Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 254: Dr. Yakub, CDC Director

Episode Date: June 24, 2022

We discuss all the latest and greatest crises on this week's episode of Trillbillies Support us: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

I'm gonna start Boom I was just looking at this thing from Shout out Noah Noah Colwin for pointing this out But The twos is at it again Oh god

Oh god The what is at it again? Twos You know twos bros You ever heard of twos bros? Nah Nah Really?

Adam twos Nah what's that? Twos the coos h hound i feel like i should have said yes now what is it i feel bad for not knowing who are they that's hilarious just just in in uh in some circles he's known as the coos hound yeah the coos hound he's like an economist that wrote a book i think first he got started as a historian of like the third reich of like the political economy of the third reich and then he wrote a book called crashed i think about the 2008 did they get made into a movie i don't think not the crash movie i'm thinking of like a documentary yes yes it did it got turned into a movie? I don't think... Not the Crash movie. I'm thinking of like a documentary. Yes, yes, it did.

It got turned into a feature film star and Chris Ludacris Bridges. Dude, the director of that movie recently... Dude, that dude is a piece of shit. Paul Haggis? What's he doing well he's like he's like sexually assaulted multiple people but he he's the the first time he came across my radar was he like wrote a piece in the new yorker about him leaving scientology do you remember that it was like 2014 we'll See the going clear guy?

I think he was featured in that documentary a lot. That Scientology documentary. But I've always gotten really weird vibes from him. And I think it's because of that movie Crash. It's like such a deranged, absurd movie that like anybody who could have made it, i'm just very sort of sussed out by if you uh i mean he did get out of scientology but for you to get into it you have to be like some level of deranged man definitely hope we don't have any scientologist listeners that'll be offended by that if you are i'm sorry yeah we can anger them. They're the ones that have the money. They spend the money on Patreon, so we can't actually take all that back.

Sorry, Tom Cruise. Sorry, Mr. Cruise. It would be funny, a True Billy Scientology caucus. Like, a lot of things fly for them, but a few things don't. Well, Scientologists, they believe in aliens, right? They love the fast and loose series what if the tribility scientologist fans were the like love the fast and loose series we tuned in

for fast and loose everything else is dog shit fast and loose is where it's at well man if they believe in aliens then uh which i think they do then man i'm with it you know they do believe in aliens than uh which i think they do then man i'm with it you know they do believe in aliens i'm pretty sure would it uh well i used to believe i used to believe but i've come around to thinking that aliens are one million percent or not if you look at the if you look at the map of ufo sightings that like 98% of them worldwide are in the United States and the UK. It's interesting to think about that. Like what is it about our specific situations

that we're like seeing them more? Or are the aliens more interested in the United States and the UK? Maybe they're just into like the Who and the Kinks. I think, yeah, they're interested in two former global empires in the death throes of their own

specific collapses. You know what I'm saying? Well, they saw the American flag on the moon and they were like, hey, man. Chill out. You know what? That's actually really depressing because i'm a hundred percent that a sure that aliens exist in the universe i mean i can't be 100 sure but that'd be insane if they didn't but the ufo shit is a complete op like

entire op yo so i mean if they do exist they've never visited us. That Mirage Man documentary that Terrence put me on to, where that fed just absolutely terrorized the UFO community, kind of really brought it home for me. It's like, why even do something like that? It's just so mean-spirited. Well, I just think that they're... It's crazy when you think about like this thing about misinformation now that like misinformation was always basically the cia's playbook from day one they were constantly

like manipulating perspective manipulating your ability to get a proper read on the current situation on political economy uh liberals would be shocked to know that many of the things they accept as dogmatic are actually misinformation right done by the cia mostly right in its fight to defeat communism and after it did that they had nothing else to live for. So they just started... Something that they did in the 90s, like after the fall of the Soviet Union, fucked them up, and now they're just now starting to see the grotesque side effects,

and they're calling it Havana Syndrome, you know? Yeah, right. They had all these heart attack guns laying around after that, and just had a field day of it one day. Just like that scene in Zoolander where they're hitting each other with gasoline, but they're hitting each other. Whoa! Do me, roll me next.

You know what, dude? That's like, yeah, man. After the fall of communism, they had just nothing to do. So they just made up UFO shit. Today we got like Havana syndrome shit, man. Yeah. The guy's got too much time and too much money, man. Not enough enemies.

We should rename Havana syndrome for when your beard falls out. And just on the CIA failed op for the one they tried to make Fidel when your beard falls out. Just on the CIA failed op for when they tried to make Fidel Castro's beard fall out when you have alopecia of the face. That's Havana Syndrome. I've been having that shit for like 31 years. Not 31, but like 15 years.

Me too. I'm afflicted. I can't grow shit. Shit, man. It's embarrassing. Wait, hold on. I strayed very far from my original entry point, which was the coos hound. He's back at it.

He's defining crisis. Okay, I don't mean to talk shit. I kind of like Adam Tooze, but this is an amazing example of what no marxism will do for a motherfucker uh it's a entry in his blog uh defining poly crisis from crisis pictures to the crisis matrix back in january 21st this year i proposed chrysan builder a chrysan pictures okay i'm just gonna go ahead and tell you we don't we don't need any more germanic uh i don't even like using the word schadenfreude for the same

reasons you know i we just don't need to we need to take as little as possible from the germans yeah at this point in history I would say that we're taking a little bit too much Yeah, yeah I'm sure once they were proud people But you kind of squander some of your goodwill There in the 40s and 30s And so forth

Kreisenbilder So what is this deal? What's this poly-crisis? They're crisis pictures As a way of making sense of what then looked like a complicated pattern of stresses around the world scene so do you mean historical and dialectical materialism dog is twos on this adam curtis shit or what where is this going look look look look i'll show you it's hard to explain to the audience but what it is is it's basically like that scene in always sunny it's like a meme you know where he like charlie's standing in front of the wall and he's got all the connections drawn out that's

what it is yeah but it's like for all the things in the world so omicron is the very first thing he's got in the top left corner then it's a and then it's an arrow to china and then it's like for all the things in the world so omicron is the very first thing he's got in the top left corner then it's a and then it's an arrow to china and then it's like three arrows u.s inflation european inflation it's just like it's got things like looping back so it's like a map of crisis a map you know what you know what would have been sick as if twos would have been like listen if you draw a straight line between all these crises, it forms a perfect pentagram, motherfucker. And then he just got on his conspiracy shit. Dark twos!

Yeah, dark twos. Occultist twos. Yeah. Adam twos needs to go critical paranoia. Yeah, we need occultist twos. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man.

I proposed this schematic because it seemed a useful way of mapping interconnected forces in a heuristic way. As it turned out, it succeeded in capturing quite a lot of the dynamics that have subsequently convulsed the world. That was January 21st. The war unleashed by Russia on February

24th has added spectacularly to the scale of tension and the complexity of the interconnections. What was once a relatively legible map has become a tangled mess. So wait, I want to know something, man. All right. I don't want to make fun of this guy either because I don't know him. Seems like it does good work. work but like like i feel like the entire ethos of this show or maybe any kind of left newsy podcast is exactly like this thesis that he's making but he just makes it sound really complicated you know but i don't know i mean like i'm not hating on it i guess it just it sounds like really convoluted

to just be like yeah all these things are interconnected and like you don't have to draw a fucking chart you know like what is this like for kindergartners you know i'm saying like i don't know man let me let me trace let me trace one path here i'll trace one path here all right so we're starting with omicron it's kind of like a game of monopoly but on the way back around you pass through all kinds of hell just start it is this dark twos man let's see you start with you pay the luxury tax you go to jail you start with omicron you go immediately to china in both of these the first arrow is china like that's the first destination is he just why is he not going back even further to like

i don't know like is he just going back like to a couple years ago he could go back to like the dawn of man i know i mean that's the thing okay i do respect his i feel like twos first came across my radar right after the pandemic first started i never really knew anything about him before that but he like wrote this series of articles right after the pandemic started. And at the time, I was trying to understand the economy and shit, so I was reading him a lot. Your first mistake, trying to understand how this shit works.

