Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 40

Episode Date: June 25, 2022

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's got to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Robert, what podcast is this for? Ah, Moira, that's a perfect way to open this episode, because it could happen here. The podcast about things falling apart and putting them back together sometimes. Not often enough, because I'm a hack and a fraud.

Are you doing it wrong, motherfuckers? This is Robert Evans, and my guest today is Moira Meltzer Cohen. Moira, you are my lawyer, and you are my editor. You edited After the Revolution, a book in stores now. So you're many, many things to me. And today, you're going to help me understand the Supreme Court. Well, that's a lofty goal. Let me be a little more specific about why we're chatting today for the internet's sake.

The Supreme Court last week issued a ruling, and there may have been another ruling by the time you hear this, but this specific ruling was about a case that had to do with what's called a Bivens action. If you have seen people talking about this Supreme Court ruling online, there's probably been with them sharing an image of the United States that shows the 100-mile zone where Border Patrol is able to operate, and being like, now, because of this ruling, Border Patrol can come into your house with impunity and do whatever they want to you. There's been a lot of stuff said about this ruling,

and as is often the case when people get really up in arms about the niche aspects of a court ruling, they're not entirely correct about what the ruling does. The 100-mile zone is absolutely a real thing, and the feds can do all sorts of fucked-up shit to you in your house. But that is... Let's talk about this, yeah. Sure. I think the first place to start is people are always asking me,

when can the feds kick in my door? My girlfriend always says when it's closed. What I say is whenever they want to... Right. What might change from case to case is they rationalize it in court later. Right. And so this is really a case that further reinforces the fact that for many, many years, federal agents in particular, Border Control,

have been able, have had a lot of power to conduct searches. If they rationalize those searches with respect to immigration, or in this case, the even more hype-term national security. So this is not new. The federal statute outlining the powers and duties of border officers was passed, I think, in 1952, I believe always said that border agents can conduct searches within, quote, a reasonable distance of the border. I think case law has determined that that reasonable distance is 100 miles.

We're not really looking at anything particularly new here. So one of the things about this 100 miles is people keep saying, oh, the Fourth Amendment doesn't exist within 100 miles of the border. It does. This is not considered to be a violation of the Fourth Amendment because a search within a reasonable distance of the border is considered a reasonable search. Right. The Fourth Amendment protects you from unreasonable searches. This is statutorily considered a reasonable search. Right.

So I feel like a lot of the media around this particular case is kind of an exercise and extreme point missing. It's both an overreaction to some things that are outrageous, but are in no way new. Yeah. Everyone's sharing these maps, like you said. And again, it's one of those things where it's like, we're not saying that this is not a problem, that there aren't problems with the 100 miles zone isn't a problem, the border patrol. There's not a lot of messed up stuff that they do. It's the idea that this ruling came out and suddenly there's no more Fourth Amendment, right? Which is how some people have interpreted it because the internet is a machine that devours context.

That's right. Social media, I should say, yeah. Sure. So this case is called Egbert V. Bool, which I just think is a marvelous case name. Oh, and these are all incredible. The original Bivens case is Bivens versus Six Unknown Named Agents, which I also like a lot. Six Unknown Narcotics Agents. Yeah.

I mean, there's a lot of sort of wonderful case names. My favorite, of course, is Alien V. Predator. You see what I did there? I did. I did. I just showed Garrison Aliens last weekend. Oh, for the first time? Yes.

Marvelous. So I don't know. I think what's happening here is that even among people who kind of have a sense of history or an analysis, there's maybe this lingering belief that the legal system is supposed to protect us or that maybe at some time it did protect us. And it just like persists like a vestigial tale of hope. Yeah. But I kind of love this case. I did read this case.

And at least as Clarence Thomas describes him, the plaintiff in this case, who's Bool, is basically the viewpoint character from a Steely Dan song. He like appears to have sort of sprangfully formed from the head of Donald Fagan and he drove off with his vanity plate that says smuggler. Honestly, I'm sure you're going to tell me it was something problematic, but sounds like a cool dude to me. Well, he spent years playing both sides of this game. He would get paid by people to smuggle them across the Canadian border and he'd make them he'd like extort money from them. He'd make them buy a room at his hotel, even if they weren't going to stay at his hotel and then he'd charge them money for every hour that he spent driving to pick them up and take them across to Canada. And then he would turn around and get paid by the feds to snitch on the people who had just paid him to smuggle them across the border. Geez. Yeah.

All right, now I don't think this guy's cool. Yeah. So he he basically ends up getting in an altercation with a federal agent. He's back to being cool. Okay. And then when he makes an administrative complaint to the agency, the agent six the IRS on him. This is I mean, all right, it's not good behavior. Right.

Right. But now after years of doing dirty work for the feds, bull is outraged because he never thought tigers would eat his face. Yeah. So he's the agent under Bivens, which is a case that sort of a little bit maybe sometimes gives individuals a very narrowly tenuous circumscribed opportunity to sue federal agents for certain civil rights violations and it's not a very strong right and it has been getting ever more eviscerated since 1980. Yeah. And really what Bivens does is it gives you, you know, in the very unlikely event that you win a Bivens claim, it gives you money damages. Right.

It doesn't give you a law. It doesn't give you better police practices. It doesn't make you safer. It's not nothing, but it's not like it's money. Right. It's basically what the law can give you. Right. So unless you're harboring the delusion that there is a sort of direct connection between being allowed to try, usually unsuccessfully to recover money from the federal government and the self control or good behavior of federal agents.

Bivens is not actually a particularly useful mechanism for pursuing anything that resembles like a well developed vision of justice. Yeah. Right. It's not nothing. I don't I don't want to dismiss the utility of Bivens, but it's, you know, it's not like it's not a strong right. It's not a reliable right, you know, to sue. It's not very effective. One of my beloved colleagues described it.

He said Bivens is such a bad doctrine that it's taking other doctrines down with it. Right. It's just, it's just such a weak case at this point that it trying to trying to use it and trying to invoke it and actually end up just being counterproductive. As it is in this case. Right. Yeah. We have a very unsympathetic plaintiff. And we have a really weak doctrine.

So he sues under Bivens. It goes up and down the courts. It winds up in the Supreme Court, which issues a sort of a bunch of sort of fragmented opinions. Ultimately, all the justice is mostly agree. This is not a super controversial question, at least within the context of the court itself. Yeah. So the first thing is they all say, you don't, there's no right to sue for money damages under the theory of First Amendment retaliation, meaning we'll had sued the agent for basically for punishing him for making a complaint. He's saying I exercised my First Amendment right to make a complaint to the agency you work for. And then you punished me by sickening the IRS on me.

Right. Which I see why that's questionable in the actual like legal documentation. Yeah. So, you know, the justice is saying, no, that that's not a right that exists. And then they have some differing thoughts on whether or not you can sue for excessive force. But ultimately, the big decision that is made here isn't about the border. It's not about the relative impunity of border patrol, which has long operated with relative impunity, just like the rest of the federal government. Yes.

I remember that impunity when they were firing tear gas at us. Yeah, I, you know, they decide you can't sue them. Which if you if you ever could have sued them, I guess, in a successful or effective way and if suing them had ever had a meaningful impact on their behavior. Yes, this opinion would be a real loss. But all this opinion really does as far as I can tell and I've spoken with my colleagues and we all agreed that the sort of uproar over this particular case is a little baffling. Because all it really does is further remove what was already a really inaccessible and pretty weak remedy. Yeah, sorry, sorry. Well, you know, and then everyone lost their minds and started sharing the ACL's ACL use map of the 100 miles of border looks like and getting really mad on Twitter. Yeah. And again, the 100 mile border zone, I think it's fair to say that like that's a problem. I don't like that's that's a bad way for things to work.

The border patrol, as we talked about in our two parter on the border patrol has a lot of massive issues with it. But I feel like kind of what's happening here is some of this is like a little bit of collective PTSD because of the shock of the imminent kind of demise of row. And so I think maybe there's this kind of expectation that every ruling issued by the Supreme Court because fuck it is going to be this kind of like earth shattering like end of a fundamental right. And in this case, it's really just like, no, this is more or less like this is not a massive sea change. Yeah, more of the same. I like to say about this kind of thing it's appalling but it's not surprising. I do want to note just for your listeners. This case does not in any way touch our right to sue state level please. Because there is federal legislation called section 1983 that gives us permission to sue the police. And for some strange reason, the federal government has not passed similar legislation allowing us to sue them. That's really surprising. I wonder why. So, in any case, one of the things the court says in the bull opinion is that if the feds wanted to be constrained by the citizenry Congress would have given us the right to constrain them. So, I think this particular case that people have been looking out about is a great sort of example of the way that the sort of the zeitgeist moves inexplicably to make much of things that are maybe not all that much.

And while also kind of failing to notice things that are really significant and so I'd like to sort of highlight some of those things. I think there actually are real reasons to breathe and prepare and gather our courage. Based on what the Supreme Court has done this term. And I love to talk to you about some of those things. So I do think there are real reasons that they said to breathe and prepare. And some of those without getting to in the weeds. I guess I want to talk first about the shadows off it, which is yes, it is a kind of a more recently coined term. What it means is what it's referring to are the cases that are often heard. They're not heard. They're decided by the Supreme Court on the basis of the record below, often without oral argument, and they're often issued as holding decisions without written opinions. So they're often not justified and rationalized or, you know, the reasoning for the decisions that are made is often not made transparent to the public. Okay. Yeah. And these are cases that are sort of highly procedural, or they're not super complicated questions, or the questions of law where there's maybe a circuit with it. And they just need to resolve, you know, what might otherwise be repugnant views of the law. Right. Yeah. And the shadow docket has recently included death penalty cases. Yeah.

We decided in something of such great import with decisions that are not explained by our opinion, where the justice is not make clear that reasoning. This is, I mean, in my opinion, problematic. You know, the amount of power that can be exercised by the Supreme Court, to me, I think requires a really intense degree of transparency. I think that like the amount of transparency that is incumbent upon you to have is sort of inversely proportionate to the amount of power you exercise. Yeah, that makes sense. And so the Supreme Court has just, I mean, literally life of the power here. Yeah. And so for them to be making decisions on the shadow docket about death penalty cases and death penalty jurisdiction is just wild. It's troubling. It's frightening. You know, I think I can't remember if I talked to you before about how about the injuries. Maybe in the show about it, but I certainly talked to you about it.

We might need to do it. It's probably a good idea at some point to do a show about it. But yeah. One of the things that makes grand jury so anonymous is that they, they aren't public. Right. And that to me, like, this is a math. Well, not to me. It is, in terms of the sort of received wisdom about the American legal system to have secret proceeding is an aftermath to the underlying principles of due process, which, you know, which involves Well, notice in a hearing, but really, there's a commitment to publicity, right, in the American legal system that is undermined and trampled upon by federal ranchers. Right. And there's a similar thing happening here with the shadow docket. We know at least what the cases are. We know what the findings are, what the holdings end up being. But to have these kinds of cases been decided without oral argument to have these cases being decided without written without written opinion is troubling. Yeah. So that's a move toward an exercise of power that I think there is. One of the things that we're seeing and I think it's sort of not unrelated to that is that they think to be dissenting with the doctrine of

dissent, which is precedent, right, the idea that previously decided cases are binding. And, you know, if you overturn one, you really have to be very clear that that's what you're doing. And you have to explain why. And we see that with the where they have, you know, if indeed they issue it, sure. Because yeah, and this is like an originalism thing, right, like you can throw out precedent if you're saying all that matters is this interpretation you're saying that's based on the original intent of like some dead dudes. Is that more or less an accurate way to say it or you can overturn precedent, you know, overturn precedent. Yeah. You would have, I think, suggest outcomes or whatever. But I think there's many reasons that you can overturn precedent. But they seem to be doing it for subcelentio, right, they're not, they're not always the least roadmap did was pretty clear and parent about it. But I think there are some other things that are going on. There was a six amendment case where they just sort of didn't mention all of the countervailing precedent.

You know, they, there's some stuff happening there is a case in Texas that was a six amendment case where the court, the Supreme Court sent it back down to either the district or the court of appeals I know I don't remember. Or either the district or the circuit and said, look, this, this guy who's on death row did absolutely receive an effective assistance of counsel. Yeah. Whether he gets prejudice and the Texas court just ignores them. Yeah. And that's one of those ones that people freaked out about that was like, yeah, I think folks should be very unsettled by this. Right. And then the court was like, so they didn't the court, the Supreme Court just didn't they just let them get away with it. Yeah.

