Covid Spreads, Unions Under Attack, Market Crashing: Capitalism, Everyone!
In a jam packed show, hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the Frito Lay strike and how it relates to the historical attacks we've seen in this country on unions themselves. The Delta variant has covid on the rise, with Fox News actually taking it seriously now that they see potential crashes in the stock market because of it. And how on earth will Joe Biden get anything done if he's not willing to twist arms?
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We have to do something with the suicide shifts because to work 12 hours and be off 8 and work 12 hours, I said that's a safety risk.
Imagine being an employee in here that has not had a day off for five months.
That is the reality of what you're seeing.
Just like we've been saying, please take COVID seriously.
I can't say it enough.
Enough people have died.
We don't need any more deaths.
And it absolutely makes sense for many Americans to get vaccinated.
I believe in science.
I believe in the science of vaccination.
Hey everybody, welcome to the Muckery Podcast.
I'm Joe D. H. Sexton.
Here as always with the most valued co-host, the top of the top, the most of the most, Nick Halseman.
I'm a good value.
You have wins above replacement, is what I would say.
Yeah, a lot of wins above replacement.
We're here today, as usual, to sort of sort through a lot of the cultural and political bullshit.
And there is a lot to deal with today.
And we have to start with some really troubling signs, both with the coronavirus pandemic, but also with our economy, which, Nick, I don't know if you know, but our economy is basically a toppling top at every given moment that looks like it's just getting ready to fall apart.
And what we're looking at now, and this is a strange thing, and I don't know about you, Nick, but it's like, I've been paying attention to what's been going on with the Delta variant.
Um, it of course is, uh, it spreads easier.
Uh, and on top of that, like we're seeing our numbers go up, uh, by over a hundred percent on top of that, we're seeing people who have been vaccinated, who are getting sick simply because there's more of this stuff out there.
There are more chances to catch it, uh, out in LA.
I believe they're starting to get back to mask mandates at this point.
And today, the US economy dropped 700 points in the Dow because of rising worries about the Delta variant.
And I don't know about you, this feels like the deadliest, most awful deja vu imaginable.
It does.
Well, it's scary because there might be other variants out there beyond Delta that could get even more deadly.
Lambda sounds terrible.
Lambda?
Yeah, I have to start studying more of my Greek alphabet.
I used to know all of it.
But, yeah, it's sort of like the, you know, the scenario that we've seen in the sci-fi movies where something hits the earth and, like, everybody, you know, it's a terrible thing.
Like, you kind of thought about that in the very beginning of COVID.
I remember, like, but we knew it wasn't anything like that.
But yeah, what happens?
You know, maybe the next version of this can then suddenly become a little bit more like a 12 monkeys scenario.
And now what are we supposed to do?
At least we have some sort of competent leadership that might be able to mitigate some of these things.
Because we've been railing for this since the beginning of COVID.
Had Trump done what he should have done and convinced people this was a real disease and actually shut down the country for a solid two months in the very beginning, we would have gotten a handle on this way early.
We would not have had variants, right?
I don't think.
We would have had less people killed, less people infected, and certainly more people vaccinated by now.
Yeah, at the risk of being redundant here, just to get everybody on the same page, variants happen as these diseases spread.
And as they grow and they go through the population, they evolve very, very quickly.
And what has happened in this case?
I want to put this in large scope before we start narrowing down in America and American politics.
What happens is that, or what has happened, is we live in a system where healthcare is for profit in most of, you know, the industrialized world.
Like, other places have better healthcare systems than we have, but you still have the haves and the have-nots who do not have the same access to vaccines or treatments.
Meanwhile, you have a difference between the first, second, and third world, the so-called different types of worlds that have different access to this, We had a lot of medical technology companies that dragged their feet on making this readily available because it was incredibly profitable for them.
On top of that, I don't know if everybody remembers it, we had a complete jackass of a president who had no interest in telling anybody the truth about COVID or doing anything to actually curb it.
He actually saw it as a really useful biological weapon against blue states and Democrats.
And Jared Kushner, by the way, helped him with that, and they should both be in jail For that, but I digress.
So what happens is, because we live in this current circumstance, these variants have been allowed to grow and strengthen.
And what happens is the same thing that always happens.
This system of inequality and exploitation bites us in the ass.
You can sit here and say, like, we should be the strongest country, or we should do this, or it's ours, and we shouldn't give it around.
And now we're in a situation We have this Delta variant that is already wreaking havoc.
You have the Lambda variant, which I mean, my God, if you read the description of that, it sounds like a horror movie and you start looking at all this stuff and you realize we could have wrapped this up.
We really could have, but we have reached a point of inequality and exploitation where we didn't act, and now we're going to deal with the repercussions.
And I don't know about you, I feel so strange navigating this thing.
Like, I've been traveling, I've been seeing people, I'm still being safe, I'm still taking precautions, but it feels so strange right now.
This whole thing is just very odd.
Yeah well the whole environment of the world in 2021 where we are now feels odd and uncertain and I'm not sure where we're going to go.
Now, I suppose when you're talking about inequality, you're talking about on a global scale how like I think the most one of the most ridiculous things is, is that any American in any American who wants a vaccine can get a vaccine right now.
Yet we have, you know, billions of people across the world who can't, you know, in their countries because, you know, they just can't get enough vaccine.
A buddy of mine was just in Bulgaria and he was saying that like in a lot of different countries around there, if you get the two shot thing, you get it might be eight or nine or 10 weeks in between shots because they don't have enough to give everybody and get the second one in their arms.
But I'm not so sure that it's the inequality.
If we're talking about America, that is the root of why we're not getting these vaccinations, right?
It definitely feels like it's the privileged class, a very specific part of the privileged class, who has these notions of how evil the vaccine is.
