Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 442: The Get Big Era (w/ Special Guests: Tara Rhaghuveer & Josh Poe)

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

Our friends Tara and Josh of TUF (Tenant Union Federation) join us to talk the latest in tenant organizing around the country and the importance of that organizing in the south in particular. Check their work out here: https://tenantfederation.org/

Welcome everybody to Trillillillies for the week of Derby Week. But we're still a little bit in April, Thursday, April 30th. I'm your host, Tom Sexton. Join me, as always, is my right-hand man, Mr. Terrence Ray. Hello, everybody. And joining us this week, return guest, Mr. Josh Poe, with the Louisville Tenants Union. Hey, Tom. Thanks for having us back. Hey, Terrence.

Hello. Since we were last on the show, the Louisville Tenant Union has expanded to the Kentucky Tenant Union. So we're now a statewide. So we're statewide. We're statewide. I'm sorry. I didn't mean the pigeonhole. It was a good. It was a good way to intro it. Hell yeah. And join us for the first time. Tara Ragivir. Did I butcher your last name, Tara? Or is that pretty good? No, that was pretty great, Tom.

Nice to meet you. Thanks for having me. Hell yeah. Well, I guess let's just jump in right there. Let's talk about our expansion here out of Louisville and into the bluegrass at large. What's the latest? Give us the happenings. The scoop.

Will, I can't remember the last time we were on. I think it was last November. Is that right? Yeah, this is our record. It feels like a long time ago. Yeah, we had known for a long time that we needed to organize outside. to Louisville for a lot of reasons, right? And we had a landlord in Louisville that we had organized their building and we saw that they had other buildings out in the state. So we went to scout

those buildings. And what we found was a high level of retaliation. The property management companies did not want us to talk to the tenants there. Threatened us called the police, threatened to beat our ass. He used a lot of physical intimidation, which let us know that we probably need to be out there. We also, we passed legislation in Louisville in 2023, and the state GOP basically cut a deal with Louisville mayor to give him development dollars and the state GOP can do whatever they want. So we knew that any legislation we passed in Louisville was going to get preempted at the state level, especially if it really protected tennis. Like if it's a really good legislation, the state GOP is going to preempt that, and that means that no one in the state has that protection.

anymore. So we didn't want to take our members through a lengthy legislative campaign just to have it snatched away from them by the state GOP. And the other reason, and I think this is at a higher level, is we have to organize rural people. There's no way to push back on the tide of fascism without organizing rural white people. And since the Kentucky Democratic Party has abandoned these areas, it's created this sort of base of reactionary fascism in places like eastern Kentucky. So, you know, for instance, the Kentucky Democratic Party didn't even run candidates this year in over half the districts in the state. So I think you can make the case that, you know, the Kentucky Democratic Party is barely existing at this point outside of some liberal enclaves. I argue the national parties hanging on by threat.

Exactly. And, you know, the world's changed more in the last two years. I think it has in the previous 40. And a lot of people just aren't getting this. They're not getting the shift. So we feel like the tenant movement is well positioned to go into rural areas and give people something to fight for that has a material impact in their lives that can actually improve their lives in a way that they see tangibly, much different than electoral politics.

And we can also build economic power that way and build cross racial solidarity, which just isn't happening right now. So we decided to organize six. There were six buildings originally, all owned by one landlord based in Texas, horrible conditions in these buildings. Who was the landlord again? We talked about it last time. It's called OSPM.

Initially it was made up of three investors, two Israeli investors, and one guy in Texas. Throughout this campaign, we actually got the two Israeli investors to divest, and now it's solely owned by the guy in Texas. So yeah, corporate landlord, trying to build a huge portfolio around the country, got properties in Texas, New Jersey, Illinois, Ohio, and then Sixth, and Kentucky. And we launched that campaign, tried a lot of different tactics to bring the landlord to the table. Our goal was to do a rent strike.

These are all HUD properties. So, you know, in a HUD property, the tenant's income is supplemented. So it's harder to do a rent strike because the government's paying some of that rent, right? We never got to, we never organized enough tenants around the state to actually do that rent strike, but we still managed to win. We made a huge pivot in January and February and we're able to bring the landlord to the table for bargaining. And we actually had Tara come in to lead that bargaining session. Tara flew in to Mount Sterling. Flew into Lexington.

I flew into Louisville, ended up in Mount Sterling, Kentucky at the public lawn. library where we negotiated the first collectively bargain lease in the south, the first in HUD properties, and what may be the largest in terms of the number of units that it covered in recent history in the country. Tarwell, I got to ask Mount Sterling, Kentucky, probably not exactly New York City. What was your initial impressions? Different terrain than what you're used to bargaining on, I'm sure. Right, exactly.

Well, I'm based in Missouri. Most of my bargaining. Most of my bargaining has gone down in crummy-ass apartments in Raytown, Missouri, and Independence, Missouri, and God knows where. So it wasn't that big of a change for me. But I will say, you know, we did this bargaining session in the public library in Mount Sterling, Kentucky. God bless the public librarians because we were in this room, this little room that we had rented for three and a half hours with this Texas landlord Jason Astro. And in the beginning, it was all okay, like the vibes were all okay. By the end, though, we were yelling at each other.

And I was running in and out of the room to print our term sheet multiple times. And the people at the front desk were, I think they were like, what the hell is going on? Who is this little brown girl? Why does she keep demanding basically the same document with a couple little tweaks? Why is she yelling at this man in the other room? But it was a lot of fun. And the crew that Josh and the team organized in these properties is really amazing. I mean, this 80-year-old tobacco farmer named Ms. Pauline was at the bargaining table,

Mary Lou, Ms. Rosa, these badass women named Heather and Kimberly. Kimberly was the chair of the meeting. And there's a woman named Amber who's also been part of this team. And the retaliation that Josh was describing, I had been kind of tracking it from a distance for the last year. But this is some of the most intense retaliation for organizing that I think any of us has ever seen in tenant organizing in the modern era across the country. The property manager was hiring people to beat people up. People were actually assaulted.

They were paying staff to wear shirts that said, fuck the tenant union. It was really intense. So the fact that we got to the table, huge kudos to the Kentucky tenants for all their scheming and conniving to get to the table. And then at the table, the fact that we ended up with a signed agreement

is kind of groundbreaking. And there's a lot of lessons here about leverage and also just resilience and ruthlessness. I told my partner early in this campaign, I said, I am going to get my ass kicked in this campaign. There's no way around it. Like literally?

Yeah, everybody just get prepared. I'm going to get beat up because they were threatening to beat me up every time I went to the property. And I actually didn't end up getting my ass kicked, but unfortunately a tenant did. And I managed to avoid it. And then they went after him instead. So I actually felt bad about that.

