“Economic policies have profound effects on the tensions within and between countries — tensions that can lead to war,” renowned progressive economist James K. Boyce remarked to me recently, adding that economics is in part “about plunder … and plunder sometimes morphs into war.” Given that economic triggers clearly contribute to conflicts, why is war a topic largely neglected by the…
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Donald Trump will once again be inaugurated as president in just a week’s time, and the lessons of workers’ victories from his past administration provides an important roadmap to the fight ahead. In 2019, flight attendants organized to end a government shutdown that threw airports around the country into chaos. Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO, joins The Real News for a look back at the 2019 shutdown fight and how unions can give workers the tools they need to fight back over the next four years.
Studio Production: David Hebden
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
On January 20th, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the 47th President of the United States of America. As I sit with you here now, I can feel the pull of what’s coming. It’s like we’re fast approaching a waterfall. We really don’t know what’s on the other side, but big changes are coming one way or another. We don’t know how the next four or eight or even 50 years will play out because that story has yet to be written. What happens next depends on what we all do now.
But if we want to be the authors and protagonists of that story, not just names and stories written by some sociopathic, billionaire oligarchs or religious fanatics, not just numbers on a corporate spreadsheet or in a passing news report, then we got to be very clear about what we’re fighting for, what side we’re fighting on, and we got to learn from the past about how to fight effectively and win.
And today on The Real News, we are talking with someone who knows a little something about fighting and winning. Sarah Nelson is one of the most prominent and widely known labor leaders in the United States and around the world, a United Airlines flight attendant since 1996. Sarah has served as the International President of the Association of Flight Attendants CWA AFL-CIO, a union representing over 50,000 flight attendants at 20 airlines since 2014.
But it was exactly six years ago that Sarah Nelson became a household name. If you all recall, six years ago in January of 2019, the US was in the midst of the longest government shutdown in our history, a shutdown that lasted 35 days. It was the second government shutdown that took place during Donald Trump’s first term, and the shutdown centered on Trump’s demand that Congress approve $5.7 billion in federal funds to build a wall on the US-Mexico border.
The shutdown resulted in around 380,000 federal workers being furloughed with an additional 420,000 federal employees forced to work without pay until the end of the shutdown. While working people suffered and Democrats and Republicans in DC played their game of high stakes political brinkmanship, Sarah Nelson stepped into the national spotlight and called on the labor movement to intervene.
Sara Nelson:
We are here today because we are concerned about our safety, our security, and our economic stability, our jobs. For years, the right has vilified federal workers as nameless, faceless bureaucrats. But the truth is they’re air traffic controllers, they’re food inspectors, they’re transportation security officers and law enforcement. They’re the people who live and work in our communities and they are being hurt.
This is about our safety and security and our jobs and our entire country’s economic stability. No one will get out of this unscathed if we do not stop this shutdown. Leader McConnell, you can fix this today. If you don’t show the leadership to bring your caucus to a vote to open the government today, then we are calling on the conscientious members of your caucus to do it for you.
There is no excuse to continue this. This is not a political game. Open the government today. We are calling on the public on February 16th if we are in a day 36 of this shutdown for everyone to come to the airports, everyone come to the airports and demand that this Congress work for us and get politics out of our safety and security.
Maximillian Alvarez:
In a speech she delivered while receiving the MLK Drum Major for Justice Lifetime Achievement Award from the AFL-CIO on January 20th of 2019, Nelson went even further and called for a general strike to end the shutdown and to support the 800,000 federal employees who were locked out or forced to work without pay.
She said, “Almost a million workers are locked out or being forced to work without pay. Others are going to work when our workspace is increasingly unsafe. What is the labor movement waiting for? Go back with the fierce urgency of now to talk with your locals and international unions about all workers joining together to end this shutdown with a general strike.”
Nelson’s fiery calls to action hit the political world like a lightning bolt. And after a month of political gridlock with the threat of a general strike now on the table, Trump and the GOP caved and ended the shutdown on January 25th.
What can we learn from this pivotal and historic struggle from Trump’s first term in office? What can it teach us about the struggles that we will face with a second Trump term and a fully megafied Republican Party effectively controlling all branches of government and what lies in store for workers in the labor movement itself as we careen into our uncertain future?
To talk about all of this, I’m honored to be joined today by the one and only Sara Nelson herself. Sara, thank you so much for joining us today on The Real News, I really appreciate it.
Sara Nelson:
Happy to be with you every time, Max.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Right back at you, sis. And we need your voice now more than ever, and I really appreciate you making time for this with everything you’ve got going on, which we’re going to talk about at the end of this interview.
But right now, as those clips that we played in the introduction show, yours was a powerful and essential voice rising from the labor movement at a critical moment during the Trump and GOP-led government shutdown back in 2019. It was, as I said, the longest government shutdown in US history, and this struggle really showed why we need labor movement militancy, and it showed what workers can do to flex our power to change the partisan and political terrain.
So I wanted to ask if you could take us back to that moment during the 2019 shutdown. Let’s remind our viewers and listeners what was actually happening, what was at stake and what was going on in your world, in your heart as all of this was unfolding and why you stood up the way that you did.
Sara Nelson:
Well, Max, every government shutdown is a threat to flight attendants and anyone in the aviation industry, we’re very, very aware of that because you have people like transportation security officers and air traffic controllers coming to work without a paycheck, which is incredibly stressful.
The first thing you learn in safety is remove all distractions. What could be more distracting than not getting a paycheck for going to work? And so as we saw this coming on, we started to define the problem right away. And what we saw in 2018, because this started just before Christmas in 2018, and you would think that people would have a little bit of empathy, but what Donald Trump had done is that, oh, they’re not missing a paycheck yet. This is no big deal. They’re going to get paid and back pay.
And so there was already a division. What we had to do was define the problem, and I want to be really clear about this. This is a really important thing. Define the problem. Set your demands, back up your demands with what you’re willing to do to get them and add urgency. And so the very first thing that we did was we worked very, very closely with the other aviation unions and even the rest of the industry.
Very early in January, I happened to be at an aviation conference with everyone in the room and from manufacturers to airlines, to suppliers to general aviation. I mean, people were worried about this who were flying private jets, right? And aviation unions, we got together and defined all of the issues about why this was a problem to have this shutdown.
There were not safety specter inspectors in place. There were not safety inspectors to sign off on new aircraft for delivery. There was not safety inspectors in place to sign off on pilot licenses where they’re getting their renewed certifications so they could go back on the job.
The issues and the ramifications around this are endless. The other thing that happens is all the work on any modernizing or fixing problems, that all gets put to the side. So as the government shutdown goes on, the safety net stretches to the point where there are holes, and that became more and more dangerous as that shutdown went on.
So we defined that problem. On January 10th, we actually published a letter that had never been published before by the entire industry. Everyone had signed this. These are people who usually fight with each other every single day on Capitol Hill and in the workplace, but we were united around that and nobody remembers that part of the story, but we put that out there. We started having press conferences.
AFGE, they were telling the stories of the workers. These were not just nameless, faceless bureaucrats, like I said in that speech, these were real people that people could see were sleeping in their cars at the airport, not because they didn’t have a home to go home to, but they didn’t even have money to put gas in their car.
And so they were so dedicated to their jobs and the fact that they were forced to come to work because as we knew from Patco, they’d just be fired or possibly sent to jail if they didn’t. And so they were sleeping in their cars because they didn’t have any more gas in their cars to go home and come back and still going back to work in the morning. These are the kind of stories we were able to tell.
And AFGE actually got a hold of a memo that went down through some of the agencies from the administration saying, you are not to say that you were struggling during this shutdown, you are not to share your stories. You’re supposed to tell everyone. You’re just fine. And it’s only because the union was in the workplace that we were able to give workers cover and say, that is baloney. We’re telling the truth. We’re telling the American public what this means to them.
And that is a really important part of this story because that needs to happen in every contract fight that needs to happen in every legislative battle, whether it’s local or federal. We need to be ready to define the issues. And we can do that because nobody knows this work and what it means to our communities and to everyone around us better than working people do. So we got to take that in.
But I kept saying to people, what can we do? What is going to get their attention? And you talked about it. He wanted the money for the southern border wall, and that was what was holding up the package deal. Well, I got to tell you, that was bullshit. Okay? That was racist fear-mongering to try to divide the country further, have people focused on this issue over here when what was really happening was this was Trump trying to get what the GOP had been trying to get for 50 years.
And that is privatize every function of government because if there had been an aircraft accident, if there had been a terrorist attack, there would’ve been incredible weight that had been added to the administrative office of the president and the executive office, and the president would’ve been able to say, I’ll fix it and privatize everything. It’s not working. So we’ll do that. And if nothing happened, of course, it would give more to the narrative of, oh, this is just a bureaucratic mess in government, so we don’t need it so we can shut it down.
So let’s be very clear, Project 2025 was at the heart of that government shutdown. That was already the plan that they were trying to put in place. We see it in black and white now that they’re trying to dismantle these functions of government because what does that do? That makes the most vulnerable, even more vulnerable, which makes people desperate, which makes people agree to things they would never agree to otherwise, just to get fresh air, just to be able to try to feed their families.
And so we cannot have a labor movement that is in a desperate place. We have to be defining the problem and setting our demands. That’s what we did there. And I’ll tell you what, on January 24th, the Senate and the House took a vote that did not pass. The same thing that passed the very next day. And it wasn’t until we had said, we’re ready to strike. We’re calling on everyone else to strike.
And a few flights started to cancel LaGuardia because 10 air traffic controllers signed in for their job and said, “I physically can’t go on. I cannot do my job.” People talk about it calling in sick. No, these are people who have such a stressful job that when they come to work, they leave their phones outside, they go into dark rooms, they have to retire at age 56, and they have to sign a note every single day that says I’m fit for duty.
And they couldn’t continue to sign that they were driving Ubers at night to try to take care of their families. They missed another paycheck just the day before. And so when these flights started to cancel, we said, “Leader McConnell, can you hear us now?” And all of a sudden when there was no political solution about a southern border wall, supposedly there was a solution within a couple of hours because the GOP recognized that workers were going to get a taste of our power, and that was the thing they were more scared of than anything.
So they ended that government shutdown before people could truly take in that when we take action together, we take control of the agenda and we can set forward the policies that matter for working people.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, yeah. I really want to underline in red pen again in case anyone is forgetting what happened. It was union workers who ended that shutdown. It was workers who applied the pressure that got the people in DC to actually do what they were supposed to do.
And I want to hover on that for a quick second, Sara, because I think, like you said, every government shutdown is a threat to our safety. People don’t think about all the ramifications, but during a 35-day shutdown, you start to see what the effects are. But in every-
Sara Nelson:
Yeah, seniors are going to get kicked out of their housing because that program was down. HUD was down. But workers everywhere were talking about this. And what I also saw there was I was talking about this in interviews as I was going from one part of DC back to our office and the cab driver, when I handed him money, I’ll never forget this.
I handed him the money and he grabbed my hand through the little window of the cab and he had a tear rolling down his cheek and he said, “Thank you. You’re fighting for me too.” Because no one was coming to work. There were no cab fares to be had. This is all related. We’re all in this together.
And what I noted in that moment, especially as this all started, was that we had been suffering for 40 years of an attack on the strike and attack on unions, an attack on working people while the rich got richer, our wages stayed flat, productivity went through the roof.
And that was because Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers in 1981, sent many of them to jail and told the rest of the country, all of corporate America, that it was open season on unions. And the labor movement did not respond the way that we should have been. We should have understood that even though Patco endorsed President Reagan and people were pissed about it, even though they had demands that were demands that were better than the rest of ours, they were fighting for a 32-hour work week.
And people were like, “Oh, they’re greedy.” And all this stuff. There was all this messaging. The fact that we let that happen, the rest of us have been suffering ever since because of the attack on that strike, because the attack on working people. And so this moment in the government shutdown was also about righting that wrong and resetting the course for working people to understand that an injury to one is an injury to all, and it is a ripple effect.
And if you don’t get out there and stand up with the most vulnerable people, they’re coming for you next. And that’s what we saw. We’ve seen it. We need to know that we learned that, and hopefully we’re not going to ever allow that to happen again.
Maximillian Alvarez:
On that note, that’s also what makes 2019 such a pivotal moment, both in terms of the Democrat, republican, bipartisan political side of things, and as you mentioned, the labor movement politics within unions 40 years after Patco, right? Or nearly 40 years after the Patco strike. You were really kind of stepping into a moment where these two things were converging.
And I just wanted to ask a little more about that. Because in every government shutdown, it’s basically a waiting game opinion to see which party gets blamed for the shutdown and caves to the public pressure and gives into the demands of the other side. And that’s kind of what we were watching unfold six years ago.