My first mistake. You're a twos hound. You're a crypto twos hound. I was an early, I was a crypto coos hand, man. You've been leeching his ideas into the mainstream. You're responsible for the cut article. I didn't understand what shit like quantitative easing and stuff meant. So I was like, I've got to read.

I've got to go back to the basics. The basics being the coos. Yeah. Coos. Damn, being the coos. Yeah. Coos. Damn, man. Cusimano. Cusimano. Cusa Plaza.

But I do respect his periodization. He correctly starts... If you want to come up with a theory of crisis or an explanation for what's going on probably the best place to start is covid i think yeah yeah for sure yeah yeah uh reasonable yeah right it seems let me ask you this do you feel like covid the era of covid started a new epa kind of in kind of the same way 9-11 yeah do you think we're kind of in a new epoch? 1,000%. And the way that you can tell is,

I feel like, I think the way that you can tell is these Supreme Court decisions. It's just like, because we were talking about that before. Like, why didn't they repeal Roe earlier? They, you know,

they could have done it in the 2000s. Like, what about this specific moment made them feel like so emboldened to like repeal right road today right right yeah i feel like it's i feel like there's a few things probably going on but i think that for the longest time neoliberalism uh presented this complication which was what do we do with the individual? After we've stripped away all the institutions, what do we do with the individual?

And COVID allowed them to resolve that because it raised all these questions of, I think, bodily autonomy. I mean, just, okay, at the sort of philosophical cultural level, but then also at the political social reproduction too right right exactly social reproduction staying at home like the role of the family like you know what i mean like all of these different things all these

also mores that reinforce all of these like you know as you said staying at home with the family and you know patriarchy and like which is i don't even mean it to say what is a job what is work like is you know what i mean like exactly man we we are at i was thinking about it before we got on and like you know well because yesterday too there was that supreme court ruling um today's roe v wade repeal the net overturning it yesterday was um uh a concealed care making it easier to conceal carry right and like it just seems like like you said terrence neoliberalism like what do we do with the and the miranda rights thing and the miranda rights thing right so it's like weird has it ever felt worse to live in this piece of shit

dude that's exactly exactly like psychically and emotionally not even just physically but yes psychically especially dude we're just just physically, but psychically especially. Dude, we're just at this, I mean, I don't mean to say historic moment. It always feels like that. But literally where you could go one of two ways. And the elites, the ruling class, they're just doubling down, man. You know? They're just doubling down.

Was there another thing? Am I forgetting another thing? There was like the Miranda rights. The open carry thing is one of those cases that I'm like, I lived in Texas, grew up in New Mexico, live in Kentucky. I'm just used to, at this point, seeing people just walk around strapped to the- In a Walmart with a gun. Yes, yes. I was pimping last weekend, saw a motherfucker pull up on a side-by-side,

and he just had a Glock 9 right on his hip. I'm like, bro, what are you afraid of out here exactly? Dog, I used to work at a Golden Crust right by my house. And one time, everybody, all the workers were making a commotion because somebody had left a gun in one of the booths. Like, I guess it just slipped off of their holster. They left their keys. booths like i guess it just slipped off of there like they lit it slipped off of their holster dude and they picked it up my co-workers picked it up with a plastic bag and just carried it like to the to the manager's office and we're just like dog what do we do about this shit the guy

just left and he just left his fucking gun like yeah like you were saying in the south taking that shit home where yo dog i was thinking about i was like man i haven't been feeling too good no i'm kidding i'm kidding i'm kidding i mean guns is one of those things that it's just like an issue that my specific trajectory through american society is just like they're the our our like our insane trumper small businessman arcade owner downtown whitesburg he looks exactly like chuck norris and he's constantly packing heat and he's always giving he's always giving me the fucking stink eye dude i'm like this dude is about to waste me just he's looking for a reason how far away are you are we do you think in like a place like easter kentucky of it just going back to like like uh you know the fucking okay corral type shit oh dude like i mean with the like we're

a motherfucker just like you just draw down at high noon on main street and then whoever loses just gets kind of drug off to the side and then everybody carries on like nothing happened tom and i yeah go ahead go ahead here no i mean i think i said this on the show before but a couple weeks ago there was a shootout i sent it on patreon it was a shootout in a parking lot when this guy got held up at gunpoint for his rifle went back to his car grabbed another gun and they started having a shootout in the parking lot of target is their shit it's all right time out i gotta go run here get something stronger than this i don't know it seems like a bad idea to like also the cigarette shit like you take it away

all these vices and shit no you take away all these vices quote vices and shit like that and try to paternalize be very paternal about this shit but then you just give motherfuckers guns instead like that's just a recipe for like mad max like apocalyptic disaster dog it's well it's also just like i i don't know what it says about wherever you land on guns is wherever you land on guns right but like it is very just indicative of the mean-spirited and psychopathic nature of this country that we have something like that Uvalde shooting, and then they decide now's the time

we need to run that through the court. You know what I mean? That's the kind of stuff that makes you feel like they are... It's the kind of stuff that makes you think that they almost are operating from a specific blueprint. Let's make society this specific set of horrors for the modern individual i really do i think america is satanic i think america christianity is satanic really i and and i do think that no dude truly like the ontologically evil thing like i think it's totally legit for the united states i mean check this yo i looked

this shit up today too the senate passed this uh gun reform bill quote reform bill that i think they expand back background checks to people under 21 um there's like um financial incentives for um states to implement like red flag laws and shit like that yeah yeah so this passed this passed the senate today and then like like uh yesterday they passed the concealed carry shit you know what i'm saying they made it so it nullifies all of those those little meager reforms you know it produces this very disorienting effect where you see them doing the theater it's so bizarre it's almost like it's intentionally made to take your eyes off of the off of what's actually happening so

it's like at the front of this stage they are doing these symbolic gestures like the january 6th hearings and this gun legislation but behind the scenes you just hear these you hear people getting stabbed behind the curtains you're're like, what the fuck? Wait, wait, wait. What's going on back there, man? Wait, wait. Maybe one of these guys tried to do a monologue. Yeah, yeah.

Like, I think something's going on back there. Bro, you got to pull back the curtain a little bit. Shouldn't we call this all off and get the full picture here? Behind the curtain? It produces a very disorienting and strange effect i mean the weird thing about that gun legislation is like one of the weird things is that mcconnell voted in favor of it but but i read the new york times article and it didn't sound like it was much of anything at all they were like this is monumental gun reform. And so I was trying to just tease out ease.

Well, that's the thing. If there's one thing you can set your watch by about America, it's that there is never going to be any meaningful legislation ever again. We're past that. Because we're several decades into, like, politics is not the way that the world is ordered now here and that's what you got to understand so there's not going to be another new deal there's not going to be i mean you could have you could have fucking half of congress bernie sanders representing half

of congress and it wouldn't matter because that's just it's not the way the world's not built yo like one thing too and i mean like i don't mean to keep harping on this but this kind of blew my mind like the tobacco thing because it was like dog i don't even trust like the government to do something that's supposed to be good right they're always just going to half-ass it like what they want to do is cut nicotine in half right but if you cut nicotine in half then that means that the tobacco industry is going to find out or like you know concoct some fucking new you know what i'm saying like the ingredient to like get people equally as hooked as if they didn't cut the nicotine out at all.