I would rather have been me. You're too handsome to get that moneymaker. bruised up, John. We couldn't have that happen. What's the story with this company, OSPM? I mean, as I'm reading this story in these times about, you know, the collectively bargain lease and it's just like apparently, you know, I don't know, I'm just reading here, like, despite heavy backing from government subsidies, both in the form of Section 8

rental assistance and loans from Fannie Mae, public records show evidence of significant neglect across Ostro's profile portfolio? I guess that's the guy that owns OSPM. Like what are other examples of like what is their deal, I guess? Maybe that's a really vague way of asking it. Yeah, TAR I can go into this a little bit, but probably explain the federal subsidies better than I can. But these are investment properties, right? So let's say, let's say I'm a landlord. And I want to buy properties in a place like Kentucky. I'm going to look at Kentucky. I'm going to look at Texas. I'm going to look at places that have no. no regulations, no tenant protections. Fannie Mae provides the loan to buy the properties. So I'm not

actually coming out of my pocket to buy these properties. HUD guarantees rent payments every month. So these landlords are, it's hard to even conceptualize like how subsidized they are. They're not coming out of their own pocket for anything. So I buy six properties in Kentucky. I got guaranteed income every month from HUD. I got money from Fannie Mae to buy it. Now, all I have to do is not fix shit, not make any repairs, leave people living with the worst conditions. So every broken blind, every piece of mold, every AC unit that's not fixed is money that I get to keep. Right. And the key to making all that work is you hire a property manager who is so ruthless that they corral any tenant dissent or any complaints and basically rule over those properties

with a heavy hand and intimidation to keep this system running. And most of the time, especially in rural areas, the landlords don't give a fuck what the property manager is doing as long as they get that bottom line every month. So as long as they're getting the money on their investment, the property manager has free range to sort of create these little territories of control where they move in their families, they move their people, they start doing illegal shit and just terrorize the complex. you know I kind of experienced that a little bit growing up in the housing projects back in Latcher County where it's like when they switched from like a city board that like

legislated the housing authority whatever to a like a private like you know management company which I think I touched on a little bit last time but in our case it was winterwood in Florida and you saw the qualitative shift of like you could get your stuff fixed on time and all this stuff and the worst thing you had to think about was how you're going to hide your cat to avoid paying the, you know, the pet fee or whatever. And it became like this very, like, weird, like living in a fiefdom of sorts, you know, and kind of mediated by the whims of whoever was the person that was running the office up there for Winterwood or whatever. And it just, you'd see trash running out of the trash bins and, like, there's just no urgency to fix anything. And it's like,

well, what are you going to, what are you going to do? Like, what are your options as a poor person or whatever, like growing up in that kind of context? And so you see when things, just go to this sort of private model, kind of how they deteriorate in particular in places like there. And it's interesting, Tom. I mean, one of the first challenges when we start organizing tenants is to help corral their anger at the right person. A lot of tenants, the person they interact with all the time is the power hungry, power-tripping

property manager. But that's not the owner of the property, right? So there's like early education that we need to do with each other. when we're forming unions, that's like the property manager sucks. Also, the property manager has more in common with you than he or she does with the landlord. The landlord's calling all the shots. And sometimes the landlord's not even calling the shots about who the property manager is and how they run the business. But ultimately, if we want things to improve on the property, if we want to stop some harassment,

it's the landlord who gets to make that call. So just to build on what Josh was saying about OSPM and what's their deal, to your question, Terrence. This guy, Jason Ostro is in a very particular business. He's a kind of mid-sized landlord who's heavily reliant on public support. And this is actually a major thing that we all need to know is that the government, the government likes to play these days like they don't have a big role related to our homes. That's false.

The government has a huge role at every level. And one of the biggest roles is what Josh was describing. there's $150 billion in business that our government does with private sector landlords in the form of loans through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac every year, $150 billion every year to the biggest landlords in town. And whether it's that financing or HUD subsidies, so much of the design of this actually creates incentives for the landlord to behave the worst. The loans are written in a way that basically means they can only make the mortgage payments

if they are regularly and egregiously increasing the rent, if they are regularly deferring maintenance, right? So all of these incentives are stacked to screw over the tenants and to empower and emboldened the landlords to do their worst on these properties. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if our listeners are very familiar with that. I mean, I myself am not that familiar with it. I've always ever rented off of just small, you know, landlords who just own. one or two properties. I'm not sure if people are familiar with this whole ecosystem that in some ways you describing it, like in some ways it kind of resembles our healthcare paradigm as well, just how much of privatized health infrastructure and insurance as well is subsidized by the government.

Precisely, I mean, really it's because I guess when you really dig down into it, It's because like when you subject housing and health care to the commodity markets and the commodity form, like it's something that has to be subsidized at a basic level. I mean, healthcare is sort of a naturally inflationary business. I'm not that familiar with like housing. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, like, it's funny because I was just reading this thing this morning. I haven't listened to the whole interview, but Ezra Klein at the New York Times had. Derek Thompson on

and they like did their whole like let's look at abundance one year later they're still on that they've not dropped it yet they've not dropped it yet but uh as you said Tom they're hanging on by a thread

yeah that's right that's man that hell that's that's persistence of nothing else they really are and um and Derek Thompson was and I know this is slightly different because we're talking about homes or houses as opposed to you know a

complexes. But he was talking about how like Texas is like the, uh, paradigmatic success story in American housing policy because they have no zoning regulations and you can just build, build, build. And he was like, this is all a supply issue. If you just build more houses endlessly, then it'll drive down the cost of homes. And I guess it's like to connect that to what I was saying a second ago, like they can only think of policy in terms of market incentives and imperatives. So it's like whether it's the government subsidizing markets or it's, you know, in the form of like, you know, direct outlays or if they're subsidizing them through like tax breaks or just zoning regulations, it's just like they cannot conceive of a housing policy paradigm that is like, you know, tenant driven, that is, you know, collectively envisioned. It all has to be in some way. you know, mediated by the market. Just, I don't know, this is what kind of came to mind as you guys were, you know,

detailing that. Josh, your thoughts on housing supply? Yeah, I was hoping you. This is a, yeah. Thanks, Tar. Yeah, the whole, the whole argument on supply. I mean, we've had, we had a national campaign in, what was it, we stopped in 2024. And how many economists started we actually get to sign on?

It was like 60-something. to the idea of national rent control. And you've got to realize when they say the market dictates the rent, they are the market. The landlords are the market. You know, for instance, in Sweden, Sweden has a national tenant union that actually negotiates the price of rent with the government. We can have a vision for something like that in this country. But the entire supply side model, for one, is based on the assumption that one landlord owns one home. And if that's the case, then yeah, that plays out that way.

But we know that that's not the case. We've got huge monopolies. We've got price setting. We got collusion among landlords to actually set the price. So all of the abundance argument, it's the most flimsy bullshit on earth. None of it stands up to any sort of reality. I think we're sure how many units right now, TAR, like 1.5 million units in this country. That is by design.

