiency. Yeah. In that sense is like what makes the 70 people who actually own this company the most money. That's the thing. But it's horribly inefficient in every practical sense of the word. Yep. horribly inefficient in every practical sense of the word yep and and this is kind of an interesting change because i mean you know this isn't to say that like the supply chains that worked before

this were like better because they also sucked in a lot of their own ways but all of the like efficiency stuff that we're about to talk about like just just in time production etc etc like you know what isn't produced just in time sorry but it is an ad break time yeah they're they're not produced just in time anymore because the supply chain's falling apart it's our sponsors that's that is our promise about our sponsors is that uh they're they're not at all in time who knows when they'll get your products to you there's no way to tell. It's impossible to know. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill.

Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora, an anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. 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. We're back. Yeah, we're back to talk about how, you know, having developed an entire network of extremely inefficient supply chains that just absolutely suck and don't make any sense. People tried to make them efficient

and this is where we go back to Japan because Japan you know I guess this is the other Foucault's boomerang which is that you know okay so we industrialize Japan in order to like fight our colonial wars right but then

you know this turns into this huge like pikachu face moment when japan suddenly starts like industrializing more efficiently than the u.s does yeah it's very funny and then michael crichton writes a bunch of books that are the premise of all of them is japan scary yeah it's very funny yeah you know like it's interesting it's such an interesting thing here which know, like, it's interesting. It's an interesting thing here, which is that, like, all of the panic around China, there was exactly the same panic, like, around Japan in the 70s and 80s. It's exactly the same, like, right down to, like, a bunch of socialists going, like, hey, look, this is a model for anti-capitalism. Like, people said that about the Japanese model. And it's, like, it's all the same thing.

It's just happening again. But what Japan did, and specifically what Toyota does, is create this thing called the Toyota Production System, which eventually becomes known as just-in-time production. And if you've read anything about the modern supply chain problems, you've almost certainly heard of just-in-time production or lean production and just-in-time and lean production are technically different but the differences don't matter for us so yeah and and this this stuff is derived from what toyota was sort of doing in the post-war era and basically the goal of it is you're never supposed to have any inventory that's just sitting there. So the whole system is supposed to be constantly in motion. So you have parts come in, they immediately get put into the production line, and the finished products immediately shipped out to the stores. And the theory is that the stores are only going to carry exactly enough

product to meet demand and it's supposed to be quote-unquote flexible which means that it can like react to shifts in consumer taste and demand by like increasing or decreasing production and it can't do this this is what we've been seeing for the entirety of covid which is that you know this this is why every time there's a run on toilet paper everyone runs out of toilet paper because it turns out that these systems can't – even a 10% increase just completely obliterates this entire system and it just collapses and can't produce enough toilet paper. Yeah, and again, just because it's expensive to store things. It's pricey. has the potential to disrupt the status quo more than any strike in recent history,

is so potent because John Deere tractors are kind of a necessary part of the agricultural industry, not just their ability to sell new tractors, but their ability to repair the extant tractors. Like if harvest season comes around and there's not spare parts to repair tractors that break, like food doesn't get harvested. It's a significant issue. John Deere, we'll talk more about this at another date, but like not only did the most that they could do to squeeze their employees, to suck out pensions, to cut expenditures on wages. But they set up their factories in such a way that there was no extra space. So they could not scale up any of these factories to increase demand when they needed to. So that now that John Deere is going on strike, if they lose a month of productivity, they can't ever catch up.

It's impossible because they can't actually expand the productive capacity of their factories. And because the strike is hitting, they didn't have any extra spare parts lying around. any extra spare parts lying around so if shit gets broken they can't manufacture the parts necessary to keep tractors functioning in a lot of american farms because they didn't store anything because that was not the most efficient thing for the economic bottom line of the ceo who gets 160 million dollars a year yeah and this is anyway this is this is the funny part about this whole thing which is that you know okay so this whole supply chain system was based around just like destroying destroying the organized working class right but it's like they were so successful at it that they've like turned around and fucked themselves with it because like you know this is this is the thing about about the

john deere strike right it used to be you know back back back if you look at like like how how the unions were broken in the 80s or like if you look at like the giant like auto strikes you'd have in the 70s right and companies still do this to this day but like they're worse at it the thing they would do is so okay so you you you know if you're a company you know roughly when a strike is going to happen right and the reason you know when a strike is going to happen is because in the u.s like the way labor law works is that like you you can you can basically only strike like when a contract is up i mean you can do wildcats but it's illegal but you know okay so they they they knew that

the auto unions for example we're about to go we're going to go on strike when when the contract like was was coming up and you know they'd have spies and you can get a sense of like you know okay so are how likely are they to to do this strike and you know so so that that that lets you do things like build up an enormous sort of inventory of spare parts and it lets you build up an inventory of supplies and it lets you build up you know it basically it lets you build up the capacity you need to outlast a strike but the the problem with Justin Time is they can't do that anymore. Because they've completely fucked themselves. Yeah, and in the John Deere situation, because the workers hadn't gone on strike since 86, they'd been putting funds into their strike survival fund for years.