And so there's this sort of weird push and fall happening, not only between this court interpreting the last court opinion, and deciding basically not to enforce them. There's an interesting power struggle where the Supreme Court seems to be specifically seeding power, the certain, certain lower towards in a way that's unusual. Yeah. So, you know, they're not, they're not being transparent. They are not following precedent. They are not enforcing the hierarchy of the courts, which does sound like an odd thing I think that needs to complain about. But one of the things that we want to know is that, you know, one of the ways that we can anticipate what the law is or make reliable legal arguments is that the law has to be consistent with, you know, the law of the lower courts has to be consistent with what the Supreme Court has said. And if we can no longer rely on that, it's, you know, chaotic, potentially bad, really bad for our clients, apparently, particularly clients who are facing the death penalty, which is a particular concern. This court does seem pretty intent on knocking over the entire amendment. And then I think yesterday or the day before they issued a really important immigration case on the class actions that were brought by, or on behalf of people who were detained in immigration detention for like months and months and months without hearing, without volunteering.

Yeah. And essentially what the court held was that lower courts don't have any authority to lower code stuff from the authority to demand that the federal government do or not do certain things because they're playing with the immigration naturalization act does not give them that authority. And so there, there's a lot, I think the big trend here is there's a lot of protecting the federal government from any kind of accountability. Yeah. Accountability that's being imposed by the lower federal court, who are so concerned with states rights, they have a cool way of showing that. I don't know what else to say about it because it is one of those things where when we talk about or when I talk about like frustration at people kind of sharing information about stuff the court is doing or about changes to how our rights are being interpreted by courts that are incorrect, it's not because like there's not a problem, it's because it's really important to be aware of like the it's really important to like see the problem accurately.

And to see it like it's this it's this broad assault like like you said the fact that the fact that you have this kind of high level attack on the Fifth Amendment is is really frightening because that's one of like theoretically our primary protections. Yeah, the Sixth Amendment. There's also, I think there's going to be a Miranda case. Oh boy. I'm not looking forward to that. A little bit anxious about that. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think the general thing. So, you know,

I think the thing that I would like to highlight here is paying attention to what rights with the Supreme Court is tramping on is obviously pretty important. But it's pretty likely to be kind of more of the same, particularly for quality targeted groups of people. Like the law is in certain respects, right? Like the law is an abstract concept. Absolutely. Yes. Material impact. It's not, you know, like, I don't want to get all postmodern here. A lot of fictional things have have real impacts.

Exactly. Like, it has real impact, obviously, but I think that the impact of the Supreme Court ruling, you know, it's very serious. It's very important. But it doesn't sort of immediately transform the world. I think it just sort of changes what kinds of solutions we look to. Right. Like, I'm not particularly inclined to look to the court to protect me or anyone. I'm not particularly, I don't trust the law or court enough to really want them to be the arbiters of things like free speech. Yeah, absolutely not. Obviously, I won't throw it into council, but, you know, my hope is that we can take care of each other enough to make the court irrelevant, which I realize is a delight type thing.

But I guess the thing, you know, especially with well, and I was talking to Margaret, a mutual friend about this. The thing that is going to change if we're always overturned is really going to be what solutions are available to us and how much courage will it take to pursue them and what are the potential consequences. Right. Yeah. What kind of resources do we need? I think in the face of these Supreme Court decisions, some of which are genuinely terrible, and some of which are just reinforcing things that have long been the truth. Yeah. You know, our police and our outrage and our bitter toast are not fractured. They are not necessarily useful.

Right. And even getting super in the weeds of, you know, what does this opinion actually say? I mean, I think that's interesting, but it's, and it's good to know and at least have somebody around you know. But instead of spending so much time focusing on the real nitpicky language of being used by the unelected God things behind it. Yes. I think we should start thinking a little bit more about what are the material impacts that might have and what are tools that maybe aren't legal tools or at least that aren't only legal tools that might be useful in securing the things that we value. I think that's both an important note and a good one to end on Moira. I will run one thing by you real quick. So I have a plan and I want to, I want your advice on the constitutionality of this. I would like to acquire Fort Bragg. I'm thinking what I do is I go in a third amendment case, right? And say that, well, I mean, if look, you can't, what if we just extended the quartering act, right? Like in the, you know, could we, could we push it even further so that nobody can host soldiers?

And then all those military bases are going to be, there's going to be a fire sale. You can't keep soldiers on them. Government's not going to keep running them. And then I get to own Fort Bragg. How are we doing? Is that, is that legal? Is that a full-end goal that you own Fort Bragg? That is one of the end goals. I think you should probably talk to your contacts that raising on. Okay. Okay. Because yeah, you're right. They're probably going to outbid me anyway. That's right on what I'm thinking. Okay. But constitutionally, I'm on solid grounds with the third, right? That's bulletproof.

You know, like, like many of the questions you asked me, the legal questions you asked me, I think the answer is nobody knows. Nobody knows? Okay. I'm going to, I'm going to do what the NRA did with the second, but with the third amendment. It's going to take a couple of decades, but I feel, I feel good about this course of action. Thank you for putting up with me, Moira. You had some stuff you wanted to plug at the end of this episode here. I do. I would like to plug the Reaper Legal Defense Fund, if when, how? Because if we're going to talk about Rowe at all, the... Oh boy. Yeah. The Reaper Legal Defense Fund, which can be found at repolegaldefensefund.org.

They have a donate page. They're doing amazing work. I'm just incredibly impressed with them. They are also at repolegaldefensefund on Instagram and probably also on Twitter. But I don't really understand Twitter, so I'm not going to swear to it. That's for the best. We'll check that out. They are at www.reprolegalfund.com. So please donate to the Reproductive Legal Fund, twitter.com, repolegalfund. By the time this episode drops, we may have the Rowe thing. So I know everybody's gearing up, but, you know, this is definitely, it's good to help out.

We all need to be, like, pulling, because we're not going to yank this back on course through just hoping that eventually the Supreme Court gets better. Well, we're going to wish really hard. It would be nice. It would be nice, but I think organizing is probably a more effective thing to do in the immediate term. So yeah, I thank you, Moira, and that's the episode. Oh, it could happen here, which is the podcast that this is. I'm Robert Evans with me, our other people. Hello, other people. Hi. Hi.

Hey. Hello. So this podcast, things fall apart, put them back together. Yada, yada, yada. Today, our guest, well, not our guest, our host, is the inimitable Andrew. Andrew, how's it going? What are we talking about today? What are we learning? I'm good. I'm good. Today, hoping to tackle another book, kind of. This one's not fictional, like the past two, though I do hope to, like, explore some of those in the future because I think some good conversations come out to those.

This week, we're going to be talking about Paulo Freire and the perigarje of the oppressed. Oh, yes. For those who don't know, Paulo Freire is a Brazilian educator and one of the leading advocates of, well, was a Brazilian educator and leading advocates of critical pedagogy. Pedagogy is basically like the study of education, philosophy of education. He was born in 1921 and his experiences kind of led him to that path because during his childhood and adolescence, he was falling behind in school because he was poor. His poverty and his hunger affected his ability to learn and so as he got older and he got opportunities and he was able to study and so on, he basically realized he needed to do more to uplift the lives of the poor, improve the lives of the poor in order to facilitate better educational outcomes.

As he says in one quote, I didn't understand anything because of my hunger. I wasn't dumb. It wasn't a lack of interest. My social condition just didn't allow me to have an education. Experience showed me once again the relationship between social class and knowledge. So as he progressed in his studies and his writing and stuff, he eventually contributed to a philosophy of education which blended classical approaches coming from Plato and modern Marxist and post-Marxist and anti-clonial thinkers. When I was reading the book, it really sort of struck me.

I got a lot of, I got a lot of fans on vibes from his work. He died in 1997, RIP, but his greatest contribution to me at least and to most people is his book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In the book, he sort of explores detailed Marxist class analysis in the relationship between like the colonizer and the colonized, the oppressor and the oppressed. And he talks about the banking model of education that traditional pedagogy espouses because it treats the student as like this bank, this empty vessel to be filled with knowledge. Instead, he argues for a form of education of pedagogy that treats the learner as a co-creator in knowledge. As far as I'm aware, and I guess it kind of is illustrated in the book itself, but as far as I know, Per wasn't an anarchist or libertarian socialist of any variety, but he still ended up coming to some anarchic conclusions with regard to the education system and learning and stuff. Anarchists have been writing about, you know, like youth liberation and the school system and even experimenting with new models of schooling for a long time.

The Ferrer movement, for example, experimented with implementing modern schools in the US and in Spain. Emma Goldman was very much involved in that process. And I don't think that the experiments were necessarily free of error, but I think they did a good job of trying something new, trying something with more liberatory in the sphere of education. Because, I mean, for the past several hundred years now, we've kind of been going with this sort of Prussian model of education. Very strict, very regimented, very divided model of education that arose to sort of ferment nationalism and division, class divisions and stuff within the populace. So I think that any experimentation in the more libertarian direction is a positive. In preface, Ferrer sort of goes into why this book came about. He's talking about his experience as a teacher in Brazil, the time, the observations he made while in political exile. And so what he realized as a teacher when he was teaching his students is that they had a sort of a fear of freedom.

It's not like a real fear of freedom. It's more of a fear of the risks associated with freedom because of the experiences and stuff that they've had. What he considers the most vital, however, to the education system is sort of establishing a conscientious or critical consciousness within students. A consciousness that commits to social change and human liberation. According to Ferrer, the educational model can only really be successful if people are radicalized through it. If people are able to see the issues in their current society, think about them, stew upon them, criticize them, compare them and look at ways to solve them. And if they don't come up with that sort of critical consciousness, then it's all for naught, basically, the education system is kind of spinning on top of mud. I find it especially interesting that I ended up reading this one I did because as we've seen in the US, a lot of conversations are now attacking anything, even approaching critical consciousness. With this world debate going on about critical race theory and this sort of...

Even though critical race theories aren't being taught in primary or secondary education, this attack, this full-front attack on anything that resembles critical thinking and critical study of history and of the present. So in chapter one, Ferrer makes a case for why the pedagogy of the oppressed is necessary. He says that humankind's central problem is how we affirm our identity as human beings. Everyone is trying to reach that sort of affirmation, that sort of human identity, that sort of humanness. But oppression and systems of oppression interrupt that process. They prevent people from expressing and establishing their full humanity. Whether you're talking about racism, keeping people from reaching their full potential, or sexism, preventing people, or, you know, satirical patriarchy with the whole limitations and such put upon people's sexuality and gender expression and gender identification. All of these systems of oppression are put in place to restrict and confine and bound us below, you know, our full potential.

And so a lot of that and a lot of the, you know, cultivation and forging of one's awareness of, you know, the systems around them and how to operate within them takes place in the education system. And so the education system should be one of the critical junctures in which we wage our fight for oppressed people. There's a sort of dehumanization that occurs as a result of oppression. Whether it be in the form of comparing people to animals as racists often do, whether it be in the form of degrading people to a sort of childlike status, which itself is a form of oppression because the fact that, you know, childlikeness and youth is considered to be something less than, it's just another way in which people are oppressed and another way in which people are prevented from asserting their autonomy and their humanity. Oppressors, they tend to treat people as objects to be possessed, they see freedom as threatening and in turn oppressed people end up becoming alienated from each other through oppression and begin to see their oppressors as something to strive towards. Farrah talks about how the oppressed, their whole vision and their whole understanding of what being human is is being like oppressors. And so a lot of people, and you see that even today, you know, when they strive for freedom, they strive to become entrepreneurs.

You know, they strive to become business owners, they strive to become billionaires and CEOs and all these sort of images of what, you know, what being human looks like because people are striving to be free. And if the only way you can get a measure of freedom is by becoming an oppressor yourself, then it makes sense a lot of oppressed people are going to try to do that. Of course, as Farrah himself says, the oppressors themselves are not fully free either because by denying the oppressed people their humanity, they rob themselves of humanity. The fight for liberation, as Farrah argues, must consist of two stages, reflection on the nature of oppression and the concrete action needed to change it. And that's sort of reading that line paraphrasing, but it reminds me of the process of prefigurative politics where not only are you bringing about the consciousness of people to recognize these systems of oppression and to understand how they operate, but the concrete action to change it is one that is intended to reflect the society that we wish to establish in the future. Farrah does warn that, you know, leaders and stuff must engage in dialogue with oppressed people rather than becoming like oppressors. But as the book goes on, I think he relies a bit too much on this concept of leaders as well. He warns against them existing above the people, but he still sort of upholds that distinction between the leaders and the people.