That's exactly the way they want it because the larger, the shortage, the higher rank. increases that they can charge. You know, when you have an army of houseless people out, you know, outside the door, you can charge whatever you want for rent. And so that's, that's the actual abundance model is that landlords are getting rich off houselessness in this country. And if you really look back at the history of it, and you all know this, like the original model for American housing was that your employer owns your housing. It's the coal company model, right? The company owns the housing. The company owns a store. The company pays us in script. That didn't work because it couldn't produce enough housing for workers. There was this

contradiction between bosses who wanted to keep wages very low and landlords who wanted to keep rent very high. And those two things could not coexist. So the federal government stepped in to subsidize our housing system to make sure our wages were low. And the other thing that I, I mean, there's many things the abundance guys get wrong. Another one of them is the they don't talk enough about what the shortage actually is, like where the pain points are within the housing shortage. It's not just shortage, period. It's shortage of housing that people can actually afford. So then if that's actually the core problem, we need to design solutions around that. That doesn't lead me to conclude that we just need to build as much market rate housing as possible. No, the contrary. It leads me to

conclude that we need strong rent controls. We need a big role for the public sector in building housing that people can actually afford, because guess what, that might not be housing that is profit making for a private sector developer. So it leads me to a whole other set of solutions. We're not the, Josh and I are not the types of tenant organizers who are like, there's just no, you know, we're not going to engage in the supply conversation. There's no shortage whatsoever. We're just trying to be precise. What is the shortage actually? What is the pain point actually? And how do we address that? More to the point, though, I mean, I think there's a problem with, you know, Tom, you were kind of lightly poking.

fun of me. I'm sitting here in Brooklyn right now. A lot of these guys who are like having these big ideas about housing policy are sitting here in Brooklyn. And quite frankly, they don't know what the market is like in other places. When I talk to, and I do talk to developers, when I talk to developers who are trying to build a quote unquote affordable housing in place like Kansas City, the shit getting in their way is not zoning, guys. It's finance. It's a capital stack. It's like the money that can actually make that business model work if they're going to try to drive rents down. And so we just have we have to understand that any thinking person who's looking at this complicated issue knows that there is not one solution. Anyone who's trying to sell you one quick, easy, silver bullet solution on this issue is a liar.

They're a fraud or they're not thinking very hard, maybe a combination of all of them, right? It's a very complicated issue that requires complicated solutions. Here's my take is that it's not either a regulatory agenda or a supply agenda. It's a question of priority and sequence. And for us, the priority needs to be regulating rents, protecting tenants to keep them in their homes today so that we can then have a big public sector approach to providing housing that actually needs people's needs. What are some of the more like, I guess, occluded factors in like, how the market dictates like housing prices and stuff like that that like we might not be

acquainted with that you guys see kind of in your research of things i guess i guess particularly in kentucky uh like something that we see going on here at lexington is the university getting kind of tied up and over leveraged in these real estate schemes and it's like you know it's bad when they're cutting the basketball team's budget and uh they're like uh doing an eight billion dollar fucking student housing sort of thing and tearing down all these like yeah I guess traditionally more affordable houses like near campus and stuff like that in order to do that stuff like what are kind of the things that probably we don't think about as much that uh kind of affect those kinds of things that they use to kind of you know artificially make prices what they are everywhere but

I guess particularly here in our scope I think maybe the thing we don't realize is how much competition there is for public money over these developments. And I, you know, if you look at Trump, for instance, Trump is a genius when it comes to utilizing tax credits for his projects. And that's what, that's what universities have got into. That's what developers are into. So, and there's, those tax credits are highly competitive. So no developer wants to come out of their own pocket. And what you find is this tightening and this conglomeration of the number of developers that are actually going to win that lottery to get the public money. So someone like Jason Ostro, mid-level, he's going to get some, he's going to get some level of support, but not the huge tax incentives that a university is going to get. So we live

an economy now that's not really producing anything material, and we're scraping the barrel. And really all that's left is land and public subsidies that we can get to develop that land. Yeah. Yeah. Something that Terence and I had overheard sort of independent of each other is we heard some college kids talk about how tuition at UK has gotten to be 33,000. Like when I was there, it was 8600. It was like... It's also someone, and I don't know if the statistic is correct, it does seem extraordinarily high, but someone said that UK has a 95% acceptance rate right now. So we're named Moorhead State now.

Well, and so it's this thing where like the university is just sucking more people in to the city and they're trying to I don't know it's like weird because like I had so like the neighborhood I live in

trying not to docks myself but this might be inevitable the neighborhood I live in is they're like flattening a lot of your arm to the teeth what's yeah that's right yeah

they're like demolishing most of this neighborhood so they can build these like high rise student housing and I was talking to a neighbor about it and he was like

yeah I'm of two not two minds about it But, like, you know, I think that, like, urban density is good. You know, the whole walkable city thing. Like, we need, like, people, like, sprawl is bad. And as an environmentalist, I agree, sprawl is bad. But, like, I also don't know, like, what is the solution necessarily. But, like, I also feel like maybe one place to start is, like, the city has to actually get antagonistic with the university a little bit.

And, you know, maybe try to slap them on the roof. and say like, you know, you can't keep... But like at this point, like all these institutions are so highly neoliberalized that it's like you pointed out earlier, Josh, like the thing with Trump is like you use it the public purse or

and public institutions to essentially enrich himself and that's kind of been the game for the last 40 years. It's kind of what the fire sectors are in general. It's just trying to raid public surplus and infrastructure for private gain. It's a, I don't know,

look at what it's rot. It's where we are now. But anyway, sorry for the Yeah, and that's really all that's left, Terrence. I mean, that's the reason they're building those is because the public incentives are to build those, right? And this is just a system reproducing itself over and over again. And the larger the shortage gets, the more, the larger the supply gap, the more they can charge for rent. So it's actually built into our entire housing model. And the thing that the abundance guys can't reckon with is that a system that's short 1.5 million units is a catastrophic failure has a system. You can't fucking reform that.

It's good. We're going to have to look to another model. Yeah, I don't understand their whole, there was this article in the nation, which I write for from time to time. So, you know, not knocking it. We like to have a public debate, public discourse. But there was this article in the nation, because something I've wondered about is for the long,

as long as time is like, what is the even abundance theory of like power and capital? I don't understand it. But then there was this article in the nation, a YIMB theory of power by Ned Red. Well, let's hear it. I mean, it's really long. And I can't read the whole thing. But the subheader is pro housing advocates offer an analysis of class relations that is more sophisticated and has more explanatory power than the one held by many critics of

the abundance agenda. and I, you know, again, I want to read the entire thing, but I'll almost guarantee that anybody pushing that agenda is benefiting financially from development dollars in some way. You pull that thread long enough, the roots, there's a developer at the end of it. You know, no particular shade to this writer or whatever, but there's an instructive example that I have from a time when I was more active on Twitter than I am today where I wrote a little thread explaining real page, which was this like rent-setting algorithm that the Biden administration really went after and they were trying to sue because there was a cartel. They're running a rent-setting cartel in the market, right?