But then people’s imaginations changed because a new player entered the chat. You and the movement and workers and unions showed that it’s not just Democrats and Republicans who have a say in what happens here. And so I wanted to ask what that moment meant for the breaking of people’s political imagination and why that’s such an important lesson for us to take to heart now.
But also if you could speak a little more on what state the labor movement was in at that point and what willingness the organized labor movement writ large was willing to play and why this was such a step forward calling for a general strike, like urging more militancy like you did six years ago.
Sara Nelson:
Well, I want to be really clear that that was on the backs of the Chicago teachers in 2012 being willing to say under Karen Lewis’s leadership, the word strike again, being willing to organize in a way that brings the entire community to the fight and helps the community understand what that fight was about. And that strike inspired then West Virginia teachers to go out on an illegal strike.
They didn’t even have collective bargaining rights, but they defined the problem so well that not a single county executive was willing to go to court to sue them over illegally going on strike. And they brought everyone to the fight by defining that problem and having everyone understand it was everyone’s problem. And they went out and they built so much power that they not only got a contract for themselves with those races, they got raises for all the other public employees in West Virginia.
And that set up a spark that lit all over the country with the red for ed strikes. And I think it’s really important actually to recognize that because working people are not red or blue working. People live everywhere. And if we confine ourselves to, oh, we can only force the people that we think might have a conscience, and the people who have traditionally said they’re with working people with the applause lines like, “Labor gave us the weekend, labor gave us the eight-hour day.”
Hello? Look the fuck around. Nobody has a weekend anymore. Nobody has an eight-hour day. Stop it. What we need to be talking about is collective bargaining. We need to be talking about worker power. We need to be talking about taking care of people. And so going into that shutdown, we already had grocery who had taken on a huge strike. Teachers all over the country, there had already started to be an awakening in the labor movement to labor power.
So we took that moment and ran with it. This wasn’t like a game. I lost my friends on 9/11 and I was in our office one day during this fight, and it’s all we were doing. We were updating dating our leaders every sing day, I was talking to the other labor union leaders every single day, talking to the president of the Air Traffic single day.
And we kept people informed, we did town halls for our members, but some people have to let off a little steam and have a little fun. And my communications team, I heard them laughing down the hall. And I got to tell you, I’m almost embarrassed to tell this story, but I went shooting down the hall and I said, “What’s so funny? There’s nothing that’s funny. Somebody’s going to die and it’s going to be on our watch, and I’m not going to stand for it. We can’t stand for it.”
And so we knew that this was as mu on us as it was on those federal workers, and we had to take Stan going into this moment with Trump. There was already this labor militancy was moving and people were about labor’s power that was starting to take effect. But we also had to recognize that it’s not the politics. We have this big argument in how much do labor unions spend on politics every year and how much do they spend on organizing?
Where would we be better served? Democracy doesn’t just sort of exist in this great land of like, oh, if everybody shows up and votes, it’s all going to be okay. They are controlling our politics with their money. Every single corporate entity has lobbyists on the hill talking to these people every single day. And I’ll tell you what, Democrats and Republicans are subject to pressure from their constituents if their constituents understand what the fuck they’re doing.
So we have to not think about this as red and blue or purple whatever it is. We have to think about it from the point of worker power, defining that problem, setting our demands and making sure that we’re holding every single representative accountable. They answer to us. We don’t wait to hear from them what the plan is, they answer to us.
And so that is a really important point going into this administration. We cannot assume that Trump and his band of fascists have all the power here. We have power and they have claimed that they’re for working people. We’re going to use that to our advantage. You see Bernie Sanders saying Trump said one of the campaign promises was to cap credit card interest rates at 10%. Let’s do it, man.
Let’s go hold these people accountable. Don’t just sit around and wait for the bad shit to happen. Let’s go on offense here. And we have a real opportunity to do that with labor and awakened labor, a burgeoning labor movement. Starbucks workers and Amazon workers who were on strike over the holidays showing the power of labor, not looking at this from a lot of people saying, “Oh my God, going into their bunkers next four years, terrified, worried about all these things.”
No, we’re going to keep taking action. We’re going to keep doing what we need to do and we’re going to keep tackling capital. Because the problem here is that capitalism is in control and capitalism has gone to a place where there is no check on it without labor. And capitalism doesn’t give a shit about any human being. It’s only about extracting as much profits as possible.
And we see that very clearly. The other thing that’s been really defined since that first Trump presidency is just how bad the inequality is and just how gross it is that there is someone like Elon Musk who could practically double his wealth in the time from the election until now. That is insane. And we can’t just let that go on. We got to attack that right where it exists.
We got to organize at Tesla, we got to organize at Amazon. Workers have to rise up. That’s what we’re going to have to do. And frankly, I actually think we can make some great gains if we really get on this and understand this. And we also have to understand that when they come for our sisters and brothers and union and siblings who they don’t want to have here because of the color of their skin, that is a fundamental, one of the four Ds from the Union Busters, divide, delay, distract and demoralize.
And they’re going to do that to try to continue to distract us, to make us believe that we’re at odds with people that don’t look like us or we don’t have the same experiences. And we have to understand that taking on those fights too is tackling those union buster tactics that are going to weaken labor. We cannot stick our head in the sand and think that’s not our fight.
And so anyway, as we take on all of this, and we really understand that when we follow that formula of defining the problem, setting the demands, backing it up with what you’re willing to do and understanding the urgency of the moment to get everyone’s attention, we can actually win.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I want to pick up on that point about how the attempts to divide us are going to be central to everything moving forward. As you said, going after immigrants, going after trans people, these are the proverbial low hanging fruit, but these are also human beings that our fellow workers are being convinced are their enemies, while our actual enemies are destroying our planet and enriching themselves in corrupting our democracy, yada, yada, yada.
But another category of worker that is going to be ostracized and in fact already is, our government employees. And you were really making that point years ago that these were not nameless, faceless, useless bureaucrats. These were human beings providing essential labor. And this is what we can expect in the coming months pretty immediately. Because you mentioned holding Trump to his campaign promises.
It was so apparent to me, and I think everyone with two brain cells that Trump was trying to distance himself from Project 2025 on the campaign trail, acting like he had no idea what it is. Then he gets elected, turns right around and reappoints the primary author of it to lead his staff while also appointing a bunch of Project 2025 authors all throughout his cabinet.
So first off, he was telling you, the voter, fuck you, I got what I wanted and now I’m going to do what I said I wasn’t going to do. But I think it is telling, you mentioned the union buster tactics, and this is a type of governance that we can actually learn from how bosses and CEOs operate to understand how these people think about government and think about us.
And one of the linchpins of Project 2025 is a union buster tactic is to take tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of federal employees, reclassify them, make them easier to fire, make it harder for them to object to directives that are coming from the Trump administration, yada, yada, yada.
I wanted to ask as one of our first salvos in this fight where the Trump and the GOP, Fox News, all the arrayed forces in the MAGA movement are going to try to do what Scott Walker did in Wisconsin 10 years ago and pit the public against public sector workers.
So what can we learn from the fight in 2019 that can help people not fall into that trap of saying, yeah, fuck those guys. This is all government waste and I don’t need to care about these people?
Sara Nelson:
Well, for example, if you actually believe that you’ve earned your social security benefits and it should be there for you, and it shouldn’t be cut, it shouldn’t be undermined, then you have to defend the federal workers. A lot of people are talking about the fact the federal workers are going to be at the tip of the sphere of the labor movement. They’re going to face the first onslaught of attacks.
But we can’t just keep it defined that way. That’s sort of like saying, we’re going to tweet hashtag Pro act every day and hope that it passes. And so I think that what we have to do is we have to talk about the work that they’re doing and what that means in people’s everyday lives. And that is going to bring the, that’s going to build power that’s going to bring the community to these fights because it’s not just about the attack on workers’ rights.
That’s really about just trying to make it easier to dismantle all of these social programs that keep that basic safety net and needs to be strengthened. Let’s face it, it’s one of the worst in the entire developed world, but if we care about these programs, we got to talk about that’s what they’re trying to do. Because if they move the social security offices, this is another tactic for them and say, oh, it’s too expensive to have that in DC. We’re going to move it actually to another state.
Those workers have to decide, am I going to uproot my family and go to that other state? This is another way that they’re going to try to very quickly get rid of people, and we have to understand the programs that they’re trying to dismantle too. The VA, our veterans need a hell of a lot more care for what they have been put through on the front lines of battle, and they want to dismantle the VA which has a higher rating than any other hospital or healthcare program in the country.
And so we really have to be very clear about what these attacks mean and not just be lulled into a place that’s saying, this is just about worker rights that is popular. Everyone wants to be in unions, but people don’t really understand that. They can’t really identify with that. We have to make this real to people and what it’s going to mean in their lives about why these attacks on federal workers is going to affect them and their families and hurt them and understand that this is all of our fights.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I have so many more questions and I could talk to you for hours, but I know you’re a busy woman. I got to let you go in a few minutes. So I wanted to just, by way of wrapping up, kind of ask the big scary question here about what are working people and the labor movement actually facing with the second Trump term?
I think people are maybe naively saying they’re saying we got to organize, but in a naive sense, without considering all the ways that a anti-labor NLRB is going to make it a lot harder for people to organize unions on the shop floor kind of thing. So we got to be clear-eyed about what we’re actually facing.
And I wanted to ask from your vantage point, what are we actually facing as working people as a labor movement that has already suffered four-plus decades of direct attack? But also, to ask if you could round us out on bringing us back down to the ground floor here and talk about the organizing efforts that you and your union and your members are involved in right now and why people should care about that and what they can do to get involved in that as a way to flex the power and to remind themselves that we are not powerless moving into these next four years.
Sara Nelson:
So first of all, I just want to note that we have laws in place. We have the NLRA, we have the Railroad Labor Act that we work under. We have the FLRA for federal employees, and the laws are slightly different in each of these areas, but those laws were all put in place because there was mass disruption that led to corporations wanting to have laws that would give them some order, would give them an ability to resolve disputes.
So the attacks to try to dismantle the NLRB, to try to dismantle the NLRA altogether is a little bit laughable because workers actually flex their power a hell of a lot more when there were no restrictions on the strike, when there was no restrictions on how they could actually fight the boss. And people are angry. People are together, and so they should be very, very careful about what they’re doing in order to dismantle these laws because they’re going to unhandcuff workers too.
But it is difficult. I’m not trying to be Pollyanna-ish about this. This is very difficult because when you are asking a worker to stand up in their workplace, there’s a lot of fear there. They got to take that paycheck. They have a family that’s counting on them or other people who are counting on them. Maybe it’s roommates because they can’t afford to live alone on the wages that they’re making. And so it can be very fearful.
But I think about the warrior met strike at the beginning of the last four years and what those miners went through in Alabama and how that unfair labor practice strike that they went out on, they got confirmation later after the strike had been broken by the company that they were right, that they were in the right, the law was on their side, but the state was not. The state governor used troopers with tax funds from the people who lived in that state to escort scabs from other states to go in and break that strike line.
There were injunctions that put the union at a place where they had to be, I think it was 900 feet from the entrance to any mine. Well, let me tell you, this is in the hollers of West Virginia that’s out in the trees somewhere. And so they did everything they could to try to take away workers’ power in that fight.
And I think that we have to recognize that we’re going to have to organize no matter what and help people understand the Mother Jones call to action that she gave us when she said, if you only understand that you hold the solution to the whole problem in the palm of your hand.
If for example, every worker were to simply hold up and stop working, the capitalists would yield to any and all demands because the world could simply not go on. The anarchists never wanted to sign a contract because they wanted to have the power to strike whenever they needed to. They’d get the provisions in place at the workplace, and the next time the company screwed up, they’d go out on strike again.
And so sometimes these contracts and these rules actually undermine worker power if we truly understand that in our hearts and our heads. And I’m not saying that that’s the model we should follow, but we have to recognize that there is real power in that when there’s a consciousness in the workers and that solidarity that runs through all of working people that can really hold these people to account.
And that’s what we can do. So we’re organizing at Delta, most of the airline industry organized with the pilots in the 1930s. The rest of the workers mostly organized in the 1940s. We’re 80% organized in our industry. Imagine what this country would look like if every industry had 80% of workers and unions. But we are organizing, there are over 28,000 flight attendants.
I just got word that Delta plans to hire more to try to dilute because they’re very worried that we’re going to get to a vote here. We have more momentum than we’ve ever had. We’re in a big push to try to file so that we can have jurisdiction under the current National Mediation Board. And it’s really tough because under the RLA, you have to sign physical cards and get a majority of those cards. And those cards are only good for a year.
And if you have churn like that, when Delta hires more, they have the new people who just came out of company training who have just been through the whole union busting integration with the company. And then the people who are more seasoned will take the leaves to be off, the unpaid leaves and be at home. And so there’s a lot of hurdles in place, but we’re making more inroads than ever at Delta.