As the book progresses, he begins to compare the concept of the banking model to the concept of the problem-posing model of education as he calls it. In the banking model, quote, he, the teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized and predictable, whereas he expounds upon a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to fill the students with the contents of his narration, contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated and alienating verbosity. Already being that sentence is quite verbose, but on the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction with the following attitudes and practices which mirror oppressive society as a whole. The teacher teaches and the students are taught. The teacher knows everything and the student knows nothing. The teacher thinks and the students are thought about. The teacher talks and the students listen meekly. The teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined. The teacher chooses and enforces his choice and the students comply. The teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher. The teacher chooses the program content and the students, who were not consulted, adapt to it.

The teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which they set in opposition to the freedom of the students. The teacher is the subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects. I think I needed to incorporate some more gender neutral language in that, so I had to kind of correct him there. But that quote in full, it really reminds me of my schooling experience. As some people may know, I was actually homeschooled for the majority of my learning experience. I actually didn't know that. Oh, well, now you know. Yeah, so I was homeschooled for the majority of my education experience, and then after I went into college and stuff. But before then, I did make it through the school system, and even though it was a really long time ago, my memories are still crystal clear of that process. You know, I remember seeing students being disciplined.

I myself was kind of a teacher's pet, but that does not surprise me. In the best possible way. I'm not sure what to take it, but I'll take it in a good way. Because me too, Andrew. Not me. Oh, that also doesn't surprise me. Teachers are cops. Oh, my God.

Yeah, this is my pre-anarchist days. I wasn't jumping out the boot canal with a black flag, you know. Unfortunately. A. Cab includes the person who tried to get me to read Catcher in the Rye. Catching the Rye was a good book. It was a good book. It's a perfectly fine book. I'm just being an asshole. Andrew, what are you alluding here is that stoicism is something that is weaponized in the education system?

Stoicism? Stoicism? Being like no emotion, delivering like... Right, right, right. Because I was thinking the philosophy. Oh, yeah. No, but like... No, because yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like a vessel for quote unquote facts and knowledge to be like injected into you for you to like hold as... Yeah, it's... We're seeing a resurgence in this type of thing. I'll be probably a little bit less eloquently stated in some of like the anti-schooling anarchist literature that's been coming out the past few years, or at least has been gaining more traction the past few years. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This... And that's kind of the funny thing about it because most people in their schooling experience can recall it being in some ways negative,

even if they look at it in a positive light. We can at least, even if they don't go in that fully radical direction, most people can look at some of the elements to their schooling of their education and say that that wasn't right. You know, there's something messed up about that. Even something as simple as having to like ask, you know, the teacher to go on and use the toilet. It's just those sorts of little ways of control. So like as I was saying, in my schooling experience back when I was in primary school, I was very adorable. I'm sure you can guess.

But I remember seeing these students being disciplined. They had, the bell had rung for, you know, the end of break and you're supposed to, you know, fire back into class. But I think there was a school next door that was having some kind of event and they were playing like music. And so a bunch of students in my class, not me, but a bunch of students in my class were, you know, dancing at the side of the school, enjoying the music, having a good time or whatever. They heard the bell and they didn't go because they were, you know, they were having a good time. They were like six, seven, eight. But then afterwards the teacher, after, you know, I sit down and stuff.

The teacher goes and finds them and brings them in. And this is prior to, at least to my knowledge, prior to the corporal punishment being phased out of school. So I just remember seeing them having to, you know, like lay out their hand and receive punishment for daring to have joy after hours, you know, daring to enjoy themselves. But it was supposed to be class time and they're supposed to be in class. I'm sure people have similar experiences here at least of a kind of punishment and control. I mean, this is not the same kind of punishment, but I think to your point of being controlled, like even just like, not even being aware of it, just like being forced to stand up and say the Pledge of Allegiance in America, for example, it becomes this like repetitive, culty thing every morning that you're expected to do. And if you don't do it, personal experience, if you refuse to do that, you have to go to the principal's office and explain why and it happens over and over again.

And I think it's like, you're questioned and you're punished even for like thinking not like differently or questioning, not even thinking just questioning reality. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in Syria, when I was, I went to school in Syria when I was really small, and me and my sister ate really slow and we would get hit with a ruler on our hands because we didn't finish lunch fast enough. So, yeah. Yeah. Mine isn't that intense, but the school I went to when I was a little kid in Oklahoma, number one, they paddled us. That was legal as a public school. But my first grade teacher was obsessed with the fact that like, it was bad to be left-handed. Oh my God. Oh my gosh. She couldn't do the shit that they used to do, right? They used to like fuck kids up for using their left hands.

But she would every single day like chide me and tell me that I should use my right hand to write and stuff, that it wasn't like proper, that it was like bad. If you're not aware, if you're not left-handed, when you're like do stuff with a pencil and you're left-handed, you get a bunch of like pencil stuff on the side of your hand, right? Yeah. Because of the way that, unless you're using like those weird left-handed notebooks and shit, which no one ever has, and she would like, she gave me so much shit for being dirty because like I would get stuff on my hand. It was just like, when I tell people that it's like, really? This was like the 90s? Yeah. There's a few of those folks left. I think she was extremely Catholic. And I know nuns used to go fucking shit on that stuff. I didn't know that Catholic people cared about the left-handed thing. Yeah.

Catholic schools used to. Oh, schools, sorry. Yeah. Yeah, I wouldn't say that like it's, I don't think there's anything in like the catechism about not being left-handed. Right, right. I mean, like in some very strict Muslim culture, a lot of it is like phased out, but for example, your left hand isn't meant to be used as the primary hand because it's like a dirty hand, like the one you wipe yourself with or the one you clean yourself with. Yeah, there's a lot, but like. I know you were left-handed though. Yikes. Oh, yes. Yikes, thank you. Thank you. You should be concerned.

I have to make a number of things frustrating, like shearing sheep anyway, whatever. Well, everything is designed for right-handed people for sure. It is. Like guitars, everything. Yeah. It is. You try to keep us hands. Speaking of hands. But we are the master, right? Okay, sorry. Speaking of hands.

Speaking of hands, just out of curiosity, did you all have the hand up, hand out experience? Hand out? What's hand out? Basically, it's just sort of a tool used to just sort of a repetitive kind of follow instructions kind of thing. So like if the class is getting too rowdy, it's like hands up, hands out, hands up, hands out. And the teacher does not stop saying it until everyone is quiet to down. And it's just like a robot just racing and lowering their hand. It's so culty. I don't think I've experienced that.

And I mean, I did, I wasn't an assistant teacher at one point. And for very, very young children, I'm talking like four to five year olds. And I understand the frustration of like, you're just trying to get something done and everyone's kind of wilding out. They just had snacks or whatever and everyone's kind of wilding out. But I think that says more about like the methods we're using than about the children themselves, you know? That's for sure. Like you have to, you should adjust more to like their cycles and their needs at their stage, rather than trying to force and shove them into this sort of robotic.

Like militarized. Yeah. Yeah. No, totally. It's, yeah, they're not allowed to actually develop naturally or like be themselves in a setting like that. Yeah, exactly. I think what happens that kind of throws me is that when people have these experiences, you know, traumatic and not as dramatic in the education system.

A lot of people, but some people, they come out radicalized by it. And other people end up being the like most stringent, most passionate advocates of it. Like even like this Catholic school teacher you're talking about, Robert, like at some point she was also in the education system. And it really makes me wonder like what she went through to have to come up with that kind of mindset. Yeah. I mean, I think she'd grown up in Oklahoma too. So it must have been a nightmare like everything in that state.

Yeah. Yeah. Like why does it have a panhandle? Anyway. I mean, there is a reason for that and it's not fun, but okay. I'm assuming it's slavery. Any fucked up geographic thing going on in the South, the reason is generally slavery. Yeah.

Right. Right. Right. And so he spends a lot of time talking about this banking model and we could go on and on about it. I spent a lot of time just talking about the education system and all my problems with it. And at some point I would like to do an episode about deferrer schools and how those sort of transpired. But what prayer proposes as an alternative is the problem posing model, which is basically through dialogue. The teacher and the students cease to exist.

The teacher of the students and the students of the teachers cease to exist. So instead of there being these two separate categories, they are teacher students and student teachers. There's no separation anymore between the one who teaches and the one who is taught. Rather, there's a dialogue between the two as they become part of this process where all of them can grow. Let go of this sort of authoritarian arrangement and allow people to teach and be taught, to learn and be learned, to really draw out what it is that we have to gain from each other. Rather than being sort of docile listeners, the students and the teachers, the student teachers, the teacher students, they become co-investigators in dialogue.

They become critics. They become radicals who are able to open up and de-bethologize the way that reality works, the way that human beings exist in the world. Banking education tends to inhibit creativity and try to domesticate our consciousness. Throwback to what I was talking about human domestication the other day. But in contrast, the problem posing model really bases itself on creativity and stimulates, rather than domestication, a sort of a full flourishing of what someone could be unbound and unshackled. So in summary, banking theory is immobilizing, it's fixating.

It doesn't acknowledge people as people, but rather as objects. Whereas the problem-posing model, it takes people's historicity. It takes people's humanity as their starting point upon which they can grow and learn from each other. I think that's what frustrated me the most about the education system in the time that I was in it. And even when I got back in it in college, even though it was not as bad in some ways, because in college they tend to emphasize dialogue a bit more in certain classes. But I find the issue is that there's this assumption in the earlier sections of school, in secondary school and primary school and even preschool, that the children and the youth,

they're not there to have anything to add. They're just there to regurgitate, to study and to repeat what they've studied for approval. Which is something I definitely did back in the day. If what's lacking is dialogue, a dialogue that requires who, when trust and critical thinking, then liberation would also be lacking. There can't be dialogue without love for the world and for people and for knowledge and for bringing that knowledge out to people. So as Farrah says, love is at the same time the foundation of dialogue and dialogue itself.

On the other hand, dialogue cannot exist without humility. The naming of the world through which people constantly recreate that world cannot be an act of arrogance. And I remember encountering a lot of arrogant teachers and lecturers and stuff in my time through the education system. I was being condescended to on multiple occasions. And that's the thing, nobody likes being condescended to, but condescension is kind of the default way in which we engage with young people. Just sort of, there's this projected ignorance upon them is that they have nothing of value to add or to share. And on the contrary, you know, we all have something to contribute.

We are closed off and if we are closed off to the contributions of others, we can't engage in dialogue with them. If we are fearful, if we are considering people to be like inferior in some ways, if we cannot embrace people as equals, then how can we engage in dialogue with them? I think there's a beauty in the way that he reflects on dialogue. He goes on and on about it for quite a while. At one point he says that dialogue requires an intense faith in humankind, faith in their power to make and remake, to create and recreate, faith in their vocation to be more fully human, which is not the privilege of an elite, but the birthright of all.

And so finally, when he's talking about action and how this sort of change is brought about, he divides cultural action into two kinds, dialogical action and anti-dialogical action. While oppressors use anti-dialogical action to protect their power and to separate people, radicals can use dialogical action to bring people together in the struggle for freedom. There's a different methods of anti-dialogical action through conquest, through divide and rule, through manipulation, through cultural invasion. Oppressors were able to put the oppressed in the predicament they're in. The oppressed wouldn't be the oppressed if not for the oppressors oppressing them,

that's kind of self-explanatory. But in contrast, radicals from among the oppressed using dialogical action, using cooperation, unity, organization, and cultural synthesis are able to rise above and to push back against this oppression and to allow education to flourish among all. And so I think that's the beauty of the text. The hope that it imbues in people to really bring about these changes. And I think it was a good read, 5 out of 5. Excellent.

And it's off very long, right? It's like under 200 pages from what I read. Yes, yes, like four short chapters, relatively short. Back when you were talking about how sectors of the right specifically are so set on attacking anything related to critical theory or critical race theory, the book was banned over a decade ago from the Arizona schools for teaching students that they are oppressed. Yeah, that's how you know. It's a good book.