Why don't you just nationalize the tobacco industry? But like you said, Tom, we can't even imagine that, much less a tentative contract between labor and capital to regulate shit. It's exactly like you pointed out on Twitter, Aaron. It's class war. What it does is it illegalizes, it criminalizes another item just in the same way that the drug war does. It criminalizes survival strategies

under a deteriorating political economic system. That is a good point. And just coping like smoking a fucking cigarette. As you pointed out eric garner was killed for fucking selling cigarettes i mean like this is another site where the state is trying to further criminalize your activity and take and i know it sounds fucking ridiculous because like i saw you arguing with someone over that that was like uh or or or maybe someone was like subtweeting you or something like that but people

were like it's absurd that uh it's even a leftist position that you would want to keep cigarettes they're a public nuisance and a social harm and it's like yeah they are like a lot of fucking things in society nobody nobody even no smokers under the illusion that it's good for them i hate myself every time i smoke a cigarette i hate myself and i fucking hate it and it tastes disgusting i'm addicted to them you know what i'm saying like what the fuck dude somebody had a good tweet it was like uh you know we got uh you know basically a nanny state that just wants to legislate dangerous personal choices but in terms of like health care and all these things it's like a fucking fucking, you know, a fucking homicidal free for all.

Exactly. Exactly. Yo, what's insane, too? This is not my original point. Somebody brought up on Twitter, but I think the the the the concealed carry thing was that the states don't have a right to like legislate this. Right. But the abortion thing is like, but the states do have a right to do it. So, like you said, Tom, like the scope of control right it's always like yeah man like we're gonna uh illegally like ban you know all this other shit that helps people get through daily life but the big important stuff like the truly important stuff like health care abortion rights man like these motherfuckers are nowhere to be found you know all they're gonna do is send us a bunch of emails this weekend probably man and tweet about how we need to vote in November, man.

It's fucking disgusting. Yeah. I mean, I don't want to, like, sound the alarm about monkeypox or no shit like that, but we have a vaccine for this shit. And, like, you can't get it anywhere except for, like, two cities in America. You know what I mean? I like how they're, like, I felt like monkeypox fell off for a second, and then it came back. Yeah. And I was like, stop trying to make monkeypox happen, bro.

It's not happening, dog. You can't make monkeypox cool, man. It don't even sound cool. Monkeypox, at least COVID sounds COVID, you know? It sounds like a movie pandemic, you know? It's weird. Yeah, it sounds like somebody in The Sith, you know what I mean? Yeah.

pandemic you know it's weird sounds like somebody in the sith you know what i mean it seems to me that like there are several things going on here that like you've got capitalism you've got you know a political democracy and you've got the individual and like a lot of these forces that were put into motion in like the 20th century that created the modern individual also created to be able to keep the system running and to keep people under control was criminalize the very facets of the modern individual that they created in the 20th century like addiction you know like widespread addiction and like mental health and all this other stuff that is a good that is a good point it's like you introduced all these sort of pernicious things in society that right like addiction done so much damage and everything else and now and now you want to

legislate those things exactly i think it's an individual way though legislate not even regulatory right to the tobacco industry but people's own personal behavior they want to pass the buck to the individual yeah and criminalize their own choices yeah well yeah it just further demonstrates what we've been saying just because we were able to witness here. Our fucking office is right next to the jail. You know what I mean? Like, I just see this every day.

Like, this is the future. I mean, I'm telling you. I'm not, like, making a prediction or a prophecy. That is the future. The future is more jails. Which way, Western man? Yeah, no, that's it. Prisons or podcasting?

Or Presbyterian that's the that's the in between it's us presbyterian church and the jail prison presbyterianism or podcasting your choice yes that's a good title goddamn but yo like i mean even think about like yo that's something you say terrence all the time like you just said just now you reiterated like this is the future like think about like a town like uvalde right why the fuck is that police budget so high why the fuck are there so many cops to police a small town like that yeah you know it's just fucking insane dude and like and like you see the way in which they've been trained to uphold this system that the most the vast majority of

us have either been instructed or instructed to ignore brainwashed to ignore or whatever you see the way in which they've been trained to uphold that system kicks into gear when actual like human uh you know when human crisis comes to the front. They don't know how to respond to it. They don't know how to actually help people. That's the thing. I don't know. It's just like you saw these news.

Well, it's not their function, though. It's not their function. Their function is the state has a monopoly on violence, and they are the foot soldiers of that violence to get to execute that violence however they want to in order to keep a certain social order it was cops were never intended to protect us and to solve crimes or any of that stuff that's just an excuse to keep them perpetually on a payroll exactly if they could if they could they would just call these motherfuckers up when like

they need them you know what i mean but like no what they do in the meantime is they like you know they fee grab they stick and they shorten our pockets up and we pay them to harass us yeah exactly which which stacy abrams uh perspective um um governor of uh georgia she just had a tweet yesterday talking about giving law enforcement. Man, to be honest with you, the ratio was impressive. I've never seen that happen that quickly, which made me feel like Twitter's not real life. But I was kind of like, dog, OK. Someone pointed out.

I wish I could find the Twitter handle real quick. I follow him, but I forgot the Twitter. Someone pointed out that it's the only time she's ever mentioned living wage with regards to the police yeah yes yes exactly yo you know what i was just thinking too man um and again it's probably not a novel idea but like everything that we're talking about like you know using the state the state having a monopoly on violence using the police all of this shit right but and i mentioned last time this idea of like continuity right it's like yes capitalism is like completely like necrotic i mean it's just obsessed with death right but they also need to keep motherfuckers alive you know so it's

like on the one hand it's like the right is doing their whole abortion great replacement like their whole project with continuity and then the liberals are legislating harmful vices and in in this language of like health care and keeping people you know what i'm saying what it's like yeah yo do you just want people like maybe during a pandemic that for a minute they were like hold up not only are bodies dropping quick but people are realizing this and fighting back and resisting this is part of the labor movement right so now we gotta legislate bodies in a way that only keeps them alive so they can fucking work and we can extract from them you know right squeeze them like a stone you know what i mean

i think that there was a kind of new there was a kind of reassessment of the individual and of bodily autonomy that's why i think like twos isn't completely off to start with covid and i think he's actually completely correct to start with covid like you that is the entry point to the crisis there were things that led up to that like obviously 9-11 like that 9-11 is the first world event that has ever happened the first world in my opinion it's the first world event to explain explain every insane thing happening to America right now, I think you literally have to start chapter one. 9-11, 7.53 a.m. If you work for McGraw-Hill, like the textbook company,

and you were like, okay, Terrence, what's your chronology here? And you say, I think we have to start with September 11, 2001. That's what I say. That's where history starts. That's where history starts. The rest of that stuff is... Everything else is buildup. That's all buildup.

That's prologue. Exactly. Foreplay. Foreplay. That was foreplay. Exactly. That was foreplay. And also, that's kind of the Russia-Ukraine thing.

That's what I find so disconcerting about it, is that I can't escape it. You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. But if we were just concerned with international conflict, why don't I know anything about anything else? You know what I mean?

Right. Right. Yeah. Right. Right. It's like the scope... Go ahead, Terrence. Go ahead.

No, no. You go ahead. No, I was just going to say, adding on what Tom said, it's like the scope of knowledge, right? And not just power, but knowledge that you have is constantly being restricted and restricted and restricted. So you're only looking through the telescope of what they want you to look at, you know what I mean? Right.

Oh, man. That's insane, though. All right. I want to take a path. Let's take a path down fucking one of Two's avenues here. Dark Two's? We're taking a twos cruise we're taking a twos cruise through uh the world through his eyes i again i hate to i'm not completely talking shit and honestly i'm not even really smart enough to to talk argue to talk shit or to even argue an alternative joke. Yeah, I can't eat the crumbs off Tuz's table,

but his name is just so conducive to a good Coos joke. You have to. You got to. You got to. Okay, let's start with Omicron. We're going to go to China. From China, let's go to, let's see, pressure on Russia. I'm not sure what that necessarily means.

It's a two-way arrow. From pressure on Russia, we go to risk of nuclear escalation. And that's the end of that road. Okay, all right. This is a fun game. Let's start back at the top. We'll start at Omicron. We'll go to china

now we're going to russian gas boycott okay so did china uh boycott buying russian gas or is it that china is buying gas from russia i think china's buying i know china and russia are always like tight so like i think that i can't imagine china boycotting russia you know what i'm saying like you got against the united states i cannot imagine china joining the anti-russia chorus yeah they would never okay so we've got okay omicron china russian gas boycott from there we've got italian gov under intense pressure damn how did we get to Italy? We get to Italy, yeah, baby. You get the Poison's in there. And that road leads to a Eurozone sovereignty debt crisis risk. Okay, why is it?