But the company had nothing. Like, has no. It's rad and this is you know this this is the other part of of of why everything like good that's happening right now is happening is that they they they you know that we everything has circled back around and suddenly all of these companies are you know weak are incredibly vulnerable to strikes again because yeah as you're talking about the just-in-time production thing it only works if if everything actually comes in on time right like if if any if any individual part is late the whole system starts to fall apart and then and then you can't repair it and yeah you know

and there's a lot of ways that that this this this can be very bad um you know we've talked about the john deere we talked about the labor stuff uh the other big thing that's happening is covid which has happened and continues to happen and has killed off just enormous parts of the working class i mean it's like four million dead worldwide or something and again that that's also probably an undercount because that's just direct oh yeah that's not like yeah it's probably like twice that it's i mean we're looking at a minimum of 725 000 to the u.s and again that's probably a million undercounted at least yeah it's it's a horror show right and and the people they killed with that you know like especially in the initial phases like it was just it was just they took a change chainsaw to the

working class and those are a bunch of people who you know that they're they're not replaceable they're very highly skilled and they do a bunch of jobs that absolutely suck and now you know and one of one of the places that this this has caused a bunch of problems is is in the ports because this the other thing that this entire supply chain relies on is being able to very quickly and cheaply move parts from you know china to the u.s from china to mexico from like bangladesh to like sombalia you have you have you have to be able to continuously like keep moving stuff around in in you know you have to continuously keep moving ships around and you also have to be able to load and unload them and we you know we we saw like there there was the the that when that

ship got stuck in the suez there is that whole yeah you know that that that was yeah sex asses were uh where people couldn't get sex asses because the world's supply of sex asses for months was on that one ship. It was a real crisis for the sex ass community. Those are plastic asses that you have sex with, if you're curious. Yeah, it is. The world appears as an immense collection of commodities, some of which are sex asses. Yeah, most of which, in terms of the ones that matter, are sex asses. Yeah, most of which, in terms of the ones that matter, are sex asses. Yes.

The sex ass industrial complex is really the linchpin of global capital, but please continue. The sex ass industrial complex falls apart. And it's not just the ship being stuck in the seaway. It's like, it made everything way worse. And was very funny.

Yeah, it was extremely funny. It was extremely funny. The part, the thing's like not very funny is that like okay so in order to get any of this to work right you have to have a bunch of longshoremen you have to unload all of this shit and you know one of one of the problems that is that is happening in the sort of global supply chain right now is that the ships can't be unloaded fast enough. And part of this is this job sucks, and people just, a lot of people don't want to do it. A lot of people died. And it's causing

this huge problem. And there's another, you know, if you want to take the macro perspective about this, it's that this whole system is relying on logistics workers. So it also needs you know you need truck drivers and we're coming back and you know in the u.s is like there's yeah you know

there's there's a shortage of truck drivers now because again their job sucks and they've been like just absolutely screwing these people over for decades and decades and decades now and turning them into subcontractors just not paying them and you know and and this and when you know when the when the port shut down like not even shut down like when the ports are behind unloading stuff and when the trucks like that are supposed to be moving this stuff there aren't enough of them and like the the cost of that increases it throws off the whole system and that's that's another big part of why this whole thing is sort of imploding. And it's interesting because I remember this,

there was like a decade where every other article would be talking about how they were going to automate truck driving. And it was like, ah, the truck drivers are all going to go out of business because they're going to automate. It just never happened at all. And it's the same thing with, you know, there's been some port

automization but like not in the scale that you know actually does anything and part of the reason for that is you know i was talking about people not investing research developments yeah so the biggest people who aren't doing that are the shipping companies and that's a good time because the shipping cup basically like container shipping has been taken over by what's essentially just like a monopoly of two companies and those two companies make just an indescribable amount of money they have like a thousand percent profits and they just pay it all out as dividends and so they're not you know they're not investing in any port infrastructure they're not investing automation they're just pocketing the money and that means that you know we have all this and they're spending in in any port infrastructure. They're not investing automation. They're just pocketing the money. And that means that,

you know, we have all this. And they're spending in, in the case of John Deere, which I keep going back to a bunch of money lobbying to make it illegal for farmers to repair their tractors. Yeah. Yeah.

