Trillbilly Worker's Party - **UNLOCKED** Parasitic Ambition (w/ special guests Josh Poe and Haley O'Shaughnessy)

Episode Date: September 25, 2025

We're unlocking this week's Patreon episode due to popular demand. Louisville Tenants Union reps Haley O'Shaughnessy and Josh Poe drop in to update us on their latest efforts both locally and nationally and the challenges and opportunities with tenant organizing in the era of ICE proliferation, as well as the use of Charlie Kirk's murder as pretense to go after the left. Please consider supporting the Louisville Tenants Union here: https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/embed/ticketing/louisville-tenants-union-member-dues?modal=true Bloomberg article about the LTU's latest campaign: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-22/capital-realty-group-tenants-seek-to-unionize-across-the-us Support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Welcome, everyone everybody to the Monday, September 22nd edition of the Trailbillies, I am your host, Tom Sexton. And joining me, as always, is my right-hand man, Mr. Aaron Thorpe. Yo-yo. And missing in action today is Mr. Terrence Ray, who got his nose sooths. Move off. This past week, as you know, and now sounds like, you know, one of those particularly fru-frew car horn. So he's going to be sitting out until that's. adjusted, but we

overcorrected by getting one of the better voices of a guest that we have here. And of course, I'm talking about Mr. Josh Poe of Louisville Tenants Union. Say hey, John. Thank you, Tom. Sorry, I was playing with my recording. Thank you. Thank you. It's always great to be here.

The world's changed a lot since we were here last time. That is true, my friend. We'll get into a little bit of that. Not to keep us gamefully employed, those of us that are gamefully. employed, I should say, anyway. And also making her third or fourth appearance on this program. Either you've got a couple of solo joints and a couple Louisville's tenants joints here, but Ms. Haley-O-Shonnessy, beaming in from Louisville, Kentucky.

Thanks for having me back. I appreciate it. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Well, I guess let's just jump right in there to ask you all, what in the hell's been going on with the tenants union since we last spoke. I guess that's been what has that been two years ago a year and a half ago the last time we were on it was i remember it well because it was my birthday was november 9th 2023 and we actually passed a policy in louisville that night i remember when we were on the show we were like we our show kept getting interrupted because we had council people calling us and journalists and it was like getting we was coming down to a vote that night and we passed it that night it was really hectic uh unanimously it was unanimous yeah

We took on, like, the Louisville development community and the Louisville mayor, and we passed that. And, hell, you know, they've been trying to wipe us out ever since. You know, sometimes winning brings you, brings more, brings a lot more pain than losing. I have, I've heard, I've heard that. I've not had enough wins to really have, you know, a large enough sample size to test that theory. But I take your word for it. Yeah, but hell, the world has changed a lot since then. thinking back to, you know, where the tenant union was, then we've gone through a lot of

changes. So, you know, Tom, our first couple years, we didn't really know what a tenant union was supposed to be, you know, and we started in March of 2022. We didn't know what we could take from labor, what we couldn't take from labor. We were very clear that we didn't want to be another nonprofit coming in and doing advocacy service work. But we didn't know how to, how do you actually bring a landlord to the table and get them to bark? You know, that process and labor is largely driven by lawyers, their legal protections there. You don't have any of that shit

in tenant organizing. So our first couple years were largely an experiment and we were really committed to running policy campaigns and building campaigns. We really devoted to the idea of building economic power and political power. You know, with labor unions are really focused on economic

power and then you got nonprofit political organizations focused on political power, but you don't have a lot of organizations in this country doing both. And so, we had trouble figuring out how to do both, to be honest with you. You know, it stretches you pretty thin. The policy campaigns tend to neglect. You tend to neglect the folks in buildings. And so after a couple years of running a bunch of campaigns, we felt like we really had a clear idea of what we wanted to be in 2024. So 2024 was a rebuilding year for us. We wrote a constitution.

We ratified that constitution. And we moved totally out of the nonprofit space and into a democratically elected rank and file led union elected a president at the end of 24 2024 really got clear about what we wanted to be and you know when you can do that within an organization a lot of people left well let me ask you that like structure wise what do y'all look like these days what you y'all decide on was the best kind of way to go we we decided on a structure real similar to connecticut tenant union uh they had developed a structure went up there and did some training with them um so we're really dedicated to win collectively bargain leases in buildings.

There's, you know, our government's totally in bed with our landlords. If you're a tenant out here in a building, corporate landlords have taken over your building, you're living with mold, you're living with roaches. You're dealing with all that. The government's not gonna help you. HUD is certainly not gonna help you.

Code inspectors work, maybe in cities, you have a chance that that might help you in the short term, but it's not a long term solution. So what we found is building majority unions in those building super majority unions is the only thing that actually works because a super majority union has the power to threaten the rent right these landlords walk around with an equation in their head uh you know profit equals rent minus maintenance

minus staff cut staff cut maintenance raise the rent we have a lot of power in that equation though to actually control the rent and so building majority unions is what we're really focused on so we have a building level chapters if a building is able to build a super majority union president, those vice presidents serve on our tenant council, and essentially run the union. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Josh, can I ask a question? This might be kind of silly. But what are some of the differences or challenges in tenant organizing where the difference in between, I guess, you're saying buildings like apartment complexes versus like, I guess, individual houses? Like,

what are the challenges and differences between those two? Well, obviously, you're not going to have a high degree of natural relationships among the tenants in single-family houses, right? We've had a lot of trouble building tenant unions within single-family houses because people don't know each other, they don't see each other, they don't talk to each other. In that complex, you already have those natural relationships. So in our structure, we have chapter-level members, and then we have what we call at-large members. So let's say you live in a single-family home and you want to be a part of the tenant union,

but your landlord only owns like five houses in the city. You can join our at-large team, and I think this is where things really started to click for us is in 2024, we started building infrastructure. And the infrastructure is largely driven by those at-large leaders. So we have a transportation team, a food team, a legal team, a child care team, a research team, a media team. And you really can't organize people. You can't organize people without those things, right? It seems like those are like connective tissues like that, you know, kind of connect the movement in the organization together, you know? Exactly. Yeah. So the at-large leaders, their job is to really support the building level fights and provide all that