Which again, is because we didn't have the proper leadership that would have given us the kind of competence that we need in these kind of vaccines.
So a buddy of mine who's, you know, he's an anti-vaxxer, he was texting me angry texts the other day saying, you know, 99.99% of people survive this.
You're going to just kill yourself by putting the disease in your arm.
And I didn't want to try and explain to him that that's what a vaccine is, is actually is the Is the virus you whatever nonetheless the number is wrong So I just want to share this because if you have somebody, you know, it's gonna say 99.9% of the country of the people who got it Don't die.
Let me just point this out that there's a tweet from John Whitehouse who said on Twitter if that was the case Then that means that there's our deaths are 1 in 100,000, which would mean that to get to 600,000 deaths that we already know and verified, which is probably a low number by the way, we would have needed by that math almost 60 billion positive tests.
He's pretty sure, as am I, that we don't have 60 billion people in America, right?
So that tells you that whatever numbers they're thinking of what the real death rate is, is a lot higher.
I'm talking about a thousand-fold on what they're thinking it is.
And that should definitely change your mind if you're talking about getting the vaccine, but here we are.
That's easily the most math that has taken place on the Muckrake podcast.
Sorry.
I am a liberal arts professor.
I glazed over.
I got the gist of it, but I... Really, the gist of it would be, okay, even if it's 99% versus 99.9, like a one percentage difference, that is hundreds and thousands of people that are dead because of that.
It's a huge difference on the order of a hundred times.
So you can't be so, you know, convince your mind that like 99.9% is what that is when it's not.
Does that make sense?
Well, yeah, it does.
It does.
And I think what we also need to focus in on is that all of this has happened because of demographic marketing, like going back to Trump and the disinformation, right?
Like Trump, somebody would come in and be like hydroxychloroquine.
He's like, yeah, inject it, whatever.
Good luck, everybody.
Right.
And meanwhile, of course, we had Fox News that was every single day spreading lies about the coronavirus, which, by the way, was not just for political purposes because they wanted Trump to get reelected.
They did not want it to be a big giant crisis, but also they didn't want to mess with the economy.
They wanted people to go to work and survive, you know, go to work and maybe they'll get coronavirus.
Maybe they won't, but they didn't want everybody to get spooked about it.
And they kept playing these political games with it.
And now we've reached a point where Fox News, and I really want to say this because we all know it, but we don't say it.
Donald Trump was president when the initiatives were put in place to make these vaccines.
In one breath, he will tell you, I made these vaccines.
It's the greatest thing anyone's ever done.
And in the next breath, he's like, I don't know if these vaccines are safe.
You know what I mean?
And we talk all the time about this absolutely inherently illogical shit.
Fox News, has found that what they're going to do is they're going to say the exact opposite of whatever CNN or MSNBC says or whatever so-called liberal media says.
So they've been pushing this anti-vax stuff left and right.
Don't go out and get it.
Hey, by the way, wink wink, nudge nudge, there might be tracking devices in there.
It's the Mark of the Beast type bullshit.
That, you know, Book of Revelation stuff that they keep pushing.
To let you know how dangerous of a situation like that we're on the precipice of right now with the Delta variant, they've started running segments talking about the need to get vaccinated.
Like it's the moment where all of a sudden they're like, oh that's right, at any moment this could crash everything.
This 700 point drop tells us and reminds us, and again Americans have Our attention span sucks, man.
It's just so bad, and we just keep making the same mistakes.
It reminds us, oh yeah, that's right, there is an economic consequence of having a massive pandemic.
So a lot of people today, I think, got a wake-up call, which is, this economy is a top that is constantly looking like it's going to fall over at any given moment, and if you keep fucking around with this, it's almost assured that that's coming.
I have an idea here for you.
Is it fair to say that Fox and the right itself treats winning back the White House and controlling the government as a life and death biblical imperative?
Right, safe to say that.
Absolutely.
If they don't win the midterms, it's the apocalypse.
If they don't win back the White House, it's the apocalypse.
Every single thing is a constant apocalyptic nightmare if they don't get their way.
Absolutely.
So, how far of a stretch is it to think that, I mean, I know that we have to acknowledge that they've been pushing vaccines a little bit during the daytime, Fox.
But I'm wondering though, if in the back of their mind, the front of their mind, in whatever the space is in between their ears, if they think, you know what, if we get a bunch of people to die, that'll reflect really poorly on Biden.
It's really a big political problem.
And you know what, if we get the economy to crash, that really hurts Biden.
They're all vaccinated.
Everybody who goes on TV.
Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity.
I mean, hell, Donald Trump's vaccinated.
All of these assholes are vaccinated.
They understand what this thing is.
And you're exactly right.
Like these people will sit there and they will strategize and they will happily sacrifice people at all given times, which sounds horrific, but it is horror.
Absolutely.
And what are they railing about now?
They're railing about these Gestapo Nazi people going to door to door and forcing you to get vaccinated.
Right.
That's their big boogeyman thing right now.
And by the way, you know what we haven't talked about is the fact, just very, very quickly, in Arizona, where they rigged the entire recount investigation, they couldn't find any fraud, first of all.
Second of all, they're already talking about going door to door, asking people who they voted for.
So again, it's always projection.
Right.
And it is that type of thing.
Like it is that that sort of Machiavellian idea behind it all, which is that people are sacrificeable, rights are sacrificeable as long as they get their way.
And what we're seeing right now with Fox News at any given day is just a lot of people trying to pull out these strategies to win back power and influence.
Right.
And then, you know, people's lives be damned.
That's sort of the scorched earth that we've seen on that side for so long.
And if we're ever looking, because, you know, you can criticize the left as much as you like.