And imagine finally taking on this company that has been able to make more money than any other airline off the backs of the workers because they have total control there and winning in Atlanta. And that winning turns into more winning. When workers saw all across this country, when workers saw baristas standing up at Starbucks, this sparked an entire movement because people are saying, oh yes.
Not only are these workers willing to do this but it seems like these are workers that wouldn’t have any power because these jobs are not really necessary. They’re all the ways that we have defined work to try to undermine the value of that work, that is the epitome of a Starbucks barista. And yet, these workers have shown their value by taking action, organizing together and calling an entire nation to be behind them in this organizing campaign. That’s where we need to be.
But I’ll tell you something else, the kind of organizing that we need to do is not going to be done just by the unions that exist today. If every single union did spend the amount of money that we’re spending on Delta organizing, it still wouldn’t be enough to meet the demand of people everywhere who want to join a union.
So the other thing that I’m working on is a project called Union Now that would essentially for those of you who are familiar with Super Charge E-walk, be a place where any worker can call up and get help to organize their workplace but also get help with with organizers, communications with attorneys, and have that backing through that first contract.
And this would not be an intention to build up a membership base. This would be an intention for Union Now to actually put itself out of business because you get everybody into their unions, you get their contracts in place, and we’ve got to have that kind of focus. We’re going to be doing massive fundraising around this to try to make this work and stand this program up.
It’s the kind of thing that we need right now to build worker power and have the kind of worker power that we need to put in check capitalism that has run amuck and has us in a place where a guy who’s building a dick rocket to head off to Mars while he leaves the rest of us on a burning earth is held to account because the working people in his workplaces hold up any more profits that he can possibly make.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
In his 2009 paper Worst-Case Scenarios, Harvard professor Cass Sunstein coined the term the “Goldstein Effect” to describe a government’s “ability to intensify public concern, by giving a definite face to the adversary, specifying a human source of the underlying threat.” His basic argument was that in the instance of the “War on Terror,” the US government had Osama Bin Laden and his steady stream video messages. Selling the Iraq War, the Bush administration, obviously, had Saddam Hussein. The term came from Emmanuel Goldstein, the mysterious Party villain and counter-revolutionary in Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. Bad Guys, in other words, need a human face for the public to care about a threat. And climate change, unlike the war on terror or other real wars, by its very nature, has no singular villain, nothing the public can put a literal face to. And this, Sunstein argued, is one of the primary barriers to get the public to truly care, on a visceral and real level, about pending climate chaos.
The headlines should, at least occasionally, read “Human-Caused Climate Change Fuels Another Disaster With LA Fires, not just a stream of “LA Fires Grip Nation.”
The reality, of course, is climate change does have villains, with an “s.” The line of demarcation isn’t neat and clean, but, broadly speaking, it’s fossil fuel executives, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and media propagandists, and the private equity and hedge funds that fund them. And there are faces of the victims as well: the climate refugees in the Global South who are already suffering mass displacement whose numbers are expected to reach as high as 1.2 billion by 2050, those subject to increasing flash floods, fires, hurricanes, and tsunamis. A demographic that––despite what Serious Centrist Pundits Insist––increasingly includes Americans.
That climate change directly causes more frequent and more severe wildfires is no longer in dispute. A 2022 United Nations report concluded that the risk of wildfires around the world will surge as climate change intensifies. “The heating of the planet is turning landscapes into tinderboxes, while more extreme weather means stronger, hotter, drier winds to fan the flames,” states the report, produced by 50 researchers from six continents.
Media coverage of these sensationalist events almost never connects the dots. A survey of Nightly News coverage from the first full day of the LA fires showed that, in 16 minutes of coverage ABC, NBC, and CBS nightly news broadcasts did not mention climate change once. In their Wednesday morning coverage of the LA fires, neither the New York Times Daily podcast nor the New York Times Morning Newsletter addressed climate change at all. The Daily had a single throwaway mention but didn’t actually talk about it, and the newsletter just ignored it. One can see dozens and dozens of examples of lurid coverage of the LA Wildfires—and other extreme weather events—in US media that doesn’t mention climate change at all or relegates it to a throwaway line.
Many of these outlets do sometimes have separate articles about the connection between climate change and extreme weather events. But they’re typically relegated to “science” stories isolated from the original, far more impactful reporting of the human tragedy unfolding before our eyes.
Climate change-fueled extreme weather disasters overseas are typically ignored or downplayed altogether. A survey of two weeks of coverage from April 15 to 29—when the 2022 heat wave in India and Pakistan was at its most acute and newsworthy,ultimately killing almost 100—showed that it was ignored entirely by CNN’s primetime news programs: The Lead with Jake Tapper, The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, and Anderson Cooper 360°. The heat wave was also entirely ignored by NBC News (Today, Nightly News with Lester Holt, and Meet the Press), CBS News (Evening News, Sunday Morning News, and CBS Mornings), and ABC News (Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and This Week With George Stephanopoulos). By way of comparison, a survey of the same news programs from the week of May 30 to June 6 showed almost 2.5 hours of coverage of Queen Elizabeth II’s Jubilee, a holiday in the United Kingdom celebrating the 70th anniversary of her coronation.
To be clear, many of these outlets do sometimes have separate articles about the connection between climate change and extreme weather events. But they’re typically relegated to “science” stories isolated from the original, far more impactful reporting of the human tragedy unfolding before our eyes. They read more like liberal box-checking than a fundamental feature of how these stories are covered. Severe weather events, when they’re reported on at all (typically because they’re within the US) are indexed in the “Oh, Dearism” genre of reporting, where politics and human decision making are stripped away entirely, and all one can do is look on helplessly and say “Oh, Dear.” There’s no villain, victims but no victimizer, no political actors or politics at all, and—above all—no explicit or implicit call to action. Just agency-free human suffering that may sorta kinda be linked to erratic weather patterns, with no sense there’s anything the viewer or reader can actually do about it. It’s just vaguely sad and everyone is expected to chip in a few dollars to GoFundMe, gawk at the suffering, and move on to the next extreme weather event right around the corner in a matter of weeks. Nothing is ever part of a pattern, a broader human-driven context. The headlines should, at least occasionally, read “Human-Caused Climate Change Fuels Another Disaster With LA Fires, not just a stream of “LA Fires Grip Nation.”
Newsrooms are still neatly delineating the human story and the “science” story, when these are one and the same.
If one accepts the basic tenets of the scientific consensus around climate change, that we more or less have a decade to radically alter course, then why wouldn’t our media outlets be more clear about the causes of the suffering, and what forces would have to be curtailed to practically do so? In March 2023 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released another damning report, authored by 93 experts, which found that the Earth’s average temperatures are likely on pace to rise by 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial levels by the first half of the 2030s. This shift would surpass a climate threshold, they argue, which will unleash unprecedented flooding, heat waves, megastorms, and famines that could very well threaten all of human civilization. The only chance we have to avoid this extremely plausible scenario is for rich nations to immediately slash their greenhouse emissions and do so right away.
Newsrooms are still neatly delineating the human story and the “science” story, when these are one and the same. Without centering the scientific explanation of the why—which is to say, the cause of the human suffering on display—journalism is just emotional pornography. We can’t cover school shootings without centering lawmakers who defend and take large sums of cash from gunmakers. We can’t cover mass death in Gaza without centering Israel and the White House’s central role in causing it. And we can’t cover extreme weather events without centering climate change, and the fossil execs and their media and political organs that fuel it. To do so is to take politics out of what is inherently political, to only show a small slice of a much larger and richer story. If US media won’t permit its viewers to put a face to the villain of extreme weather––and in the wake of media anger over Luigi Magione’s online popularity, this will almost certainly never happen––they can at least permit its viewers to put a face to its victims. On a negligent, massive scale, they are still failing to do so.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
This post was originally published on Al Jazeera – Breaking News, World News and Video from Al Jazeera.
This post was originally published on Al Jazeera – Breaking News, World News and Video from Al Jazeera.
James Carville is saying, nothing has changed between the time that he helped get Clinton elected and now. The American public has not made this vast change in the way they view the political world. He said, it comes down to this, the economy stupid. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software […]
The post James Carville Says He Knows Why Democrats Failed In 2024 appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.
This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire.
This post was originally published on Al Jazeera – Breaking News, World News and Video from Al Jazeera.
This post was originally published on Al Jazeera – Breaking News, World News and Video from Al Jazeera.
“I did not start out as a writer interested in organized labor,” Hamilton Nolan writes in The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor; “I started out as a writer interested in why America was so fucked up. Why did we have such gargantuan levels of inequality? Why were thousands of homeless people living in the streets of cities where billionaires frolicked in penthouses? Why was it that certain classes of people worked hard their entire lives and stayed poor, just as their parents had been, and just as their children seemed doomed to be? Even while labor unions had fallen almost completely out of the public mind, it turned out that they were central to all our most fundamental problems.” In this live episode of Working People, recorded at Red Emma’s cooperative bookstore, cafe, and community events space in Baltimore on Dec. 6, 2024, Max speaks with Nolan about his new book, what the ongoing war on workers’ rights and unions tells us about the “fucked up” society we’re living in, and what lessons labor can teach us now about how to fight and win, even in the darkest of times. Sara Nelson, International President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL–CIO, also makes a special guest appearance in the second half of the episode.
Additional links/info below…
Permanent links below…
Featured Music…
Studio Production: Max Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Analysis:
Mic check. Mic check. We’re going to go ahead and get started with tonight’s event. It is always, always, always good to see you at Red Emma’s bookstore Coffeehouse. There are many things you could be doing. The weather cleared up nicely, cold as hell, but it was a beautiful afternoon, so you might’ve been somewhere else. You chose to be here with us in community and in the struggle capitals, and that is never lost upon us. I’m the poet known as analysis. Welcome on behalf of the entire team Hamilton. Nolan is a longtime labor journalist who was written about labor, politics and class war for publications such as Gawker in these Times, the Guardian and More. Speaking of Gawker Media, he helped organize them in 2015. That became the first yes, yes, yes. First online media company to unionize. He’s based in Brooklyn, New York has a publication called How Things Work, and you can find that at his website, hamilton nolan.com, Hamilton nolan.com.
We are joined in conversation this evening by Red Emmas fan. Max Alvarez is the editor in chief of the Real News Network, the host of the podcast, working people, PhD in history and comparative literature from University of Michigan and does so much more, writes for so many things. Speaking of writing, we have one copy. How many copies did I say? One copy of Max’s book, the Work of Living. Where can people talk about their lives and dreams and the year That World ended This right over there. So you should get that along with tonight’s book. We are so glad to get into this labor history. It is very important. I need y’all to give up some real radical roof rays and red ass noise for in conversation with Max Alvarez and presenting the hammer power. I love this subtitle. Listen to this Power inequality and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor. Y’all make some noise for Hamilton Nolan.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright, thank you so much analysis. Thank you once again to the great Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore coffee house and gathering space. This is a really important space for our community, so just wanted as always to thank our hosts and encourage y’all to please support Red Emma’s because we need places like this to plan the next steps, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about in the second part of our conversation today. And I couldn’t be more grateful to be in conversation with my man, Hamilton Nolan about that because I often find myself looking to Hamilton for answers or guidance or even just a little dose of strength that I can kind of get to help me get out of bed and keep fighting. Hamilton is a role model for so many of us in the labor journalism and labor media world, and I’m so proud of him and everything that he’s done, especially this incredible new book that we’re here to talk about today, which as analysis said is called The Hammer Power Inequality and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor. Hamilton, thank you so much for joining me today and Baltimore brother and welcome.
Hamilton Nolan:
Thank you and thank you Red Emmas. This is my first time at Red Emmas and I love everything about this place already, so I’ll definitely be back and thank you all for coming and thank you Max, who by the way, if you all don’t know, is definitely one of the best labor journalists in the United States America, and we are lucky to have him here in Baltimore, so thank you for having me.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Thank you, brother. That means the world to me and who boy do we got a lot to talk about, right? I mean, I’m thinking we’re never going to be able to sum up the richness and depth and importance of this book in a 60 minute talk, right? That’s an unfair aim to have in any book talk. So I want to encourage everyone first and foremost to please buy and read this book. If you are finding yourself, like me feeling overwhelmed by anxiety, fear, anger, resentment, all these heavy feelings that you don’t know what to do with, but you are looking for something to do, you were looking for more that you can do to fight back and to keep us from falling further into the abyss. I would highly recommend that you start with this book and you’ll find a lot of hard truths and a lot of warm comfort in it through the stories of our fellow workers, past and present and through Hamilton’s fierce and righteous perspective.