infrastructure. And so that's our structure right now. And then the at large leaders also have a, they elect their vice president that serves on the tenant council and represents those members. Yeah, it's, it's interesting. You talk about like the sort of having a building level sort of strategy in terms of putting this together. I remember I grew up in the Wattsburg Housing Authority and, you know, I didn't know it as Section 8 housing at the time or anything like that or relationship with HUD or whatever but I remember very specifically when I was a kid and this was all Greek to me at the time but looking back on it now it's like there was a shift when they had outsourced at first it was like sort of localized and there was like a board of people

that you know made decisions about who got to move in and like what the rent was set at and so forth and then at a certain point they outsized outsourced that to this outfit in Florida called winterwood and I remember like a lot of tenants at that time like whether they knew it or not they sort of organically could feel the sea change about how things were done there but how their rent was jacked up and how there was little sort of process and how they could challenge that because before that you could just go to Mr. Jack Berkich who we all went to church with and who was like the head of the board and like oh well you know I'm struggling at this and then he could just sort of you know take it to the board and you know figure out how to like get you some rent relief and things like that but like if you all notice like with you know I guess, germane to my experience. Like, you know, some of these buildings

that are rammed by outfits like that. Like when I said Winterwood, I know y'all shook your head knowingly about them. Like, like the, I guess sort of teasing out the differences of like what it's like to be sort of,

you know, the leadership of the building being local versus like outsourced to a private company. Yeah, landlordism changed in this country in the last 30 years, and we don't really acknowledge that, right? Like traditional landlordism, like you're talking about, Thomas, like you had a landlord who was invested in landlording, right? It was their business model, and that totally changed with this sort of neoliberal order. You know, we had Clinton's Hope Six, which privatized public housing, and then Obama came

behind that with Choice Neighborhoods, which further privatized public housing. And basically, all HUD is at this point is a vehicle to shift more public money to the private sector. Now, the way that plays out for tenants is tenants don't understand, you know, the, the financialization of all this, right? When you go talk to tenants, what they know is this shit used to work. You know, we used to have Jack as the property manager. Now we got Tammy. Jack was good. Tammy sucks. If we can just get rid of Tammy, everything is going to be fine. And so a tenant union actually provides a real high level of political education to actually explain what's happening, right? Because that's how they see it. And so every tenant just

thinks that they got unlucky and ended up with the worst property manager on earth when this is actually a financial model because these firms now, they're not landlords in the traditional sense in the way we think of them. They're investment firms. They're not interested in higher property. They're not trying to hire property managers. They're not trying to hire maintenance staff. And there really isn't a such thing as a private landlord. Every landlord we deal with is subsidized in one form or another, right? Whether it's the low income housing tax credit, whether it's Section 8 or FHFA. Fannie and Freddie subsidizes a lot of the landlords we deal with. As a matter of fact, the statewide campaign that we have right now, this guy got a low interest loan from Fannie Mae for $12 million to buy five buildings in Kentucky.

He's spending about $10,000 a year on maintenance. And our federal government... Across all those buildings? No, on each building. Oh, okay. Okay. Well, still. Still. So this is how this works. So our federal... So Fannie Mae and Freddie are government back banks, right? when you get a federally backed mortgage that's backed by the feds we give that money to landlords we don't require anything of them so we don't require maintenance standards there are no tenant protections and

that so here's a guy lives in texas he got a 12 million dollar loan to buy five buildings in kentucky uh and he pockets that money yeah and what that means for us is that you know we have seniors living without air conditioning for four years we have seniors die we've had two members die as we've been running this campaign uh not directly but you know you're living in an apartment is full of mold. You've got COPD. You don't have air conditioning. There's serious health consequences of this. So that 12 million is what is on top of what he gets from HUD, right? So he's making about $300,000 a year off these properties in Kentucky and investing very little back into it. The flip side of that is, is those are 355 units. If we organize the majority of those tenants, we can sink him financially

and not just sink him financially, but seriously disrupt the financial. market if enough tenants do this because these mortgages are, you know, they're packaged, right? So if one loan defaults, it hurts a lot. It hurts everyone else in that package. Yeah. Yeah. And your landlord, your landlord like being more local, you're right, like is a thing of the past. Now there's something that's almost like a landlord diaspora where they're going to vulnerable places like Kentucky where the laws are loose if there's laws at all. But I think, well, we've realized a lot of people like owning their own power and feeling like, they can actually do something, is realizing that the poorest people in this country actually have the

most leverage. And that sounds ridiculous because working class people who can't afford the rent are clearly the most vulnerable. I think we'd all admit that. But two things can be true at once, which is that they are vulnerable, but so are their landlords because poor tenants have this leverage where their landlords can't survive without the rent chuck every month. It is really, really, really good business to be a landlord who rents to poor tenants. It's way better business than even luxury homes because poor tenants more than anyone else like Josh just said live in federally backed buildings meaning that the landlords are getting money from the government to possess these buildings and they're getting money from us to pay them off and to pay off

their other buildings which is obviously a rich contradiction seeing that the whole stereotype is like poor people want handouts from the government when really it's these landlords with a ton of properties But that's real leverage. And without that money from the government, without that money from us, like Josh said, these landlords are defaulting on everything they own. And they know that. They're on the brink like no other quote unquote rich people in this country. Like they don't own anything for real.

They just only they make us think that they own us. So tenants realizing that it's not true and that there's actually a person who's way more vulnerable than them and putting a face to that person because like Josh was talking about now they're they're being so they're putting everything on this property manager so the answer is if we can just get this property manager out of there the problem solved but this is a cycle that's not ending for them so tenants realizing that they have this power over this guy who refuses to fix their toilet for six weeks is real power yeah yeah it's it kind of mirrors I guess in a way although the mechanisms are different it's like the same reason that like if you're selling cars like the subprime market It is like a way better business to be in. But for, I'll be it for different reasons. That's usually it has to do with, you know, poorer people, maybe with no credit or bad credit, have fewer options.