There's two risks, nuclear annihilation and Eurozone sovereign debt crisis risk, which is like, I feel like one of those things that's been building up for 20 fucking years like i read that yannis yarafakis isn't that his name like book yeah yeah yeah greek yeah yeah like yeah yeah and that that was like he was like in there in the early 2010s like this was going on even back then like i feel like this is just this thing that's been like building up in europe for 15 fucking years. These recurring rounds of debt restructuring and austerity. Yes, yes, yes.

He's right about that. There was a time there, it was like Greece, this ancient and proud civilization didn't have two nickels to rub together. Right. Germany was calling they were like calling in their debts i think it's what it was right how the mighty have fallen man yeah and ahela

merkel just over there being like hey you got that 10 you owe me you got that 10 yo you know you just made me think about like i'm not saying that actually you could probably say that the united states today is comparable to like ancient rome in its height you know so like now where you have italy that can't rub two nickels together and has to like go into like you know angle of merkel's purse and pick out some change what is the united states gonna look like like two thousand years from now because i know we're asking why the germans are so flush dude what it'll be we don't talk about that though it'll probably be states doing that to each other you know what i'm saying it'll probably be like the the government of california eventually they already do that they already do that right oh yeah we take care of kentucky

west virginia as if there was never a history of complete extraction and gutting of all of our resources before you became what you became. You're right. So you could build your cities and shit like that, man. Okay. Let's take another route. Let me start with Omicron, China. Again, you can only at the beginning start with Omicron and China.

Where the U.Ss comes into play like i think maybe what about the protest over the summer a couple years ago if you zoomed out well i think he's probably i wonder if he he doesn't have that on here so i guess he's talking about like at the global level but that was a little sus but okay it is sus it was kind of it was super glow i mean i don't know man maybe not maybe i mean i live in america so maybe i'm being like america-centric but that felt like a pretty big deal around the world. All right, so here's another direction you could take. Omicron, China.

Oh, wait, I was going to say you could possibly zoom out a little bit and maybe the bubble behind Omicron would be like United States creating Omicron in LA. Perhaps that could be one. It would just be one single dot. That would be so tight. You know what would be so tight is if we had like a White House press conference and Biden was like,

there's been a lot of speculation about this for years, particularly in the NOI communities and so forth, but it's time I'm going to bring out Dr. Yaakov. Dr. Yaakov is yeah but it's time I'm going to bring out Dr. Yacob. Dr. Yacob is yeah, it's like fucking Fauci's down

with COVID, so Dr. Yacob goes step in and be the head of CDC. Dude. Dude. Oh, shit. New CDC director, Dr. Yac director, Dr. Yockum.

Dr. Yockum. Yo. We got a new line of white people coming out this summer. You new white man about to drop? You new white man about to drop. Oh, shit. All right, let's take another route.'s take another let's take another two's crew wait terrence are there any that don't like the second point is it china because it sounds like everyone

you've read so far it's abacus china it's always the second point with him it starts with china okay i don't really know why i guess that's perhaps because that's where Omicron started. But at the same time, just because it started in China doesn't mean that other forces weren't behind it. These days, I don't know how I feel about COVID. Well, he's just talking Omicron. He's not even fucking talking covid i guess omicron is the 2021 strain all right twos you're going in a little too microscopic here i

don't need like the specific strains we don't need the granular baby we need the broad strokes this is podcast that's right he's like a weed dealer trying to tell you like this is a sativa and no motherfucker i just want to get high. Give me the cheapest shit you got. Yeah. Well, I got $20. How high can I get for that?

Oh, I had you a bag of shake. Yeah. Um, let's, we got Omicron China next oil prices from oil prices. That's a flash point for twos you can go in all kinds of different uh directions with that one you could take it one direction oil prices lead

to the climate crisis net zero climate policy that to him that's the broad strokes yeah yeah big broad strokes you could take it to the next risk, which is Biden administration and quote unquote GOP risk. So I think maybe in Two's schematic, like the GOP is a modern like fascist theocratic movement and the Dems just exist to provide a theatrical spectacle for the stripping away of all of our rights. Yeah. But to keep people engaged in the electoral process. Exactly. I'm sure that his analysis of the Dems is exactly like mine. Yeah, yeah.

You could take oil prices to U.S. inflation, which goes to Fed, which goes to stagflation risk. Damn, dog. Okay, listen. We've hit stagflation risk. Damn, dog. Okay, listen. We've hit stagflation risk. If we're playing Pick Your Own Adventure, get me from, let's see. You remember when we were going to do that game where you start on one Wikipedia page and you have to get to another one?

Right, right, right. In like six moves or less. Right, yeah. Let's Kevin Bacon game the twos here and get me from Russian oil crisis to monkey pox. Does he have that? Russian oil crisis? To monkey pox. 2022.

Okay. Because you would think that I could go to like a Wikipedia page, but instead I've got Bloomberg, the second wave of the Russian oil shock. All right. So, but what even is monkey pox? Where did it originate? For more on this, we're going to go to CDC director, Dr. Yaka.

Good evening. Good afternoon. Good evening. Good afternoon. Good evening. See my first model, first version sitting up in the front row? About to drop a new white man? I don't even know what stagflation is.

In economic stagflation or recession inflation is a situation in which the inflation rate is high, the economic made me think, man. Like, yo, I call myself a Marxist, and Marx knew about the machinations of this whole system and sometimes i'm like yo i have no idea what stagflation means i don't know how any of this shit works and i don't feel bad about it well well there's something actually i wanted to read today that actually might help us understand that a little bit better uh because i know very little about it, all right? But I still have some,

I might still have some shit in the tank from when I tried. All right, baby, let's see what he's got. Let's see what I got. You're gonna rig up that stone. First, I guess I need to close the twos tab. Twos says, I don't claim any originality for the exercise, pulling all these well-known influences together. Anyways, I don't know. I don't think twos has for the exercise, pulling all these well-known influences together. Anyways, I don't know.

I don't think Two's has a really Marxist theory of crisis, but between you and us two, because I know no one else is listening, I have no fucking clue what Marxist theory of crisis is. Goddamn, bro. Rest assured somebody's going to tell you soon. Yeah. These guys are fake as hell.

They don't know what they're talking about. Like, you're right. I don't. No, I had no clue. That's why we're going to read an article in the New York Times called Fed Confronts a Quote-Unquote New World of Inflation. Central banks had a longstanding playbook of how inflation worked. In the post-pandemic era, all bets are off.

I think this is an interesting article because it's trying to as far as i understand it economists are for this segment we're gonna have to adopt the the famous disposition taken by former president george bush george w bush who did 9-11 see it's all it's a circle as he famously said I'm an optimist not an economist or

I'm not an economist I'm an optimist same could be said for the three of us we are all optimists here we all must put on our optimist hat. Put on our optimist hat, and we're going to look under the trunk here. I think economists are kind of puzzled as to what is actually causing inflation. But I can't tell if that's a ruse, if they're pretending to be puzzled

because they don't want to admit, like J-PAL doesn't want to admit that they might have to cause a recession to bring prices down. But at the same time, I don't know if that's genuine or not. This article will get into his quotes and shit. But first, I just want to say,

as even a sort of prologue to that there are some other people who think that what is required to bring inflation down is yes a like genocidal vulgar shock 2.0 or something that would like you know cause mass unemployment and uh and that will bring and also i guess interest rates too going up and shit too right i'll go ahead and tell you you can you can buckle up for that but since rose been struck down now they have their thing to run on so they can go ahead and engineer the recession and all that stuff that's fine yeah you know it's it's weird though because i feel like they're kind of caught because i would imagine that the the Biden administration is trying to tell the central like the Fed to be like, we've got midterms coming up.