And so Hamilton, I want to by way of introducing the book sort of jump into the moment that we’re in right now because everyone is sort of looking at the past eight to 10 years to try to understand what the hell happened in this country that not only led us to elect Donald Trump president the first time, but now a second time with a fully magnified GOP controlling effectively all branches of government. And there are a lot of different narratives about the last eight to 10 years that cherry pick stories about the working class and their politics, our politics and so on. I wanted to ask you, Hamilton Nolan, what does the last eight to 10 years in this country look like through the lens of labor and through the lives of the working people that you report on for a living?
Hamilton Nolan:
Yeah, thank you, man. It’s a great question and obviously one I’ve thought about a lot and you’ve thought about a lot, probably everybody in this room has thought about a lot. I think I’m going to cheat a little bit because I’m going to go back a little bit farther because I think you have to go back a little bit farther to really answer that question. And I will go back to the end of World War II 1950s in America. It’s going to be short though. I’m not going to talk that one, but the context being that after World War II in this country, one in three working people in America was a union member, and what did that produce that produced what is looked back on now as the golden age of America? Ironically, look back on by Republicans in particular, I was like, wow, that’s the time we need to get back to one in three working people in this country was a union member and America was prosperous, but that level of unionization in this country meant that the prosperity that America had was widely shared.
So we had the greatest shared prosperity for a good 20 to 30 year period. It was really a golden age in the history of America. All that prosperity was widely shared because working people in this country had the power to take their share of that wealth thanks to high levels of unionization. And over time the decline of unions in America in the mid 1950s about one in three workers was union member. Today it’s one in 10, and that’s been a slow downward decline for all those years, and particularly beginning in 1980 with the Reagan era. I was born in 1979. So this kind of the story of my lifetime is that we saw this inequality, crisis, economic inequality, crisis in particular start to rise up in America. And of course Reagan’s assault on unions and worker power was a big part of enabling that. And there’s a really famous chart that a lot of you probably seen, and one line is the decline of union density in America.
It goes down like that. And then the other line is the rise of the wealth held by the top 10% in America and it goes up like that and it’s perfect mirror images, perfect mirror images. So those two things are not coincidental. Those two things are one enabled the other. And so I think to bring it up to today, I think that it’s just the nature of societies that inequality can only rise for so long before stuff starts to break and stuff starts to break down, the social contract starts to break down, the political system starts to break down. People stop believing in the American dream because it becomes increasingly obvious that the American dream is kind of a sham. And I think that is the environment that fostered a guy like Trump who is not only a Republican, but also like a conman and just clearly a scam artist and all the sort of worst qualities come to the fore.
But I remember I covered Trump when he was running in 2016 and 2015, and one thing that always stuck with me from the 2016 election was that in West Virginia, which was one of the highest states in America for voting for Trump in the democratic primary, Bernie won every county in West Virginia. So what is that? That’s people being like, we need something different. We need the most different thing that we can find. And I think that is what’s led us to Trump the hollowness of what neoliberalism produced in this country, the failure of America to share his prosperity, crushing unions crushing working people’s ability to get their fair share of the wealth that this country produces, which is still, by the way, the most wealth any nation in the history of the world has ever produced we’re rich as hell. It’s just that all the money goes to the very top. All those things I think conspire to form atmosphere where a guy like Trump can rise up. And I guess the story of the last election is that in those eight years, the opposition did not rally itself to fix the underlying problems that contributed to Trump getting in the first place. So here we are.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and I want to tease that out just a bit more, right? Since it’s, again, this is in the air that we’re breathing right now, it’s everywhere, especially if anyone’s like, I understand why you would maybe not be following the news so closely these days because exhausting. So I do understand that, but it’s all that anyone’s talking about right now. So I do want to sort of ask you if you could also take this and respond to the discussions and debates that are being had right now from mainstream news all the way to independent channels like ours all across social media, Democrats abandoning the working class and reaping what they’ve sown, Republicans having this quote, great realignment and a lot of working people supporting Trump and maga. And you really, I think helped us understand some of the complex reasons that might happen. But I want to ask you if you have, what you feel is missing from those debates right now, especially in the wake of Trump’s electoral victory.
Hamilton Nolan:
I mean, I do think one thing that’s not getting really enunciated enough or made clear enough, especially in the discussion after the election of the sort of alleged working class shift to Republicans, and some of it was real. I mean, there has been a real certain amount of shift of lower income votes to Trump, but one thing that didn’t get brought up, and especially in the ways that the Democrats panic about that, and a democratic political consultant is probably the least equipped person in the world to solve that problem. They’re all millionaires who live in dc. But I mean, what I think didn’t get talked about enough specifically was that the union votes still went to Democrats by the same healthy margin that it had in the past. So actual union members did not shift to Trump, not that Harris was so great or anything, but the actual union vote stayed to the left.
And so I think that, and I’m a broken record maybe, but when we talk about, oh, the working class, how are we going to bring the working class back, raise union density, get more people into unions, and you get people into organizations that actually can do political education, people’s relationship with politics can’t just be seen ads on tv. I mean, that’s not politics. And politics is being in an organization that can help people fight for their own interests, whether it’s electorally, whether it’s in the workplace or anywhere else. Unions are the foundation of that in America. The labor movement is the foundation of that. Even though it’s gotten very weak, it’s still demonstrated even in the last election when working class people shifted to the right union members didn’t. So unions are an essential ingredient to American democracy. And when we talk about the declining in unions, it’s not just a story about economics. It’s not just people aren’t earning enough money anymore. It is a story of the loss of power, the loss of regular people’s ability to exercise power, political power in particular. And so I think that’s something that has not been discussed enough, at least in the mainstream news though I’m sure on real news. Yes.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh yeah, we got you baby. And I want to come back to the union question in a second, but I think you make a tremendously important point, right? Given the sort of post World War II context that you gave us in the beginning all the way up till now, and like you said, our lifetimes are effectively the arc of this decline. We are sort of like and bear the living imprints of Neoliberalism’s like rise and fall, and we bear in our family stories and experiences like the effects of a failed ideology, well failed for us. But for the past 40 years, that has been what working people across the board have experienced, and whether they are joining unions or trying to form unions in larger numbers than we’ve seen in a generation in recent years or going on strike, whether they’re burning down police precincts or voting for explicitly anti-establishment politicians like Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump, that being the linkage that there’s an anti-establishment rage harnessed in there, all of those things are sort of different and even interlocking responses to a crisis that’s been building for our entire lifetimes.
And I think that’s what drives me so nuts about the ways that the media talks about politics and then those of us who consume the media learn to think about politics and it limits the scope of how we can think. George Orwell wrote this a century ago, I’m not saying anything new here, but I think that’s such an important point because if you don’t have that deeper historical context, if you don’t understand that what people are responding to every two to four years, they’re responding to a crisis that’s been building for 40 or 50. And so in fact, what’s more telling about our political situation, not just here in the US but around the world, is that we are in what many analysts are calling an anti incumbent period. Because again, what we just lived through the past three election cycles we haven’t seen in our lifetime where the incumbent party was voted out each time.
Hamilton Nolan:
I mean a two party system which we have, which unfortunately, and I think the older I get, the more I realize how bad a two party system is shitty system. But in a two party system, every election is a referendum on reality. And so if reality sucks, you get that pendulum nature that we see in America and that we’ve seen for much of the 20th century and into this century as well where the ping pong and back in America, we don’t have parties that have 40 year runs on top of the government. Why is that? Because all the dissatisfaction with the status quo is always going to be channeled to kicking out the party in power.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And again, traced along that timeline from when you were born to now, not only has union density just plummeted down to barely 10% in this country, but with that is all the neoliberal poison that has eroded the very foundations of our society, our democracy, everything, corporate consolidation, deregulation, privatization, globalization. These processes have been building up and accumulating. And it’s not that it’s anything new, it’s just that it’s taken this long for so many working people to feel it at this level, I think. And so that, sorry, did you have something to jump in on? No go. Because I think that leads us to where and why unions became such a central point for you, and in the same way that they become a central point for so many people in recent years looking for hope. Yeah. So talk about your path to understanding unions as an important institution. You didn’t start there. You didn’t set out to be a union guy
Hamilton Nolan:
And both of us, the fact that we sit here and talk about union so much is weird in media, in politics, unions are still considered this sort of niche story off to the side. And when I started and became a journalist, I didn’t start out to be a labor reporter. I was just like, I want to write about why is America fucked up? Why the rich get richer in the poor, get poorer? Why is there homeless people sleeping on the street and then there’s rich people in the penthouse, basic super basic stuff that all of us are like, why is that so broken? And over the years as I reported on all those things, I found myself repeatedly being drawn back to issues, to labor issues, to worker power, to the decline of worker power and the consequences of that and the ripple effects of that, and learned about the history of unions and the history of labor and the way that that had affected our economy, the way that that had affected our politics.
And over the years, just pursuing the threads of those really basic questions. Why is America broken in the ways that it’s broken today? I ended up becoming a full-time labor reporter because I found over and over again that labor issues were at the center of all those questions. The inequality crisis was directly spawned by the attack on labor power in this country. And the inequality crisis is the thing that was destabilizing our country in all the ways that manifest in a million different ways, including Donald Trump and a lot of other things. So I mean, I just sort of increasingly covered labor over the years because I was like, wow, this stuff is so important, so important, so important. And at the same time as I was looking around the media and being like, nobody’s really talking about this that much. I mean, people cover politics in really stupid ways, and there’s not that much attention on things that are actually more, in many cases, a union election is more consequential than a political election in the sense of the impact that it’s going to have not just on the lives of those workers, but the ripple effects going to have through the economy, the way it’s going to change the balance of power economically in a city, in an industry.
Those things have long-term ripple effects down through years and through generations, and they change families and they change people’s lives, and it’s a very, very undercover aspect of America in the media, in journalism. And so I think one of the reasons I kept on writing about labor over the years was just like nobody else was. Not nobody you were doing it, but relatively speaking, not that many people are writing about this stuff. That was actually really important, and that’s still true today, unfortunately.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Just a small aside, please, please support any and all labor journalists that you follow. Support Hamilton Substack. Please support the real news support freelance writers like Kim Kelly, support great labor writers. Publishing for places in these times, Jacobin all over the place, local papers, the people doing the beats in their local area, they’re the only person covering labor stories. Support it, please. Otherwise it goes away.
Hamilton Nolan:
Max, how did you get into labor?
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, I’ll sort of give a condensed version that hooks into the union question for the same reasons that you do. I feel a little weird when people ask my opinion about unions or I’ve become known as a union guy or someone who knows a lot about unions because I interview a shit ton of union workers and cover a lot of labor stories, but that is not where I started covering labor. I started the podcast that I’m still doing working people. Years ago when I was still a broke grad student, we were living in Ann Arbor, and I say a joke that I almost started the show as a ruse to get my dad to talk about losing our house and losing everything that I had grown up with, losing the American dream in his mind because for years it had just eaten our family away.
It had taken my father away from me, the lights rum, but no one was there. My parents’ marriage was on the rocks, and that was so stunning to all of us. I was working at warehouses as a temp worker 12 years ago when this was all happening. It was really bad. And we grew up deeply conservative Republicans pro capitalists. The crash was a huge ideological crash for us because we saw how much the system we believed in and that we believed we could work within to make a good life for ourselves was so nakedly rigged in favor of the very people who had caused millions of families like ours to lose everything. And it was our going government bailing them out, and it was our media saying, Hey, the economy’s great while I’m sitting there on a couch with my dad in the house we were going to lose in two years.
So I started doing labor journalism on my podcast because I did not want my father to go to his grave feeling like a failure. And I kept doing the podcast because I saw how much, and I knew how much pain you accrue as a human being in such an inhuman system that chews us up and spits us out until we have nothing left to give that gets us accustomed to being paid so little and treated so poorly and what that does to your heart and your psyche. I wanted people to have a space to talk about that and to tell the stories of labor through the human stories of regular people. And it was years in the making that I came to understand a, people don’t deserve this. Well, I mean, I knew that from the beginning, but there’s something they could do about it. And that’s how I came to understand, oh shit, they had unions. I am seeing people come to the same conclusion. I’m seeing how they’re improving their lives by struggling together to exercise that, right?
Hamilton Nolan:
It’s really like one of the best parts of being a labor journalist. The stuff that we do, and you would probably agree with this, I don’t want to speak for you, but it is just like when I was at Gawker during the recession out of 2008, 2009, I did this series of unemployment stories. So I just had people who had become unemployed right in and tell their story. We published this every week for 40 weeks, 40 week long series, hundreds and hundreds of people telling their own stories. I got more thank you notes from people about that than probably anything I’ve ever written. And I didn’t write any of it. It was all their stories. And just giving people the ability to tell their own stories is such a blessing. And in unions, when I’ve been on book tour most of this year, I’ve been like all over the country and everywhere I go, I meet people who would just be like somebody who has worked in their union for 20 years, 30 years, been a member, been active, been elected, been a shop steward, whatever it is, and nobody’s ever told that person that was important that you did that it was actually important.