So you can, you know, juice them more in a way. But it seems like this is kind of the flip side of that where it's like paradoxically, we all staked out of like where there is actually some leverage there. Totally. Yeah. And I think, you know, this country has never really figured out the contradiction of how do we keep wages low so bosses can be happy. but keep rent high so landlords can be happy, right? And basically HUD in Section 8 is how we manage that contradiction.

So landlords can still get paid. Bosses can still get paid. Yeah. Well, let me ask you all this because y'all, you know, as good to understand this as anybody. It's like, it seems to me, and even like some of my even more well-intentioned friends, if sort of eating or taking this sort of rise and grind,

I'm going to, you know, try to buy a couple of buildings and make them Airbnbs or rental properties or whatever. Like that is sort of the de facto way that like young men are taught them to... Oh, brother. Tell me about it, man. I've lost so many friends because of this very conversation. All my male friends won't talk to me because, yeah. I mean, I've talked to all of my friends about this the last year, like, you know, and my female friends, too.

And everyone wants to find a way to be smart and make money and hold on to something. And I don't think that until, we really pointed out, you're showing this like you are participating in this direct line. It's going to sound dramatic, but like this direct line to exactly what we have set up today, which is

it's such a contradiction too, because it's just a trend that I noticed, especially as of saying, like young people in general down here. And it's like for a generation whose chances of owning a home, you know, and who's just like livelihoods are consistently declining, I guess, you know. But still,

to buy into the system and to be become a landlord you know so that you yourself aren't suffering it's just this weird kind of contradiction you know yeah it seems it seems a strange proposition to you know uh sell to you know younger people like hey if you're going to build wealth everything is so hollowed out but there is one strategy left you know it's the one that even adam smith said was parasitic but you know and then you know to i mean i don't you know you don't you know you don't really have to hand it to these cities. But there are a lot of cities. I know Lexington is like, you know, put the kibosh on like new Airbnbs and stuff like that. And that's, you know, it's a decent measure. It doesn't really go far enough. But obviously that's something.

But I'm just curious like if, if y'all can trace any trends of like where that sort of mentality started and like what is so advantageous about it. Well, I think it started with the, you know, I think it started with a lot of gentrification narratives, right? And I think it started with Obama. And, I mean, maybe it didn't start there, but it was definitely popularized there with the idea that you can gentrify your own hood, right? And like, we can use equity to build generational wealth for black communities. And there's, here's, you know, investment is coming. And this belief that investment is somehow a tide that lifts all ships. And I think it's just how it's how it works in this country where you starve people for generations and deny, you know, even the most basic resources.

And then suddenly you open up that idea that you're going to be included in this wave of capital that's getting. to wash over your community, I think it's just, it's mostly based on hope. But, but I think the key there, Tom, is like, there's a real investment in that narrative. If you look, if you take any city right now and look at how much money is being propped into nonprofits around that very investment, around the idea of generational wealth, it's a huge investment. And I think people are responding to that. And I think it's real, that's, I think that sort of narrative has plagued black communities in the same way Trump has plagued poor white communities, this belief that somehow this this is for us and we're going to benefit from it you know it doesn't stand up to any reality

test it's just based on hope and fantasy right right you see that a lot in Atlanta too and um you know this is something coronel west talks about like the black misleadership class right and this kind of idea of like black excellence but all it really is it's just like it's just venture it's just vulture capitalism you know it's just literally just pushing people out of their homes and changing even just the cultural sort of just like texture of a neighborhood you know like their neighborhood is in Atlanta where, I mean, there'll be like, I always talk about, make jokes about this every time we see it. In Atlanta, they created the Beltline, right, which is like this ring around the city that was supposed to include green space, a light rail, a walking trail, cycling, and it's

only half done, right? But they're in pockets, like, parts of it are unfinished in pockets of, like, black neighborhoods, and you'll see, like, you know, a block that's, like, half-blighted. And then, you know, a couple blocks away where the Beltline starts, there's, like, an axe-throwing boutique bar. Like, who acts for that? You know what I mean? It's just so. bizarre and it's such a juxtaposition with the actual neighborhood, you know. But it's bringing it's bringing development, right?

You know, it's a zoning classification. Like we still have racialized zoning, right? Like the way zoning works, just like if we got, if there's a bunch of land zone agricultural and it's worth $300,000, let's say we buy it, we got a buddy on the planning commission that can rezone it residential. Now it's worth $3 million. That's just

artificial, right? That's just it's a false economy. It's a It's a scam economy. Black neighborhoods are largely the same where if you can flip that population and make and bring in white people, suddenly that lands worth exponentially more because of the removal of black people.

Damn. And then we, and then we tricked black people into basically doing that work course. Here in Louisville, they had this thing where they were selling $1 houses, right? And all my friends got excited. Like, we're going to buy these houses. And I'm like, you know how much it costs to remodel a house?

Like, you're going to have to have like a hundred, you know, building materials were through the roof. And so when we sat down and did the math, it's like the city is banking on basically young black entrepreneurs buying those homes investing some capital, right, that basically subsidizes the much larger developers that are going to come in and buy them out. It just reminds me of one time, go ahead. No, no, no, go for it. I'm sorry. No, I was just going to say, no, I was just like an anecdote. It just reminds me when I was organizing with Housing Justice League down here in Atlanta, which is a housing advocacy organization.

You know, we were working on this Beltline for All campaign, which I'd mentioned the Beltline being this public-private partnership, right, of, you know, equitable development that's going to come to Atlanta. And I just remember knocking on doors just kind of educate people about who live by the beltline that, you know, your rent's going to go up, you know, all these properties top property taxes are going to up, everything is going to change. And this one black guy I spoke to was like, well, I know that I moved here because of the Beltline, you know, you know.