Yeah, so that's, anyway, just a fun fact there. Yeah, we can't have kids knowing that they have shared interests as a group and that adults are mistreating them comprehensively. That's good. God, you just reminded me of so many moments that me and teachers really got into it and the teachers that were condescending that I hated. I have to really go through the roll decks and try to vent this out now after we finish recording.

Yeah, well, listen, if you're a child. Why are you listening to this? Rise up and rebellion. Destroy the adults. Their joints are terrible. Hit them in the knees. They won't recover. My joints are terrible.

Yeah, exactly, some fucking nine-year-old whacks you in the knee with, like, a shalely. Be down. You're out of the game. No, I know. My knee would break. Yeah. Embrace the ancient traditions. Make shalelys and go for the fucking joints.

Yeah. Children of the world, you have nothing to lose with your bad times. Rise up. Wow. That's the episode. Should we record this episode? Sure. Let's start.

I'm ready. I'm sure we can use some of that as the opening. Hi, welcome to It Could Happen Here. The podcast that is about medical ethics in the 1860s. Not today, but fair. Today, it's me, Christopher Wong, and we're doing an episode about inflation. Six. Speaking of medical ethics, well, speaking of kinks, actually.

The moment I said that, I was like, I have opened myself up for a real... Yeah. That was some of the first... Real broadside here. That was some of the first weird internet porn I came apart. It was specifically the cast of DuckTales being, like, inflated. Okay, let's get to the topic of the episode. This episode is now about DuckTales' inflation fetish pornography.

That is enough pre-rabble. Christopher, what do you have for us today? Yeah, so we're talking about inflation. We're talking about... Economic inflation, to be fair. I mean, somebody was making money off of that inflation. I'll tell you that much. God.

Okay, okay. I mean, the one thing DuckTales actually does crossover because of Scrooge McDuck and his giant vault of money. That's true. That's what actually it does tie in. That's part of what's causing inflation. That's right. I can tell you right now, that's not the only thing about him that was inflated.

Oh, boy. I'm talking about his dick. Okay, let's keep it on track. Okay. So, all right. If people are... Inflation, it's not good. It's pretty high.

I probably should have looked up the inflation rate. Isn't it like 8%? Before I did this? Yeah. I think it's... It keeps going. 8.6. Yeah, but every time someone says it's this or it's that, people are like, well, no,

but they also changed these and these indicators five years ago and these other ones 10 years ago. I have no way of judging who's accurate about that. This is the thing. I didn't put this in the episode, but there's a thing that if you study economics, you will realize pretty quickly is that all of the... Basically all of the econ statistics that we have are fucking bullshit and are basically... They're really, really fake.

Yeah. One of the big ones that is one of the underlying things that makes all economics fake is that no one knows how to actually calculate the value of just a factory. If you have a bundle of goods and they're not the same thing, you have two factories that make different things. Actually figuring out what the value of that is is fucking impossible. The way that it's done, if you look at... There are these...

The U.N. produces statistical annals. The values that are in the U.N. statistical annals are literally them guessing because the thing is the actual value of the thing changes depending on where it is on supply and demand curve, blah, blah, blah, blah. They literally just tell the people who are doing the econometrics to just pick a random price that they think is equilibrium. It's completely bullshit. It's bullshit literally all the way down.

It's nonsense. All of the indexes are wrong. Yeah. Unfortunately, the field of economics doesn't really care about this that much, so we're going to have to take them seriously. The thing I specifically want to talk about today was there was a really interesting paper that was produced by two economists at the D.C. Federal Reserve, David Ratner and Jay Sim, about why inflation happens, which is called Who Killed the Phillips Curve and Murder

Mystery, and we're talking about this for two reasons, one because it's funny, because what is going to happen over the course of this paper is that the Federal Reserve has discovered Marxism, and they are going to attempt to solve this mystery of inflation by applying Marx, and the second reason I want to talk about this is that it reveals something that's very, very important about the current political situation, which is that both economists and the rest of the ruling class, in general, do not understand what inflation is, or they kind of understand what it is. They don't know what causes it.

Before we go on here, I should explain what inflation is, because the way I got talked about this, I talked about this with Garrison a few days ago, about the way people get taught about inflation, is that inflation is when your money is worth less. Yeah, when the government prints more money, so each individual dollar is worth less because it's more of them circulating. Yeah, yeah, and this is propaganda. That is not what inflation is. Inflation is literally just when prices go up, and if you think about it, that's kind

of the same thing, sort of, because if prices go up, your dollars are worth less money. Mostly inflation isn't about the amount of money becoming less, mostly it's about something happens and that makes things cost more, and likely, yeah, it is possible for you to get inflation because the government printed too much money, but that most of us are symbiotic. Government will print more money because prices are going up, so that people need more money and circulation to buy things. You saw this happen a lot with the COVID pandemic, so both these things kind of feed off each other and contribute to this overall problem.

Yeah, sort of, but I think something that's important to understand about this is that if you look into the actual econ stuff, the supply of money, how much money there is in the world has very, very little to do with inflation. It only really has effects inflation when you're dealing with, I don't know, like 1930s, 1920s, Germany, or China after World War II, where there's literally just like, you know, the government prints so much money that like, I have my family has a bunch of stories about literally carrying around baskets full of money in China to buy a train ticket because... Yeah, this is like the shit everybody knows about Weimar Germany, too, is the wheel arrows

full of cash and stuff, yeah. But this stuff, that's actually, it's really rare, and it's like the reason everyone knows about when it happens is that it's only happened, it's happened like four or five times, and mostly that's not, that's not why inflation happens. And if you look at inflation right now, for example, there's the prices of like a whole bunch of stuff from like food to like microprocessors are going up because, A, it's harder to produce things because of COVID, B, our supply chains are collapsing, and C, because Russia invaded Ukraine and like, absolutely annihilated an enormous portion of global food supply.

And this, that stuff causes prices to go up, right? Because now it's harder to make a thing, and because it's harder to make the thing that thing cost more, and this has, you know, this has literally nothing to do with the money supply, right? Like it doesn't have anything to do with how much money there is in circulation. And there's another reason that we'll get into kind of at the end that inflation happens, that also has nothing to do with money, which is that corporations just do price markups because they know people will pay for it, and that's happening, too.

But having an explanation of like why inflation is happening is really, really politically important. Even if the explanation that you have is completely wrong, it allows you to do really powerful things politically. One of the ways that neoliberalism sort of took power is that in the 70s and 80s, especially in sort of the 70s in particular, both in academia and as a politics writ large, there's this problem where you have a bunch of these old Keynesian economists who are like, Keynesians are like, they're big on like using government spending to keep the economy running and like

you get a lot of welfare programs, but yeah, it's like, okay, you can avoid crises by having the government do spending. But the problem is that like, they couldn't explain why inflation was happening in the 70s. That's just because the Keynesians are working on something called the Phillips Curve. And we have to do a little bit of econ bullshit, but it's not that complicated, I promise. I survived it, so it'll be fine. So the Phillips Curve says that like, the closer you get to full employment and like

the lower the unemployment rate gets, the higher inflation gets. And this sort of really starts to kick in around from like 5% unemployment to like 4% to 3% unemployment, the inflation rate like spikes. And you know, the reason this is supposed to happen is because the lower the lower the unemployment rate is, wages start to rise because as there's less people who's unemployed, you have to pay them more money to get them to work. And yeah, so this is, and the theory behind this, right, is that like wages increasing is what is what causes inflation to happen because it makes everything cost more.

Now there's a simple and obvious, this is like, this is a very simple and obvious solution to the problem of why like inflation happens. And like all simple and obvious solutions, it is also wrong. The Phillips Curve does not explain inflation. I'm gonna refer everyone in the chat to this tweet that I made, and I want you to look at exhibit A, which is the Phillips Curve. And then I want you to look at exhibit B, which is I actually plotted unemployment versus inflation in the US from like 1946 until 2021.

And I want to get a description of what the second graph looks like because it's supposed to look like a curve. Well, so the first graph, we have an xy graph of the Phillips Curve starting at 8% closer to the y-axis and then swooping down and then flattening out at 8% on the x-axis for the unemployment rate versus the inflation rate. And then for the next graph, we have what's not a curve. What is instead inflation and unemployment graphed except it's zigzagging everywhere like dark sides, omega beams, it is not in fact doing a curve.

My favorite thing about this is that like multiple, multiple, like, and this happens with both unemployment and inflation. There are multiple unemployment rates that are associated with different inflation rates and multiple inflation rates that generate two different rates of unemployment. It's incredible. It is an absolute sort of monument to how much this stuff doesn't work. There is a really good reply to your graph tweet that says, economists are the modern day court astrologers.

It's basically true, which is a funny way to look at it. I mean, court astrologers, though, were probably right more often. That's true. If you're simply guessing, is it a good idea to invade this country or not, 50-50 odds it works out for you, right? If you're trying to predict like, I don't know, the S&P 500, there's a lot more variables. Yeah. And this is one of the things that like, okay, if you can be the person who like walks in

to a lecture and goes, the emperor has no clothes, you can like attain immediate ultimate power because again, this stuff is like, so it's so, it's so trivially and easily like falsifiable that like, you know, like, Milton Friedman is able to do this. And you know, okay, so I should say about the false curve, the Phillips curve that like I showed you, that's like a curve is like a very simple one. There's all of these really convoluted like modifications to it. There's, you know, if you look like the new, the new Keynesian Phillips curve or whatever they've done, they've done a bunch of math to it to try to like make it kind of work.

The problem is that it doesn't work. There's, there's, there's another Phillips curve that's been, that was like modified by the new classical economists and the new classical economists were like, this thing doesn't work. Okay, here's some modifications you have to put in. So that curve also doesn't work. And you know, and this is a real problem, right? Because, okay, so if, if, if this inflate explanation of why inflation happened doesn't

work, like what is actually happening, Milton Friedman, who sort of like takes the economic scene by storm, by like predicting a lot of the inflation in the 70s and like sort of having an answer to it is his, his argument is that inflation is they print too much money in those inflation. And this is kind of a gross oversimplification of, of what his actual point is. But it's, it's, it's, it's more true than any of like Friedman's oversimplifications. So I'm just, I'm just going to leave it at that. And this is what the Federal Reserve and like Paul Volcker used to try to, to try to fight

inflation in 1979. He, what Volcker does is he just tries to massively reduce the money supply. The problem is that this didn't work. Like inflation, like inflation is still like above 10%. I think it spikes to like, like 15% or something, like into like 1984. So and just based on how much larger Huey, Dewey and Louie got, sometimes two or 300%. Do you know who else wants, oh boy. That's right, Garrison.

All of our sponsors are into DuckTales inflation fetish pornography. This is it could happen here, a podcast sponsored by the concept of masturbating to the cast of DuckTales, getting inflated by bicycle pumps. Oh, we're back. Well, I've done my part. Yeah. So, okay. So, so we're left off, right?

There's there's a bunch of inflation happening. Some of it is happening to DuckTales characters. If it's happening to the economy, Paul Volcker has tried to stop the inflation by like making there be less money. And this has done nothing other than like dramatically increase the unemployment rate. Now, the problem with again, Friedman's sort of explanation of inflation is that inflation persists into the 80s and it only stops after insert foreshadowing noise here. Reagan crushes the unions and we will come back to that is to solve inflation.

We should stop all unions. That is your official position. No. Wow. Okay. But this is this is part of the position of the federal of the Marxist Federal Reserve. So we will get there in a second. So, all right.