Democrats are, you know, have a lot of issues, but they don't seem to want to kill people.
Right.
Like that seems to be a line we can draw if you had to differentiate between the Democrats and the Republicans.
Well, I have to tell you that if a Democratic administration had a conversation between the president and his son-in-law, and his son-in-law, and the son-in-law told the president, the Democratic president, that it might score him some political points, To let blue states suffer a pandemic and die and have to deal with the political consequences?
I don't think they would be done talking about it now.
I'll just say that.
There is a chance.
Ventilators, though, man.
Everybody had a ventilator who needed one.
You know, the funny thing about that is, I mean, it's actually the opposite of funny, is that, you know, if you got as bad as needing a ventilator, you're probably going to die anyway.
I hate even thinking about that time period.
Like I have to tell you, I don't know how you navigate it or how our listeners navigate it.
Like watching these numbers go up and watching the difference between what I'm reading in one place and what I'm reading in another and the varying type of sources and information.
And like that trauma of living through the early days of coronavirus with Donald Trump as president of the United States of America.
I'm still not okay from that.
Do you know what I mean?
Like I still feel like something from that.
There's still remnants of it.
You saying that made me feel very viscerally aware of how I felt during those press conferences and during the lies and all of that and now I'm sitting here watching this Delta variant thing happen and like I don't know about you but I don't really trust anybody at this point.
Do you know what I mean?
Like I'll listen to epidemiologists and I'll listen to experts but It just feels like at any given time like people are willing to sacrifice lives To not mess with the economy.
And to know that our economy is so fragile right now, it really brings to the forefront of the question, which you asked this before we went on the air.
The question is, are they going to shut things down again?
Like, are we going to see a moment?
And can I trust that they would shut things down again if it got to that?
Because other countries are having that conversation right now, and I don't feel like America has even started talking about that.
Right well it's the summer we need to be able to have our barbecues and go out and do whatever but you know like I told you before when I drove to Chicago from LA in October in the you know in the height of the pandemic there was nearly a mask to be seen between LA and Chicago so that's what you have to remember is like whatever bubble that we all live in where we see people masking up really wasn't the reality for anybody for all this time.
And in fact, you know, what we the videos that we see are probably the more accurate depiction of the people who are harassing mask wearers and get this, you know, sort of primal rage from seeing that and the virtue signaling, whatever they're, you know, getting from that, which is the projection and whatever.
And perhaps even the guilt that they're not actually, you know, considering everyone part of a community that they take care of each other.
This is the problem and then that actually opens up the whole notion of the global community that we live in where we I know there was reports a while back that we were gonna send a lot of our extra vaccines to other countries but all I could tell you is that from what I've seen in other countries they're still so woefully short that that we're not helping enough.
And especially when we have people here who won't get the vaccine anyway, willingly.
I mean, it's just mind boggles to me, mind boggling to me, that we're in that situation now, where we're going to have 30% of the population who simply will never get the vaccine.
Well, and the pandemic, just to bring that whole thing around, the pandemic has made clear, like, large problems that have been with us for a very long time.
We would not have had the problems that we had if we had a better health care system.
We would not have the problems that we have if there was a more global community where people took care of each other and shared information and resources.
Like, you can sit here and say, take care of Americans first, all you want.
A pandemic doesn't give a shit about that.
A pandemic doesn't care what flag you're waving or what national anthem is playing.
What ends up happening is everything comes back around.
It always does.
And the route that we have been on, both with capitalism and nationalism, and this individualism where we don't consider other people or care about other people or, you know, look into actually helping people, It bites you in the ass.
It always does.
And like, you know, one of the things that we talk about on here is if you look at American history, America, in order to make the world safe or to fight communism or whatever, has gone into one country after another, overthrown a leader, put in some sort of a puppet, and guess what happens?
It doesn't matter who you put in, you eventually have to deal with the fallout from it.
There's always a reaction to it you put it like you you sat there and you help Saddam Hussein Guess what?
You're gonna have to go fight two fucking wars against them, right?
Manuel Noriega could not be reached for comment And so what what ends up happening is all of these things that these people have done Have put us in a position where we are now dealing with a very real problem that is manifested because of all of the decisions that have been made.
And we need to look at it that way and understand it.
And that's the only way that we're actually going to fix this thing, is if we start viewing ourselves as part of a global community.
Well, I'd also say we need to kind of actually, may I use the word, critically examine what we do?
Cancel.
Cancel.
Don't.
Because legislated out of existence.
I know that you say we have to, we have to consider ourselves part of a global community.
Yes.
But I also think we need to be self reflective and understand what the mistakes have been over the last 250 years, whatever, how long this country has been around, in order to then progress into that.
I got called a Maoist yesterday and a communist for saying that.
I had people trying to get me fired yesterday because I said that Americans need to relearn their history.
And everyone's like, oh, look at the communists putting us in camps.
It's like that simply saying that we need to learn from our mistakes at this point has become tantamount to treason.
We've had these camps that they're so afraid of, right?
That's part of the point.
A couple different times.
Yeah, it's crazy to me.
Now, what's the Venn diagram between anti-vaxxers and Trumpers?
It's a circle, right?
You know, here's the thing about that, is when it really comes down to why a person would choose to get a vaccine or not choose a vaccine, the people who are on the anti-vax part of that, there are some communities Who have been really screwed over and they've been experimented on.
You know, I don't know if you read American history, but some people were told that their syphilis was being treated and it wasn't, you know, like there are people who do not trust authority for very good reason.
And then you have a bunch of white people, by the way, I don't, I don't know if you're paying attention to this.
I'm sure everybody is.
People are losing their minds out there.
Like, I mean, like whether it's sporting events, the hot weather, right?
We don't know how to deal with each other.