And so I think that’s what we do. We’re very lucky because in a sense you get to let people speak and you also get to tell people that they’re legitimately important in a way that they might have never even heard before.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, I think that’s beautifully and powerfully put. I mean, I am reminded of it week in and week out, just how much we all need that and how little we all get it. And there’s a hopeful note in that because that’s a gift that we can all give one another, listening to each other and talking to each other, showing your scars, telling your stories. That’s how workers learn that they’re being paid different rates all the way up to, again, the raw human stuff. That is, that’s what labor journalism is about. It’s not about unions, it’s about people struggling for a better life, a good life, and that manifests in the need that you can’t move anymore because of a work-related injury. So you can’t play T-ball with your kids, the life quality of life you lose because of someone else’s greed and negligence. I mean, it comes through in stories like that.
And there’s so many in Hamilton’s book, there’s so many in the work, in the articles he’s written, the interviews that I’ve done. And I think we all have a duty to sort of try to reconnect with each other on that human level for nothing else, to remind one another that we’re not alone. We’re not worthless. We deserve better than this. And every life is beautiful, and people need to be seen that way before they can see themselves that way and believe that they can even fight for a better world and that they deserve one. And so in that regard, I wanted to bring, I actually brought a prop, which was like, I didn’t expect this to be so relevant, but I have here in my hand for those listening to this, a cup from Tudor’s Biscuit World in West Virginia. I won’t go into the backstory of how I got this cup, but I found myself in Huntington, West Virginia and saw this restaurant that looked like a throwback to the eighties.
And I was like, oh, shit, I want to get a biscuit and I’m going to get a cup. But then I read your book and I was like, I wanted to throw the cup at the wall. So I wanted to ask, just by way of, again, really bringing us back to the book, there’s a really important story here about Tudor’s biscuit world. I wanted to ask if you could tell us a bit about that, the incredible person at the center of it, and also what this story says about everything you’re talking about, both the need for unions and also the reality that working people are up against when they try to exercise their rights.
Hamilton Nolan:
So the book is about, as you said, the gap between the potential that unions have to really, and I completely still believe today, and the seed of this book was being a labor reporter and getting involved in unions myself, organizing my workplace and all this stuff. And you’re like, wow, unions are so powerful. Unions are the tool. All these things that were broken, here’s the tool that can fix ’em all. This is so great. We just need to give everybody unions and we’re going to fix all these problems. And then you get involved in the actual labor movement and you start looking around, you’re like, this shit is broken, and that shit’s broken and they’re not organizing and nobody has unions and people don’t know about you. And it’s like it’s all a mess. So the gap between the potential of unions to sort of save this country innocence, and then the reality of the labor movement and organized labor being broken in a lot of ways is kind of the seed of this book.
So one of the chapters in the book I want to write about just something which should be one of the most basic things that anybody can do, which is a person organizing their own workplace. Every union started somewhere. And generally it started with one person who’s like, we should have a union here. So I went to West Virginia. Tudor’s Biscuit world is like, if any of you’re from West Virginia, you already know what it is, but it’s like West Virginia’s homegrown fast food chain biscuits and breakfast and stuff like that. People love it. In West Virginia, there was a woman named Cynthia who worked at a Tudor’s biscuit world, tiny town called View West Virginia. She had grown up in a union family. Her dad was in a union. So she, like many people in West Virginia, which has really strong union culture, knew about unions, had connections to unions.
And after she retired, she got a job at Tudors of Biscuit World. She was there for a while and she was like, these people aren’t paying our overtime. My colleagues aren’t getting their time off. The manager’s abusing us all. And she was like, we need a union. Her dad was in a union to her, it was a very natural thought to have. So she was like, I’m going to unionize this tutor’s biscuit world. She called her husband’s union, which was like the operating engineers. They were like, we don’t really do Tudor’s Biscuit world, but eventually put her in touch with the guy at UFCW who agreed to help her out with this organizing campaign, came out there to Elk View, helped her run a union campaign inside tutors, which little did she know at the time was one of the only fast food union campaigns in the United States of America.
I mean, you could count on one hand the number of even organizing drives at fast food stores in the United States at that time. So very, very unique thing that she was doing, even though to her it seemed completely natural and normal. And as she went to organize this workplace, which probably had 25 workers at this tutors, tutors sent in the union busting team, the corporate union busting team arrived, and new managers start showing up at work. And this is a very, very small town, LVUS Virginia. And so people start getting threats. Some people start getting bribes, we’ll give you a watch, we’ll give you a promotion, vote against the union. One person at one point, somebody knocked on their door and their kid was getting ready to go to I think the University of West Virginia, and they were like, the scholarship might be in danger if you vote for this union.
That was the kind of thing that was happening at a freaking fast food restaurant. And so when the vote came around and people got fired, of course, and they lost the vote by only a couple of votes, and failed to successfully unionize this tutors and filed a bunch of unfair labor practice charges, which got upheld, but everybody went and got new jobs because you’re getting paid $8 an hour, $9 an hour at this job in the first place. So it’s just such a story of an uphill battle. And the thing that she set out to do was so basic. It’s something that ideally really, you should be able to do that in a day. You work at a bookstore, you talk to the people that you’re like, we should have a union set up the election. Bam. That’s how easy it should be to form a union at your workplace. And the reality of what a struggle was for her, I think is illuminating story for us and also for the labor movement itself and for the labor movement to look at and be like, why are we unable to provide the resources that people need to successfully accomplish this thing at a fucking 25 person fast food restaurant, much less a 2,500 person factory or on and on.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I want to drill down on that for a second because I think there are two crucial points there. One, about the reality of the past few years and the uptick in organizing, the increasing militancy, the creativity of strike strategies, the voting in of more democratic caucuses and major unions like the UAW and Teamsters and so on and so forth. So there’s been a lot of movement in the movement over the past few years, and we’ve been there covering it, and it’s exciting, and that’s how a lot of people know who we are. But one of the things that constantly freaks me out and stresses me out and bums me out is that we are still living in a kind of time and place and media ecosystem that conditions us to have no long-term memories, no long-term commitment to struggles that even we deeply care about.
And we see the results of that when strikes the Pittsburgh Post Gazette are still going on, and people have forgotten about ’em, just like we forgot about the coal miners in Alabama. And they effectively lost just like everyone loved the Starbucks drive, but they’re still fighting for first contracts. A lot of those stores that got closed aren’t reopened. A lot of people’s lives have changed and they moved on. We keep talking about the labor wave as if it’s still going unabated, but we’re not dealing with the reality of that people trying to exercise that right, have run into over these past few years. But then there’s also, and this is what I wanted to ask you about on the larger labor, organized labor side, all the way up to the leadership of the a Ffl CIO, current president, Liz Schueller said at the convention that our goal is to organize a million new workers in 10 years. That is such a small dream for such a big crisis. So I wanted to ask you for your thoughts on that. And also we need to be dreaming bigger. What are the bigger dreams that workers and the movement need to be having right now?
Hamilton Nolan:
Yeah, I mean, today 10% of workers in America are union members. That’s the last stop before single digits,
And there’s no stop after single digits. That’s the last stop on the elevator. So we are in a fucking crisis, man. And the first thing is the world of organized labor, which still, by the way, has 16 million people in America and unions have billions of dollars. And there is a considerable amount of resources in organized labor, even though it’s been weakened for many decades. They need to see it as a crisis. First of all, the leadership of the institutions of organized labor, and I compare it a lot to climate change because it’s like this slow moving crisis. It gets a little bit worse every year, but it goes slow enough that you can kind of ignore it. So it gets a little bit warmer every year and the water comes up this much, but you can kind of ignore, it’s not in your house yet.
And the same way union density goes down every year, 0.2%, 0.3%. If you’re running a union, you can kind of ignore that. It’s not really destroying what you have, but over time, that leads you to oblivion. The first thing we really need is a sense of urgency among the leaders of the labor movement. And then we need them to open the checkbooks and start from the premise that we need to double the amount of union members in this country. We need to organize the next 10 million people. What you touched on the story of Liz Schuler, the A-F-L-C-O convey, I went to the a Ffl CO convention in 2022, which is like the presidential convention of the labor movement. And there was a new president taking over the Scheller, and she made a big splashy announcement for her introductory speech taking over the A-F-L-C-O. And her big announcement was, we are going to commit to organize a million new workers in 10 years.
And everybody clapped, it’s like a million sounds big. And so I pulled out a calculator and did about one minute worth of math. And it turns out that if you unionize a million new workers in 10 years, union density will continue to go down because it’s not even enough to keep up with the new jobs that will be created in that time. So the goal, the aspiration of the biggest institution in the union world was to keep declining. And that to me is so emblematic of the fucking problem at the center of organized labor. And it’s interesting because at the same time as a labor reporter, you can go all over the country and meet the most inspiring people you ever met in your whole life in unions, in the labor movement, organizers, local presidents, activists, workers, all these people, brave people, smart people fighting, dedicating their life to this cause. I mean, there’s a bazillion incredibly inspiring stories and incredibly inspiring people inside the labor movement, but the farther up you go, the less inspiring it tends to get. And one of the things I read about in my book is I followed Sarah Nelson, who’s a great labor leader, the head of the Association of Attendants, and she sort of wrestled with the question of how to be a leader of this movement. She’s sitting right there, by the way, she’s in the house tonight.
But I think the importance of that was sort how do we wrestled the leadership of this movement into the right place, tons of great people in the labor movement, and yet the leadership is so disappointing and it’s hurting us and it hurts us every year continually until we figure out how to fix it.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, you anticipated my final question before we open it up to q and a, but if I can, I actually wanted to pose my final question to both you and Sara. A) because, yeah, Sara Nelson features heavily in this book and you learn a lot about Sara, her career and just what an incredible human being and fighter she is and what she’s fighting for. But also, if we recall, we saw this woman on the news a few years ago during the first Trump administration, during the government shutdown saying, fuck this. We’re going to general strike till you assholes get back to work. And that’s what stopped the government shutdown. So I really don’t want to put you on the spots here, but I kind of do and kind of already have. I wanted to ask both of you guys, what can we take from the first Trump administration to really get our heads and hearts right for the fight ahead, moving into a second Trump administration, but also again, in the vein of dreaming bigger, what do we need to correct or expand in this next dark period that we didn’t do in the last administration?
And then I’ll ask everyone to applaud and we’ll open up to audience questions. But yeah, Sara, I would love if you could answer that question as well.
Hamilton Nolan:
Alright, I’ll give a quick answer and then you can give a more inspiring answer or whatnot. I mean, we got to get more. The response to where we’re going is to get more hardcore. And the thing that makes me fearful in this moment is not, and I don’t think the people in this room are going to be the problem. I mean, if you’re sitting in this room, we’re probably fairly copacetic in the sense of when you’re faced with fascism, you have to organize more, build the labor movements stronger, fight more or fight back harder. But I think that the Democratic Party, for example, and the portion of this country that coalesces around the Democratic party, there’s going to be a big section of that whose impulse is going to be to compromise this time and to the way that strong men like Trump work is like he makes it so pleasing him is the only way to get anything done.
And so there’s a very powerful incentive for people in the world of politics on all sides to start kissing his ass, start licking his boots, start compromising. You see the president of the Teamsters taking buddy buddy pictures with him. Why is that? It’s because it’s like, well, this is how you get things done in this. But all that does is empower him more. And so it’s like a downward spiral where you give the strong man more and more power. So I think we got to fight harder. I don’t know if we will, but Sarah, what do you think?
Sara Nelson:
All right. Glad I had some bourbon for this. No. Okay, so Max, I could give a lot of answers to this question. First of all, I just want to say that I was back here getting emotional because these two men were sharing very personally and very openly about why this shit matters. And anyway, that was some good stuff, max. That was some good stuff. Okay. So what I’m going to say though is that of course, we got to organize more. We got to take this on. We got to fight, fight, fight. We got to do what Mother Jones said. She said she told the ludlow strikers after they had been gunned down and their tent, that they were sleeping in the cold depths of the Colorado winter while they were on strike against the co barons. And their intensity was burned and women and children were burned in the process.
She came to Ludlow and she said, you will fight and win. You will fight and lose, but you must fight. And part of the story that’s not ever told is that actually minors came with guns and a lot of spirit in their hearts to chase the militia out to chase the Colorado National Guard out, and they set up their own government there in Ludlow for the next six weeks, and they had their funerals and they took care of each other. And ultimately that went away. But that part of the story is never told. And so that is the power of our solidarity. But what did those people learn from that fight? I mean, they were out in that tent city to start with because the coal company was not even following the laws of the state at that time. They were, in some ways, they were just fighting to just enforce the law because they were all immigrants who spoke 28 different languages in that tent city.