We have to do something. Right, right, right, right. Like, I don't think they want to completely admit that they're going to do that yet. But I think their actions show that they are doing that because they are there. Yeah, there are rising interest rates they've been they've been raising rates for the past couple but wasn't wasn't the head of the fed asked by warren the other day if uh if if if this was going to actually help like lower the price like rising interest rates if that was going to help lower the price of like gas and food

and he straight up said no not quite yeah yeah it was basically it's almost exactly what he said um former treasurer secretary lauren summers said the jobless rate would need to rise above five percent for a sustained period in order to curb inflation that's running at the hottest pace in four decades we need five years of unemployment above five percent to contain inflation. In other words, we need two years of 7.5% unemployment or five years of 6% unemployment or one year of 10% unemployment. You know what we need for Lawrence Summers? We need to put him at the top of one of those really high buildings

in the Middle East that are sacred sites, and we need to let an ancient bird peck at his liver every day. Until there's no more like, what was that in Greek mythology? Peck it as like a small intestine, a crow or some shit. That's what we need

for Larry Summers. He needs a mythological punishment. Also, dude, I don't think we've really explored the Mariana Trench. That might be something that we could say to the delegate. No, no, no, bro. I gotta push back.

He's... The Mariana Trench ain't gonna do it. We need to cast this motherfucker in the river Styx. Just... No other way skeleton hands reaching up and pulling him under yes does it water yeah yes hell yeah hell yes oh my god now if you're listening to this and have no idea what the fuck any of that really means the point is that these people view you basically as just another cog like they this is how capitalist democracy manages an economy i mean you're a number on a ledger is what you are and they just move you from you know things happen the column yes things happen within an economy like inflation a bunch of economists sit down and based on their

own ideological sort of premises they come up with a conclusion for why inflation exists then they fight that out in the political arena and xyz happens uh yeah i mean basically the point being is that like capitalism does exist on a set of laws that aren't you know readily apparent or available that because they're not natural right exactly um and but at the same time uh there are ways to because it creates crises in political economy the political systems have to do something about it so they or have the spectacle of doing or do something about it and then have a spectacle of as if they're addressing it with regard to your welfare. Exactly.

That's exactly right. This is already predetermined. They were already going to do this. The minute they found out this was going to happen, that's just the way the shit works. Right. So, yeah. So, basically, people have different ideas on how this goes. Anyways, you know, and like I said, we've...

All right, wait, wait, hold on. Let me find this article. Okay. Yeah, New York Times. Fed confronts a new world of inflation. Federal Reserve officials are questioning whether their longstanding assumptions about inflation still apply as price gains remain stubbornly and surprisingly rapid,

a bout of economic soul-searching that could have big implications for the American economy. For years, Fed policymakers had a playbook for handling inflation surprises. They mostly ignored disruptions to the supply of goods and services when setting monetary policy, assuming they would work themselves out. The Fed guides the economy by adjusting interest rates.

Maybe that's causative. What we did before was just how we just rolled them on out. Right. We let the fever pass. We just let the fever pass. Yeah, we just let it pass. The confusions to the body. Yeah.

Worst thing you could do is bow to a fever. worst thing you could do is bow to a fever i mean basically i hope after reading this article you come away with an indication of just how deranged capitalism is and how completely irrational completely nonsensical that it is um the fed guides the economy by adjusting interest rates which influence demand so keeping consumption and business activity chugging along at an even keel was the primary focus. But after the global economy has been rocked for two years by nonstop supply crises, from shipping snarls to the war in Ukraine, central bankers have stopped waiting for normality to return. They have been raising interest rates aggressively to slow down consumer and business spending and cool the economy.

And they are reassessing. It's also, it's weird. It's like there's no mention of that, you know, there's no mention in that of, I don't know, like rising labor militancy. The fact that you've got people like Starbucks and shit, like unionizing. Amazon, yeah. Like they used to talk about that, you know, when they talked about the business, like talked about business, like, you know, 70 years ago in the business press. But it's weird to like not factor that into their decisions. Like surely they fucking care about that because they they run around in the same circles as the fucking capitalists.

And so, of course, they care. They know about it about it but if they acknowledge it that means that it's real you know well and it and it means that wages are going to go up and that's going to in their schematic that means that prices are also going to go up and that inflation you're just going to be caught in the spiral to them they're helpless to do anything but destroy the worker that's the way they say it they church it up in all this fancy language but what they're telling you is like we're like i'm helpless i have to fuck you over you don't understand yeah also too it's almost it's almost like you're really behind that it means like oh y'all got too uppity so now we have to lay down the law you know let me ask you a question i was talking to uh my cousin who's in logistics and he was talking about the degree to which like a lot of these shortages

are manufactured so they can like like make prices go up and stuff like that right like like how does that fit into all this you know what i mean like how does a motherfucker pull up at taco bell and see the mexican pizza as popularity has been underestimated by this chain this location and it's out how does how does stuff like that i'm being facetious but how does stuff like that connect to that overall labor militancy and everything you think i don't know i see i've stopped i see I stumped the panel. You stumped the two. I'll go ask twos. That shit went right over. A man that knows some things. Say the first part of the question again.

No, I'm just curious how, and I don't know either. I'm just thinking out loud. But I'm curious. Like, you see these things, and it's like uh you know you go to arby's for lunch or something i truly i can't be the only one to listen to ship frequent to arby's right yeah and it's like this and this and this are not available right now and it's like they kind of chalk it up as to the ongoing supply chain crisis right never but i'm told by those in the know that much of that is manufactured itself.

Interesting. Like the shortages and stuff like that. I'm just wondering how those dots connect. You know what I mean? And I'm not saying there's not shortages because of like, you know what I mean? No, no, no, no, no. A lot of motherfuckers died that were in places like the global south where they make things and send them to this piece of shit. You know what I mean?

Listen to this article I just saw on Reuters. Shout out Sean KB for putting this out old is gold sky-high cost of aging ships sounds it sounds inflation sos okay the fucking title sucks ass the basic the takeaway from it though shipping companies are transforming rust buckets into gold mines in a modern day alchemy that could fuel already rampant inflation for years to come. The disruption of world trade caused by blah, blah, blah. Cashing in on the boom, shipping firms are locking in long-term leases lasting three to four years, which means consumers could carry on paying the price for the surging costs

until hundreds of new ships on order come into service. Like, they are basically insuring high prices, both throughout a crisis that is manufactured, but throughout the short-term future as well like they're seeing sky high i mean you saw this fucking biden even admitted to this the other day he said something about like oil companies profiting off of this like getting sky high fucking profits and they just flip shit you know what i mean that of course they're going to like get the implication that they are fucking profiting off of this yeah yeah oh man dude i don't know man

like that's what i was talking to my mom the other day and i mean even i think even like like the lay person which i mean i mom i don't i don't know anything about this my mom doesn't know anything about the shit most people fucking don't write about the things that we're talking about here but like even she kind of thought about it was like hey i feel like all this is manufactured you know and i was like yo you might be on to something moms you might be um let's see after the global economy has been rocked for two years by non-stop supply crises all right it's from shipping start we read that um they are assessing how inflation might evolve in a world where it seems that the problems may just keep coming all right that's that's another interesting thing i wanted to point out about this article the premise is that the world is

increasingly chaotic and complex and the good news is there's no end in sight exactly nothing we can do about it either i think you're right tom like what the fuck is causing the supply line crisis? I mean, okay, were things so fucked up and disrupted in 2020 that they just couldn't untangle all? Was it like a mass of microphone cords like in our studio that I have to spend like eight hours fucking untangling and stuff? Like, does it really work like that? Like, I thought in capitalism everything was streamlined. And if not, yes, I thought in capitalism everything was streamlined and if not yes i thought in capitalism

everything was supposed to be streamlined and guided by the invisible hand and all this if it can get that fucked up isn't that kind of a testament to maybe we should start looking at dog there's no way like i'm thinking about it and maybe it's a facile understanding but you know they made so much fucking money during the initial first two years of the pandemic they're still making so much fucking money obscene obscene amounts of money but we have supply uh supply we have supply shortages we have like i'm calling bullshit what the work condition you know what i'm saying like lowering wages and shit like that and just like it's totally incongruous how are you making record profits and you have no product?