All right. So, so the thing I've been describing that that Friedman is pushing about the money's way. This is called monetarism. And monetarism is like the fakest theory of inflation. Like it's a theory of inflation so fake that like even other like even other like neoclassical economists don't accept it. Like none of the other different neoliberal schools of economics, like every single one

of them look at this and was like, this is nonsense. Like what are you doing? But you know, so, okay. So it's like it's like the tick tock astrology compared to the neoliberal court astrology. Yeah. It's it's it's all it's like it's it's it's somehow an even faker explanation of this. But you know, this brings us back to like where we started, which is that like, okay, so if the monetarist stuff doesn't work and the Phillips curve also doesn't work, what

is causing inflation? And the answer from inside of the like the actual fuel of economics is that nobody knows. Here's Daniel K. Turallo, who was the former Federal Reserve who was a former Federal Reserve bank governor and was a member of the Federal Reserve Board. So he's a he's a very, very high ranking like guy inside the sphere of people who try to apply econ shit. And here's here's a quote that he gave about it in 2017 quote, the substantive point is that we do not at present have a theory of inflation dynamics that works sufficiently

well to be of use for the business of real time monetary policymaking. So what are you saying there is like if you translate that out of econ speak and you don't even really have to translate that out of econ speak much. What he's saying is that he no one has any idea why inflation works and none of the models work well enough to let you like try to deal with inflation. If you're you know, the people who control the money supply like the Fed. Now economists like we've seen in the past, if you've been following this off in the past like 10 years ish, especially in the last five economists have been getting like increasingly

desperate to explain what the fuck is happening and they're getting increasingly increasingly desperate right now because you know, hey, inflation's back. And that that brings us to the paper I mentioned at the top of the episode, which who killed the Phillips curve of murder mystery, which opens talking about two sort of massive recent failures of the like new Keynesian we fixed, we added variables to the Phillips curve until it like sort of kind of works ish, maybe. But you know, one thing they're talking about two of its sort of like incredibly massive failures.

The first is in 2008, where there's you know, there's a recession. Oh, really? What happened to economic 2008 2008 2008? There's a recession. But what's interesting about this, right? Is that, okay, so if you think about this, like there's an inflation is there's a recession. Unemployment skyrockets, this should cause deflation. Well, you know, because you know what also happened in 2008?

The official DuckTales video game came out. So I think this could we are, we are through the looking glass people. You know, I mean, this, this, this is not any more bullshit than any of the other stuff they're doing. So like, but you know, okay, but there's, there's, there's this thing that happens where like, okay, the like the inflation, the inflation rate should have been decreasing and it just stays the same. And economists are like, what, and this is, this is called the the missing deflationary

period. There's, there's a second thing where during the sort of like quote unquote economic recovery in the last like 10 years ish, I until basically until before the pandemic, employment rates dropped really, really low. And this should have started, this should have triggered inflation, but it doesn't. And you know, okay. And so the people who run the Philadelphia Phillips Group, like the economists are looking at this and they're like, okay, what do we do?

And the Fed economist solution is again, and I say you not Marxism and more specifically the solution is Neo Marxism. Neo Marxism. Yeah. Yeah. This is, this is, this is something else I'm sort of excited about, which is that I finally get to tell the world what a Neo Marxist is because this is technically a thing. It's just that none of the people who talk about Neo Marxist have any idea of what it

is. Most modern Neo Marxism. Yes. Actually, weirdly, well, I mean, I guess you could have, okay, what once we explain it, I will, I will talk about how you could theoretically have a postmodern Neo Marxist, but I don't think I've ever met one. Whoa. How welcome, contradictory terms.

Okay. Okay. So I'm excited to hear this. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So what is happening here is that there's an old joke in Marxist circles that like the most advanced bourgeois economists is 50 years behind the most vulgar Marxist and

this is this coming true. So the Federal Reserve economists are developing, they're trying to make a new Phillips curve and the new Phillips curve is what they call a Kalecki and Phillips curve because it's based for... Hey guys, new curve just dropped. Yeah, it literally is, except this is the Neo Marxist curve. And it's based on the works, it's kind of loosely based on him, but it's just based on the work of a Polish Marxist economist named Mikhail Kalecki.

And Kalecki is a, he's a very, very weird Marxist, like by Marxist standards is extremely weird and to explain why this is, we have to, we have to speed, we're gonna have to speed run Marxism 101. So I'm going to attempt to explain Marxism in one page. All right. Let's, let's go for it. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Let's go for it. Marxism 101, right? You have a worker. She has to go find a job and sell her labor to like get food to eat because otherwise she can't support herself. So she goes to work in a factory that makes like hospital stretchers. Now under capitalism, and this is, this is, this is, well, the thing I'm explaining,

this is like the, this is the orthodox Marxist interpretation. So the people who are about to scream at me for a million years about how this is wrong, I'm explaining the orthodox position, damn it. You're not explaining. This is my position on it. You're not explaining vegetarian Marxism. Yeah. No.

Okay. Now, yeah. Chris, quick question. What, what, what, what, what was Marx? So Marx was a experiment, a psychological experiment run by the, by Harvard University that was included in 1897, but he wrote, he wrote a bunch of books and one of those books is capital and, and in capital, so, okay, so you have, you have your worker, right? And she, she, she works to make hospital stretchers and the thing that makes the hospital stretcher

have value is the amount of time that it takes a worker to make it. So under, under, under this, this sort of understanding of, of what Marxism is, value was just labor time, right? The value of an object is how many hours of work it takes to make a thing. Now, this labor time, or, you know, like, like, how long it takes to make the thing. The value of it, it isn't measured by, like, how long it takes to make, like, an individual cot, right? It's measured by, like, how long on average it takes society to make.

So, you know, for example, like, let's say this is in Finland, right? It's based on how long on average it takes to make a hospital stretcher in Finland, not, like, you know, how long it takes to make in, like, Bolivia or something. And this is the technical term for, for, like, this thing is socially necessary labor time. So our worker, like, works for through her day. And after six hours, she's produced enough value to support herself. She can buy food. She can pay a rent.

She can, like, I don't know, maybe buy a car or something. But she's also worked two more hours of the day. And during that time, the labor that she's doing just goes to the boss. And this is called surplus value, like, the amount of time that you're working where you're working for the boss and not to, like, support yourself. This is called surplus value. It is the objective root of exploitation and Marxism. Yeah.

And it's the value that goes directly to your boss that, and the reason that, like, your boss can just steal this from you is because they have the factor in you don't. So if you want to produce something for them to survive, you have to go to him. And this is called the ownership of the means of production. Now the price in theory of this hospital stretcher, right, is based on value, on its value or how many hours it takes to produce it. And how precisely you get from dollars as a unit of measurements from two dollars from time is a subject of an absolutely interminable debate called the transformation problem.

If you want to go read more about it, I have wasted probably four years of my life reading about it. I don't recommend it, but the answer is you can sort of kind of get it to work if you fuck with the numbers a lot. But if you do, it's unclear if they mean anything. You can also bypass it entirely by arguing that it only works in a level of the entire world. Economy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I don't care. If you do care about this, don't yell at me. Go read chapter six of Bickler and Nietzsche's Capitalist Power, Paul Maddox's theory is critique, Fred Mosley's Money in Totality, and Kilmin and McGlores' Temporal Single System Interpretation of Marx's Theory of Value, Marx's Value Theory, and then Google DuckTalesGoBig. Jennywinely. And then send all of that, all of your notes on both the texts and the DuckTales, send

all that to IWriteOK on Twitter, and they will get back to you. You will probably come out of the DuckTales stuff more sane than you will doing the Marxism stuff. Yeah, but I've now covered my bases. This is orthodox Marxism, which is the stuff we've been talking about is based on another, there's another assumption here that's important kind of technically, which is that orthodox Marxists assume that, so you have a bunch of sectors of the economy, right? There are people who make different stuff.

Yeah, there's people who do, who make hospital guarantees, people who do more important work, like make podcasts, and everything in between. And the assumption is that, okay, so you have a person who makes podcasts, right? And the other, the people who make hospital structures figured out that making podcasts is more profitable than making hospital stretchers. So they start moving all their capital into making podcasts. But then, because there's too many podcasts, the rate of profit goes down and eventually, like eventually, the rate of profit across all sectors is supposed to equalize.

Yes. Yeah, so, and this means that, like, in the combination of this and competition, is that price is supposed to tend towards value, or like, how much something cost in money is supposed to tend towards the labor time socially necessary to produce the commodity in a given place. This is like the basic thesis of, like, what you'd call orthodox Marxist, like, orthodox Marxist political economy, you would probably think, or Marxian political economy, whatever the fuck you want to call it.

Now, in, in, starting in about the 1920s, there was a new Marxism. This is called neo-Marxism, neo-Marxism's basic, like, thesis. I think I heard about that from Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, now, now we're going to get the inside scoop on, on neo-Marxism. So neo-Marxism, their basic thesis is, like, what if profit rates don't equalize across, like, between different parts of the economy that make things, and, you know, and, and because they don't do that, what if, what if you don't get competition because instead

of people being able to just freely move capital between, like, sectors, what if you have monopolies? And if you have monopolies, instead of sort of price being, like, price is just value, blah, blah, blah, blah, because everyone can keep moving their money around. Price is now, price, price is now derived from the power of, of a corporation. Because if, you know, if, if, if you, if you are a powerful enough corporation to, like, have a monopoly and stop anyone else from producing the thing that you do, now you can, now you can charge what are called markups. And this is where Mikhail Kolecki, like, enters from stage left.

Kolecki, like, he probably should have been the father, father of, like, modern macroeconomics in the sense that, like, he invents a bunch of the shit that, like, Keynes does before Keynes did, but the problem is that he's writing a lot of this in Polish, and so the, the sort of, like, Anglophone, like, economists are not reading it because he's in Poland and he's in Marxist and he's writing in Polish circles, but he invents a bunch of the stuff that, like, Keynes invents slightly earlier, and he starts, like, looking at, like, monopoly and oligarchy theory, and he starts trying to apply it to Marxism, and what, you know, his inclusion is that monopolies are powerful enough that they can charge these markups,

which is just, like, additional price increase over, like, what the, like, value-determined price is supposed to be, because they could provide anyone else from selling the thing, and then, you know, once you have a monopoly in the market, you can force people to just, like, fucking suck it up and pay it because they can't get it from anywhere else. And this is actually, this is, like, pretty similar in some ways to, like, the bourgeois economic, like, theory of how this stuff works, which is like, okay, yeah, in bourgeois economics, like, monopolies can increase the price over where they're supposed to be in a perfectly competitive market because they have power, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but there's

something very different in Kolecki's work that is not in the normal bourgeois stuff, which is that, what, what he argues is that trade unions, okay, so you, you have a trade union, right, they represent the workers who work at a company, and these trade unions are fighting over the product of the markup. And this keeps the size of markups, or these sort of, like, these price increases that monopolies are doing down, because the larger the markup these companies apply, the more incentive there is for unions to sort of, like, fight for pay increases, right? Because, okay, well, the more expensive the goods are, the more money there, like, very

clearly is on hand, and so the larger the demands you get from organized labor. And this is the insight that who killed the Phillips curve, the paper I was talking about jumps on, that unions fight over markups, and thus that the strength of unions is part of what helps determine inflation. And they point out that, you know, unions want lower prices for goods, and the reason they want lower prices for goods is that the higher the price is of something, right, the less people buy of it, and the less people, like, buy of the thing, the less has to be produced, and that means that there's less people being employed.

And so if you're a union, you want, like, the most number of people being employed as you can, and so that means that you want prices to be low, because, yeah, because lower prices means more of the good being produced, and the good being produced means more jobs. And this is where we get to sort of the fundamental assumption behind the regular Phillips curve, and this is also true for this sort of, like, new, like, pseudo neo-Marxist one, right? Their assumption is that inflation is driven by rising wages. And you know, even though the unions are trying to sort of, like, reduce the markup and, like, and reduce markups, reduce prices to increase the number of workers, firms are trying to

increase prices so they can make back the money they're paying out in wages. Now, when unemployment is, like, high, this doesn't matter, because wages still don't rise very fast, because there's, you know, there's this enormous pool of people who are incredibly desert for jobs, and you can pay them sort of, like, nothing, and they'll come work for you because the alternative is, you know, starving or getting evicted. But when unemployment is low, the bargaining power of workers increases, and that's where the class war starts. Yeah.

I mean, you see this in 1941 with the screen cartoonists' strike, that Scrooge McDuck brutally cracked down on, and eventually had to seed ground to the guild, but Scrooge McDuck was brutal during this time period post the 30s rise of unions. That's right, Garrison, and that's a big part of why Huey Dewey and Louie had to track him down in his money room and stick a bicycle pump into his mouth while he was sleeping and begin to inflate him largely while touching themselves. Critical support to Huey Dewey and Louie? Oh, boy.