And I wrote a thread at one point that was sort of criticizing supply essentialists, I called them. A lot of the people like the chief economist who works at the company who started the real page software, who presents himself as an expert and is often referred. to as an expert by various publications and elected officials and whatnot. This is the type of character I was talking about. These are the supply essentialists. It's the industry lobbies who are spending millions and millions of dollars every year advocating against a regulatory agenda and advocating for supply solutions because it benefits their bottom line. So I wrote this whole thread about supply essentialists. This thread must have ended up in some YIMBY slack because I then got like

absolutely, you know, piled on by like all these dudes from California who were like, look at this idiotic woman, da, da, da, da, da, da. Like, you know, there was an era. I don't know if they're still on this, but there was an era where they were like real nasty on the internet. And I was really confused because I was like, I'm not talking about you guys unless I am. Well, you were uninterrupted in their grand set of trying to acquire a bunch of Airbnb properties. In fairness, I'd be a little persnickety too.

you know if i could just read one paragraph from um this article which i guess is kind of like getting into the ymbi critique of power much of the class conflict in housing politics takes place not between big real estate capital b capital r capital e and local communities but within communities affluent homeowners particularly particularly when they are organized into neighborhood associations form powerful anti-housing blocks political science research has found that the people most likely to speak out against housing development during public hearings tend to be older, wider, wealthier homeowners. Their opposition to new construction helps ensure the persistence of regional housing shortages, which drives up rents and locks first-time homebuyers out of the

housing markets. Some of this opposition stems from an understandable resistance to change, blah, blah, blah. I don't know. I mean, what is he trying to say here? Is it like just kind of like, look, this is a nuanced area of local politics? I don't, I mean, I'm sure there's some truth to the fact that the local... The underlying assumption still is that the solution is just to build more. So then he's criticizing the critics of the build more. We're talking about completely different things, right? Yeah.

When I think about the power relationships related to people that Josh and I fight with, I'm thinking about trailer park residents outside of Bozeman, Montana, who their trailer park is owned by a guy named Gary Oakland. Gary Oakland is in the middle of a cash grab. He's about to sell out to an out of town, out of state investor. And on the way out, he's trying to charge 11% rent hikes. We're talking about completely different things. I am talking about the power imbalance between big real estate capital,

these out-of-state investors that are about to ravage this trailer park as they have every other trailer park in the country. And people who have no power in this equation, they've got nowhere else to go. they're already living on the margins on the edge of society. That to me is the power. That's the conversation about power we need to be having. He's talking about a sort of, it's just a much smaller thing.

And it's the problem he's locating is only a problem you can locate if your assumption is the only path forward is to build more because these are the impediments to building more. Yeah. And I think, I think what I'm glad Tara said cartel because the way we explain this to tenants, is that these are gangsters doing gangster shit. And I think when you enter the NIMB-YM-B debate, it's a lot of what's happening right now, right? There's this reverence for the system

that maybe the system can work again if we just use, you know, these interventions, and that's so far removed from reality. And also the problem with the NIMB debate is you have white middle-class homeowners versus white middle-class developers and poor people, tenants, don't even meet the threshold of recognition in that debate.

Yeah, I was going to ask that, Josh. I'm curious because something that you see from time to time of some crazy stat that seems like kind of not real, but somehow is. Like one in 15 Americans is a millionaire. And that's mediated obviously by like owning a home and build equity on your home and so forth like that. I think it's one in 20. One in 20. Wait, no, no, wait.

It's 20 million millionaires. There are 20 million millionaires in the United States. That's what the statistic is. Okay. So like still like more than what you would think. Like how does like that fact and like I guess the I don't know if what you would call it the the rise in the last 50, 60 years of using your home as like a financial instrument? Like how does that kind of stuff play into like this fight? Like in terms of like I guess what I'm asking is like in terms of getting like upper middle class people that on their own home and have built equity on their home and are like worth maybe not liquid cash but like have like an asset that's worth makes them, you know, technically a million.

there. Like, how does that position people that would otherwise be sort of have class interests with renters, but like, it kind of positions them more with like, you know, the opposition and that, you know, I'm curious. I think that's, I think that's one of the problems with organizing in this country, particularly when you add whiteness into that and how property values are tied to whiteness. You've got a whole lot of people in this country that identify with the ruling class when their actual economic status doesn't reflect that at all. And yeah, I think that's a deeper issue. Are you talking about how to organize those people, how to get, how to get those people

on board with what we're doing, or just them presenting a barrier to it? You might be able to organize them in about a year or two when they're not able to. Check back in about 48 months. I mean, our point in all this, the tenant movement, I think, is we're built for this time. And I think that's what makes us different than a lot of other organizations. I saw Boots Riley on TV yesterday in an interview and they were asking about what, you know, what needs to happen. And he said, we need a huge economic intervention.

We need to disrupt the capitalist machine. And he's right, except his solution is we need a radical labor movement. And one of the problems with labor is there are a lot of homeowners in labor unions. And one of the problems that we've had working with labor unions is that they see their class status, maybe not their economic status, but their class status. that is as different than that of renters. And so Boots calling for a radical labor movement feels a little antiquated at this point because we don't have a radical labor movement.

We have a labor movement that is very much bought into the system that's that I'm generalizing. But I think by and large, they're concerned with their contracts, their wages. And a lot of those wage increases that they win are going to get handed right back over to the landlord or the mortgage company. Well, a lot of times their leadership of even turned reactionary in the last couple of years, too. Like you look at what's his face with the teamsters and kind of coddled up with like vans and then, you know. Exactly. And I think we're going to see more of that because they've been conditioned to,

as part of the system for the last few decades. And so that radical intervention that Boucher Lally was talking about, we believe that the tenant movement is the best, is the best place to bring that about because we are not constrained by a hundred years of, you know, collaborating with the Democratic Party. we're not constrained by these legal protections that actually get you tied up in court and take your power away. And, you know, we're pushing for a day where tenants don't pay rent. And we actually cause, we can actually trigger that level of economic disruption. Getting back to your question, Tom, I think there's an avenue there where homeowners

participate in that without paying mortgage. But I think that's a different fight and a much more, much longer and more difficult organizing arc because they're not experiencing the same pain points that tenants are on a regular basis. We do talk about working class homeowners as bank tenants. So as tenants of their bank, I mean, basically, whoever doesn't own their land or their home outright is a tenant in a sort of broader sense. And then we need to be more specific as we're making more precise interventions. Josh, I was sure you were going to quote me to me about, you know, what we believe about the tenant movement is that the tenant movement could be for poor and working class people in this country,