And one of the reasons for that is because the co Barrons thought we’re going to hire people from different countries who won’t be able to communicate with each other because that is also going to be a way to make sure that we don’t have a union come in. And what they don’t understand at that level, and I’ve met these people, right? I’ve been in a lot of board rooms. They do not have the corner market on smarts, let me just tell you. But what they don’t understand is that when there’s a mine explosion and the mothers are left to tell their children that not only are their fathers not coming back, but they’re not sure how they’re going to be able to take care of them because none of the mothers can get work. They’re going to have to find another man in order to survive, and they’re trying to comfort their kids and figure out how they’re going to put their lives back together.
You don’t have to speak the same language to understand what’s going on in the heart. So that’s how the union was built. And I think about the last Trump administration, and I’ve really worked at not saying his name, no, it’s really fucking important. Let me just be clear, because our union learned after Carl Icahn fired all the TWA strikers in 1989, that we had to have a different way of striking. And so we looked at creative tactics and we created this strike tactic called chaos, create havoc around our system. And the idea was that we were using this provision of the railway Labor Act that had never been used, that allowed for intermittent strikes to go on strike and off strike. And we decided we would add an element to this, the element of surprise, we were not going to tell you when or where we were going to strike.
And so at Alaska Airlines in 1993, we struck seven flights and brought this deeply anti-union company to its knees who wanted to settle a contract overnight by fax machine that gave the flight attendants a 60% raise. We asked them if they wanted to meet and talk about it. They said, no, no, no. Every time we meet with you, something bad happens. We just want this over with. And so when I’m watching the government shutdown and seeing what’s going on there, and they’re saying that this is because Trump wants to build his southern border wall for security, for national security for our country, that was a bunch of bullshit. It was a 50 year campaign by the GOP to try to privatize everything in our country because if there had been a terrorist attack, that would’ve accrued incredible power to the executive to say, I’ll take care of it.
We’re going to make all these changes. If there had been an aircraft accident, same thing would’ve happened. If nothing had happened, they would’ve said, see, it’s a bunch of bureaucracy that we don’t need, and so we’re going to privatize. And so that was really what was at stake. And once we understood that this was not a political discussion between Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell, this was actually an attempt to try to distract people’s so much with the racist fearmongering, xenophobic, racist fearmongering, and keep people focused on all of that and create his own chaos campaign. I’m like, I know this one. We’re going to create a little chaos too. And so we set about talking about a safety strike for flight attendants, and we called on the rest of the labor movement to talk about a general strike because there were 800,000 people either out of work or forced to come to work for free, and another million contract workers who were just out of work with no hope getting anything in return.
This was a crisis and everyone could see it. And the cab driver in DC as I’m talking about this from one place to another, and I’m getting out of my cab and handing him the money, he turns around and grabs my hand. He’s got a tear going down his cheek and he says, thank you. You’re fighting for me too. You don’t think about this shit. But there was no work going on in DC so he didn’t have any cab fairs, so he couldn’t make a living for his family. So it’s all connected and we’re all connected, and if one person is mistreated, we’re all mistreated. But what we have to understand with this next incoming administration is that we cannot talk about Trump. We need to talk about the people who created Trump, the people who are going to give Trump power like you were talking about, and we need to hold them accountable, every one of them.
And we can’t think people think about this stuff in terms of red states and blue states. That’s bullshit. There’s working people everywhere, working people to be organized everywhere, working people to defend everywhere. And that’s how we need to approach this next administration. So the one thing I will say is that during that time, people were like, oh my God, which is what always happens in chaos campaigns. They don’t know where the ball is. So they’re like, oh my God, this is amazing. And one thing we learned is that instead of the typical strike coverage where it will say, how long can the union hold out? People are going to start crossing the line the next day, or people are not going to be able to hold out. They couldn’t say that because we weren’t telling ’em when or where we were going to strike, and they didn’t have their normal playbook. So all of a sudden they had to report on the issues that the workers were fighting for. And so we took control of the narrative, we took control of the schedule, we took control of the situation, and that’s what we as working people can do if we understand that this is all of our fight. But during that time, all these reporters were covering this and they were like, wow, this is amazing. And the one person who asked the question, yeah, but how are you fucking going to really do this was Hamilton Nolan.
So when he said, I’d like to write a book and I’d like to follow you around for a year, I was like, I don’t know. I is. This guy’s going to see right through me. And you did follow me for the worst year of my life. Thanks very much for doing that. But no, I mean, this is a really important book, and if all you do is read the intro and the last chapter, you’re going to know how to fight this next administration and how to take this on. But if you also want to hear some really inspiring stories about people who are trying to make this work and people who have won fights against all odds, read this book. And then the last thing I’ll just say is that laws do not give us power. We have power when we decide to come together and use it. Yes.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Let’s give it up for Sarah Nelson and Hamilton, Nolan, yo
Sara Nelson:
And
Hamilton Nolan:
Max Alvarez.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right, man. I’m like, I’m crying, I’m cheering. I’m like, there’s a roller coaster here. So we want to open this up to questions. We know you all have questions for Hamilton, please, yeah, flag analysis down so we can get your questions and everyone can hear ’em also. Yeah, the recorder is going. We will have the audio for this published at the Real News. So if you’d prefer to ask a question but not on recording, Hamilton and I will be available afterwards.
Analysis:
And there’s so much to get into, so much thank you for such a rich discussion that we could talk for hours. Guess what, we don’t have ours. So we want to keep our questions and comments relatively brief and truncated so that we can get a few in. And we have one question here, and then we’re going to take a couple more hands.
Audience Member 1:
And I apologize because usually I don’t do this and I talk shit about people who do. But I’ve got three questions and you don’t have to take, I’m going to ask them, but you don’t have to take any of them. We can take one. So there are not red states and blue states, but there are red counties and blue counties. How do you do the organizing in those red counties? Two is that we’ve had a number of folk like Susan, but also high powered folk like feign at UAW, who’ve actually taken a different approach to labor. Could you talk about their approach to organizing? And then there are three different identities that we’re trying to navigate as workers. So one is our identities as consumers, the other is our gender identity. And then finally, and I think it’s most important actually, is our racial identity because all those things are related to organizing and how we think about ourselves as workers. How do you think about how our successful unions navigating those identity dynamics? Again, you don’t have to take any of them, but the questions are still important.
Hamilton Nolan:
I try to give a sort of broad answer that maybe touches on most of them at least. I think the thing about red states and blue states and red counties and blue counties goes to the heart of why this stuff is so important, particularly in this time that we’re in, where that is held up as such a strong divide in this country. And every election gets stronger. The two sides of the media, the two sides of politics, the two sides of everything. And people think that that is an unbridgeable gap, that this country is going down a road that we’re going down that is actually getting worse and worse, and the divide is getting starker and starker between red and blue. And when, to me, the one thing that can bridge that gap and that can close that gap and erase the distinction between red and blue is the labor movement.
Because I’ve been all over the country, I’ve been in red states and blue states and red counties and blue counties, and working people have common interests. And the fact that the labor movement is weak and that people don’t have access to unions is why they don’t think about that. And they don’t think in those terms. They think in terms of Fox News and CNN and M-S-N-B-C, and that’s not the real story, and that’s not the real story of politics is not Democrats and Republicans. It is working people building their power. And so I think the labor movement gets more important, the starker that red and blue divide gets, because it is the one thing that can bridge that gap and bring working people together. I always think of when the Warrior met coal strike was going on in Alabama, which was the longest strike in America, they had a big rally in Brookwood, Alabama, way out in country Alabama.
Sarah Nelson was there, a bunch of labor leaders were there, and thousands of united mine workers were there. This is country ass Alabama, and it was the most integrated event that I have ever been to in my life. I grew up in the south. I’ve never been to an event that integrated apart from maybe a football game. And this was everybody in that community there. And they were all talking about the evil private equity firm that was stepping on the necks of the workers. And I guarantee that most of those people were probably Trump voters. Oh, no,
Sara Nelson:
I’m sorry. I went to the first week of that strike, and at that first rally, people were real skeptical about the union. They were pissed, so they were out on strike, but they were not sure that they liked their union. And it was not an integrated event. The black workers were over here, the white workers were over here. They were all staying about as far as they could from the union stage where we were having this rally. And they were not talking about who the villain was either. They were just mad. And so after being on strike for six months, I’ll hand it back to Hamilton because that’s what we have to recognize too, is that when we’re out on the picket line and we are defining our issues together, suddenly what our differences are don’t matter as much anymore because we’re all human beings fighting for the same thing.
And you suddenly start to see people differently and you start to hear their stories too. You start to understand those stories better, so you start to understand why the strike matters to them, and then you start to feel connected to why you’re not just fighting for yourself, but you’re fighting for the person next to you too. And so this is where we have the opportunity to break through these gender identities and race identities, and not to wash them away, but to celebrate them and find the strength in that. Because I’m telling you, max, I’m going to fight fucking harder because I heard your story about your dad. That’s what this is about.
Maximillian Alvarez:
There you go. I mean, yeah, give it up and to pile on here, I mean, I can’t stress enough that this is the conclusion that you come to doing the work that we do at the Real News, right? I mean, you hear these stories week in, week out. You can’t help but be affected by them, and you can’t help but feel a duty to not give up on people and to help them fight the fight that needs to be had so that this kind of shit doesn’t happen on the regular. And this is by way of addressing a question about red counties, blue counties, and where the rural urban divide really kind of comes into that. Because like Hamilton has for this book, I mean, we are out there not just interviewing union workers in dense urban areas. We are out there reporting on family farmers in Wisconsin who are the last few hanging on as big agriculture has taken over the entire rural landscape and wipe generations of knowledge, of pride, of land ownership off the board and swallowed it up into the gaping maw of corporate America.
It’s still there. It just looks a little different. And the names on the sides of the trucks are different in rural America, but the same monster is destroying the fabric of our society, whether you live in a red county or a blue county, I see it all the time, not just in the conditions that workers are living under the declining quality of life and access to basic public services and higher cost of living, yada, yada, yada. But I’ve been in deep red Trump country, places like East Palestinian, Ohio, sitting on the stoops of deep red Trump voting Republicans who will say to me, he is like, yeah, look, I don’t care that you’re a socialist weirdo from Baltimore, but because you’ve been there talking about our stories, you’ve been interviewing us, you’ve heard what we’re going through and you keep showing up. And then we got unions to show up and we got environmental justice groups to show up.
We got residents from other sacrifice zones or people living near other rail lines who didn’t want to happen to their communities. What happened to East Palestine? And it was like when, to Sarah’s point, the Hamilton’s point when we’re all there standing in a room talking about the shit that is impacting all of us and how we are all effectively fighting off different tentacles of the same corporate monsters and Wall Street vampires and bought off like corrupt government systems and bureaucrats. I mean, we realized very quickly how much all the shit that they used to divide us and how it all comes down to that human connection and sharing stories that melts that shit away like that. And then when you work in common struggle to address those things, you build the working class consciousness and movement that everyone keeps talking about. There’s some great recipe.
What’s the messaging that we got to get to get a working class movement? There’s no fucking message. Just go and be there for each other, fight for one another, struggle together. See one another as human beings who deserve better than this and who are in fact the solution that we are waiting for all of us, right? You do that, you learn more about each other. You become less scary to your coworkers who look different from you, right? I mean, you’re forced to stand next to a burn barrel and talk stories about your kids in school and you realize that they’re friends and you deal with a lot of the same shit. You build solidarity through struggle, not through carefully curated messaging that I think you got to touch grass to do that. You got to talk to people to do that. You can’t just do that all online.
You can’t do it in your own little reality bubbles. We’re all living in those reality bubbles. So whatever we do, it has to help people break out of them because our social worlds have gotten so much smaller over the past 50, 60, 70 years, and that went into hyperdrive with Covid. More people went underground or socially distanced and more of their connection to the outside world was being mediated by a screen. And so we’re seeing people sharing the same physical plane, but they’re not living on the same plane of reality. And that is a big reason why Grifters like Trump and the GOP are so able to convince working people that their neighbors are their enemy. You break that through struggle. You break that through being there. You break that through being the face behind the headline and behind the kind of scary archetypes that people are fearful of. Sorry, that was a long answer.
Analysis:
I’m watching our time, so let me just take, I know we had a couple hands, I just wanted to see what the hands were in the room. So one, two. So I’m going to come here and then I’m going to move right that way.
Audience Member 2:
Thanks for this inspiring discussion. Something I’ve been thinking about a lot, which is kind of related to what we’re talking about is that we’re in a moment of record distrust with the government and with media and the Trump administration has made clear their plan to demolish what’s left of our social safety net. And so I’m spending a lot of time thinking about what the next steps are going to be. It was a poll that found that people, people’s leading source of election news is other people, they’re not going, people are avoiding the news, they’re not trusting the news, they’re going to social media. So you’ve talked about the of organizing and unionizing and building solidarity. What I want you to dig into more is how can we use that to actually reach people and educate people and build trust and actually get information out to people who need it to hear it.