People are trying to jump out of airplanes.
Road rage incidents are out of control.
We also have, man, I watched this video of like these two women getting into it at like a Victoria's Secret.
And it was just like to like a person having a total breakdown on camera.
Like people are not Handling all of this well.
And so for some people, the anti-vax stuff is a manifestation of that.
And then there's other people that it's a political identity and their allegiance to Trump and this right-wing idea is putting all of us in danger.
It's not.
And I know that it, this is something I really need to put out there.
It was a political issue, right?
It was like part of your identity was I'll wear a mask or I won't wear a mask.
I'll get vaccinated or I won't get vaccinated.
It brings back to the forefront.
If those people aren't getting vaccinated, you're still getting screwed.
They're kindling on a fire and like it's going to get worse.
Like even if you disagree on even the basis of reality.
You're still going to suffer the consequences of these people not doing it.
It just so happens we live in an ecosphere that works that way.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, listen, I know a guy who was over my house the other day who said, like, you know, his brother got the vaccine and then rushed to the hospital and died.
You know, 53 years old, whatever it was.
And it's like, you know, am I supposed to blame him for refusing not to get the vaccine because he's convinced that he killed his brother immediately?
There's probably some more details and it probably gets fuzzy and we don't know.
The doctors didn't seem clear on what the doctors were saying to him.
But that's the other thing.
I'm sympathetic to that.
I don't know what else you're supposed to say.
If you have a family member that dies a week or two after you get the vaccine, you might think that.
You know, like, I don't know if the kid if your kid was acting normal and then gets measles and mumps, whatever, and then develops autism.
You know, it's like, I don't know.
I can't feel anger towards people like that or, you know, dismiss those people.
So it's like I don't know.
I don't know what to make of that.
And I guess I have to hope that the number of those people is so small that it doesn't increase the likelihood of getting different variants.
But you still have a moment where it's like, you know, those people are not going to get the vaccine.
And I don't know what to say about those.
Well, and I do have to say, and to go ahead and transition out of this and into the next thing we need to talk about, I really wish that Joe Biden would discover the bully pulpit.
Like, he needs to take the office of the presidency.
And like, sure, he'll do press conferences and, you know, he'll do this.
There needs to be a full court press on so many things.
You know what I mean?
There needs to be a force that's happening.
Whether or not it's getting infrastructure passed, whether or not it's getting people vaccinated.
I don't know if that's in commercials.
I don't know if that's in events.
I don't know if that's in building coalitions of people who will come and tell people to do it.
But like, so for instance, one of the things right now that is I'll be honest with you, Nick, it's infuriating me.
Which is, for those who haven't been paying attention, there's this massive strike right now with Frito-Lay, which is part of Pepsi company.
And at Frito-Lay, you have just an absolutely untenable situation where employees are being forced To do mandatory overtime, to work six to seven hours, upwards of like 83 hours of work a week.
And I have to tell you, to go ahead and put my cards on the table, I know people, people that I love, people in my family, people that I care about, they're working six to seven day weeks.
Their bodies are giving out.
And by the way, it has a terrible effect on your mental health.
And I know I can hear people right now who are like, aren't there laws on the books?
Absolutely, there are laws on the books.
The problem is that oversight in this country has been intentionally hollowed out.
It's been made to the point where, like, they're not checking on this stuff.
Or, the employees, because of precarity, they're terrified of losing their jobs.
And by the way, in this country, you gotta have a job to get healthcare.
Don't undermine that!
Don't undermine that.
You quit your job, chances are you're going to lose your health care.
And the economy is so fucked up at this point that people are just doing it.
They're like, I guess I'm going to do this for the rest of my life.
This is a situation where, you know, it's like Reagan with the air traffic controllers.
And for those who don't know it, the air traffic controllers in the 1980s went on strike and Reagan told them that they would be fired if they didn't go back to work and systematically undermine labor unions.
I would love right now if Joe Biden discovered the bully pulpit and said, we're not going to have Americans working six to seven days a week, 83 hours a week.
This is bullshit.
It needs to stop.
Some people need to really step up on this thing.
And I think that I think throwing your weight behind this and actually taking a stand on this could change labor relations in this country, and that is one way that we could possibly turn this country around.
For sure.
The first statement I have when I looked at this was like, well, where the fuck is their union?
Because how did they get so deep into this without any union representation before?
But in case you're wondering, if you're one of those people out there that wants to disparage unions and say they're terrible, This is why we have them.
Because before we had unions, everybody worked this way.
This is what the sweatshops looked like in New York City for immigrants all those years.
Their kids worked next to them!
You know what I mean?
Like, it was an entire family in your sweatshop.
And occasionally, because there were no safety recommendations and no safety protocols, your place would catch on fire and everybody would die.
Or there would be a mine cave-in and it would kill your entire family.
That's what happened before unions and labor fought to get these regulations in place.
And now they've just been destroyed.
Yeah, and by the way, it's Reagan again.
So I like what you said, how you brought him in there.
Not only did he disparage the government, remember the seven most frightening words are the government's here to help you, whatever that is.
And he also destroyed the notion of unions.
It's really impressive what he did to change our country in this very short eight years.
And as a result, I hear this from a lot of the conservative people who rail against, you know, teacher unions are the same thing.
These are vital.
Now, listen, in the best of times, The problem ends up being that unions can end up negotiating these amazing terms that when the economy does go bad, it makes it really untenable sometimes for the companies to handle what they agree to pay when it was going really well.
But that's okay because that's when you have negotiations and we kind of go back and forth and we, you know, just depending on how the economy works.
But the point of it is, is that they can now protect the fucking workers.
So they're not, yeah, in danger of dying while they work and they're not overworked the way they used to be.