in this century, what the labor movement was last century. And here we are a day before May 1st. So I'm not going to say it's not about labor, and it's not about choosing, right? It's about labor and tenant organizing. But I think Josh is right that the idea that we're going to like build back better the labor movement is a little cray. Like it doesn't really take into consideration the nature of work, the realities of AI and how quickly it's moving, the realities of gig work and how quickly it's already moved. And I think more to the point, our focus is on an arena that feels like it's bursting with potential. And I think, Tom, your question about class identity and formation, that is like up for grabs right now. There are a lot of people who might still be aspiring

homeowners who haven't yet turned the corner of reckoning with the reality that they never will be. And our project, I think, is to politicize the tenant identity, recruit people into this kind of class identification with what it means to not be an owner and to act with some militancy related to that. And I think even in the decade plus that I've been organizing tenants, I've seen that militancy grow as people realize they got nowhere to go and they got nothing left to lose. So more and more, we're seeing tenants willing to take a crazy level of risk in places where they have no protection. I think with this clarity of who they are and who they will always be and how little they've got left to lose. Yeah, you mean you tell me you don't think these Donald Trump 50 year mortgages are going to address any of that stuff? Listen, I think one thing. That's pretty short-sided up you, Ty.

Yeah, it's short-sighted. But one thing, one thing I do think we need to keep our eyes on is like the ruling party right now, they are radically opportunistic in a way that Democrats, have never been in recent history. So, you know, do I think the 50-year mortgage-year mortgage-homeownership stuff that, you know, the mortgage-homeownership stuff that he's talked about is going to like change everything? No. But I wouldn't put it past this crafty mofo to figure out how to do right by tenants, deliver for them in a way that the Democrats never have. You know, it's, I don't want to be overly cynical about this, but I don't think we can ignore the possibility that as stuff starts to feel dire for him, maybe on the other side of the midterm, or whatever, you know, the last price controls in this country in a serious way were done under Nixon. Like affordability is kind of up for grabs right now. We cannot be lazy. We can't afford to be lazy about who's going to grab onto some of the shit that we know that people need and we know will resonate with people. Yeah. Yeah, we maybe aren't mourning the collapse of the liberal order as much as other organizations. We see it as a huge opportunity, actually.

I guess basically what you're describing is, like, tenant as a class designation that would probably be more akin to peasant. I don't mean that in like a, I mean that in a technical sense. We had, like, Leonardo de Vilchus on the show. We talked about, like, the, you know, landless workers movement. I think it's like in South Africa or, you know what I mean? like basically like the goal being to like occupy and seize land essentially that's what we're talking about here you know and something i think that a lot of marcus have started a little um scared to kind of challenge that whole labor supremacy thing um but like i really encourage

the listener and i'm in talking about this book for about a week or so now on the show but i really encourage listeners to go read gemm they sent qua his book about uh I'd put that in the show notes for those of us, you know, with the barely got a liberal arts education. It's just like the drink, just like the little seltzer beverage. It's called class struggle in the ancient Greek world. And basically, like, he starts out talking about, like, the different class designations of ancient Greece. In the ancient world in general, ancient Rome, ancient Palestine. These were, this was an economy that was essentially run by unfree labor.

but there are so many different classifications of unfree labor. There was debt bondage, slavery, obviously. These were slave societies. But then it gets into the different forms and varieties of the peasantry. There were free peasants. There were slave peasants. There were tenant holders. There were slave tenants.

There were hot, you know, rich peasants, poor peasants. You don't know what you said. Did I say hot peasants? I thought that's such a year. There were sexy as peasants, ugly peasants. Ugly peasants. Five peasants. But like if you're talking about like a class society and like who stands to be able to like

sort of wage a long, you know, protracted militant struggle against, in our sense, in our, you know, context, it's capital. That's different kinds of capital. In those days, it was just literally like landholders, property owners. You know, you kind of got to be a little more like flexible as like what that category is. So I'm, I'm totally in, uh, in agreement with you. I'm, I myself don't see, I, I myself see in the, uh, sort of fetishization and deification of quote unquote, the labor movement, which I'm not even sure what that is anymore. I see it as kind of like a larp from

70, 80, 100 years ago. It's like I'm sympathetic. I would love for that to be the case. Yeah, I don't think I'm reputant on labor or anything like that. No, it's in the short term. It's not, it's You just have to take an honest account of political economy. You can't just larp into existence like what you want that revolutionary class to be. It's just you have to like actually look at political economy and how power is reproduced and how capital is accumulated. I mean, I don't know though. I mean, I'm perhaps maybe there are some listeners out there that have more. But you guys, you know, know what you're talking about.

I'm sleepy and I don't read enough books about neoliberalism. anymore. No, I mean, I think there's lots of fighting components of the labor movement that exist today. But I think all of us, I think what you're saying resonates at the level of like, we got to take stock at what we have, like, all of the arena that we have to fight. And I think, you know, our project is to figure out a kind of new arena of fighting and specifically waging economic warfare and exercising new and different kinds of economic leverage. which isn't to say that other types of fighting, issue campaigning, you know, labor strikes, et cetera, aren't worthwhile. But we're in this kind of sweet and urgent spot to figure out what tenant organizing needs to be to meet the needs of the moment.

And we're up against some of the most formidable targets in world history. You know, organized real estate capital is organized at a level of scale and concentration today. unlike ever before. And I think the most important thing for me and if I can be so bold for us, Josh, as we're building the Tenant Union Federation and this movement across the country is just we got to try some shit. We got to be like unbound by any, even any like historical references or the ways other institutions or projects organize. And we just got to, we got to be really creative. We got to be ruthless. We got to try some stuff. We got to study what we try. And learn from it. And I think that's the kind of beautiful project that I see us as as part of right now.

I think that's a good jump. And I'll point to kind of talk about like, you know, the national group and like what y'all's, you know, Josh, me and you sit down at Red State Barbecue. I guess that's been hell a year, year and a half ago or something like that. You showed me kind of like a lot of places y'all have identified as sort of choke points in this movement. I was curious, like, where's, where's that at, you know, as far as the national work goes? Go ahead, Tara. That's you. You got to pick up on the barbecue twin discord.

That has been a while back. I don't remember when that was, Thomas. I feel like my memory's been wiped the last couple of years. But I'll let Tara talk about the Federation, the founding, and just some of the big wins that we've had lately. Yeah. So the Tenant Union Federation, aka tough, aka the only good acronym on the internet.

Thank you. Tough is a national union of tenant unions, organizing to do exactly what we've been talking about, which is established tenants as a political and economic class that cannot be ignored. And what we said when we found it tough just a couple years ago in 2024 was we wanted to start small to get big.