These articles, dude, you're exactly fucking right. Because reading this article, and I also read Paul Krugman's column this week, the tones of both of those articles are like, who could have possibly done this? Like they're looking around with their microscope, their Sherlock Holmes. The motherfuckers who made money? Yeah, exactly. Who could have possibly done this?

I'm going to put Krugman up there and larry summers with that bird coming to peckham making a flock of birds instead it is so crazy how they've like dematerialized the capitalists they're like oh well it wasn't the capitalists don't blame them who could have possibly caused skyrocketing inflation like i don't know the fucking people who make the goddamn prices well well terrence everything has to be dematerialized because like all of these motivations and causes and things are just like like abstracted and just floating like cigarette smoke in the air you know what i'm saying yeah like none of it can be tied to any specific individual or specific system right of economics like it's always just like, well, we don't know.

Well, none of it matters. I think probably the thing that drives me nuts about, like, the sort of, and I'm not, and listen, I'm not casting aspersions, because I was on the Bernie train, all that kind of shit, okay? But the thing that kind of drives me nuts when people, particularly liberals, talk about, like, voting at the ballot box and all that stuff is, it's's like none of that stuff matters anymore. Elon Musk is the governor of Texas, effectively.

Right. You know what I mean? No. These are old ways of ordering the world that are just there. Congress and the Senate and all these branches of government are essentially the Queen of England now. Just figureheads, you know? In there sort of, like, for the window dressing.

I'd say they have one remaining purpose at this point, which is budget negotiations. Literally, the only thing that they do is allocate where the fucking money goes. Yeah. And they, what, their one one job all they fucking do they show up one day give 800 trillion dollars to the pentagon and just say to the pentagon and the rest to like nine other dudes right and then like yeah basically they're accountants for like the war machine and the nine beneficiaries of the war Right. You know what I was thinking about, too? Like, in regards to all of that and the Supreme Court and shit.

It's like, you know, people love to write columns and love to theorize, right? I mean, to some extent, like, you know, we do it, too. And other people like us do it, too. Like, pathologize this shit. You know what I'm saying? But really, it doesn't really make sense to pathologize that. just gonna do whatever the fuck they want to do you know they have like the license now to just get away with it and it doesn't mean it doesn't matter about catching them in hypocrisies right or pointing out anything like that because not only do they have any shame

but there's no public power to hold them accountable anymore you know like there's no mass politics to do any of this shit. So they can say whatever the fuck they want and change the rules as they go. And we just have to grin and eat shit. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Like, I've been grinning and eating shit for too long, boys. 31 years, man.

Been at this 35, 36 years now. Grinning and eating shit. Damn, dog. You're right. They have to keep up the theater of it, though. I mean, I don't know. I feel like one of the defining features of fascism is theater. I feel like that is, I mean, if you look at even the third reich like all the things

they did it's so theatrical and so like i mean it could be that the future the crisis everyone keeps talking about is coming is here in like a proto form you know what i mean it's sort of like the the fascism being that like the liberals will continue to do this entire theatrical exercise and not actually use government as an instrument of power at all while the conservatives use government as an instrument of power to lay down the legal foundations of the coming just you know catastrophic uh crisis that whatever you want to call techno fascism or whatever that's coming you know what i will say about tues though he's totally got it and you were saying this tom is 9-11 was kind of a paradigm shift right and covet is also a paradigm shift and it makes sense that even though he

starts with omicron twos i mean i thought you would start with the first train but whatever yeah like the first train this is a preview and a test run for the ruling class and like of how they're going to handle crisis and we are seeing this shit play out not only are these motherfuckers going to make mad money but they're going to push through the most draconian shit possible because that window is wide fucking open for them to do it because everything has been changed and it's never going back all these fucking good no no no you go ahead i was just gonna say all these fucking powerful people hang out together like i really can't stress that enough why do you think that like every time you're slightly suspicious of a ceo like did they hang out with epstein and gizlaine and you find a

photo and they did it's like yeah they all hang out together regardless of their ideology they're trying to fucking kill you and so i guarantee chris Chris Rock is in there too somehow I don't know how the fuck Chris Rock Chris Tucker damn my bad Chris Rock that man's been through enough okay I forgot between the two black Chris's my bad

wow wow all black people look alike what do you mean you people my people Wow, wow. All black people look alike. What do you mean, you people, Eric? My people? Yeah. Oh, shit. Dude, but, like, I guarantee you that, like,

it may just be as simple as, like, the Supreme Court people, like Amy Coney Barrett and Clarence Thomas, whatever, they literally hang out with people like Bezos maybe not Bezos literally but other powerful people they run around in the same circles they're like guys we're getting away with everything right now we're getting away with everything just fucking go for gold it feels like we're living

honestly it feels like we're living in some sort of laboratory where they're just like standing over us and like dissecting like owl shit you know to get the little mole bones out. Yeah, stop to Yaka's lab. Dr. Yaka's lab. God, it really is.

Okay, after the global economy has been rocked for two years by nonstop supply crises, from shipping snarls to the war on Ukraine, central bankers have stopped waiting for normalcy to return. I've read that sentence like three motherfucking times. I still don't know. This is just like me sitting down like, I'm going to read this book. Before I know it, my brain

is so addled, I just read the same page like five times before I keep going further. If the Fed determines that shocks are unlikely to ease or will take so long that they leave inflation elevated for years, the result could be an even more aggressive series of rate increases as policymakers try to quash demand into balance with a more limited supply of goods and services. That painful process would ramp up the risk of a recession that would cost jobs and shutter businesses.

uh drone pal uh fed chair said this the disinflationary forces of the last quarter century have been replaced at least temporarily by a whole different set of forces oh shit dog look at my fed chairman i'm going i'm definitely going to hell like if the chairman's like this is a new world boys he sounds like he kind of also sounds like adam curtis like adam curtis always saying uh the new the new forces and shit like that. Yeah, man. The new forces. The new forces. The new set of forces.

The real question is, how long will this new set of forces be sustained? We can't know that. But in the meantime, our job is to find maximum employment and price stability in this new economy. When prices began to pick up rapidly in early 2021, top Fed policymakers joined many outside economists in predicting that the change would be transitory. Inflation had been slow in America for most of the 21st century, weighed down by long-running trends like the aging of the population and globalization. It seemed that one-off pandemic shocks, especially a used car

shortage and ocean shipping issues, should fade with time and allow that trend to return. But by late last year, central bankers were beginning to rethink their initial call. Supply chain problems were becoming... This kind of answers your question from earlier, Tom. Even shit like used car shortages are factored into the stew here, man. It's the broth. They got put.

That's insane. Used car shortages. Yeah. But by late last year, central bankers were beginning to i mean you can see why it's like perfect for like for people who do hold the ideology of capitalism like they really do believe in it as a a force they may critique it like paul krugman but at the end of the day they they believe in it as a stabilizing force for distributing resources. And that's interesting. You can see the way that that opinion is bending.

It is completely – it's being pushed to the utmost stress. For example, Robert Reich, you remember him? I feel like he is exactly like Krugman. Like, those two, they have got to be the same guy. They were made in the same... Right, right. Yeah, if you see Krugman and Reich and the two guys in the same room look identical, just remember Reich is the one that's four feet tall.

He's the short guy. He's saying now that Liz Cheney should be the next president. I mean, you see the way they're believing in capitalism. The short king, he's pulling for Liz in the booth. Dog, Blake. Go ahead. No, I don't know. I'm just saying.

Rock's one of those guys you want to like, and then you just like, up to the microscope, you're like, okay. Like, ew, okay. How much can you really trust a recycled Clinton not? You know what I mean? I mean, these are people who still think

that capitalism can work, or you can make this whole system benevolent and work for people. That's why they're arriving at extremely pained, enforced takes like Liz Cheney should be the next president. Because they don't have a comprehensive or holistic critique of capitalism. They just see it as a separate force from politics. And they're completely confused as to why the political system has completely degenerated. Because they just think it's the people in charge.