So as with, I don't even know how to transition that, I can't do it. Nobody does. I mean, really, the main thing is that the concentration of wealth in the hands of a small number of individuals will inevitably lead to inflation. Which is true, and this is one of the things that the economists are sort of talking about here, which is that like, okay, so once you get an actual, once you get a real classwork going on, you're getting a classwork to the extent that the bargaining power of workers and the bargaining power of capitalist firms are very close to being equal, you get inflation.

Now what's interesting about this is that when you have strong unions, you get high rates of inflation during periods of inflation shocks because the unions are sort of propping up wages and this theory, but, and this is the interesting part, you get way lower rates of unemployment. Okay, it's just a step back for a second. So what's happening here is if you have strong unions and there's something else in the supply chain that increases costs, say to pick a completely random example that never happened, say for example, you're in the 1970s and the price of oil has quadrupled in one year and that

increases the price of everything. Yes. Now when you have strong unions, but relatable, this never happened, I don't Google the oil shocks. I should literally don't Google the oil shocks because almost everything written online about the oil shocks is a lie. I, yeah, I think I've talked about that before on the other bulletin episode, but yeah, it's all a lie.

But basically like one of the, you know, okay, what happens here is if you have strong unions, you get a bunch of inflation, but people don't get fired and when corporations are strong and you don't have unions, I, you know, you get these shocks and the inflation rate is much lower, but everyone gets fired. Your unemployment rate goes up to like 10%, it's, you know, it's an absolute disaster. So that's, that's one thing to note about, about the way the sort of the Phillips curve, the sort of Marxian Phillips curve, like analyzed the situation, right? But there's another consequence here, which comes back to like what inflation is under

a Phillips curve, right? Inflation in a Phillips curve is literally just wage increases, right? So when union power is weak inflation styles, but like, what does this actually mean? What it means is that wages aren't growing. Sure. Sure, aren't. Yeah. And this brings us back to like the sort of weirdness we saw in the, in the earlier

part of the episode right after 2008, right? Where there should have been deflation because the unemployment rate was really high and also like during the recovery period where unemployment rates are super low, but, and there should have been inflation, but there wasn't. And the answer is why, why wasn't there inflation? It's well, okay, because no one had a union. And so everyone's wages just stayed the same the whole time. I have another explanation for this.

When I previously, when I previously said the DuckTales game came out in 2008, I was actually incorrect. Oh. 2008 was when Nintendo power listed the DuckTales game as the 13th best Nintendo entertainment system game. It was, it was, it was voted that in 2008. Now it's important that 13 is a very unlucky number. So by voting the DuckTales game, the 13th best game from the NES in 2008, they could

have basically caused a psychic rift in the fabric of the universe, creating the financial crash. That's fascinating, Garrison, because I was 13 in 2001 when I came across that AngelFire website with home-drawn DuckTales inflation pornography, which is- Wait, so this calls 9-11? I think in a lot of ways, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. It's all connected.

You know who else may have been a contributing factor to 9-11? The products and services that support this podcast? I think so. That's right. That's right. We do not accept a sponsor unless it gets the explicit sign off of the king of Saudi Arabia, who if you'll remember, did 9-11. All right.

Yeah. I'm not gonna, I'm, I am not getting paid, Duff, to properly transition this. So I'm not going to. So it turns out that, yeah, so the reason there wasn't been inflation is that there's no unions, and because we don't have unions, our wages all suck, and this means that wages are stagnant and low, and it means that the unions aren't a driver of inflation, and also low wages aren't a driver of inflation because they, you know, like unions aren't around to increase wages.

Now, meanwhile, the other thing that this suggests is that monetary policy, and they- Okay, I think they're, they're an exact analysis was like, I think like 84% of like inflation shocks can be explained by looking at like union density, but this also means that meanwhile like monetary policy, like how much money there is, like in the economy has like basically no role in inflation whatsoever, and this is, you know, okay, so like this has all been sort of one perspective from some economists at the Federal Reserve, and we can ask the question like why does this matter, right, like why, why, why does like sort of one like group of people on the Fed, like their response, this matters, and partly it matters because

it's again extremely funny to watch the Federal Reserve turning to neo-Marxist to like try to explain why inflation happens, but it also matters because theories of inflation dictate inflation policy, Jerome Powell, who's the, the chairman of the Federal Reserve was had a press conference on May 4th, and it's too long to play the whole thing, but he, he, he has the speech and he lays out a few things that are interesting. So he, he talks about a bunch of stuff that's causing inflation, right, production bottlenecks, increasing crude oil prices, increasing commodity prices from like Russia's invasion of Ukraine, like his lockdowns in China, they're keeping factories like closed, and like, yeah, okay,

those are all like reasonable things that cause inflation. But then when you get to like what the Fed is actually going to do, he starts talking about how the job market is too good for workers right now and unemployment is too low and that's what's driving wages up, so his plan is he's going to tinker around with monetary policy to reduce wages and decrease the demand for jobs. And this brings us back to like two things. The first part is just the class war part of inflation, right, prices are rising right now because someone inside like prices are rising right now and someone inside, if you

want them to not to like cease to continue rising, somewhat some part of like the company is going to have to take a hit to like their percentage of like the sort of the markup, right, like their percentage of like the price increase of the corporations do above like cost. And okay, so someone has to do this and the Federal Reserve like absolutely wants to make sure that the person paying for that is you, the worker. And the second part is something you might have picked up on if you're paying close attention and this has been something that's been true of, of both like the Fed Chairman and the Fed

economists do this too, which is they do this when they talk about inflation, they do this kind of two step, right? They talk about a shock or something that causes prices to increase like, you know, a bunch of Ukrainian wheat, like suddenly being unharvestable because the Russian army is squatting on it or like Chinese factories shutting down to use the amount of wheat and price of electronics, or sorry, reduces the amount of wheat or the amount of electronics being produced that drives that prices, right? They talk about like there's an inflationary shock.

And then they start talking and instead of talking about that anymore, they start talking about unemployment levels in the job market and monetary policy being what drives inflation. And I think this is, this is a very like important piece of ideology because if you look at what's going on here, right? If you go back to the 70s, it's not like inflation in the 70s is not the union's fault. Like the, you know, the inflation in the 70s was like in large part the original price increases were because the price of oil quadrupled in one year. But you know, the Fed instead focuses on wage increases is what drives inflation, even if

they're sort of like using like Marxist to do it. And what they're doing here is shifting the focus from the actual shock that is like the thing, the immediate thing that is increasing prices. And they're shifting the focus from the shock to the people who are reacting to it. And from there, the question stops being about like dealing with the shock itself and starts being about who's going to pay for these price increases. And in the 1980s, like Reagan's Reagan solution, this is well, okay, he's just going to make organized labor pay for it.

And so he just annihilates the annihilates the unions. He uses the state to do it just crushes the unions completely and price increases, you know, prices stop increasing, right? And they stop increasing because the production costs of all of these goods like decrease because workers are no longer getting paid and they lose all their benefits. But this is the thing. They never dealt with the actual source of the problem, right? Oil prices are still really high to this day and we never transitioned off of oil.

And to look at sort of that problem, I want to briefly look at another theory of inflation, which is one presented by Steve Mann, who I think we've actually had on the show before. He's one of the people at Strange Matters and he wrote this article called Notes Towards a Theory of Inflation, which is based on the work of a heterodox economist named Frederick Lee, who is, he's a cool guy. All of this stuff is like completely out there from the Ecom perspective, but it makes more sense than most regular econ stuff. So the sort of like founding observation of like that, like Frederick Lee's basing his

stuff on is that like, okay, prices are not set by like an abstract market, right? The price of something in a grocery store is set by a guy. Like there was a specific guy or there were like several specific guys whose job it is to set the prices for the firm. This theory of like, well, it's not even a theory. Like the fact that this is how prices are formed by just a guy who sits there with a notebook or like a computer is this is what the price is going to be. This is called administered prices.

And Lee like very convincingly argues that like, this is how firm, this is how both large and small firms actually set their prices, right? A guy calculates his expenses, he adds a markup and he sets the price. Now Steve Mann argues that these prices don't generally tend to increase naturally because the price setters don't generally want to just increase the price randomly. Because if you increase the price randomly, you will piss off your customers. And the customers, you know, okay, they'll tolerate like some small increases. But if you raise the price enough, they lose your goodwill towards your brand.

And they'll like, they'll go off and try to find another brand. And this is disastrous because even if you reduce the prices back down again, like the goodwill is lost and that sort of like, you know, the sort of like happy association that like you have in your brain between like, I don't know, like Nestle chocolate or something or like whatever brand of thing you're buying, like you get pissed off at them because the price is now like way higher. So, you know, you don't go back to the same like grocery store because that they've increased their prices.

Now, obviously, this is like, there's like, this is subject constraints, right? Like if, if you need insulin and the monopoly that controls insulin production just jacks the price, you're screwed, right? There's no sort of like, there's no other place you can get insulin unless you're gonna try to make it. So your, your, your solutions are you either try to ration it and you die or you pay for the price increases. And this, this is bad and it does happen, but most goods aren't like this.

And so price increases when they happen tend to be small and fairly infrequent, unless unless the person, and the reason this doesn't, this wouldn't happen is if the person setting the price has no choice. And the main reason that if you're a person setting a price that you would have no choice but to increase like the price that, that, that you're setting, the main reason you would do this because something happened to your supply chain, I don't know if you all see it. There was a TikTok going around from a farmer in Iowa who was talking about like why, why

food prices are going to keep increasing. The woman honestly, bless her heart, honestly thinks that food prices are not going to go up. She thinks that this is the highest they're going to go. I tried to explain to her that that was not the case, that they're absolutely going to go up even more. And I told her there are things that like we have to buy. There's something we had to buy that two years ago cost us $24.

Last year was about 46. This year it is costing us $96, okay. Local farmer, 50 had a cattle. It's costing him $8,000 a month to feed them. Food prices understand, food prices are going to go up. Yeah. And so, and so you can see here what's happening. Is it like at some point down the supply chain, prices are increasing either because of like

climate change or because of the war in Ukraine, because of COVID, because of like any thousand sort of other factors. And eventually the, like the farmers who are setting the prices, right, they have to increase their prices because they don't have, they don't have a choice, right? Because the each, each person further back in the supply line as a charity, right? Like they have to be able to pay a bunch of shit bills. Yeah. And, and this, this sort of, you know, this is the, Steve calls it like, he calls it the

supply chain theory of inflation, right? And, you know, in this model, like this is what's causing inflation, right? Each person successively down the line has to, has to increase their markup because they have to cover their, they have to cover the new, the newly increased production costs. And this is important because unlike most models of inflation, inflation isn't being caused by like some kind of like giant macroeconomic thing, like it's not being caused by like unemployment or like monetary policy, but it's being caused by very, very specific microeconomic forces that, you know, there are literally specific people who as a reaction

to a specific thing happening that makes production harder or increasing their prices. And this is a very different sort of, you know, this is a very, very different theory of inflation than like any of the like 17 mainstream ones, all of which are bad in various ways. And yeah, there's one other thing I want to mention, though, that kind of isn't talked about in this model that is absolutely happening right now. And that's something that is really one of the drivers of inflation, which is that corporations are raising prices because they think they can get away with it and they're just pocketing the costs.

And this isn't like a sort of speculative thing. Companies when you ask them about it are very, very open about it. Just from a Business Insider article, what we are very good at is pricing Colgate, Palm of Oil CEO, Noah Wallace said, whether it's foreign exchange inflation or raw and packing material inflation, we have found ways over time to recover that in our margin line. We've been we've been very comfortable with our ability to pass on the increases that we've seen at this point, said Kroger CFO Gary Miller chip in October. And we would expect that to continue to be the case.

And here's something here's from the Wall Street Journal, where more people talk about doing this. We have not seen any material reaction from consumers, Procter and Gamble Finance Chief Andre Shulton said last week, referring to a string of price increases that went into effect in September. So that makes us feel good about a relative position. Now those two articles like just those two articles alone, talk about prices raising like talk about companies that are just raising prices because they know consumers will pay

for it because they think there's inflation happening. And those companies just from those two articles alone include Procter and Gamble, Nestle, Verizon, Unilever, Colgate, Palm of Oil, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Gillette, Chipotle, AT&T, Verizon, Kimberly Clark Corp, Clorox, Reynolds, Kroger's and Albutson. And like that's just like the corporations in the article that are like specifically named as talking about having done this, right? And they can get away with this because normally right price increases are pissed people off. They go free for brands, but if prices across the board are already increasing, you can

just like do basically like a price gouge increase and you can do and you can increase your markup and it doesn't affect your goodwill because people just assume that inflation is already happening and that inflation happens sort of naturally is either because the wages are too high. There's too much money in circulation. So oh, there's just like inflation happening is this like abstract thing. Instead of what is actually happening, which there are very specific, like there are individual people with with names and addresses who specifically increase the price in order to screw you.