And I was like, damn, brother, I guess, you know, I guess I don't know, man, you know. It was this hard, dude, you got it, you know. Try to explain how that wasn't helpful to the community or himself, but, you know. I've had those conversations a lot in black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods. And, you know, and, you know, people, you know, class, nobody hates poor people the way poor people do, you know, the way poor people hate each other. And none of us want to see ourselves as that. And we're all, you know, we all think that like, if we just, you know, we've been sold this narrative that if you work hard enough and you get this certificate, get this degree and. invest in the right business model at the right time you're going to come up and a lot of people

were swayed by that still you know it's funny last time i was in atlanta uh we did a little we did a little stro through cabbage town and i was interested because that was sort of the appalachian out migration further south too there and a lot of people went there to work in the paper mill that's why they called it cabbage town because of the smell of the paper mill by their put off and i'm looking around and it looks like dam macroberts kentucky you know it's like the same thing like is the company town house is like the little shotgun houses and stuff like that and like and then I'm talking to one of the guys that lives there and and he's talking about like how like you know his family come down

from uh eastern Kentucky or maybe east Tennessee I think is what he said and um you know he's like and I'm like fourth generation in this place and like he's talking about like how his house is worth like two million dollars now and I was just thinking to myself Jesus Christ like back where I'm from you know those things are not you know the the structural integrity and so forth was not a principal concern when those were thrown up because it was never you know meant for like long-term use they wanted to get the coal and then just get the hell out of there and they never built like septic or nothing like that so you had straight piping all these other things going on and then you see that in a different context and now the gentrification is turned essentially

the same type of home into like a you know like oh look at the character and all this kind of stuff But in SICO, Kentucky, it's got a very different connotation, you know. So anyway. Yeah. Location, location, location. That's right. Yeah, that's what they say. Yeah, that's what they say. Well, so I was looking at some of the materials you all sent over before that.

And I was wondering if y'all talk a little bit more about the statewide campaign. You set that map over and you'd highlight it a couple places, some in rural parts and then some in the city. And I was just curious if y'all'd give it the local flavor a little spin here. Yeah, and I'm leading that campaign. We've got a national campaign, too, where we targeted one landlord across the country. But local, we wanted to do a statewide campaign this year. And, you know, I've been wanting to do, I've been wanting to organize in rural Kentucky for a long time. Because I just see it as a huge opportunity.

And I think rural, I think Eastern Kentucky in particular has been mischaracterized. So we picked, we picked a landlord, picked a target. We were already organizing in one building here in Louisville. And what we found is that organizing across landlord's portfolios is a real effective. There's something about 100 units. It seems like when you organize 100 units, landlords start to behave a little bit differently, right? When you get about 100 people on union cards and one building isn't usually enough to do that. So we've always had this theory that rural Kentucky was right for organizing and also had this theory that if you organize one building in a county,

you've really organized that whole county because what you're going to do is you're going to expose longstanding. in class divisions that there's really no current outlet for, right? There's no way to express class antagonism through our current political system. So we went to, we had a building, yeah, no, right? So we had a, we had a building here in Louisville that we were working in and we're trying to organize and we started, it was owned by a company called OSPM, that's the landlord I was talking about that owns the five buildings in the state. And we decided to try to bring on three buildings at once, one in Louisville, one in Brandenburg

and one in Fleming County. I grew up about 20 minutes from this building in Fleming County, so I know the area really well. And we went out there, and what we found was what we expected to find in rural areas. There's no really no government intervention at all. There's a lot of, like I said, because of the landlord math, right? There's a lot of pressure on landlords to hire the most ruthless people they can find to manage these properties, right?

Because if you make the choice that you're going to do no repairs, you're going to wind up with a bunch of unhappy people. So you hire the most ruthless, straight up, fucking gangster-ass people you can find to manage these places. And that's exactly what we found. As soon as we went out to Fleming County, we found a property manager who had moved in a lot of her family. And the way she evicted people was she went to their house, you know, at night and said, get the fuck out. And if you don't get the fuck out, we're going to have all your stuff out during the day, you know, tomorrow. She did not go through the courts.

It was straight up terrorism, right? I mean, this, this woman's gangster, right? She will go in people's apartments when they're not home, steal their pills, and give them a lease violation. So, bam. And the story, the story that we heard from. Not an exaggeration, literally. The story that we've heard from years from, like, fucking lawyers and advocates is like, you can't do this, right?

Josh, you're going to, if you do this, you're going to get a bunch of people evicted, right? This is, there are no tenant protections. And, I mean, I've sat in rooms for 15 years with people with much higher degrees than I have telling me we can't do this. And what we're finding is actually the opposite. Like if we had gone to Fleming County a year earlier, we would have stopped 10 evictions out there. Um, so we get out there and it's exactly what you would find. They called the, you know, she, uh, threatened me the first day I was out there. They called the police on me. Uh, people were really scared of her and her family. Um, but getting the police called on you for protecting people's right to just live in a house

to be housed. Exactly. They, but they did not want me out there at all. So, But what we found were people out there were so, they were already engaged in a struggle with the landlord, right? So our narrative is the government's not going to help you. The lawyers aren't going to help you. Nonprofits aren't going to help you. The only thing that's going to work is working class people coming together, forming organizations, and fighting back.

And that plays really well in rural areas because they already in their gut, believe that. They already know it. They're already living it. And what happened was, we were able to organize the two rural buildings and the building in Louisville we still haven't been able to bring on. I think we learned a lot of valuable lessons there and there are a lot of reasons for that we can dig into. But the building in Fleming County turned into a really violent campaign. The second time I went out there, I got was threatened.

I sent the video. I got jumped by one of the maintenance people or he jumped in my face and threatened to be threatened me. They basically had a gang of young people and her family running around threatening tenants. They ended up, the property manager assaulted a tenant, got in a fight with a tenant. The tenant won the fight, so we weren't able to get in the charges pressed against. Yeah. Not only do I have the right to live here, but I just whoop your ass. So the night before we did the car drive, the property manager assaulted one of the tenants.

The tenant beat her ass. And then we did a car drive. It got 55% of the people signed up. Just based on the spectacle. Well, hell yeah, I'm in for this. So we were starting to build momentum, right? But one of the tenants, you know, this got really heated, right? As we went public, there was a lot of anti-union effort.