So we started with just five unions across the country. I'm going to say them to you, and you're going to be like geographically, random. Correct. So it's Kentucky, Kansas City, Bozeman, Connecticut, and the south side of Chicago. So we started with those five unions, not because there's any kind of grandmaster plan geographically, obviously, but because those are the unions that had the most alignment in analysis and practice. I was hoping you were going to say it formed a constellation in the shape of something cool. Yeah, sure.

I was looking for some cosmic significance, too. Totally. I'm sure we could connect the dots and make it mean. mean something. But really what it meant to us was like, this was a crew that was really committed to this experimentation around tenant organizing and had already gotten some reps in on that front. We started small to get big. The first big swing that we took was on the federal government. We were focused on getting regulations connected to these big federally backed loans, including rent controls. We wanted all of these loans to come with rent caps and other tenant protections. So we started organizing in a bunch of buildings with these federal loans, and we got a couple

buildings on strike. We built a methodology for organizing at the property and portfolio level. And then last year, we took on a shared target. So a bunch of us started organizing in one landlord's portfolio that was Capital Realty Group, kind of mid to large HUD subsidized landlord based in New York. We learned a shit ton through that organizing. We started nine unions across six states, 1,500 units of their portfolio. This is the biggest portfolio organizing in American history. And it ain't that big. 1500 units is actually not that much at all. And that's still more than's ever been done before. More than it has ever been done before. So. Tells the tale. Exactly. And that's the era that we're in where it's like we're trying and we're

building and we're refining. So right now we're getting ready for our second version of tenant union school. So union school applications are about to. launch. We trained hundreds of unionists across the country last summer. We've run a bunch of rent strikes in the last couple of years. We've won a bunch of those rent strikes. One of them is about to launch tomorrow. It's the folks that I was telling you about in Bozeman across two trailer parks, 338 lots. They're about to go on strike tomorrow against their scummy-ass landlord Gary Oakland. So this is the kind of project that we're working on right now. And we're learning a ton. I will say, as I talk to you in this moment, I'm feeling like agitated about how much potential exists in this

methodology and how far we are from what we need, right? I think Josh and I both know we're not going to win organizing building by building block by block. And we got to start there in order to build our movement's muscle. Our movement is so green. Our field is so green. But at a certain point, methodology needs to meet up with strategy so that we can punch way above our weight. And that's kind of what I'm fixated on right now. Yeah, I'm curious like, you know, Josh Updates me with like different victories that y'all have had. Are there like some of those you want to like talk about a little bit? Yeah. I mean, I think the the one that feels the most present with me right now, just recency bias, is the big victory in Kentucky. You know, Mary Lou Abner, one of the tenants in the

properties that Josh was describing. On the other side of this win, we won a collectively bargained lease that applies to 295 households across mostly rural Kentucky that includes a 10-day grace period, includes a schedule for major repairs, it includes eviction protections. We got this dude on the hook for a major enforcement provision that means that any violation of the agreement, he has to cough up $250 a month to every tenant affected by the mistake. It was a massive win, the first tenant bargain agreement in the South. And Mary Lou Abner, one of the tenants who was at the bargaining table with us, said to me afterwards, she said, this is the beginning of a new beginning.

And that's really how it felt. And honestly, that's how all of our victories feel right now because it's all the freshest shit ever. So, you know, that's on my mind right now. on my mind right now is a strike that I was deeply part of in Raytown, Missouri that we just ended in in February of this year. We won two-year leases, rent reductions, like, wiped the floor with this landlord, basically, and had withheld rent for four months. Last summer, we negotiated a deal ending an eight-month strike where tenants withheld $300,000 and didn't have to pay a cent back, got two-year leases, a schedule of major repairs. So here's the thing I'm trying to say. What we're doing works. Yeah. And that's amazing.

It feels so powerful. And I feel, you can hear it in my voice, I'm sure. I feel the urgency of getting this shit into way more hands and spreading it everywhere into every nook and cranny of this country because it works. And then we need to figure out how it adds up to something that's bigger. Yeah. Well, I'm curious, you identified the places that, you know, form the constellation or, you know, the aforementioned constellation, or other places?

plans to sort of branch out into other places that y'all have kind of identified right now that you're at liberty to talk about. I don't want to, you know, obviously hamper any efforts. But I'm curious if there's like that kind of stuff down the pie. Yeah, we're constantly, like Tar said, we're constantly talking about scaling up. Part of this last campaign in Kentucky was, it was a lot of, we tested a lot, right? and I spent all last year driving all over Kentucky, east and west. And not only was the goal there to win the campaign, but the goal was also to develop a methodology on how to organize across that large of a portfolio.

So we want to take what we learned. And I'm working on this specifically. We're doing a training this weekend for several tenant unions and tenants throughout the southeast. We want to take what we just learned in Kentucky and scale that up on a regional level. One thing I love about working with Tara and Tough is that, you know, I've been organizing nationally a long time. I'm old. The South gets ignored in every fucking national space. And every place I've been, last 30 years, you get together nationally.

We talk about L.A., we talk about New York. We might talk about Chicago. And that's really it. They dominate those spaces. Tara, John, the folks at Tough really understand that if the South is not included strategically, it's not going to work. And that's kind of the whole history of organizing in this country. So yes, we are really trying to scale up. I'm specifically focused on the South, and we want to be able to pull off big rent strikes.

We're not there right now. We're not at a place where we can do that right now. The question is, can we get there in a couple years by 2028? We're in our get big era. We started small to get big. I think we're in our get big era. We needed a couple years to figure out whether we were onto something. And I think pretty conclusively, we're like, yeah, we're on to something.

So now it's time to be kind of directive and, like, evangelized this methodology across the country. And so there's a bunch of groups in the mix, Tom. There's, like, some amazing tenants organizing in Memphis. There's some folks doing really cool shit in Colorado Springs in Tacoma, in Boise, in Albany. Like I said, every nook and cranny of this country. And most of the places where we're organizing, there's no organizing infrastructure. And that's actually a huge advantage. the tenants get to show up and say, we're the tenant union and kind of take shit over pretty quickly.

We're tough. Yeah. That's got legs. And a lot of folks out there have not been indoctrinated into this sort of nonprofit world of organizing. So they show up very clear, very ruthless. One of the things I said about Mary Lou Abner in Fleming County, we've, will let me back up, we feel really validated after this Kentucky campaign about rule organizing. I've had people tell me for years, you can't do this.