And that that's that's what's actually at stake here in having an explanation for why inflation happens. It tells you who to blame for it. Like right now, Larry Summers, who's the former Treasury Secretary, who was responsible for I arguably responsible for 2000 directly responsible for 2008, one of people who completely annihilated the entire Russian economy in the 90s. He is has apparently been on the phone with Joe Biden. And he is going around saying that in order to solve inflation, we have to cut wages and

raise the unemployment rate to 5% like for five years, like on average 5% for five years. And so this means either you have 5% of 5% five years of 5% inflation, two years of inflation at 7.5% or like one year of 10% unemployment. And again, unemployment right now is at like 3%. So he's talking about millions, potentially tens of millions of people losing their jobs in order to solve inflation. Because Summers again, Summers is going back on the sort of Phillips model shit, right? Where inflation is caused by, you know, it doesn't even matter what's actually causing

the inflation, which is a bunch of accommodation to price gouging and like supply chain disruptions, right? He's going, OK, who his theory isn't about what is causing inflation, his theory is about who's going to pay for it. And his solution is, fuck you, you are going to pay for it. You are going to pay for both the price increases, which the prices won't fucking come back down. That's the other part of this, right? Once you get inflation and once the prices rise, they're sticky, they don't fucking fall.

And what he's saying is, yeah, fuck you, you are going to pay for it. You're going to continue to pay these prices. You're also going to pay for it by reducing your wages. You're going to pay for it by getting fired. And you know, this is this is sort of the choice that we have, right? It's either we let the ruling class tell exactly the same stories about why inflation happens. They've been telling 50 years that they know are wrong, that they know are so wrong, they're desperate enough to turn to fucking Marxism to try to find explanations for it.

Or we find it, we find a new like explanation of why fucking inflation happens. And we go back and we take the stuff that they've stolen from us and then we expropriate the bastard so they don't do it again. And that is that that that is what I have to say about inflation. Yeah, I mean, again, what we need to do is if we organize as a people and as a people become the vacuum tube that we need to shove down the esophagus of summers and other members of the ruling class in order to inflate their organs so that their asshole widens and we can collectively fuck them until they deflate.

Is that more or less accurate, Chris, would you say? Economically. Sure. I mean, this is the thing about having an explanation for why inflation happens, right? It doesn't matter if it's true or not. As long as you have a compelling enough explanation for inflation to cause people to do something, you can. I mean, this is one of the things, for example, like this is one of the things that caused

Tiananmen to happen is that there was skyrocketing inflation and the workers had an explanation of inflation. It wasn't right. Yeah, I mean, their explanation for inflation had to do with like China was taking in a bunch of loans and the CCP was spending all their money on sports cars. And it's like, it's kind of marginal whether it was like true or not. But it doesn't matter, right? Inflation could be caused by the fact that we haven't fucking inflated.

Yeah, we haven't inflated enough, right? On that point. And this is this is this is 100 percent true. You can look this up online. So the original DuckTales game from 1989 was remastered in 2013, and it was released on August 13, 2013, the remaster of the DuckTales game, 1313, both unlucky numbers. I think that could have just as much to do with our current economic problem around inflation as basically anything else Chris has said here.

Because August 13, 2013, DuckTales getting released, Scrooge McDuck main character. That is too much to be a coincidence. Yeah, we are through the looking glass. I can see the Fnords like there's there's there's no getting away from this one. Look, yeah, you all you have to do is you just got to go, you got to show up to the room where the fucking money is and you got to take it from them. You got to show up to kind of show up to the fucking factories and inflate your bosses and you will inflation will come down.

Yeah, good work, everybody. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast about stuff falling apart and perhaps how we could begin to put them back together. Today I'm your host, Garrison Davis. We've had a lot of doom and gloom the past few weeks here on the pod, so this episode will be more focused on the putting stuff back together side of the spectrum. We'll be talking with Elizabeth Blackburn of the First Collective, a group of volunteers, organizers and activists in Columbus, Ohio, focused on direct grassroots action and mutual

aid, but we'll be specifically talking about a volunteer run homeless encampment that's currently serving around 20 to 30 people in the Near East side of Columbus. Here's some of the history from Elizabeth. The project started as a warming station at the end of January and has morphed into a autonomous encampment that's largely self-governed and managed by a loose network of mutual aid organizations that came together during the 2020 uprisings. This is as flat an organization as we can make it and we're trying to make it flatter. I just think it's important that people recognize going out with resources is great, but going

out and finding out what resources people need is better. There are so many groups in our city that are supposed to be doing this work that are not and they're being paid to do this work and it's ineffective and all I want is for more people to try and do it their own way, to try and do what their community wants to do. We've seen lots of projects grow out of the mutual aid networks that were established in 2020. It's been interesting to see how people in the wake of the George Floyd uprising have

built off things that started two years ago, what's changed in their practice and how it's evolved since then. This past winter, in this area of Columbus, Ohio, there was community needs not being met, people having to be out in the cold and not having a place to stay. This problem was recognized by people, but unfortunately, far too many people just look at problems and just be like, oh, yes, here's the thing that sucks, well, that's too bad. But today, we'll be talking about how a collective of people didn't simply acknowledge a problem, but actually went past that point and decided that even with limited resources, they had

the capacity to actually figure out how to solve this themselves and provide a solution for the community. I think the first time I really tried something like that was in December. A friend of mine had reached out about a camp on the south side of Columbus that was being swept by the city, and they had needs, they needed new tents so they could set up elsewhere. They needed food and water like they always did, and they needed people to be there to keep, you know, to prevent violence from occurring as much as possible. And hearing about that, I set up on my street in a bougie part of Columbus with a little

sign and collected goods, whatever people dropped off. I collected money, I raised about $2,000, and I think we ended up buying around 22 tents. Got other people there as well and tried to make sure everybody had what they needed so they could get set up elsewhere. But that was my first experience with that, doing it hands-on, and seeing that that worked, that encouraged me to do more. How has it grown and changed since then? There's still a need for people to stay.

It still gets pretty cold at night. So throughout winter, how did the project kind of morph and change? How'd you go about finding places to actually set up the physical spot, right? That's a whole other problem. Is it all like the logistical side of things? Yeah, exactly. Well, we happened to have a space late last fall. I was invited to join a first collective that was operating out of a church that's largely

falling into disrepair, but still operating as a church. And because we had that space, a couple members of the collective encountered some folks in the neighborhood who needed a place to sleep. They were sleeping in a bus stop on a snowy night. And we just decided to start giving them a place to stay because we had a place. It wasn't a super popular decision, but we had community back in. Conflicts from some people in the neighborhood who were more nimby-minded did obviously come up, along with the complaints from the church that the first collective was operating out

of. For the community's part, when we were at the church, we were in a part of the neighborhood that had largely been gentrified. And so there was some resistance, some concern about the changing face of the community and about the safety of kids and so on and so forth, but we didn't have any real safety concerns, not inside, beyond a couple encounters that we had to de-escalate. And a few people that we had to remove based on their behavior. But from inside the church, from the church organization, the conflict started pretty

early on. They didn't really like how we operated and we got a reputation as a warming space with no rules. And so they felt like, because couples could sleep next to each other, because people could go outside for a cigarette at night, because they weren't locked in the building, that we were running a space that was out of control. Well, until we were kicked out of the church on March 29th, I think it was, the physical infrastructure was there.

It was just a matter of getting cuts and blankets and making sure that people had food. Next to that was either through just one-off donations to my cash app or I bought it with my own funds. Once we were forced to move outside, it got a lot more complicated, because at that point we didn't have any tents. We had to go out that night and purchase the day that we were removed. We had to go out and purchase, I believe, 10 tents to start and then had a couple dropped off.

We now have around 20 to 25 tents. A lot of those were purchased by me or by donations that we received or had been dropped off by friends or people in the neighborhood. That has been, the physical infrastructure is mostly tents and canopies, and most of them are being held up by pieces of old tents or large tree limbs or whatever we can to survive the wind, because it's been nothing but wind storms for the past, well, since we got here. Our first campsite was set up on a lot that was connected to the farm, Four Seasons City

Farm. Several of the members of the collective are former paid employees of the farm or multi-year volunteers. It's a large organization in this part of the town, Old Town East, with about 15, I believe, years of history and goodwill. We set up next to their lot, but because they're on land bank land, we didn't want to interfere with their lease with the city. Rather than risk the farm getting fined or having their lease broken, we looked next

door to a lot on the other side of a chain link fence, two lots actually. One is owned by the city, that's the one where most of our tents are, and then one is owned by a private owner who's a rather wealthy person in the neighborhood. Done our best to stay on the city lot, and that has been good for us, but we're also maintaining both lots and doing our best to keep the trash to a minimum, to make sure that we're not carrying up the ground as much as we can. Now it's hard with all this rain, and just do our best to be good neighbors, and I think that has helped us a lot.

In recent years, lower-class Columbus area residents lost 20,000 units of housing due to unaffordable, spiking rent prices. An annual point-in-time tally this year, organized by the community shelter board, found the number of homeless people in official Columbus and Franklin County emergency shelters increased by more than 200 people since 2021, and online data from the shelter board, a nonprofit organization that receives funding from the city of Columbus and other organizations, indicates that as of March 2022, there was a 7% drop in the rate of people exiting their program and moving into stable housing as compared to last year, going from 33% to 26%.

A lot of times, more formalized shelters are not ideal for people to stay in. There's many issues with the formalized shelters regarding the specific rules of when you can get inside, how long you can be inside, whether you're locked inside the building, what stuff you can bring with you. At best, they are challenging to navigate. At worst, they're simply hostile to people looking for shelter. I asked Elizabeth what her take on the homeless shelter situation is like in Columbus, and the ways their encampment is different from the more official shelters.

We have limited beds, and then the beds that are available are mostly under the governance of the shelter board, and the shelter board wasn't too fond of us either because we weren't following all their rules. There are a lot of concerns about the way the shelters run. The people that stay with us, the people that come through, they feel safer here. There's considerably less drug use. There's basically no distribution. We try to keep a handle on that because it would bring problems to the camp should it

happen there. We are a safe use space. We do have harm reduction materials, and they know that. We do our best to just make sure that people have the care and the safety that they need. That is kind of a dirty word while all of those are kind of dirty words in the shelter organizing community, I guess, care and making people comfortable. It's just not really the goal. Next, I asked about what types of connections the encampment and first collective have been

making with various organizations for infrastructural support or daily needs, as well as inquiring about the relations the camp has with the city government. Here is Elizabeth's response. We reached out to the different harm reduction groups, the different houselessness groups, the emergency action groups, the different serve groups, and we just asked them to bring what they could or to send people if they could, just whatever they could spare. It's worked. People show up with whatever they have to offer from all over the city and just from

around the corner, which has been wonderful. The grassroots community support has just blown my mind. I thought they were going to hate us and here we are like making friends with everybody. Our first goal is to make sure that we've met people's needs as best we can. That involves right now keeping propane on site so that they can cook some of the food that's brought. We get a lot of prepared meals, but we also get a lot of ingredients and there are quite a few people here that cook and have done pretty miraculous things with a couple of

propane girls. We try and have meals prepared every day, but it doesn't always work out and sometimes we fill the gaps with little Caesars or something else. Whatever can be scrounged up at the last minute. Some of our biggest allies so far have been the local food not bombs. They've been wonderful as well as some different church groups that run non-profits like Community Kitchen. We get our meals provided six days a week by a church that's basically down the street

and around the corner, but as far as the city goes, for the first couple of days there were a lot of roll-bys, a lot of city officials taking pictures. No one really talking to us, but there was clearly concern. It wasn't until a man who works for the city and outreach under the safety and security department, Sean Stevenson, came out and talked to us that we really started to see the possibilities of working with the city and so much as they let us. We brought a city attorney, Steve Dunbar, and a gentleman from the mayor's office, Jason Jenkins, to talk to our folks and they listened.