Hamilton Nolan:
I don’t know if you figured that out. Let me know because journalism is, that’s what journalism tries to do. That’s what journalism is. That’s what Max does every day. That’s what I do every day. And you have a career in journalism and you’re constantly thinking about the very question, well, we got all these great super important stories. How do we make everybody listen to ’em? How do we make people care about this? How do we make people read this? How do you make people see this? The only answer I know I could make up an answer, the only answer I know is just keep doing the work. Just keep doing the work. Just keep writing the stories. Just keep recording the interviews. Just keep publishing the podcast. Just keep putting it out, keep putting it out. And over years it will come to people. And I’ve been in a million, just like Max has panel discussions and meetings and blah blah where people are like, what’s the magical solution to make these story make everybody learn about the Starbucks union and blah blah?
You just got to keep telling the stories and telling the stories and telling the stories and write this story and write this book and write the next book and do this podcast and do the next podcast and keep talking. And for us, and that goes for everybody. If you think this stuff is important, tell somebody else. Talk to somebody else. You write the story, you do the story you tell the people. This spreads by word of mouth, it spreads through the media, spreads through independent media. There’s not a magical solution. But the thing we have going for us is that this shit actually is important and it actually is dramatic and actually is a good story and actually is something that people want to know about and need to know about. And that spreads through the power of itself.
Analysis:
See, we’re going to take two more right here and here.
Audience Member 3:
Alright, I’m going to steal 30 seconds for a quick relevant announcement. I work with the Baltimore Amazon Workers Support Network and organizing campaigns are one on the inside. Often what a support committee can do is kind of minimal, so we chip away as best we can. But there’s one thing that I want to let you guys know about tonight. We’re trying to find people who might be salts at Amazon. Assault is a person who takes the job in order to help with organizing a union. We have some friends on the inside, especially down at Sparrow’s Point. So if anybody here is interested in the work of our committee or might be assault or might know somebody who’s looking for a job or labor sympathetic or whatever, we’re trying to find people to get our friends on the inside some support. And I have one quick question and I’ll get right to it.
It’s pertinent to Amazon. To Amazon. And what about your title? I’m surprised that you guys have never gotten around to talking about why that title The hammer. Yeah, we do have a lot of different identities to work with, but some of us believe that working people should be at the heart of the matter and there’s a reason for that. The potential power of working people. Amazon, for example, fits into the whole discussion about what they call choke points, which is mainly a transportation warehousing. Amazon calls ’em fulfillment centers. Were just off the longshoreman strike. There was the railroad workers. The postal service, it seems to me has been just a scratch away from something breaking there. Old thirties song that the farmer is the man that feeds them all, but the transportation workers are the people who move it all. So that’s one kind of pressure point. I’d like to get you on that topic of choke points or any other pressure points.
Hamilton Nolan:
Yeah, thank you. First of all, it’s salting Amazon, a noble thing to do with your life. I hope somebody here does that. And then when you finish, you call me a max and we’ll write a story about it. So thank you for that announcement. The book is called The Hammer because a union is a tool, a union is a tool that you wield to express your own power that you already have. When you give people the means to have a union, you’re not telling ’em what to do. I’m not telling you what position you should have. I’m not telling you what you should ask for. I’m not telling you what you want, what you should fight for. It’s giving people the means to exercise their own power. And all workers have labor power inherently. We all have power as workers because we can all not work. That’s the heart of our labor power. But the only way to exercise that power is to have the union. You got to have the hammer to do the work. And so the labor movement is a hammer to me. It’s a tool that we need to give everybody to exercise their own power.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I think there’s a really, that dovetails with how I was going to respond to your question, right? Because I think I want to get to the choke points point in a second. But I think one of the pitfalls there, which you obviously know about, you guys are strategizing about this, but I’m more talking about the average person who’s cheering this on but doesn’t know a lot about how it works. I think that people who don’t know how organizing works and don’t talk about it, but they see it and they cheer it on and they see the power that we all see in unions in the labor movement, but again, have less first person contact with the realities of that, it becomes more of a strategy that forsakes the human reality that everyone needs to, we need to organize everyone everywhere. I mean there’s a moral political and in fact a self-fulfilling need to have that mentality that can be forsaken if we only focus on the most strategic points and people can then lower in their head the priority of someone organizing it.
Tudor’s biscuit world, obviously if we’re trying to take down capitalism, yeah, the choke points are more important for the amount of damage we can do. But in terms of the people harnessing the power that has been left slumbering inside of us or wasted away for our employers, the power that we actually have to make the world and to remake the world again into something better. I mean, that’s the power that you see in the eyes of people who take that fateful step in their workplaces to say, we deserve better than this and we’re going to be the ones to do something about it. We are going to change our circumstances and not just be, as Kurt Vonnegut would say, the listless play things of enormous forces. We take that step into our own power. And I see every day Hamilton sees, Sarah sees, you guys see in Amazon, when people start doing that shit themselves and they start working together, they see in fact the power that they always had.
But that if so many of us feel powerless, it’s because we’ve never experienced that. Maybe we’ve never exercised it. Maybe we’ve been, I didn’t know about unionization when I was a warehouse worker. I thought you either quit and find another job or you stay and take it. So that step, getting people to take that step into believing that they have power and that they do have power, like every working person, everyone needs to feel that be part of it. We need to fan those flames anywhere and everywhere they are because that is the larger necessity for building a grassroots working class movement of movements. People like leading the charge. That’s how we put the working class at the center. Now to quickly return to your question about choke points, again, I think there is such a huge argument for why salting at Amazon is such a noble and necessary calling right now.
And it’s what we were talking to workers about in Bessemer, Alabama when they were trying to unionize on Staten Island when they were unionizing is that look at Amazon, look at them taking everything over. I watch who watches football. Has anyone seen how much Amazon’s got its tentacles into the NFL? I mean, this is the second largest private employer in the country. This is one of the biggest international behemoths that’s only getting bigger and bigger and bigger owned by one of the most wealthy people in the history of the world. And we as working people have fucking no say over what they do. They just keep encroaching more and more into our lives. And so it was a band of workers in Bessemer, Alabama, hollowed out de-industrialized majority black, like twice the national poverty rate, Bessemer, Alabama, who were leading this charge to bring Amazon to the table and say, we are going to have a say in what you do. That’s why this is fucking important. It’s a testament to the very thesis of Hamilton’s book. You want to wield that hammer against Jeb Bezos, go salted Amazon, build that power. And then my larger point is that we just need to build it anywhere and everywhere that we can.
Analysis:
Let’s take this last question.
Audience Member 4:
Good evening. And I want to thank you first for the message and I’m seeking tools because we already have a union, but we have the public sector and the private sector. And because of the Janus rule, you have people that work with us that don’t pay the union dues. So I’m looking for tools to fight that, to fight the people that don’t want to pay into the union. But because we are union representatives, we still have to represent them. And I don’t mind representing everybody, but we can’t fight in the public sector. Does that make any sense?
Hamilton Nolan:
Yeah.
Audience Member 4:
And I probably wouldn’t be here tonight if it wasn’t for my coworker here who’s very young and so excited about coming here tonight because she wants to be in the neighbor movement, but we don’t have any tools to fight with. So we here to find tools.
Hamilton Nolan:
Yeah, it’s a great question. And Janice, what you mentioned is the Supreme Court ruling that made the whole public sector right to work. Meaning that if you have a union or workplace, you can’t force anybody to pay union dues. So you get a situation where you can have a union and people can choose not to pay dues and they become what we call free riders and they’re basically, they get the union contract and they don’t pay their fair share and it can eat away the power of the union. And that’s what you’re experiencing and what people like you in public sector unions all over the country experience. I think one aspect is, one thing you see is that people who go through an organizing campaign and they go through that struggle to win the union, they tend to be really jazzed up and fired up about the power of the union.
But sometimes when there’s a union that’s been in a workplace for a long time and people just get hired into it, they kind of take it for granted. They take that contract for granted. They don’t really appreciate the struggle that went into building that and winning that and maintaining that. The work that people like you got to do just to maintain the power of that union. And so it can become hard to inspire people. And what I saw reporting in my book and reporting all over the place is that unions in right to work states, unions that are successful in right to work situations. They just do a shit load of internal organizing all the time. Meaning that they are constantly talking to the members of that union about what the union is doing, why it’s important, why you need to come to this meeting, what the meeting’s about, what issues are facing us, what issues is the union fighting on.
Everything. You have to constantly be talking and internally organizing the people in that workplace. There’s a chapter in my book about the culinary union, Las Vegas, which is a private sector union, but it’s in a right to work state. Nevada’s a right to work state, and yet this union has managed to successfully organize the entire casino industry in Nevada, the entire Vegas strip. They’re one of the most powerful unions in Nevada. And how do they do it even though it’s right to work and people could choose not to pay dues. They do it by constantly, constantly, constantly talking to all the members in that union. They got lists, they’re coming to your apartment and knocking on your door, hi, I’m here from the union, I’m here. We’re having a citywide meeting four times a year. We’re getting everybody together in the union. We’re talking about our issues. So it’s just work, work, work, work, work. Constant, constant talking to people. And I don’t think there are any shortcuts to that process. And it can be a real pain in the ass as you know if you’re doing that work is hard. But just talking to people about what the union is, what is it doing, why it’s important, and why they need to pay those dues and what they’re getting for those dues is the path that I see work in unions that make that work. Powerful,
Powerful.
Analysis:
I was trying to figure out what word I wanted to choose, but your words are the right coda for this discussion that has been very, very necessary. Loved all the questions they were necessary questions and the beginning, not the end of a conversation this evening, but certainly the beginning. Some more convos and organized. I need you all to give up a final red Emmas round of applause for Max Alvarez and Hamilton Nolan.
Hamilton Nolan:
Thank you Red Emma’s. Thank you, Max Alvarez.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
“I did not start out as a writer interested in organized labor,” Hamilton Nolan writes in The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor; “I started out as a writer interested in why America was so fucked up. Why did we have such gargantuan levels of inequality? Why were thousands of homeless people living in the streets of cities where billionaires frolicked in penthouses? Why was it that certain classes of people worked hard their entire lives and stayed poor, just as their parents had been, and just as their children seemed doomed to be? Even while labor unions had fallen almost completely out of the public mind, it turned out that they were central to all our most fundamental problems.” In this live episode of Working People, recorded at Red Emma’s cooperative bookstore, cafe, and community events space in Baltimore on Dec. 6, 2024, Max speaks with Nolan about his new book, what the ongoing war on workers’ rights and unions tells us about the “fucked up” society we’re living in, and what lessons labor can teach us now about how to fight and win, even in the darkest of times. Sara Nelson, International President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL–CIO, also makes a special guest appearance in the second half of the episode.
Additional links/info below…
Permanent links below…
Featured Music…
Studio Production: Max Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Analysis:
Mic check. Mic check. We’re going to go ahead and get started with tonight’s event. It is always, always, always good to see you at Red Emma’s bookstore Coffeehouse. There are many things you could be doing. The weather cleared up nicely, cold as hell, but it was a beautiful afternoon, so you might’ve been somewhere else. You chose to be here with us in community and in the struggle capitals, and that is never lost upon us. I’m the poet known as analysis. Welcome on behalf of the entire team Hamilton. Nolan is a longtime labor journalist who was written about labor, politics and class war for publications such as Gawker in these Times, the Guardian and More. Speaking of Gawker Media, he helped organize them in 2015. That became the first yes, yes, yes. First online media company to unionize. He’s based in Brooklyn, New York has a publication called How Things Work, and you can find that at his website, hamilton nolan.com, Hamilton nolan.com.
We are joined in conversation this evening by Red Emmas fan. Max Alvarez is the editor in chief of the Real News Network, the host of the podcast, working people, PhD in history and comparative literature from University of Michigan and does so much more, writes for so many things. Speaking of writing, we have one copy. How many copies did I say? One copy of Max’s book, the Work of Living. Where can people talk about their lives and dreams and the year That World ended This right over there. So you should get that along with tonight’s book. We are so glad to get into this labor history. It is very important. I need y’all to give up some real radical roof rays and red ass noise for in conversation with Max Alvarez and presenting the hammer power. I love this subtitle. Listen to this Power inequality and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor. Y’all make some noise for Hamilton Nolan.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright, thank you so much analysis. Thank you once again to the great Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore coffee house and gathering space. This is a really important space for our community, so just wanted as always to thank our hosts and encourage y’all to please support Red Emma’s because we need places like this to plan the next steps, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about in the second part of our conversation today. And I couldn’t be more grateful to be in conversation with my man, Hamilton Nolan about that because I often find myself looking to Hamilton for answers or guidance or even just a little dose of strength that I can kind of get to help me get out of bed and keep fighting. Hamilton is a role model for so many of us in the labor journalism and labor media world, and I’m so proud of him and everything that he’s done, especially this incredible new book that we’re here to talk about today, which as analysis said is called The Hammer Power Inequality and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor. Hamilton, thank you so much for joining me today and Baltimore brother and welcome.