Matter of fact, we were told if we go into Fleming County and try to, to organize. We're just going to, quote, unquote, get people evicted. And what we found is that the opposite was true. I actually knew Mary Lou Abner's family. I worked in tobacco with them when I was a kid. Mary Lou Abner has never been invited into a fight, right? No one's ever knocked on. Just never been engaged whatsoever. Never been engaged politically. And so there's a whole class of people out here in Kentucky, mostly women who are fucking radical as hell, who are fears, who are resilient, who've never actually been invited into a political fight of any kind, maybe to vote for Democrats at some point,

but probably not even that, right? And what we found is that if you invite them into a fight where that's serious, where there's let, where there's preparation, where there's a methodology, where there's an actual structure in place, they will fucking fight and they will win. And we write these places off as just red areas on the map

that we just ignore and talk shit about when actually that's probably our greatest organizing opportunity to build power. And really just because they've been sort of, you know, the NGO liberal theories of organizing just have failed kind of catastrophically there. And that's really trying to shake off that baggage, you know, is a job into itself, you know. Exactly. And what I love about tenant organizing is someone like Mary Lou Avenue never got a chance to be in a labor union. The level of service jobs that people have in eastern Kentucky, those aren't unionized jobs, right? And so in labor for years, there's this idea like, will we work? deserve X, Y, Z. Well, fuck that. You deserve that, whether you work or not. And I think that's where

we, we are more radical. We kind of, like TAR said, we represent, we're as radical as labor was 100 years ago. And that's what people really need right now to fight back against fascism. Yeah, I guess that is true. It's like, you know, like the SEIU or whoever would traditionally, like, organize, like, service work in the cities or whatever. It's just not politically expedient to go to the South, particularly the rural South and kind of do the same. And so, like, a lot of those folks, you know, kind of get left behind by the labor movement in some ways, or underserved, at least. I don't want to, like, say, like, there's no. Yeah, the same, the same opportunities didn't exist there, you know, and now look where we are, you know, in the wake of that. Yeah.

I think the other part of what Josh is saying about what it looks like for us to expand the practice of tenant organizing into these various, various corners of the country is we have to be kind of radically open to what people present to us. And I think this sets us apart in some ways from other components of our movement, if you want to call it that, where it's like, we're not knocking on doors lecturing people about Marxism. We are knocking on doors asking, what the hell is up in your unit? Do you know who your landlord is? Can your kids breathe? Or is the mold messing them up, right? there's a sort of radical dedication to the material, to the immediate self-interest. And that means that we are organizing in a way that I think is really different from a lot of

other people in this country today. It's not anti-ideological because we get there. We get there in the union. And the union serves as a school. It serves as sort of political education vehicle, mostly by exposure rather than lecturing. But we don't start there. We're not starting with ideology. We're also not starting with structurallessness, which is another sort of disease in some of our movements, right?

It's like it's people who want to lecture you about ideology or have a book club over here. And then, you know, some of the same people are sort of committed against structure in a way that I think it comes from a place of like critiquing the liberal NGO infrastructure or whatever. And in some ways, of course, we share that critique. the outcome for us is not rail against structure to the extent that there's nothing. Because the people that Josh and I are accountable to, they want to be part of something fucking serious. They want to win. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, it's not, it's not a case that only through a nonprofit that has paid staff or whatever you can win, not at all. That's not what I'm saying. But we've got to show up serious. And we got to ask the questions about what is actually happening for them right now. We've got to listen. We got to understand. people's material needs.

And then we got to come correct. We got to show them that this is a serious thing that's going to change their lives. I was so moved to drive into Mount Sterling and meet these tenants for the first time, none of whom I had met before. And, you know, I'm nervous. I was also doing this for the first time. I've negotiated plenty of deals in organizing that I've been a part of really up close. But Josh and I were like, let's test something.

Let's actually bring in, you know, some big guns, so to speak. at this at the bargaining table with this landlord who we know is going to be a piece of work. But I was nervous. I was like, I've never done this before. I'm fresh to this fight. These people don't know me. We're going to have to build trust really quick to be able to show up at the bargaining table tomorrow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was so moved to show up at that, at that prep session and have all these women that Josh was describing correctly as fighters, as badass fighters. The minute they saw me take them seriously, they were like, all right, we can do this shit, right? They take themselves seriously.

And really all they're looking for is for someone to show up, taking them as seriously as they take themselves. And then we had a winning team. And then there was no way that we were leaving without a signed agreement. But, you know, that's a kind of sidebar against the sort of loosey-goosey structuralist bullshit that I think sometimes comes into our movements. And it's just, you know, that's not the path either, even as the nonprofit, liberal, whatever, is also not the path. but we can do a third other thing. You know, people sometimes imagine that, like, we can actually do shit different.

We can make shit up. It can be better. Yeah, the dream of Colonel Gaddafi. You know what I mean? Hell yeah. Keeping it alive. Now, I think that's important, Tarr, just establishing that continuum of respect

instead of talking to people like they're, you know, like shelter dogs or something, you know, like something to be pitied or, you know, whatever. You know, I think is really important. important. So I guess just kind of wrap it up like if somebody's within earshot of this program and they said, you know, I don't live in Bozeman or the south side of Chicago or Kentucky or Kansas City. But what y'all are doing sounds really cool. Like how can they plug in in an area that, you know, we might not be there yet. Well, you want to talk about union school?

You talk about union school. Okay. Well, I mean, what we want people to do is organize their buildings, right? Even if you're out there living in an apartment building and say you don't have mold. So you don't have a lot of issues. You can still wage a war against capital that's a lot more powerful than just voting for whatever progressive is running in your area. Organize your building. That's what we want people to do. And then if you don't help someone else organize their building, there are a lot of people out there paying rent right now who can't afford it. What we offer, that's also different than the labor movement, when you go on strike on a job, you aren't making money anymore. And there has to be a strike fund to compensate for that. When you go on a rent

strike, you take that rent and put it in your pocket. So you're actually, and then if you build enough power, you can actually negotiate to keep that rent. So tough is offering a union school, which is, I believe a two month, three month class on how to organize your building. Registrations already open. It starts in June, I believe. And yeah, we want people to join. We want people to to join the movement by organizing their own buildings. Don't come at this as if it's a service project or as if you're trying to help somebody else out, come at this out of your own material self-interest. If you don't see your values reflected in the world right now, let's try to disrupt the

capitalist machine in a material way and build economic power. So it's not a situation where it's like, oh, I got to wait on X and X staff to come here and like establish and so they could kind of go to the school and take the grab the ball and start running with it. Yeah, that's the great thing about this is, Pete, you can do it. And then we are here to help guide people through our own experience, but there's nothing mysterious about this. There's no secret formula that landlords are operating as gangsters and cartels,

and we need to meet them exactly where they are because they cannot function without our rent, and there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them. Also, I just want to say that if there's nothing wrong with your apartment currently, what I have discovered, especially with something I'm dealing, was kind of recently is that even if your landlord is a pretty nice liberal person, it's like they will cut corners at all costs. They're incentivized to do it. And raise your rant for inconveniencing them.