They listened to the people at the camp who explained to them why they were here, explained to them why the resources that are available didn't work for them. It was a tearful conversation. Because then, they've largely left us alone. We wish that they would provide some of the resources that they talked about, like a couple porta-potties and a dumpster, but we do our best with our composting toilet and the good grace of some very kind neighbors. Police raids and sweeps are always an existential fear for those living in DIY encampments.

Here's what Elizabeth had to say about sweeps and police interactions. What we've been told is that they've been told to leave us alone. We've heard this from the cops themselves. We've heard this from people who have talked to them. But the precinct that is in this area has been told not to mess with us unless there is a violent conflict, the thing to do cop stuff at. There are a lot of sweeps that have been threatened around the city of different camps. They've received notice or notice of notice, so they don't know exactly when, but it's

supposed to happen sometime. But as far as we're concerned, we haven't really had that problem. Cops have come through. There are a couple times when they've been called by people, disgruntled residents or by neighbors, but for the most part, they talk to us and then they leave. We do our best as volunteers to get between the police and other groups that come out. Even the outreach groups that we know are here to help, just because those interactions can quickly get volatile if people aren't sure about other people's intentions.

I would say that one of the best interactions I've had with the cops is they did come through here once and talk to a few folks. And a sergeant from the police department said roughly that they couldn't make us leave because this was city land and they didn't have anywhere else to send us. So I'll take it. I've got the audio, so I'll take it. Elizabeth does hope that one day the relations between the church that First Collective was previously operating out of could be mended and once again work to utilize the space to

serve the wider community. She also discussed the possibility of moving into vacant buildings and helping to restore them while also having a place to provide more stable housing. So where the church is concerned, I haven't given up hope. We aren't in the building now, I don't have a key, but I got a church every Sunday. I'm not a Christian, I don't believe in God, but I do like the messages that I get there. And I want to continue to use this really wonderful building as a part of the community. There are a lot of goals that we as a camp have and some of them include the church.

I'd love to get back into that space and fix the two bathrooms in the basement that are just sitting there, build some showers, laundry facilities, a free store, kitchen. There's so much that we could do if we could utilize that building in addition to the infrastructure that we have here. But when it comes to building something more, we're currently working on a proposal for the city for some of the relief funds that have been received but not dispersed with the goals of ideally building little cabins on platforms on the lot that we're on now. Just to start to get people out of tents, to start meeting some of the code requirements

to improve the sanitary and living conditions, and then from there we'll ask them to give us a building to restore. There's a lot of really skilled people out here and they want to work and they want to work on all of these old buildings that have been allowed to fall apart all over the city. There are so many rooms available. There's so many units that they could work on that they could live in and that's what they want to do. So that's what we're going to try and help them do.

The camp functions under a sort of direct democracy with residents and first collective volunteers, some of whom are also residents, hold regular community meetings where camp occupants vote to make decisions about camp guidelines. There's been a couple instances of violence, a couple particularly scary moments that we had to try and deescalate and there's some times that we didn't handle things as best we could, but we try and we try to talk through the way that it goes down with the residents among the volunteers, we try to be transparent about why we make some of the decisions that we do and for the most part we leave it to the community.

There have been some really great community meetings that go so long, but they talk about everything. They talk about shared concerns, about safety concerns, about how they want to live together and what would make them feel safer and establish guidelines and occasionally vote to remove people though we've managed to resolve some of those conflicts before they went that far. I initially talked with Elizabeth in May 2022, but I was able to catch up with her a few weeks ago to hear about what's been going on the past month. I just wanted to fill you in on what we've been up to over the past month or so.

It's been busy. We've been to a lot of area commission meetings for the different areas of the city to try and make some allies and talk to people about what we think is a solution to a problem they don't know how to solve. I did get some unwanted attention. A local station, 10TV, came through with a bit of an agenda. Right now the city of Columbus has a problem and it has to do with homelessness. A camp set up on city property along East Mountain Street in the middle of the neary

side neighborhood is raising questions tonight about whether the 20 people who live there should be allowed to stay or forced to go. 10TV's Kevin Landers has been working the story all day. Today he went to the camp and spoke to those who live there and got answers from city leaders about addressing concerns from neighbors who say that camp has got to go. This unhousing community is located on East Mountain Street. The people who live here, the city says, are technically trespassing. The city says they're going to let them stay here until they can find housing, but not

everybody wants them here. They wanted to talk specifically about our sanitation situation and nothing else. We told them we've been waiting on the city since April 15th for the dumpster, the Port of Johns that they'd offered, but they were still looking into it, so we took it into our own hands. With all that attention, we needed to do something. We contacted a Port of Johns company who is currently donating to Port of Johns and servicing it once a week, which is great.

We had a compost toilet before, and this is just so much better. We went out of pocket to pay for trash service, so we're getting our own trash service now once a week. It's not quite enough, but it certainly helps. We see code enforcement go by all the time. They've been driving by, I've seen them at least five or six times today. People are waiting for something that they can latch on to, but so far so good. With Columbus facing 100 degree heat waves, what started as a warming station in winter

now serves as a cooling station this summer for its few dozen residents. As gears shift and new seasonal materials are required, the camp has been exploring alternative methods of funding to sustain the level of resources and services they've been able to provide the past few months. We did launch a GoFundMe, and we've had pretty good luck so far, we've raised $7,500. This is just for operating funds. There's a lot that we would like to do here, there's a lot we'd like to do with the land, but for now we just need, we're just fundraising to keep going.

The camp still serves around 25 people, so resources end up getting distributed across a large collection of individuals. All the donations received have been used to provide necessities to survive, including but not limited to shelters like tents, food, water, medical supplies, bedding, clothes, bus passes, medical services and prescriptions, hard production supplies, funds for individuals' immediate needs, and assistance to pay with residents' phone bills. Sometimes funds are also used to compensate residents for extra labor put towards maintaining the camp, like cleaning up the campsite, cutting up firewood, and providing extra services

like haircuts. The response has been really good. I think people understand what we're trying to do and are being really receptive to it. I can't say the same about the city, though. We met with Councilwoman Shaila Faver from the city on Monday and presented a proposal. We asked for $181,500 over the next six months to continue operation, to pay a small salary to the three volunteers that are here all the time for healthcare, for a small stipend to give to each resident of the camp every week.

Small operating funds, just, we came to them with this ask and they didn't really seem to get it, so we're going to keep trying. They felt like they can't really support a tent city in their minds, like they couldn't give money to support people who were residing in tents because tents are inadequate shelter, so I can test that not having a tent is also an adequate shelter. The City of Columbus relies almost completely on the community shelter board to manage its problem with homelessness. Community shelter board has a revenue of around $44 million a year.

They pay their director half a million dollars just under, and a few other executives receive ample compensation, but their success rate for the entire county is labeled at 15%. You go through their data, they have managed to get 15% of the people who come through their shelter into some sort of housing. For the zip code that we're serving, it's 7%, which equates to eight people over the past year. So what they're doing is not working at all, and they know it, but they don't know what else to do.

Whenever we talk to the City, someone tells us to talk to this one particular person. Her name is Emerald Hernandez-Para. She is the Assistant Director of Special Projects for the Department of Development. If you have a problem with a homeless camp in the City, she is the person that the City wants you to talk to. No matter what, if you're homeless, that's who they want you to talk to. She's under the Department of Development. Her main focus is economic development.

She's just special projects, which means she helps clear the way by getting camps out of the way for development projects. That's her role, and she is the City's liaison. No matter who we talk to, she's the one that we keep coming back to. I think it's pretty cynical and upsetting that this isn't under the purview of the Department of Health. Any other department would be a little bit better than the Department of Development, which shows how much we care.

We're planning to go back to the City, regardless of what they say about this initial proposal, because there's a lot that we'd like to build here, and we think they'd be amenable if they understood. We're drafting a second round proposal, taking inspiration from Dignity Village in Portland. It's an autonomous village of unhoused people that's existed since 2000, and I think there's a lot of good that we can learn from them for modeling this in a way that the City might better understand. We believe that what we're doing here is transitional housing, and the people who are here want

to be involved in building that transitional housing for themselves, and then for the people that come after. That's what we're hoping to get the City to sign off on. When we met with the Councilwoman, one of the things that she said was, at the City, they don't have a model for serving the population that we're serving. They don't know how to handle people who don't want to move inside, who don't want to move into the shelter system for whatever reason. All they can really do is move them around.

We're trying to tell them that we do have a model, and we think that we can help the City as long as they stay pretty hands off and give us money for it, so fingers crossed. I'm not going to hold my breath, but fingers crossed. The City of Columbus has been much more openly hostile to some other encampments providing cooling and shelter in parts of the City. We're not the only unhoused encampment in Columbus. There are a lot more, and there's one that is at a place called Heer Park on the South Side.

We have a lot of friends there, our organization works with their organization. They were served a 14-day eviction notice on the 1st, and they haven't till June 14th to move out, so we're doing whatever we can to support them. Very much feels like we're being treated like the good camp, and they're the bad camp right now, so we're trying our best to make sure that the City knows that we're with them. Whatever they think about us, we support those people no matter what, and we'll do whatever we can to help. We're trying to give them advice about the things that have worked for us to keep the

City away, and hopefully if they do have to move on the 14th, they'll be able to set up somewhere where the City will give them a break. Here is some audio of a press conference given at the Heer Park camp just last week. The City is not out here giving out water. The City is not out here making sure that people don't get heat exhaustion or heat stroke, right? They're nowhere to be found. So we are here to remind them they have $135 million in American Rescue Plan funds.

Where is this money going? Why do we not have housing? This weather is just a little taste for many of us of the conditions that our unhoused neighbors out here can look forward to enduring for the entire summer. The City of Columbus was planning on evicting our people today, June 14th. They delayed that eviction. It is a human right. So we are here to assert our human rights to housing.

They're hoping that we're going to get hot and tired and wear out. Are we going to let up? The Heer Park camp eviction was pushed back to June 21st due to a massive heat wave. And by June 21st, the temperature was still in the upper 90s, but the City followed through on their threat and swept the camp. At least 20 Columbus police cruisers, city attorneys, people from the Department of Development, and other city employees were on site for the eviction. Bulldozers and massive machinery crushed people's tents and personal belongings.

Some folks forcibly displaced have lived in the Heer Park for nearly a decade. For wrapping up this episode, I had just one more question for Elizabeth. For people who would be interested in trying to create similar projects or help with similar projects in their area, will it be some advice you give to people who want to try something similar? What's the kind of stuff that you've learned the past few months that you were kind of surprised by? And if you could do anything different, what's the kind of stuff that you would approach

to make the process smoother or slightly more improved? Well, I would have looked for more funders first. One of the most painful parts for me has just personally has been holding the purse, being the person that everyone knows to ask for cash if they need it for something. It is a real strain on compassion sometimes, you know, on compassion fatigue is real, and it can be really hard day in, day out, having to field requests from people who you know need these resources, but you can't always give everything. It's hard to say no.

Learning to say no has helped, but diversifying our funding sources is also helping a lot. I've learned that I can't do it all, and that I need to take breaks. And that being here 24-7 is what I want to do, but it doesn't mean I need to always, always do it. Sometimes you've got to step away. I wish that I had spent a little more time with my family rather than, you know, throwing myself completely into this, but two months ago my ex-fiance asked me to leave, so I've been living at the camp too.

So it's been a pretty stark jump to go from having a big house and some retirement funds to living in a tent and having none, but I mean, I wouldn't change it, and I'm going to keep doing it. It's because I can, because I could, and that's really what I want people to see is that if they can do something, they should. It's the best job I've ever had, but nothing is more rewarding than going to work and hanging out with your friends all day, like helping them get jobs and find apartments and meet friends.

Like, there's so many wonderful people here, and like me and the other volunteers, we love all of them, and we want nothing more than to see them succeed. So yeah, I just advise people to do what they can to ask people what they need and try and provide it. Anyone who wants to know more about the First Collective and what they're doing, you can go to first-collective.org. You can find links on Elizabeth's Twitter account at innateoptimist, and even if you disagree with some of the organizational or structural choices, I hope you at least learned

something or got something productive out of this example of people putting in effort to fill in the gaps in their local community. That does it for us today, see you on the other side.