They started off offering tenants, air conditioners for not signing a union card, things like that. So they tried a lot of soft techniques. They also tried just straight up violence. One of the tenants got jumped and beaten. A guy jumped and pulled a – one guy held a shirt over his head. the other guy beat them pretty bad in Fleming County. But both those buildings went public and we're kind of on the other side of the intense part of it now. The landlord has agreed to come to the table and negotiate with those tenants.

We got a negotiation set for October 16th. I don't want to overstate that because it's a pretty slippery guy. But we're entering a new phase, right? And I think one of the biggest things that happened there is that the land. landlord and the thugs that she hired got arrested, went to jail, which most of the leaders were pretty happy about. You know, we had to kind of discuss that with some of the abolitionists in the base. But for the most part, that's been considered, that was considered a big win, right? It was to the point where we had seniors who couldn't even come outside of their apartments.

They were being harassed and, you know, people throwing rocks at their windows all hours of the night. I mean, this was a real union campaign. And, but I think it shows from our standpoint that when you go into rural areas and you present people with a real choice to organize, they're going to take those opportunities. And like I said before, this also reawoke a lot of class divisions that already existed within that county that people have no way to express. So, for instance, the first thing tenants start to ask when you do this is, you know, why doesn't the government help us?

And it's like, well, let's look into that. And they realize, well, the mayor is a landlord. And the code inspector owns rental property. And the biggest landlord in the county financed their campaign. And so people start to make sense of how capital is working to create these divisions. And they're also starting to realize that they can do something about it. So in both those counties, Fleming and Mead, I think next year you will see tenants in those buildings run for office and start to try to pass local policy.

Yeah, I was like coming politically engaged through this union effort. I was just about that. I guess you just answered the question. I was going to ask like, you know, how many of the tenants have gone into other kind of forms of political organization or even decide to run for office and some? because I guess you're right like housing especially is such a central issue you know it's kind of a lot like with health care you know where everybody is subject to it you know and I think like organizing people along those lines are ways to open up avenues to other kinds of political organization or wider class oriented politics I think too just like on the side go ahead hey I'm sorry no that's okay um it just really reimagines like what uh what politics can look like there's definitely an argument like Josh has said this before that MAGA isn't our biggest problem in Kentucky because we can out-organize MAGA and we have, you know, small-scale proof of that. But it's the Democratic Party that's hurting working class people in Kentucky. It's the people

who are like promising that they will come and save you in electoral politics in the south or we could even just keep it in Kentucky for a second. If you knock on a door and start talking about how Democrats or the left or socialist, a lot of these parties that are like trying now to to take over what the Democratic Party has failed. If you're saying, I'm a socialist, I'm going to help you. That door's getting shut. If your grandpa and your great-grandpa's union were abandoned by the DNC or what you see now as the left,

like that's not something you're going to forget because that's how, that's determined how you're living today. But if you knock on that door and say, we know your landlord's fucking with you because he's fucking with your neighbor. And he also owns this building. you guys have all the same problems and your neighbors are doing something about it. That door is staying open because it's urgent.

So I think these are definitely like the buildings and the people that we've organized right now are people who know that we can't rely on politicians who may or may not keep the promises that they said they would. And the ultimate accountability, which has been, it's an amazing thing to realize in a union, is self-interest. It's your self-interest, it's your neighbor's self-interest and why you need this union to work. It's a lot easier for people to see themselves in attendance class than on the left or the right because belonging to a tenant's class isn't a political ideology. It's a fact of life. And for a lot of

people, it's not, you know, it's a roof over their head or it's the street. So it's literally life or death. So that opening up as a political class is really exciting. Totally. And, you know, it's like, Aaron, like, what you were saying is like the parallels with like the health care industry and how both housing and health care have these sort of scammy veneers, you know, that are, you know, bolstered by these sort of artificial economics. And I was just curious if you guys would kind of speak to that a little bit. You know, it's like in health care, you have like, you know, they'll just send you these bills that aren't for anything.

They're just arbitrary, right? And it's the same thing with like housing. It's like like the rents artificially inflated. It's not really reflected in any like real world value building on a property or anything like that. It's just inflation for the sake of getting these people rich. I was wondering if y'all would talk about some of those things and why those happen to be like such good inflection points, particularly in rural America, but everywhere. Well, I think it goes back to what Aaron said, right? Like it's so universal.

And I learned this, you know, I work for so many of these bullshit nonprofits, right? They send you into a community and they're like, well, let's do a survey. Like, we don't know what the fuck is wrong, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And every survey. Yeah, quality of lobster. Yeah, every survey is like housing, number one. And I realized, well, why don't we organize around that?

Like, if we know that, why do we keep asking these questions 10 years out? And, you know, I've worked on, like, defund campaigns, decarcery campaigns. It's hard to build a big base around defunding the police. You're basically going to end up with a base of young black people, right? and that's not you don't have the numbers there to win and so housing you you actually have the numbers to win and as opposed to health care you have power right there we can't withhold there's nothing for us to withhold in the health care fight right right right right it may be our premiums but you know we have we're we're tied to that and so you know the the the economy

crashed in this country in 2008 and I think you could make the case that it largely crashed I'm oversimplifying because black people couldn't pay their mortgages right You know. So poor people have so much power in this country. And as we descend into fascism, as we descend in not, you know, totally we can't depend on electoral politics anymore. We can't depend on the law anymore. The rent is going to become such a focal point of power because we could do that if we were organized. We could control this economy. No matter how we cut it, like Donald Trump and Jerry Kushner's family are still going to depend on our rent for, for their entire lifestyle, even if we moved to crypto, right? So there's such a huge. mechanism for power here that we could literally crash the U.S. economy if we organize enough people. And I think that's what we're going to start looking at. And the way

that investors are buying up these properties, it's like you mentioned Winterwood, right? Everyone in Eastern Kentucky hates Winterwood. Everybody fucking hates Winterwood. You could organize such a huge campaign around just off hating Winterwood. And what we're seeing is, so for instance, when

we had the launch in Fleming County, tenants from West Louisville came to that launch, right? just did a launch in West Louisville, tenants from Fleming County came to West Louisville for that launch. And so we're putting people in spaces and they're having conversations across these lines that are used to divide us that they would never have through our political arenas. And so I don't, and in some ways, I feel like the tenant movement is the only hope that we have for this impending fascism because I don't see a way, you know, I don't see any other mechanism for us to build power and withhold anything that they need. And labor, unfortunately,

is mostly choosing a legal strategy against Trump, which I think is not the right way to go, given how he's controlled the courts. And so, yeah, Tom, and you're talking about, like, the junk fees and things that rang up. Like, every month, this vehicle just becomes, like, more and more extractive. You know, we have tenants in buildings that, like, didn't want to organize last year because they didn't want to take the risk.