So it's disgusting to me to see that that, you know, this is in the name of capitalism, right?
We must work because we have a bottom line for this quarter and the next quarter has got to grow again over the next quarter.
And the only way to do that is to force these workers to work that much more.
I thought we were seeing a thawing of this year, and I thought things were changing as less people were going back to work after getting a little bit of a bailout for the COVID thing and realizing they don't need to be treated that way.
But I suspect the boomerang could very well be worse going into the future.
Well, a lot of the people, and to go ahead and put this on everyone's radar, what's happening in this situation is you have a lot of captive employees.
So like, okay, so let's talk about like post-NAFTA America.
You start getting rid of all the factories.
You start getting rid of all the industry.
Suddenly you have places like my hometown where everything shuts down.
So all of a sudden you have a town that doesn't have any employment outside of McDonald's, Wendy's, Walmart, right?
Well, maybe they'll go over to the next town.
Guess what?
They now have a 20, 25, 30 minute drive into work every single day and you start getting treated like shit.
You have no alternatives.
Are you just going to quit?
You know, if you can't find other employment, if you can't find a place to make your money and actually stay afloat.
And almost all of these people are one paycheck away from absolute ruin.
And that's what the employers want.
They want people who are in debt and who are one paycheck away from being ruined because they can pay them less, they can work them harder.
And so what has happened is exactly what you're saying.
They need, and all of these places, by the way, are profiting hand over fist.
And so the question then becomes, oh, are we going to hire more people?
And then the answer is, No, no, we work the people we have more than that.
We're making more like you're not going to give money over there, which is why trickle down economics doesn't work.
It never worked.
But the way that this country turned itself around and I'm talking around like the progressive age.
Back when they said, guess what?
Our kids are not going to work in mines anymore, right?
We're not going to employ little children to snake their hands into the machinery, right?
You know, and risk being killed and maimed.
We're not going to do that anymore.
Labor unions made that possible.
And for anybody who doesn't know this about American history, that didn't happen easily.
The people who run these factories and these corporations, they weren't like, yeah, absolutely.
That's a good point.
They brought in troops.
They murdered them.
Look this stuff up.
They had the National Guard go out and mow them down with machine guns.
They had wars in the street to get down to a 40-hour work week, to get the weekend that we all take for granted.
And eventually what happens is they were betrayed.
They were totally betrayed.
They went into World War II.
They stopped striking.
After World War II, they started striking again immediately when they had leverage and power, and they got screwed over by the powerful.
And then you get, of course, into the 60s, the 70s, and the 80s, and eventually Ronald Reagan is there to, like, hit them with the hammer and put them out of their misery.
Now, all of a sudden, you've reached the point where people are being exploited, and it's this Frito-Lay place.
Someone fucking died.
And while they died on the floor, somebody had to come over and replace him on the line.
Like, that's not humanity.
That's not at all the type of system that I want to live in.
And if you care about making this country better, we have to start caring about this shit.
And we have to start caring about people who are being exploited like this.
I mean, you said it better than I did.
And it's amazing that... Here's the thing.
It's like, we're talking about progressing, our country moving upward and onwards.
But we're still seeing this shit?
We're still seeing people dying on the factory floors and being worked like this in violation of what the law is supposed to be?
That's why it doesn't feel any better, right?
Okay, Biden wins, Trump is not in the White House anymore, but I don't feel any better.
Look at the mass shootings that are going on.
You mentioned all the tumultuousness going on in the summer.
The heat is a thing, by the way.
Something about the heat and the moon and whatever makes people insane.
Actually, speaking of Biden, though, we were talking about what do you do to coerce and use your bully pulpit to get some things done.
You think about LBJ and how he got the Civil Rights Act passed.
Well, you know, we don't need to look that far back.
We can go to Trump.
Right.
Trump clearly coerced a number of these senators to back him.
You have to wonder, well, you know, now, do you want Biden to go to the same extremes?
Like, do we have to wonder what Lindsey Graham, what he put him through to get him on board?
Because I don't know.
At this point, maybe we do.
Maybe Biden's going to have to do the same thing on the Democratic side for their senators to twist their arm and dredge up something that they don't want found out.
I don't know, because that was the only explanation I can come up with how Trump got his guys in line.
Well, one of the big problems here, and by the way, I want to give everyone practical advice very, very quickly.
And we're very good at diagnosing the problems and predicting future problems.
I want to also start sprinkling in some practical advice.
First and foremost, You have to start talking with other people you work with.
I don't care what line of work you're in.
You need to have conversations about how you're being treated.
You need to have conversations about how much you're getting paid.
Because they use the siloing and alienation of these jobs to keep you from comparing notes.
And getting on the same page.
People have to start doing that.
And people are terrified to do it.
And telecommuting has made it to where, like, you never even see people that you work with.
You know what I mean?
You have to make a concentrated effort to come into a consciousness with the other people that you work with.
Otherwise, you're just going to get wrote out.
And that's what unions used to be.
It was the place where you could meet and talk and compare notes.
That shared space has been gotten rid of.
So talk to people that you work with and develop trust between each other.
What I will say, though, and I think you're exactly right.
Trump was one of those situations where he put the fear of God in the Republican Party.
Some of them wanted to lick his boots and other people were afraid of the boot.
Right.
And then they licked the boot because they were afraid of the boot.
One of the things that has happened and one of the reasons we've reached this point in this country is because the political parties have carved up the electorate.
And by the way, thank you Richard Milhouse Nixon, who created this.
Before Nixon, presidents and politicians wanted to reach out.
They wanted to find more voters.
Here's what I'm gonna do if you vote for me.
Here are the future things that are gonna get there.
Richard Nixon was like, fuck that.
I don't like people.
I only want the number of people I need to get elected.