Yeah, like democracy is incompatible with capitalism. And it's like you're seeing the fucking convulsions of that. But they don't have a critique of capitalism that's sort of holistic like that. So that's why they're coming up with like, oh, she can save... Liz Cheney, listen to yourself. Liz Cheney's gonna fucking save the dying republic?

You know what, too? I mean, it is just so unironically full circle. Listen to yourself. Bro, you talking about the daughter of one of the fucking, like, advocates and the people that pushed fucking the Iraq War, you know what I'm saying? Like, it's just insane that this is the person

that you're talking about should be, like, leading us into the second half of the 21st century. It's just completely just deranged. I just want one of these howdy-doody motherfuckers. You know what I want? I want somebody just to...

It's like the Anton Chigurh thing. Just admit your position. There's gonna be a lot more dignity in it. There'd be a lot more dignity in it. This is the one game where you can't. It's truly in life. This is the one game where you can't it's it's truly in life this is the one game where you can't admit your position and that my friends is called ideology when you can't admit your position here that's ideology dog god damn uh when yet okay blah blah blah but by late last year central bankers were beginning to rethink their

initial call supply chain problems were becoming worse not better instead of fading again how do we know that is that a thing that is uh or like true objectively or is it something that like we're taking capitalists at their word you're you're i think you're right tom i think there might be something to that to that the idea that, like, this is kind of manufactured. I don't know. I could be wrong. Maybe that's, like, ridiculous to think, but we shouldn't take capitalists.

Maybe we should interview, like, you know, union officials or workers. Maybe that would give us a better idea. Well, none of this is, like I said earlier, none of this shit is natural, right? But, like, capitalist realism, like, it means that you have to see like this the economy as like a natural law like you know what i'm saying as if like as easy as like fucking breathing air or drinking water or something like that you know yeah you're right and then as such it can be like

they kind of see it like an ecosystem in the sense that like you can make changes to it that will keep it in a state of stability. That's a dying breed, man. There's not a lot of people like that out there anymore, I don't feel like. Like Robert Reich. I feel like one example is the MMT people. Yeah, like Stephanie Kelton.

Yeah, what is the name of that? Like Modern Monetary Theory? Modern Monetary Theory. Something like that. I thought you meant Mountain. Yeah, Mountain Community Radio. I thought you meant mountain. Yeah, mountain community radio. WMMT. WMMT.

Yeah. A little white shirt joke. Who's he talking about? Barefoot Nelly trying to... Trying to fix the economy? Be better and better than anybody else's doing it now, bitch. But yeah, so supply chains. Instead of fading, price increases had accelerated and broadened beyond a few pandemic-affected categories.

Economists have made a monthly habit of predicting that inflation has peaked, only to see it continue to accelerate. Now, Fed policymakers are analyzing what so many people missed and what it says about the unrelenting inflation burst. Jay Powell said, oh, go ahead, Aaron. No, no, no, go ahead, Terrence. I want to go ahead no no no go ahead terrence i'm with you go ahead j pal said of course we've been looking very carefully and hard at why inflation picked up so much more than expected last year and why it proved so persistent it's hard to overstate this is a funny quote it's hard to overstate the extent of interest we have in that question morning noon and night

they like they're like we it's hard to overstate the extent of interest we have in why inflation is occurring. No, first of all, you're lying. But secondly, like, what? Yo, I want to know what other profession or career can you have and be paid for and trusted with the public trust. Right. Where you have no idea what the fuck, what you studied and spent money and resources, fucking time time and you don't know how to explain this shit dog you don't even know how to explain it in a sense of the brightest minds dude it is just like it's just like insane you know what i'm saying like they're just like magicians who don't

understand their own fucking spells you know what i mean i think that's it you're right dude there that is very significant because i think it says that is very significant because I think it says – That is a good way to put it. That is very significant because I think it says that their ideologies or their explanations for why I think this is occurring are kind of outdated. There is a kind of vacuum in legitimacy in monetary policy probably. If we take him at his word and he really is completely baffled, I mean, I think that this is, again, probably something being engineered by the capitalists. Like, we have to understand, again, you need a Marxist conception of this. This is probably something engineered by the capitalists because another thing that happened during COVID

was a rise, I don't even know if you can put it quantitatively, and it sounds like I'm putting it quantitatively, but there was a rise in class consciousness. We had a reassessment of what it meant to be a worker and a reassessment of class. And that's why I think that you're seeing a lot of organization efforts. And I think that you have to view what's going on at these sort of macro levels as a response to worker militancy like they're trying

to fucking kill us basically i'll give you one i'll give you one quantitative example um last month the nlr nlrb received its 1000th um like filing for unionization that milestone wasn't reached last year until october right that's just literally just one little data point so if you think that all of this shit isn't engineered to crush the shit out of working people and to punish us for getting too uppity i don't know what to tell you they study that like i cannot stress that enough like they fucking know what's going on with the labor force at all times that's part of the fucking game if you're a capitalist you are in constant war with the worker and so you are constantly sitting

down and saying like how can we fuck them over it's not a conspiracy that's literally part of one of the laws that is supposed to be invisible that no one wants to admit to this is a coercive you know competitive laws of capitalism you have to fuck over the worker um the fed has been reacting it slowed and then halted its pandemic era bond purchases this winter and spring and i might add that they may be overplaying their hand i mean like there are developments that happen in the political sphere that impact this but like they may be overplaying their hand who the fuck knows i mean it's um well they're not in control of this shit like it's if it's well they are in control because we just talked about that so they are but i feel like it's gotten too far away from them you know

what i'm saying look at as a as an imbalance in basically like resources i mean like they yes the world as an objective thing a unified global community there is no one person in charge of that or even really a group of people like i think that the class struggle is the thing that you know sort of is sort of universal like the universal condition and like you you play out in that game on a large chess board of the global economy or whatever. And on their side, they have the fucking nukes and tanks and monetary policy and all that. And on our side, it's not looking like we have a whole lot of fucking resources. And that's why we on this show advocate for if you are rich and want to do something about your class privilege, buy a nuke for the working class.

It's a one-time offer. We're offering nukes for the working class. Small personal nukes. Small personal handheld nuclear devices. If you can split atoms, you can have your own. I mean, you gotta be able to figure out if fucking

Richard Feynman and Oppenheimer and the boys can circle jerk out in the new mexico desert come up with a hydrogen bomb surely to god we can get a nuclear weapon yeah there'd be no more there'd be no more of this fucking hand wringing like i said like why won't they rise up like why why is everything bad happening why you know why are there doomers and all this there'd be no more of that if you even the fucking playing field you know you know what i'll say man i kind of unironically you know partially most of the reason in my opinion unironically the the united states has been like uh like we've never nuked another country after that because they got fucking nukes dog give the working class the only way to deal with this

shit is to give us the tools that we fucking need and we have to match we have to match what they got that we have to match it so if you are the heir of Raytheon and you want to use your money to

advance don't start a non-profit develop a nuclear weapon for the working class buy a massive compound bunker in the middle of the desert stuff it full of motherfucking nukes and tanks and whatever staff the whole fucking place with like a militarized zone a dmz or something around it and then just say all right that's for you workers of the world that's yours that you can that is that is me helping you level listen bro the homies the homies in southwest atlanta getting a shipment of nuclear armaments men to fight off the atlanta police that is all they

fucking need that would be so tight i mean you know there'd be things to manage in terms of whatever, but like what we should do is just as a working class, we should write a version of Khrushchev's letter to Kennedy. Yes. We don't want to bring war to the billionaire cretins of the world, but if they bring it to us, we'll see them in hell. God damn, son. Dude, I don't mean to imply a second ago, I don't mean to imply that there aren't powerful people

that are running the world. Because I'm just saying that they engage in conspiracy to advance their position on that chessboard. But they haven't won entirely yet. That's one of the things about capitalist realism and neoliberalism, the idea that there is no alternative and that the working class is lost forever.