This year, they were paying $1,300 a month. This year, they're paying $1,600 a month with all these weird-ass junk fees added in. worse maintenance, you know, and things are getting worse and their conditions are getting much worse. So, you know, it's like we've got X number of people that want to do this this year. Next year it's going to be so many more people and so on and so forth. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, Haley, the last time that you and I talked, you were kind of telling me about like the ways y'all have expanded nationally and stuff like that. And there's, I think you'd mentioned that y'all had made some in roads in Montana and

Missoula and some different places across the country. We talked a little bit about the local stuff. I was wondering if you'd talk a little bit about that, the national expansion. Yeah, I mean, it's really exciting. The Tenant Union Federation has kind of like changed, I think, how seriously people are taking tenant unions in the country. And I'll let Josh talk a little bit about the national campaign specifically, but, you know, like he was saying, and this is like really true of the national campaign, too, tenant unions are where labor unions were 100 years ago.

And the thing is, is that with every major movement in U.S. history, then it gets caught up on how to stop it. And so I think that we're in such an unprecedented time right now with tenant unions that, like Josh said, you kind of have to go outside of the law. You have to go around the law. The legality is kind of like bullshit right now. It doesn't really hold any weight, or at least it's been shown to be a facade right now with trying to fight back. I mean, you have like federal judges blocking something for ice and then ice doing it three times what they would have done before. And now we're seeing with landlords in the national campaign and with the local campaign in Kentucky, which I think is actually really instructive for any tenant union building in the south, which is another like super exciting growth.

Their landlords are contacting their lawyers and have no idea what to do. because they've never seen this before and neither do the lawyers they're like we don't know what advice to give you because we've never seen this either this is like totally something that we aren't exactly like able to predict either and so it's just a very traditional like come to the table um you come to the table we'll come with our demands and it's uh it's like you said it's something that um or like i said sorry um this is like where labor was but now we have um kind of like a jump start on it almost. Yeah.

Josh, you should talk about the buildings of the national campaign. Yeah. So like I said, the Louisville Tenant Union, we decided to go statewide last year simply because landlords have buildings all over the state and confining ourselves to the citywide didn't make sense. We want to give our people a chance to win. We had been in discussions with a lot of other unions around the country. We always worked closely with Casey Tenants.

Big shout out to Casey Tenants, who've really just, kicked ass in developing this methodology and the Connecticut tenants. And so there were some similarities among some tenant unions that wanted to be unions, that wanted to be really rank and file led unions that did not want to be nonprofits, wanted to totally get out of the nonprofit space. And so as we'd refined our methodology, we decided that we needed to start a national organization. And so in 2024, we founded the tenant union federation with, it was five unions, Bozeman, Montana, Southside together in Chicago, Kansas City, Louisville, and Connecticut. And we had been running a policy campaign for three years against the Biden administration

to get rent caps on all properties with federally backed mortgages. Of course, Biden, we actually got Biden to say rent control on national TV, and I think he was gone two days later. So we had to, we had to scrap. Mentally or literally. That's what broke the brain. Yeah, yeah. That's what set the brandonization in motion. You know, I hope is chicken or egg, but he was out of there very quick.

So we had to scrap that. And so we decided that, you know, economic power is what we need, right? And we need to really focus on building majority unions. And we need to control the rent. And so Kansas City actually did a big rent strike last year, one of the first rent strikes in the middle of the country, right? Like we see this in New York. We see it in L.A., even Chicago a little bit.

We don't see this shit in Kansas City. see it in the south, right? And there's, and I think, you know, if you look at this country, the entire history of this country post-Civil War is really an agreement between Wall Street imperialist and plantation families in the South to keep the South largely ununionized, and the Midwest to a lesser extent. And so we decided we were going to pick a very large landlord and run a portfolio campaign against them. So shout out to the research team that put all this together. We had a bunch of landlords. to choose from. We landed on Capitol

Realty, which is a huge landlord across the country, owns thousands of buildings in the country. And right now we have majority unions, I believe, in four of their buildings. Three in, no, five. No, wait. One in Detroit. One in Connecticut. One in Louisville. And then three

in Kansas City. So six buildings total. What's like, what's like the threshold for like people like signing up in the buildings that like that makes sure, that instills confidence like, okay, now we've got a good shot at this. We try to get a super majority.

We try to get 60%. Yeah, we try to get 60%. You know, we hope for 75, 80, but we shoot for 60. Because the landlord's going to retaliate, right? And if you don't have that super majority, you can't really protect people. So our entire theory, Tom, is not the law, is that the law doesn't protect people. It's the number of people you organize that protect you, right? So I want to live in a world where if anybody fucks with me, thousands of people don't pay rent tomorrow.

And I want you all live in that world too, right? And that's really the only type of protection that we're going to have. A righteous gangster ismo. I mean, also too, I mean, it's just really admirable that you guys, because people are scared, right? And people are scared to take chances. But just explaining to them, like, the more numbers that we have, right, the stronger that we are, you know. And just reassuring people of this, I mean, that's the only way that we'll win, you know. Yeah, that's it.