The Republican Party engineered that and pioneered it, and the Democratic Party followed very closely behind.
So we now have reached this point where the turkey is carved up, and it's a very specific carved up.
Well, guess what?
You don't have to live that way.
That is a mindset, right?
So here's the thing.
If you start telling Americans you're being exploited, you're not being paid enough, you're being worked too hard, guess what?
Some of the anti-vaxxers, some of the Trump supporters, some of those people that right now are locked into that mindset, that's their reality.
You know what I mean?
Like, I have to assume, and I don't mean to make assumptions about this, this Frito-Lay place is in Kansas.
I have to assume that there are some people who drive to work to this Frito-Lay place, and they have some Trump bumper stickers.
They have some fuck Joe Biden bumper stickers.
But guess what they're thinking?
And they're listening to Lee Greenwood in the parking lot.
And you know why I know that?
Because these are my people now.
These are the people I grew up with that I love and I care about.
And I have to tell you something.
Those people with Trump stickers, those people with Fuck Joe Biden stickers, that are on strike right now, if you start telling them that they're on the right side of this issue, they might be interested in some unions.
You know what I mean?
They might be interested in some left-wing ideals.
It goes back.
Materialism and your conditions in your life are what make you do things.
It's what I said whenever Biden got elected.
Put some money in the Midwest to put up solar panels and wind turbines, and you're going to see a lot of people who care very quickly about green energy.
And this is a situation where you can point out what's happening, but you have to define the reality, which Democrats are terrified of doing.
Well, it sounds great except for the fact that so many people will vote not in their interest anyway.
But it's more of an education thing and more of an exposure to information versus in your gut, paycheck, in your face, right, job conditions all around you, which is, right, a little bit more penetrating and a little bit more affecting, I would imagine, versus just like the ideology that's swirling around on top of their head, around their heads that they don't necessarily pick up on.
So I would hope that that would be the case.
Well, and this is really, I can't believe we haven't talked about this on this podcast, but it's a really important thing.
One of the inherent contradictions of MAGA, of Trumpism, and one of the things that we have to do if we want to win, if we want to change this country, is we have to start looking for the contradictions of Because the Republican base and structure is all fucked up.
It makes no sense.
It's inherently contradictory.
So think about what we just talked about.
So we have this struggle at like a Frito-Lay plant, right?
Do you know who supports Trump at that plant?
Some of the poorest workers?
Managers and the administrators, right?
Because it's all about, on one hand, telling poor white people that, you know, we didn't do to you what you're upset about.
Those people over there did it.
Go get them.
And who's telling them that?
Their managers.
The people who booked private jets to go and try and run into the Capitol.
So all of a sudden, if you start talking about the issue between them, You can start severing that bind.
You're not going to do it with cultural issues.
You're not.
Because they speak in that.
They speak about conservatism and the way things are changing and, oh, they're going to come and change the country.
But if you start talking economically, That is the weak spot of Trumpism and MAGA, because they don't have an answer for that.
It is a tiered group, and you have two groups that are inherent contradiction to each other, and if the Democrats start seizing that, or if the left starts seizing that, you could see shit change in a hurry.
Well, I mean, I think we've certainly talked about the inherent, you know, clashing of ideas in the same mind that don't seem to mesh well at all.
I've often described that as, like, the torque that must exist that makes them so upset with things because they know that, like, they can't have both of these ideas competing at the same time.
You know, it also goes down to the thing where, like, Trump keeps railing on these awful releases about, like, you know, the people he hired and how bad they were.
And yet no one's going to say, well, you hired them.
Right.
You're the one who hired them.
You're the one who's supposed to vet them and do it.
But we don't.
Trump supporters aren't going to criticize Trump for that or see that in the bad light.
Right.
They just want to blame and put something on the incompetence of somebody else.
It's a it's a weird world to live in.
Right.
Because you would think, you know, It has nothing to do with that.
It has everything to do with, like, the cultural war of, you know, of the religious right and these some sort of familial values that they put, you know, that they think that the left has, you know, a vendetta against.
And so as a result, like, again, I like what you're saying.
I wish we could peel off enough of those.
Maybe it's enough just to peel off enough of those voters to win an election.
But it would be so nice to finally, once and for all, have a majority of people understand what the reality is and how ridiculous the Republicans are.
Well, I just want to sketch out to people, and we've touched on this in the past, but I want to make it very clear how the Republican Party works.
The way it works is you have a wealthy white elite in this country, right?
The wealthiest, the most powerful white people, most of them are libertarians.
They're not even actually Republicans, right?
It's like the Kochs, right?
And then you have down here the working class white people who are pissed off about being left behind in a post-NAFTA America.
Meanwhile, you have an entire constellation of think tanks and media strategists who sit around coming up with tasty Like scary stories that they can feed the people at the bottom to go ahead and take the blame from the wealthiest elite and move it towards black people, immigrants, liberals.
Meanwhile, in the middle, the Democratic Party for the large part, is an administrative class.
It's people who went to college.
They're the people who are like, you know, they're middle managers in a lot of ways.
Or they're tech people.
Or they're teachers.
You also have, of course, unions.
And you have labor people, right?
And on top of that, the biggest part of it that now is represented is people of color.
These vulnerable populations who are getting blamed for all this shit.
That's all camouflaged.
The blame that they're getting is not real.
The blame that labor unions are getting aren't real.
The administrators, the people who get educated, that's not real.
The people who are the angriest and part of MAGA are being sold a lie.
They're being sold an intentionally manipulated, created story.
CRT!
Mr. Potato Head!
Oh, you can't read Dr. Seuss to your kids anymore.
America's changing.
And that story is all bullshit.