It's not. I don't know where this idea came from. It's still obviously trying to advance its own position in that conflict. Because it can exist in complete, like, I mean, I guess the only other flip side of that is like true, like explicit fascism, right? Which is a negation of life. Like it has to like allow like some, the mechanisms and the impulses that allow it to work, this

like community, like, like like community not community but i guess working together i guess you could say some sort of collectivism like those are the same things which will or will have to use to like resist right and break free of that shit you know what i mean yes i guess it's like what they're gonna they're they're they're selling us the the rope of which which we'll use to hang them so to speak right right right right right absolutely um oh yeah so yeah like and like you were saying you know they've also you know been engaging the fed has been reacting it slowed and then halted its pandemic era bond purchases this winter and spring and it is now shrinking its asset holdings to take a little bit of juice out of markets in the economy the central bank has also ramped up its plan to

raise interest rates uh it is making these those decisions without much of an established game plan, given the surprising ways in which the economy is behaving. It's just vibes, bro. It's just vibes. It's just vibes, man. We've spent a lot of time as a committee, and I've spent a lot of time personally looking at history. Patrick Harker, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia,

said in an interview on Wednesday, nothing quite fits this situation. Very interesting. Then it has a picture of gas prices. The economic era before the pandemic was stable and predictable. America and many developed economies spent those decades grappling with inflation

that seemed to be slipping ever lower. Consumers had come to expect prices to remain relatively stable, and executives knew that they could not charge a lot more without scaring them away. so then what you're saying is it is possible that executives charge more but you you're saying they're not doing it right now interesting shocks shocks to supply but it's weird it's like it's it's a weird admission that they do do that and can but it's like it doesn't factor into what might be happening

right now anyway well because he also never mentions why they decide not to right it's just that we're supposed to take it at face value that the circumstances have not left that option open to them right right and that and that's in that capitalists look out for the interest of the global community in the economy and not just fucking themselves exactly exactly shocks to supply that were outside the feds control like oil or food shortages might push up prices for a while but they typically fade quickly now the whole idea of transient supply shocks is being called into question the global supply of goods has been curtailed by one issue after another since the onset of the

pandemic from lockdowns in china that slowed the production of computer chips and other goods through russia's invasion of uk, which has limited gas and food availability. That's another thing. I could be wrong about this, but I thought one of the reasons that gas was up wasn't necessarily because of the invasion of Ukraine. I thought it was because of the sanctions we put on Russia. Isn't that kind of part of...

Yes, that's what I thought too. It's an interesting omission. Or interesting way to phrase events, or like, you know, a contextualized event. Right, right. I don't know, is that true, Tom? With your experience, would you say

the sanctions we put on Vladimir Putin... Yeah, we've hit him where it hurts, and it's come back to bite us. The chicken's coming home to rest. That's my analysis. At the same time, demand has been heady, boosted by government pandemic relief checks and strong labor market. Businesses have been able to charge more for their limited supply,

and consumer prices have been picking up sharply, climbing 8.6% over the year through May. Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco released this week found that demand was driving about one-third of the current jump in inflation, while issues tied to supply or some ambiguous mix of supply and demand factors were driving about two-thirds. There's really not anything we can do about oil prices, J-PAL said. There is a job to moderate and depend,

but it also means that if the supply shortages that are driving so much of inflation today fail to ease, the Fed could need a more punishing response. And then you get recession. We get the danger zone. Then that's when you get into the danger zone. Da-na-na-na. Anyways, you get more on Ukraine.

Long story short, okay, as the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond said, there's all these fucking Federal Reserve Banks. Fuck off. That's what I say. Yeah, it's just not real. What about the Federal Reserve Bank of Whitesburg? Let's ask the Federal Reserve Bank of Whitesburg. That's us.

We just like nervously. I don't know. I'm about to hit. Don't ask me. The supply chain is whack-a-mole, said this guy. That's the smartest thing that's been said yet. Yeah. Yeah, right?

Yeah. People say you solve one problem and then you have another one. For now, central bankers are trying to quickly lift interest rates to a place that clearly restrains the economy. We have to find price stability in this new world jpal said last week so anyways long story short um they are trying to probably engineer a recession i i saw i saw an article in financial times that was like yeah no the united states is definitely heading for recession yo absolutely man and again like i mentioned earlier it really just struck me like you know like there's that lenin quote there are there are days when decades happen and weeks where

decades have something like that right there are weekends where decades happen or there are there are weekends where you wish that you wish the weekend didn't happen. There are weekends when you wish your mother never met your father. There are weekends when you just wish your mother never met your father. That is true. We're all here because two motherfuckers got on some loose shit one night and that's it. I didn't ask for this shit.

Fucked your whole shit up. Well, so that probably about covers it, right? You know, I'm glad we decided to re-record this week, and we censored ourselves. Like, the good... We did. That's the thing. We recorded a whole fucking hour episode about the famous New York mag piece and decided, what the fuck were we we recorded a whole fucking like hour episode about the famous new york mag

piece and decided what the fuck were we thinking i i got i got fucked up then that's that's like when i was talking about reading it you know i i likened it to eat a dog throwing up its food and then eating it and throwing it up and eating it i got like food poisoning off of it. And that's the result. That episode was the result of that. You got us all sick, man. I got us all sick. And the thing is, is it occurred to me after I was thinking about that episode,

like, should we put it out or not? Like, blah, blah, blah. That basic question is really what pisses Barry Weiss and everybody off so much. That they have to ask like that they have that they would be censored in any way at any time like they couldn't ever just fly off the handle and say some shit that they might regret and not be like punished for it i guess relentlessly attacked relentlessly attacked for it but at the same time maybe i should maybe i

just need to say fuck it maybe barry Weiss and the crew at Austin University, they know that you just got to speak your motherfucking mind. Listen, man, I will say on the flip side, sometimes there's a lot to be said about a person with great humility, enough to censor themselves and spare anyone else the agony of the trouble. Yeah, man, it's just like, you know, it's a very mature thing to do. It's like wearing deodorant in public. You know what I mean?

And we're not looking for a pat on the back or a medal on how... Except Aaron. You can pat him on the back. If you see him on the street, pat him on the back and say, good job, young man, not publishing that episode that may have got you in trouble.'re gonna get somebody knocked out terrence don't tell them that it was not a yeah sorry i don't mean it's

smart thinking young blood and they just click you there click click click yeah i'm just kidding i'll put the episode out uh you know right with this one i'll put out a three hour episode where the first part is sound like a bad idea let's start doing that dude let's record like seven episodes and let's start putting out like eight hour episodes a week so people could binge on them like it's stranger things and some shit like that we go like bad boy mode once a week so like it for a different patreon tier you get your normal two episodes but you also get a band episode you could you could hear me say edward aaron lets the slurs fly and then like the description says

the description says they're trying not to let you hear this but yeah you got to do like the debating like the right wing sort of framing and baiting of it yeah they don't want you to hear eric say slurs yeah i want i want to reach a point of singularity where we're like people have us on all day 24 hours and we get to a point where we can just start telling people how to live their lives just completely running every aspect of their life like now it's time for you to sleep that's our longer term project to tell you when to go to bed. The Trill Billy is becoming the cultural backdrop for a whole entire generation.

For a whole entire generation. Audio backdrop. I would tell them to read the most deranged articles. All the most deranged articles. You think you're not going to read this and weigh in? Guess what, motherfucker? You're reading it and weighing in, bitch.

Oh, shit, man. All right. All right. Well, if you want to read it and weigh in, go to Patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com slash Trillbilly Workers Party. Where you can hear me say slurs. That's right. slash Trillbilly Workers Party.

Where you can hear me say slurs. That's right. You can hear me say slurs. There's no marketing ploy too cheap for us to employ. So go over there. Thanks for listening this week. We'll see you next time. Bye. Peace out.