They're, you know, they figured, they figured out that like the easiest way to make money is just get the state to shake people down for you. It's like, ah, fuck like investing in, in making anything that we have better. Let people down for you it's like ah fuck like investing in in making

anything that we have better let's just you know like let's just turn the state into a debt collector and and it's interesting because so this this is the part of of the supply chain crisis that like biden's been focusing on but biden's plan biden's plan is great biden's plan is literally make the longshoremen work harder so his plan is uh and there we go there we go there we go building back better baby yeah we're gonna we're gonna make we're gonna keep the ports open uh 24 hours a day seven days a week and like make people work weekends now and then he also got uh fedex walmart and ups to do uh 24 hour seven day a week shipping so yeah the solution is literally just like feed more workers into a grinder and

make them work longer which is which is great and and you know will not in any way backfire no it's fine i don't even think we should be talking about it no it's great it's gonna it's fine. I don't even think we should be talking about it. No, it's great. It's going to, it's, yeah, it's, you know, but again, like this is the thing, like this won't work and it can't. And the reason it won't work is that like part of the reason there's a shortage is that, you know, it's not, it's not just about the, like the fact that people aren't paying enough. It's about the fact that these jobs are just awful. these jobs are just awful like you you have people you have people working like 12 hour shifts that start at like 6 a.m and then they have to make another 12 hour shift eight hours later and they just keep having to do this over and over and over again and it's well and they don't like the way that these shifts are usually put on them is that like you'll find out when you come in that instead of working 6 a.m to to 4 p.m. or whatever, they're actually going to need you to

stay until 8. And then they're going to need you to come in. By the way, you're going to need to come in like two hours early tomorrow. So you realize that like in between your two shifts, you have a total of eight hours to get home and sleep. And if you say no, well, the idea is that if you say no, like you won't have the job. It's required. Now, the reality is that most of these companies are also pretty desperate to have these workers and a lot of these manufacturing and packing firms. It takes time to train people up and then they quit a couple of weeks in because the work is miserable and the schedule is fucking miserable. And it's – yeah, it's all – it's simultaneously like deeply inhuman but also is leading to a situation. There's a reason why there's so many strikes on right now is that there is opportunity because in sort of the chasing of short-term profits, a lot of these fucking oligarchs have exposed themselves in a pretty vulnerable position. Yeah, and I think this is coming back to a sort of – the other way that when there was a crisis in the 60s and 70s, the other way they solved this was just authoritarianism.

It was – this is the Pinochet solution, right? Like, oh, workers are seizing control of copper mines? Okay, we'll just shoot them. Oh, no, we're out of workers yeah and yeah and this is you know they're they're finally running into a point where you know this is this is the solution they've been trying to do now with with with this crisis is you know they the they're relying on the fact that just the workplace is just indescribably authoritarian i mean it's it's like it's it's it's a dictatorship on a scale that is like like even to like the most despotic

absolute monarch is just like unimaginable like your boss gets to control like when you shit like they get a control when you eat they get a control exactly what you're doing like at all times they get control when you do it they get get a control when the next time you're going to do it is. They don't even have to tell you when it's going to be until you show up. And this has been the gamble for capitalism's entire existence, which is that you just have to take this and eat shit, or they're going to take away your ability to eat, get medical care, and have a place to live. But that's not true anymore like you can just say no you can tell them to fuck off you can you know you can you can you can organize a union you can just fucking just leave your job like just leave it fucking walk out yeah this is why we focus i mean this is number one why within the context of union strike funds are so important but also a mutual aid is so important is it it potentially when

organized well enough provides people with the option to like well how are you going to feed yourself well there's people in my community who want to make sure that i'm fed because they believe in what i'm striking for um that's the promise of all of that. That's the practical behind the kind of high-minded anarchist just whatever theorizing is the ability that like, well, this actually is a weapon too. Yeah, and I think – You know what else is a weapon, Chris? I hope we're not being sponsored by – Some of them. I hope we are, Chris.

Oh, Chris. Look, I've said before, for weapons, I'll read any ad for a weapons manufacturer as long as they send me some weapons. So come on, guys. Get on it. You could be in the middle of this conversation. Raytheon, send me a couple of missile guidance chips. Lockheed Martin, you want to give me an F-35?