It's all bullshit, and it's supposed to keep us from talking about things like the fact These people are being made six to seven days a week, 83 hours a week to work and sacrifice their bodies and die faster and make less money.
And that is the story that they'd use to just completely keep that obfuscated.
I was almost going to suppose the scenario where they actually win everything and they get every agenda they want, every piece of their agenda done.
We know that would never happen because they don't govern.
They can't, they had the control of everything and they couldn't get it done.
Look what they did!
They did one, well, they dismantled government for profit, is what they mostly did.
Right.
But the big thing that they passed, one thing, and it was a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, and that was it.
Right.
That was the one thing they were able to do.
But think about what that actually does.
Besides putting money back in the wealthy American's pockets, if you allow that to happen over enough time, the government will just completely go bankrupt and shut down.
It'll fall apart.
We will not have a government anymore.
And they wouldn't care.
They wouldn't acknowledge that.
They would just simply say, oh, well, next quarter, it'll pay for itself.
Until the moment when it completely fails and no one shows up to work anymore and the buildings fall down, that is what they'll say.
That is what's so crazy about this whole thing.
I don't even think that they've even thought this whole thing through.
You know, like trickle-down economics, for instance.
If you just play that out, look at the graph, you know, we have this interesting report from MIT from 1972 that accurately, I don't know how accurate it is, but it predicts the fall of civilization, basically, within the next, you know, hundred years.
So much of what they were saying is true because they look at the graphs and they draw them out further and further out to see where they would hit.
And you're talking about pollution and productivity and wages and all these different things.
At some point it's so untenable that the whole thing will have to collapse.
Food output will collapse, you know, and population growth.
They haven't been wrong yet in these, what, how many years now?
In almost 50?
Since they came out with the study.
So I don't see any reason to think that like, you know, unless something major happens, they will be accurate within the next, you know, 100 years.
Well, that's not how capitalism works.
Capitalism is not about long-term planning.
It's about pushing it to the limit until it falls apart.
Like, in 1972, MIT releases this.
And by the way, people should read it.
It's a fascinating thing.
And, like, everything that they predicted is right there.
And it goes back to the predictions that we make on this show in Come Real because it's all there.
You know what I mean?
Like, just to go ahead and watch this thing progress down, it's I about said logical, but it's illogical.
The entire process of capitalism, and particularly hyper-capitalism, is illogical.
It's destructive.
It cannot go on forever.
I want to go ahead in the 1970s and bring up another report.
In 1977, Exxon became aware of global climate change.
That's when Exxon found out, which was years before most of the world.
They had the inside scoop because of course they study the climate.
Of course they see what they're doing.
And they sat around and they were like, wait, you're telling me that global climate is going to change in 2020 and 2030?
I mean, that's a long ways off.
So what we need to do is get our profit right now and also figure out a strategy for the next 10 to 20 years of Going after these scientists who are going to warn people, that way people won't listen to them, and we can continue to profit, because we need to profit.
We always have to grow our profit.
Profit, profit, profit.
And eventually, by the way, you're gonna start running out of oil, so we're gonna make more profit.
And it's just that mindset.
You have to keep pushing the pedal to the metal.
And that goes along with this.
With like, something like, with this Frito-Lay place, or with these factories.
They are going to push their employees to die for their bodies to give out, for their mental wellness to fall apart, and guess what that's going to do?
That's going to cost them money!
That's going to hurt their bottom line because you can't work people like this.
They start to fall apart, but that's not the mindset.
It's today and tomorrow, and then everything after that is just totally in the ether, and I don't know, if the economy falls apart, we'll get bailed out and we'll do it again.
We'll have a great old time.
Yeah, there's that part too.
Yeah, the bailout stuff.
You're right.
I mean, that is, it's painfully correct.
You know what I'm saying?
Painfully accurate, what you just said and laid it out.
And then the cherry on the top is, you know, like what we saw in 2008, how all those companies, they let one company fail and everybody else got bailed out to the point where they're like, yeah, we don't, we really don't give a shit because capitalism will just come in and save the day again.
And it will not.
One day it will not be able to do that.
And it'll drag everybody down with us into the vortex.
And, you know, I suppose the people in the 70s were thinking, well, I won't be alive.
So it doesn't necessarily matter.
You have to imagine this.
In 1972, in the picture of the tumultuous, you know, climate we had then, politically and economically, it makes sense that you would do a study like that then, because it probably felt like it was getting toward the end of the world then.
And so here we are, where we're right, again, we're just, we're doomed.
We're doomed to repeat all the same stuff and maybe, but just worse every time it boomerangs around.
I don't think we're doomed, but I do think that it's time to start thinking about this.
I think it's definitely time to start considering it, because again, none of it's hidden.
Like, I have to tell you, I'm working on the book right now.
I was reading some H.G.
Wells shit the other day, and H.G.
Wells had some ideas, and one of the things I found was H.G.
Wells was like, Yeah, eventually we're going to live in a place where America's corporations are going to grow so large and so powerful that they're going to take over the democratic process and the economy.
And we're going to have a bunch of technologists who use, like, I don't know if he said computers, but I think he said technology.
And these technologists are going to use technology to, you know, manipulate the world markets and politics and all that stuff.
He's like, yeah, it's inevitable.
He wrote that at the turn of the 20th century.
You know what I mean?
Like, I read another guy who was predicting World War II in 1902.
And like, all of this stuff is just very, very clearly happening.
It just needs to be a thing where people put their self-interest to the side.
And where we start building things like class consciousness, we start building solidarity.
And again, those contradictions we're talking about today.
The fact that capitalism can't do this.
The fact that MAGA works the way that it does.
There are openings.
But people need to take them.
And we need to work on them.
I'm truly worried that, like, let's say a young charismatic politician came on the scene and started to advocate, like, saying something like, you know, this company makes a billion dollars in profit every year.