And so I forget how many units they have organized right now. shout out to our union president, Kamar Omer. Kamar Omer organized about almost 250, 275 units this year alone. And so that's just, that's the tremendous amount of work because people are scared. Like the number of conversation that you have to have with people to get them to take this risk, the amount of work that it takes is tremendous, right? And that's why we see nonprofits that call themselves tenant users,

not really able to engage in this type of work because they're so committed to advocacy and service. and they don't actually give people the chance to make that decision and whether they want to fight or not. Right. And keep engaging with people, right? It's not just a one-off thing. You have to keep talking. Like you said,

keep talking to people over and over and over again and actually build a relationship in a community. Yeah, because we have to do a lot of inoculation. The landlord really works on people. I mean, every one of our leaders, they get threatened with eviction. They try to evict them. They get lease violations. We had a campaign, you know, we did an action this summer

where our members in Brandenburg burned their lease violations. Just in defiance of the law. I just think it's, I'm just thinking about, um, the softer sort of tactics. Like, you know, bringing a Sears catalog and letting like, like, like tenants look through and then pick like a microwave or something like that. Like, that's ridiculous, you know. And meanwhile, there's mold on their walls and shit like that. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And to the point of the nonprofits, I think that there's probably a lot of people listening to this, um, you know, I'll speak for myself, like the archetype of the white educated um you know college educated person who like maybe isn't necessarily at risk of getting evicted this month um if you getting out of the non-profit mindset and being someone who will be on a food team who will do child care who will do the support like that is just as necessary and we need to start taking the same risk that these people are taking who are literally could get evicted um for

standing up to their landlord and it feels like such an impossible thing to do to start a tenant union or to be part of the start of one but it's not we have two paid staff at LTEU um josh correct me if i'm wrong but you know josh and again our union president kamar shout kumar like have built an army of volunteers um who are just as invested in this that large um that large chapter that josh was talking about because we've gotten clear on our self-interest just as much as tenants have um who are doing these chapter um organizing unions and that's self-interest is obviously like a familiar word to anybody who is has been in organizing um and even nonprofits but what that means is is understanding in a really serious way why you need this thing to succeed not just why you think

it would be nice to start for people in your community and if you're yeah if you're listening to this and you feel like you can't relate to the struggle of housing and security, you really need to examine yourself because there's a lot of educated white people who think all they can do is help rather than it be a battle for their own life. But we live in fascism. We also need to up your Patreon contribution too if you're not worried about that. Yeah. Exactly. Two things can be true. But yeah, we live in fascism. This is all of our lives. Like one of the most clarifying things you can say to a new chapter member who is, you know, again, I'll keep saying the white educated archetype person who just joined the union is who taught you was okay to help

poor people. You're not doing it for them. You're doing it with them. So you have to tap into your own rage for that to be true. And you have to start seeing the urgency for your own livelihood the same way the person who's about to get evicted does. And that's a really, really big part of LTU's success is other people investing their time and really like taking this so seriously. well let me ask this just kind of piggybacking off that haley it like all these sort of currents we're seeing you know the proliferation of ice and all these incentives that people are getting to you know it seems to be that they're like trying to even recruit people from like local police departments and stuff like that i mean we're seeing you know the assassination of charler kirk being used as pretense for a number of uh various crackdowns like how is these sorts of things connected to the housing struggle or rather like how does something like the proliferation of vice agents like bolster the landlord's cause and so forth and also too like I guess how does like you know to the person listening to this like how can we make those connections I guess yeah I mean there's a

sorry you go ahead Josh go ahead you can go no no that's okay um I am going to pull up an article though about this is insane. My mom sent it to me. It's about these landlords from New York who actually bought a building in Denver. It was in such disrepair that they hired a PR team to start looking like better people because the community was revolting against them. And then they started, they literally sent ICE in because this PR campaign was like, these are really bad immigrants living here and that's the main problem. So I will send that article. It's insane. But But yeah, there are so many direct lines. And go ahead, Josh.

I'm going to look for this article. Yeah, I think you can really see the proliferation of ISIS as a serious effort of white reconstruction, right? Like, it's no coincidence that while Trump's gutting HUD, which means, I think, 300,000 black people lost their jobs. You know, the HUD's mostly staffed by black people, especially black women. So now they're now unemployed. We know it's mostly white males that are getting those ICE jobs. So that's a huge shift, right? We know from organizing in places like Eastern Kentucky that white males are, what we have is a gendered economy there.

Terrence has written about this really well, actually. And the only jobs really available to, like, a lot of young men in those areas are military, police-type jobs, right? So you could choose fast food, you can choose unemployment, you can sell drugs, or you can become some agent of state violence. The right-wing recruiting is really effective in those. areas because of the high rates of unemployment the ice expansion is going to capitalize on all that right now what that means for us is a lot of our work is inoculating those young white males against fascist recruitment and you actually give them a class analysis and i don't think i'm not saying that we're going to be able to do that on any scale but god damn it we don't need all of them right and we can just get a few uh you can just get a few Just sprinkling a few white boys. Yeah, you just need that's all you need. That's all you need, a smattering of white.

And past a certain threshold, there's diminishing returns famously. Yeah, I don't want to overstate. Like, we're not surge, right? We're not trying to change hearts and minds. But we have had some success recruiting in these areas, right, along class lines and along the tenant movements. And so what that looks like is who's going to be doing these evictions, right? It's going to be ICE. going to be enforcing like the tenants of the new laws of the capitalist order it's going to be

ice and there again i just feel like the tenant movement like we're built for 2025 we're built for this whereas a lot of our other political organizations are built uh for a time that's that's that's long gone right and i think tom i think actually growing up in eastern kutucky actually helped us it helps you see this uh i think i you know i think growing up in eastern kutkutk it's easy to kind of skip liberalism and just deal with like the harsh materiality of capitalism which is what we're seeing right now. Like, it's no coincidence that Donald Trump is talking about abolishing HUD or setting limits on HUD. At the same time, we have laws that criminalize houselessness.