In Marxist literature, there's the competitive laws, I think it's something like the laws of competition, right, where it's like, doesn't matter whether the capitalist is a good person or not. like by engaging in the market you are incentivized in fact pressured to cut cost and that is also true for landlords as well so but not podcast baby yeah I guess we have very little overhead but they're going to cut costs as much as they can and that reminds me that reminds me tarence not only do we have union school coming up the applications are launching next week and it'll run through the summer as josh said we also have a research cohort where we train tenant unionists to be really strategic researchers. We've become

experts on housing finance in the last couple of years. I wouldn't offer that critique of the abundance bros if we ourselves hadn't gone and done a bunch of homework in the last couple years, but we really need to understand our landlords, their finances, their incentives in order to take seriously our own economic leverage. Our rent is our power, as Josh said, but that only matters if we understand our targets, what they're working with, how they run their businesses. So we also offer this cohort, and that's coming up this summer as well. People should definitely not wait to get involved in this movement. And there's a lot that folks can do of their own volition and a lot that we are hungry to do

to help people avoid the mistakes we've already made and make their strategies even sharper. Yeah. And what I tell people all the time is even if there are no problems in your apartment, if your water heater starts leaking or do you want to, do you want to count on the benevolence of your landlord or do you want a contract in place that guarantees repairs? On a Kentucky specific note, the Kentucky tenant union is doing a series of town halls around the state. We've been organizing in Maysville for the past two months. Lots going on in Maysville. We're going to go to Hazard next, then Bowling Green, then Owensboro. So we'll be all over the state this year. If you live in those areas,

come out to one of the town halls or give us a call or shoot us an email and we'll show up at your building. Oh, yeah. Oh, wait, before we go, I had a question. What the hell happened with the two Israelis at OSPM? Why did y'all get them? How did you get two Israelis to that man? Yeah, I had that teed up.

Well, we did basically to them what they do to us. We pitted them against each other. And there were three investors. And we don't know exactly why they put. We don't know the exact reason they pulled out, but we did know that our campaign made their lives very difficult and cost them a lot of money. And that's the goal, right?

So they launched their own BDS against the tenant movement. Damn. Damn. Something our basketball coach needs to learn, you know, going to Israel to recruit players and stuff. Somebody needs to brief Coach Pope on the BDS movement. Coach Pope is kind of like liberals in this moment in his own way. He doesn't understand that college basketball has totally changed,

and he's still relying on, like, respectability, decorum. Old models, yeah. And reverence when it's just, it's not happening anymore. Well, what did you have to answer? Did you have something? No, I just, this story I saw in Cincinnati, um, Israeli veterans, real estate empire and greater Cincinnati collapses amid fraud allegations.

Did you all hear about that vision and beyond co-founder Stas Grinberg? I did. Just a little bit. somebody sent it to me. This is probably not, probably a whole episode could be devoted to this, but the Israeli, the Israeli landlord lobby is huge in this country,

especially in the South. The largest, a victor in North Carolina is an Israeli landlord also. Well, there was like a group, wasn't there like three Israelis recently who got arrested for doing some sort of like Epstein adjacent sex trafficking thing?

I think there were landlords as well. Did not hear about that. A lot of landowners. landlords. When you're experienced with 3,000-year-old, you know, property deeds, you know, you've got, I'm sorry, I'll digress. Yeah, that's, I don't think that's going to hold up in an American court. But maybe, maybe, I don't know, maybe.

Terrence, this is kind of a non-sequitur, but I'm sitting and thinking still about what you were saying about, like, what if there's nothing wrong with your apartment? I think one thing that I would say, too, like one reason to start a tenant union and join the tenant movement is also about the sort of bigger picture. It's not just about what's going on in your property or your building or your block. It's also, this is kind of the best chance we have to organize with our neighbors against any of the various threats and crises that are coming our way. So we see the tenant union as a vehicle for strategy and politics. and care. And I think, you know, one thing to just tell you about is like in the fall,

when the government was shut down and food stamps were going to be cut starting November 1st, unions like Casey Tenants, which is my home union in Kansas City, we started a grocery distribution program for our union members, and we delivered grocery boxes with farm fresh vegetables and pantry items to 2,500, 2,500 union members every weekend in November, even after the government reopened and SNAP benefits came back. And that's 2,500 relative to the 80,000 people who lost their SNAP benefits at the beginning of the month. But that's not fucking nothing.

And that's a lot more than basically any other institution could deliver directly to people who needed help right then. So I think there's a lot of reasons to join a tenant union. And one of them is like we're living in a time of kind of overlapping, compounding, growing crisis. And this is some of the best chance we have, maybe the only fighting chance we have up against all that. Yeah, what you're basically describing is like as institutions and society collapses around us, and there is fewer and fewer resources from the government in terms of a safety net and whatnot, that leaves basically one option,

which is to requisition it from the rich. And the only way to do that is to basically have, as you were saying, Josh, basically like when that breakdown becomes more and more accelerated, you're basically going to have to have sort of institutionalized mutual aid of some kind. And the best way to do it is, yeah, like you're saying, sort of requisitioning resources from the rich,

Rich, having that contract in place before the breakdown starts to occur. They may not honor the contract, but then, you know, that ups the ante for other opportunities for confrontation, so to speak. But yeah, yeah, no, I guess that's the best

I think that's a really good way of putting it. Tara, it's like you, we're just going to see, I think we're probably just going to see a continued breakdown of, like we said, institutions, the ability of they government to provide any kind of, you know, means of support for anybody's lives. And so that means we're pretty much have to take it into our own hands at this point. Yep, well said.

Thank you guys so much for coming on. You want to tell folks where they can interface with you at? For tough, we're at TenetFed on Instagram and Twitter, I believe, TenetFederation.org. Please forgive us. The website is really out of date, but that'll change soon. But that's tough. Kentucky Tenet Union is on Instagram. I think that's our main social media vehicle. And you can get in touch with us there. We got our hotline form, our intake form and all that.

Yeah, well, I just wanted to mention, too, if you all want to add a capsule about what to do if your rented space is haunted to the, you know, the tenant school, I'll let your boy. Okay. Tom, you should join us. We'll do a little case study. Listen, I know you all worried about black mold and things like that, but let's deal with the immaterial world for a second. There's a spiritual component to this. There's a spiritual warfare going on just below the surface. Wait, this is huge.

I can't believe this is coming up at the very end because now we've got to adapt our door scripts. We're going to ask some questions about material conditions, and then we're going to ask some questions about the immaterial world. And then we give time. Then we call Tom in. Any strange noises and a knocking sound? You don't know where it's coming from? Well, friend, that's no accident. Guys, I appreciate y'all so much, especially to, you know,

on such a quick notice, but glad it came together, and let's do it again here in the not too distant future. Yeah, thanks, y'all. We really appreciate it. Thanks for having us. Love you all. Love the show. Thanks, guys.

Take care. Thank you.