Let's allow them to make 750 million dollars in a year and let's reinvest that extra money back into the workers themselves.
You know what would probably happen to that guy?
He would probably get killed.
Don't you think?
I would think that they would kill him.
They would assassinate him.
You just described profit sharing.
And guess what's been shown to work?
Profit sharing.
Guess what?
Production goes up whenever you take care of your workers.
Production goes up when they're happy.
Production goes up when they have holidays and vacation.
Production goes up when they have great health care.
Production goes up when you treat them well and you have sustained growth, as opposed to cracking the whip and being like, beatings will continue until morale improves.
But you're exactly right.
If somebody came out and said that, I mean, Bernie Sanders said that.
And immediately was completely rejected by almost, you know, the entire mainstream sort of political class as being too extreme and too radical.
He's now a boogeyman who, like, haunts the hallways of Washington, D.C.
Anything that anybody does to try to make life better, they're like, to watch out for the socialists.
Look what they're doing.
We're not even talking about socialism.
We're talking about managed capitalism.
We're talking about how it used to be in a capitalistic system.
You want to talk socialism, we can talk socialism.
That's not what we're talking about.
No, no.
And the boogeyman, the fear of what they think socialism is, is outrageous.
The notion that the government would take over all private industry.
Like, what the hell are they?
I mean, they should just be laughed out of the room, and instead they are, you know, they instill so much fear in everybody that it's true, and then they get to go on Fox News and talk about it all day long.
It's crazy.
It literally is, you know, socialists themselves, communists themselves would be looking at this and being insulted that they would use this as a fear possibility that happened here because it was so far remotely out of the possibility of happening.
Oh, it's absolutely nuts, but I have to tell you, this is how they went after unions in the first place.
It was the Red Scare that allowed the unions to be destabilized and depowered because those associations and solidarity of the unions were portrayed as being socialist and communistic.
So that mindset is still there.
And you want to talk about Fox News.
Fox News is the link between the wealthy Trump supporter and the poor Trump supporter.
It is the conversation back and forth that continually changes the narrative every single Yeah, and it's that narrative.
It's anything that could possibly make your life better or the United States better is communist or socialist and dangerous.
You know, I have a Weekender South story I can really share with quickly as you Maybe wrap this up.
I, you know, play guitar and back in the day I was, you know, I used to play with a couple of women and we were in a kind of a band, if you will.
We played a benefit, a number of bands that played a benefit at this bar in Chicago for UAW striking workers in 1990, whatever that was, 94, 95.
In that room, it was a big room, a couple hundred people were there.
We all held hands all the way around the room and sang Solidarity Forever before they went on with the actual show.
That was a really powerful moment.
And I'm never going to forget that, even though I might've felt a little bit weird, like I'm holding some guy's hand next to me, I don't know who he is, whatever, and we're singing, you know, the song.
But I gotta tell you that that is what we need, right?
We need solidarity forever, certainly, but it was a powerful feeling that we don't have enough of, for sure.
You know, maybe Hands Across America, maybe they had it right, and they just couldn't get enough people to do it, but that was something that we knew could solve a lot of issues, I suppose.
Well, and I just want to say, and again, a lot of this shows diagnosing rising fascism and the dangers in this country.
I just want to tell you, like, what we're talking about in terms of solidarity is the answer.
It's the secret.
It's starting to trust other people and starting to share notes and finding out that, because I have to tell you again, systematically, intentionally, and relentlessly, the wealthy in this country have torn us apart.
And told us we can't trust each other.
We can't ever depend on each other.
We're all economic competitors.
You'll slit my throat if I don't slit your throat back and forth.
And by the way, Donald Trump is the embodiment of that.
There's a reason why he was the President of the United States of America.
But you can find power in all of this.
And again, first and foremost, if anybody from the Frito-Lay plant is listening, rock the fuck on.
You all are heroes.
I'm so proud of you.
Anybody else who is involved in a labor struggle right now, you are doing wonderful business and necessary business.
Start talking to the people that you work with.
You don't have to go in tomorrow and say, let's start a strike.
Go in and talk about, how are we feeling about things?
How do you feel about the job right now?
And by the way, you're gonna feel like, well, maybe we shouldn't talk.
Maybe it's real gauche to talk about how much money you've made.
Well, why?
Compare!
Talk about what you're getting or what you're not getting.
Talk about, compare notes on what is being done in your workplace.
Solidarity is incredibly important.
It will make your life better, and it has the potential to change the world.
So, rock the fuck on, Frito-Lay people.
Godspeed.
We hope you get back to working five days a week.
Yeah, in humanitarian conditions.
And we're gonna, actually, the Weekender this week is gonna kind of have some themes of that, if you will.
Yeah, absolutely.
And a reminder, so every Friday we have a bonus episode, The Weekender.
It is a more relaxed kind of a show.
All you have to do to get access to that, as well as the Muckrake community where we have some wonderful stuff like a Discord, we have conversations with people, there's a book club, all you have to do is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
It helps keep this show ad-free, politically independent, and we appreciate all of you.
That is patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
Wait, did we tease what we were going to do?
No, we haven't told anybody yet.
Are we keeping it a secret or should we tell them right now?
I'll just go ahead and say that one of our patrons, a guy going by Hecatron, suggested RoboCop, that we should talk about the movie RoboCop, and I completely concur.
I love RoboCop, so if people want to watch RoboCop before we talk about it on the weekend or on Friday, I promise you it's well worth your time.
It's not a boring movie.
No.
I'll buy that for a dollar.
I'll buy that for a dollar!
Alright everybody, we will be back in a couple of days.
If you need us before then, you can find Nick at CanYouHearMeSMH.