We'll plug you, you know. That's the deal. That's how it works, baby. Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturno, 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. All right, we're back. Hopefully you have now heard the advertisement for knife missile to knife missile harder now with like five knives a thing that i am not making up and actually exists yeah no people keep being surprised that the r9x is a real thing yeah but there's another one is there's there's there's one with more knives they put more knives yeah what are you you're not getting look again you can't it's like with Apple products, right? Planned obsolescence is critical

You have to, you can't just rest on your laurels, you're gonna run out of money So you gotta make another knife missile with a couple more knives Yeah, just keep adding knives Nothing can ever go wrong Do not ask any questions about why you're developing knife missiles

Please do send me one Send me one and like a drone or three swear to god i'll use it for legal purposes yeah so i guess the the last thing that i that's really interesting about this moment that doesn't usually happen is that you know okay so if you if you if you you read your very basic marks right one of the things marks talks about is that there's this thing called the reserve army of labor which is it's just like you know there's a bunch of people who are just always unemployed and they they they get along by doing sort of like odd jobs like you know i like my my

quintessential person for this is like if you ever go on a subway there's you know it's the guy selling candy bars in the subway yeah it's people who quasi-legal you know sometimes yeah right illegal they're just kind of like doing whatever you know yeah it's great we call them in the west coast you have a lot of those like yeah people who trim marijuana for a couple of months and then just kind of like crashing you know campsites the rest the rest of the year or whatever. Like, yeah, there's a bunch of those folks for sure. every every strike you see has a second strike behind it and that strike is is the informal general strike which is just again people just quitting their jobs and leaving and and you have this weird moment where normally the sort of the reserve army of labor is this thing that like capitalism can always sort of rely on as a way to sort of solve its problems because like oh well

all right if you're not going to do this job, we can bring another person. But this is a weird moment where the reserve army of labor is fighting on our side. And the fact that all of these people are just, like, you know, they're seeing the just incredible authoritarianism of these workplaces, the just horrific abuse, the fact that, you know,

they're being, in a lot of cases just asked to show up and die and they're saying no is is a really sort of is a really incredibly powerful thing and and when when you add that to the fact that you know all these companies have completely screwed themselves with how they design the supply chains or it's it's all it's all come back around and suddenly all all the supply chain stuff that they carefully laid out over decades and decades decades as a way to just like break the union movement and make sure nobody ever asked for more wages you know it's it's it's it's it's been revealed to be incredibly fragile and you know weak to our attack and that leads us i think to this other tension in in biden's plan to sort of like revive the

economy which is that so the u.s technically speaking has this like very large central planning capability but it only has it to like build weapons so you know like the the army has this incredible ability like there's a lot of bullets you know despite the army has this incredible ability. We make a lot of bullets, you know. Despite the huge stress on the bullet supply chain, it really has scaled. You know, the prices have increased, but we're still getting bullets. America's great at making bullets. Less great at keeping tractors working, but that won't ever be a problem. Yeah, even if you remember at the beginning of the pandemic, was like the u.s just couldn't produce masks like we said we we

never we never like did that right like like the government never at any point was like we're just gonna make masks and give them to people like they just never did it and so you know our mass supply all those supply chains suck and the only way that like the states can intervene and get the supply chains to work is by doing one of two things. It's by either doing a thing Biden was doing, which is just go to a bunch of companies and tell them to make all of their workers work harder, which is the thing that like,

you know, totally won't backfire or explode in his face. And then the second thing is for Biden basically to like do all this saber rattling about how we have to have like medical supply chains in the u.s because national defense or something and that's the second thing he's trying to do but you know that just that just makes the problem worse right because once you once you lose the ability to outsource you you lose the hammer you've been beating the unions with and so you know all all of the sort of all all of the tendencies that are you know making things like bad and scary right now are also weirdly making this you know the the the fact that

prices are rising right the fact that there's all these shortages, it's making this the best moment to... It's making this the best moment that anyone's had in ages to actually try to make something better. And the important thing is

we're starting to see it happen. And we're going to talk more about Striketober and sort of the strike wave in the coming, you know, weeks and months. Yeah, we're going to be hitting this pretty hard even just next week. We have a lot of stuff in the pipeline. Kind of wish we'd gotten to it earlier, but there's a lot of stuff to talk about in the world happening that that's within our milieu. It turns out when you're, when your specific focus is things falling apart, uh,

you're always behind uncovering all of the things that are falling apart. But I think it is a good time to, to, to drive this to a close, to drag this episode out behind the farm, the barn and, and, and shoot it and bury it in a shallow grave and and break

its bones with a hammer so that the police can't identify it chris um thank you for for putting this together uh got anything anything else to say uh quit your job and you or you and or unionize your workplace and or take it over and run it yourselves because Lord knows the people who are telling you what to do just literally do not care if you die. Yeah. With that...

No, no, no. I was just gonna... I don't know what I was gonna do, Chris. I don't know what I was gonna do. Go do something. You're listening to things go do something yeah and if you want to listen to us do more things we are

allegedly allegedly we are at coolzone media on the twitter and the instagram you can't prove that in court it's true good luck good luck to them in trying to prove that we did this. Yeah, that's right, motherfuckers.

All right. Bye. Bye. Bye. 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 Trails, 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.