ICE is going to be the vehicle that actually carries that out, right? It's just going to be this great squeeze where we're short, what, 4.4 million units in this country. Rent's going to skyrocket, and it's going to be like this great lottery or surplus population every day. And, you know, we're going to roll the dice. Some of us are going to be how some of us are going to be out on the street and the ones that are out on the street. ice is going to sweep us up and put us in a cage somewhere. And so there again, can we control enough of the rent to stop this from happening? And that's the question we're Grapp one with. Yeah, I'm happy that I'm happy that you made that through line, Josh, because I saw

something similar with Cop City, you know, and there were housing organizations and the tenant organizations that were saying this as well, it's like, well, it's going to, we're going to have more police, right? And also, too, they would tie an environmentalism into it as well. So through housing, there are so many issues, you know, that you can also spread out from that I think can, you know, engage people and have people care about a larger political project, you know. Yeah. And a lot of it can be traced back to like the idea of deservingness. And I think this came up a lot from me with the, with, um, Charlie Kirk and like, I guess recently Jimmy Kimmel and who deserves to be heard and who deserves to die and who deserves to be saved. And like at the

end of every equation are immigrants, homeless people, you know, we're like, God, what that Fox News host just say? Like, they should be leafly injected. Yeah, it's kind of a throwaway comment, which added like a more sinister air to it. You know what I mean? So insane. These people are raving lunatics. Well, it's crazy. I'm kind of taking a, just kind of glancing of this article that you put out here, Haley, it's kind of crazy how it's like, you know, it opens up with the line how the Trump administration is declared more on Venezuelan migrants in particular in the U.S. and how that ties into this sort of fake-ass drug war, you know what I mean, which is already rich enough coming from the world's biggest narco state. But at the same

time, it's also like if Venezuela had cum quats instead of oil, my hunch is that like we might find another bogeyman, you know, to, you know, transpose this fake new drug war onto and stuff. but uh no that's that's worth that's definitely worth checking out here i it's asking me to auto renew my 1299 month or i would kind of try to kind of go through that right now but but to put a bow on this and to to cut you all off and i appreciate y'all making the time and and everything like you know just as a general wrap up like if people are listening to this and they want to get invested in what y'all are doing and and and even if they don't live in kentucky or near sort of one of the places bozeman or

Connecticut or the other places where y'all have expanded to how can they plug you um um sorry you go ahead go ahead um we can't organize without money like I said we have two paid staff

um if if that's donating is everything like please we've got an option to do a recurring um union dues um that you can sign up with solidarity dues um so hopefully Tom we can send you all this stuff and you can link we've got a zephy um i think we have a cash app um share our stuff on social

media it's louisville tenants union because i'll tell you what landlords look at our social media um we know that they look at it we know that they obsess over it they don't like being painted as bad people because again these are people who are um you know owning low income housing so a lot of them are like we provide housing for the poor um so share the shit that yeah share the shit that makes them look really bad but i would definitely say also if you're in the south and you're interested in starting something like this like contact us let us know yeah and obviously also if you're in kentucky and you want and you're interested in this like let us know we can we'll come uh we'll come to your county uh will come to your building also if you're interested in helping with

infrastructure we need a right we need more people on our rides team we need more people on child care team we need more people on food team like doing this all over the state really test our infrastructure and we always want to add people to it that are that are energetic and want to get involved. Hell yeah. Well, thanks again, guys, for joining us. I'm sorry for the musical chairs of schedule. As it turns out, I can sometimes be unreliable. We got time for one quick anecdote, Tom.

Please, please. Go for it. Yeah, yeah. Have you all ever heard of Gene King in St. Louis? No. I haven't. And I bring this up because I'd never heard of Gene King until last year, and I've worked in housing for fucking decades.

And this is important. So Gene King lived in St. Louis in the late 60s. Public housing was, you know, a terrible condition, right? So she got fed up. She was young, young black woman. She got fed up, started organizing her neighbors. And they, she ended up getting 500 tenants to sign up in her union, and they withheld rent.

And they didn't put it in escrow. They just kept it, put it in their pocket, put in their mattress, whatever. So all 500 got eviction notices and they got liens placed on them. Back then, you could actually get a lien put on. your person, which means you couldn't even access your bank account. So this was not going well, right? It looked really bad for Gene King and the tenant union,

but it's like that Mike Tyson quote, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth, right? She went out and got 800 more people to sign union cards. Now, now she's got 1,300 people, and they withheld rent. The amount of rent that they withheld is equivalent to like

4.5 million today. This shut down the fucking St. Louis economy, right? Yeah. they ended up going to Washington, D.C. and negotiating demands, this is where Section 8 came out of. So the way we see this or the way I see, let's speak for myself here.

Landlords and the government cut a deal to make sure nothing like this would ever happen again, right? Poor black women would never be allowed to do this again because now the government's going to pay your rent for you and you'll never be able to have a risk strike and we will bury Gene King's name deep in the belly of American history and make sure no one's ever heard of her. So they didn't get evicted because you can't evict 1,300 people, right?

Landlords can't lose that much money so they got their demands met. They also got to keep all that money. So a lot of the people that participated in this strike, they bought new cars. They bought new houses. And there's a reason we don't know who Gene King is today, right? Like, you want people to believe that they cannot do this. And so at our essence, and what I tell people like, what this tenant union is actually about, it's about taking our motherfucking rent and putting it in our fucking pockets.

And if you can get down with that, then that's what we need to do. But, yeah, I didn't know about Gene King. I've never heard of it. That's insane. A lot of, like, really prominent people that should know this don't know it. And shout out to, like, the Tenet Union Federation for doing this research. But we'd like to make Gene King a household name in this country as she should be. Hell yeah.

Hell yeah. Well, that's as powerful note as I can think to close it off. Yeah, now I've got it after this. So I got like, I'm in and I have to teach myself something out. Not a lot out there. I mean, there are some newspaper clippings, but Gene King has been buried, you all, much like a lot of really important black leaders in this country.

Yeah, yeah, totally, totally. Well, guys, once again, thanks for joining us again. And, yeah, let's check in periodically here. And, you know, keep everybody, you know, posted on the goings-on and everything. And, yeah, thanks for making the time. And also, if you're listening out there, you know, first of all, contribute. And I'll post, you know, y'all's cash apps and your memos and zels and everything in the show notes. But after you've checked your couch cushions to donate to the Tenet Union, think about donate to the old trilobilly

is at patreon.com slash truebilly workers party no apostrophes, no spaces and God will always bless you for it. I believe that firmly. So, yeah, thanks again, guys, for being with us,

and we'll see you soon. Thank you all. Thanks, y'all. Bye. Bye. I'm going to be able to be. You know, you know,

Thank you.