Hamilton Nolan:
Thank you and thank you Red Emmas. This is my first time at Red Emmas and I love everything about this place already, so I’ll definitely be back and thank you all for coming and thank you Max, who by the way, if you all don’t know, is definitely one of the best labor journalists in the United States America, and we are lucky to have him here in Baltimore, so thank you for having me.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Thank you, brother. That means the world to me and who boy do we got a lot to talk about, right? I mean, I’m thinking we’re never going to be able to sum up the richness and depth and importance of this book in a 60 minute talk, right? That’s an unfair aim to have in any book talk. So I want to encourage everyone first and foremost to please buy and read this book. If you are finding yourself, like me feeling overwhelmed by anxiety, fear, anger, resentment, all these heavy feelings that you don’t know what to do with, but you are looking for something to do, you were looking for more that you can do to fight back and to keep us from falling further into the abyss. I would highly recommend that you start with this book and you’ll find a lot of hard truths and a lot of warm comfort in it through the stories of our fellow workers, past and present and through Hamilton’s fierce and righteous perspective.
And so Hamilton, I want to by way of introducing the book sort of jump into the moment that we’re in right now because everyone is sort of looking at the past eight to 10 years to try to understand what the hell happened in this country that not only led us to elect Donald Trump president the first time, but now a second time with a fully magnified GOP controlling effectively all branches of government. And there are a lot of different narratives about the last eight to 10 years that cherry pick stories about the working class and their politics, our politics and so on. I wanted to ask you, Hamilton Nolan, what does the last eight to 10 years in this country look like through the lens of labor and through the lives of the working people that you report on for a living?
Hamilton Nolan:
Yeah, thank you, man. It’s a great question and obviously one I’ve thought about a lot and you’ve thought about a lot, probably everybody in this room has thought about a lot. I think I’m going to cheat a little bit because I’m going to go back a little bit farther because I think you have to go back a little bit farther to really answer that question. And I will go back to the end of World War II 1950s in America. It’s going to be short though. I’m not going to talk that one, but the context being that after World War II in this country, one in three working people in America was a union member, and what did that produce that produced what is looked back on now as the golden age of America? Ironically, look back on by Republicans in particular, I was like, wow, that’s the time we need to get back to one in three working people in this country was a union member and America was prosperous, but that level of unionization in this country meant that the prosperity that America had was widely shared.
So we had the greatest shared prosperity for a good 20 to 30 year period. It was really a golden age in the history of America. All that prosperity was widely shared because working people in this country had the power to take their share of that wealth thanks to high levels of unionization. And over time the decline of unions in America in the mid 1950s about one in three workers was union member. Today it’s one in 10, and that’s been a slow downward decline for all those years, and particularly beginning in 1980 with the Reagan era. I was born in 1979. So this kind of the story of my lifetime is that we saw this inequality, crisis, economic inequality, crisis in particular start to rise up in America. And of course Reagan’s assault on unions and worker power was a big part of enabling that. And there’s a really famous chart that a lot of you probably seen, and one line is the decline of union density in America.
It goes down like that. And then the other line is the rise of the wealth held by the top 10% in America and it goes up like that and it’s perfect mirror images, perfect mirror images. So those two things are not coincidental. Those two things are one enabled the other. And so I think to bring it up to today, I think that it’s just the nature of societies that inequality can only rise for so long before stuff starts to break and stuff starts to break down, the social contract starts to break down, the political system starts to break down. People stop believing in the American dream because it becomes increasingly obvious that the American dream is kind of a sham. And I think that is the environment that fostered a guy like Trump who is not only a Republican, but also like a conman and just clearly a scam artist and all the sort of worst qualities come to the fore.
But I remember I covered Trump when he was running in 2016 and 2015, and one thing that always stuck with me from the 2016 election was that in West Virginia, which was one of the highest states in America for voting for Trump in the democratic primary, Bernie won every county in West Virginia. So what is that? That’s people being like, we need something different. We need the most different thing that we can find. And I think that is what’s led us to Trump the hollowness of what neoliberalism produced in this country, the failure of America to share his prosperity, crushing unions crushing working people’s ability to get their fair share of the wealth that this country produces, which is still, by the way, the most wealth any nation in the history of the world has ever produced we’re rich as hell. It’s just that all the money goes to the very top. All those things I think conspire to form atmosphere where a guy like Trump can rise up. And I guess the story of the last election is that in those eight years, the opposition did not rally itself to fix the underlying problems that contributed to Trump getting in the first place. So here we are.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and I want to tease that out just a bit more, right? Since it’s, again, this is in the air that we’re breathing right now, it’s everywhere, especially if anyone’s like, I understand why you would maybe not be following the news so closely these days because exhausting. So I do understand that, but it’s all that anyone’s talking about right now. So I do want to sort of ask you if you could also take this and respond to the discussions and debates that are being had right now from mainstream news all the way to independent channels like ours all across social media, Democrats abandoning the working class and reaping what they’ve sown, Republicans having this quote, great realignment and a lot of working people supporting Trump and maga. And you really, I think helped us understand some of the complex reasons that might happen. But I want to ask you if you have, what you feel is missing from those debates right now, especially in the wake of Trump’s electoral victory.
Hamilton Nolan:
I mean, I do think one thing that’s not getting really enunciated enough or made clear enough, especially in the discussion after the election of the sort of alleged working class shift to Republicans, and some of it was real. I mean, there has been a real certain amount of shift of lower income votes to Trump, but one thing that didn’t get brought up, and especially in the ways that the Democrats panic about that, and a democratic political consultant is probably the least equipped person in the world to solve that problem. They’re all millionaires who live in dc. But I mean, what I think didn’t get talked about enough specifically was that the union votes still went to Democrats by the same healthy margin that it had in the past. So actual union members did not shift to Trump, not that Harris was so great or anything, but the actual union vote stayed to the left.
And so I think that, and I’m a broken record maybe, but when we talk about, oh, the working class, how are we going to bring the working class back, raise union density, get more people into unions, and you get people into organizations that actually can do political education, people’s relationship with politics can’t just be seen ads on tv. I mean, that’s not politics. And politics is being in an organization that can help people fight for their own interests, whether it’s electorally, whether it’s in the workplace or anywhere else. Unions are the foundation of that in America. The labor movement is the foundation of that. Even though it’s gotten very weak, it’s still demonstrated even in the last election when working class people shifted to the right union members didn’t. So unions are an essential ingredient to American democracy. And when we talk about the declining in unions, it’s not just a story about economics. It’s not just people aren’t earning enough money anymore. It is a story of the loss of power, the loss of regular people’s ability to exercise power, political power in particular. And so I think that’s something that has not been discussed enough, at least in the mainstream news though I’m sure on real news. Yes.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh yeah, we got you baby. And I want to come back to the union question in a second, but I think you make a tremendously important point, right? Given the sort of post World War II context that you gave us in the beginning all the way up till now, and like you said, our lifetimes are effectively the arc of this decline. We are sort of like and bear the living imprints of Neoliberalism’s like rise and fall, and we bear in our family stories and experiences like the effects of a failed ideology, well failed for us. But for the past 40 years, that has been what working people across the board have experienced, and whether they are joining unions or trying to form unions in larger numbers than we’ve seen in a generation in recent years or going on strike, whether they’re burning down police precincts or voting for explicitly anti-establishment politicians like Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump, that being the linkage that there’s an anti-establishment rage harnessed in there, all of those things are sort of different and even interlocking responses to a crisis that’s been building for our entire lifetimes.
And I think that’s what drives me so nuts about the ways that the media talks about politics and then those of us who consume the media learn to think about politics and it limits the scope of how we can think. George Orwell wrote this a century ago, I’m not saying anything new here, but I think that’s such an important point because if you don’t have that deeper historical context, if you don’t understand that what people are responding to every two to four years, they’re responding to a crisis that’s been building for 40 or 50. And so in fact, what’s more telling about our political situation, not just here in the US but around the world, is that we are in what many analysts are calling an anti incumbent period. Because again, what we just lived through the past three election cycles we haven’t seen in our lifetime where the incumbent party was voted out each time.
Hamilton Nolan:
I mean a two party system which we have, which unfortunately, and I think the older I get, the more I realize how bad a two party system is shitty system. But in a two party system, every election is a referendum on reality. And so if reality sucks, you get that pendulum nature that we see in America and that we’ve seen for much of the 20th century and into this century as well where the ping pong and back in America, we don’t have parties that have 40 year runs on top of the government. Why is that? Because all the dissatisfaction with the status quo is always going to be channeled to kicking out the party in power.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And again, traced along that timeline from when you were born to now, not only has union density just plummeted down to barely 10% in this country, but with that is all the neoliberal poison that has eroded the very foundations of our society, our democracy, everything, corporate consolidation, deregulation, privatization, globalization. These processes have been building up and accumulating. And it’s not that it’s anything new, it’s just that it’s taken this long for so many working people to feel it at this level, I think. And so that, sorry, did you have something to jump in on? No go. Because I think that leads us to where and why unions became such a central point for you, and in the same way that they become a central point for so many people in recent years looking for hope. Yeah. So talk about your path to understanding unions as an important institution. You didn’t start there. You didn’t set out to be a union guy
Hamilton Nolan:
And both of us, the fact that we sit here and talk about union so much is weird in media, in politics, unions are still considered this sort of niche story off to the side. And when I started and became a journalist, I didn’t start out to be a labor reporter. I was just like, I want to write about why is America fucked up? Why the rich get richer in the poor, get poorer? Why is there homeless people sleeping on the street and then there’s rich people in the penthouse, basic super basic stuff that all of us are like, why is that so broken? And over the years as I reported on all those things, I found myself repeatedly being drawn back to issues, to labor issues, to worker power, to the decline of worker power and the consequences of that and the ripple effects of that, and learned about the history of unions and the history of labor and the way that that had affected our economy, the way that that had affected our politics.
And over the years, just pursuing the threads of those really basic questions. Why is America broken in the ways that it’s broken today? I ended up becoming a full-time labor reporter because I found over and over again that labor issues were at the center of all those questions. The inequality crisis was directly spawned by the attack on labor power in this country. And the inequality crisis is the thing that was destabilizing our country in all the ways that manifest in a million different ways, including Donald Trump and a lot of other things. So I mean, I just sort of increasingly covered labor over the years because I was like, wow, this stuff is so important, so important, so important. And at the same time as I was looking around the media and being like, nobody’s really talking about this that much. I mean, people cover politics in really stupid ways, and there’s not that much attention on things that are actually more, in many cases, a union election is more consequential than a political election in the sense of the impact that it’s going to have not just on the lives of those workers, but the ripple effects going to have through the economy, the way it’s going to change the balance of power economically in a city, in an industry.
Those things have long-term ripple effects down through years and through generations, and they change families and they change people’s lives, and it’s a very, very undercover aspect of America in the media, in journalism. And so I think one of the reasons I kept on writing about labor over the years was just like nobody else was. Not nobody you were doing it, but relatively speaking, not that many people are writing about this stuff. That was actually really important, and that’s still true today, unfortunately.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Just a small aside, please, please support any and all labor journalists that you follow. Support Hamilton Substack. Please support the real news support freelance writers like Kim Kelly, support great labor writers. Publishing for places in these times, Jacobin all over the place, local papers, the people doing the beats in their local area, they’re the only person covering labor stories. Support it, please. Otherwise it goes away.
Hamilton Nolan:
Max, how did you get into labor?
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, I’ll sort of give a condensed version that hooks into the union question for the same reasons that you do. I feel a little weird when people ask my opinion about unions or I’ve become known as a union guy or someone who knows a lot about unions because I interview a shit ton of union workers and cover a lot of labor stories, but that is not where I started covering labor. I started the podcast that I’m still doing working people. Years ago when I was still a broke grad student, we were living in Ann Arbor, and I say a joke that I almost started the show as a ruse to get my dad to talk about losing our house and losing everything that I had grown up with, losing the American dream in his mind because for years it had just eaten our family away.
It had taken my father away from me, the lights rum, but no one was there. My parents’ marriage was on the rocks, and that was so stunning to all of us. I was working at warehouses as a temp worker 12 years ago when this was all happening. It was really bad. And we grew up deeply conservative Republicans pro capitalists. The crash was a huge ideological crash for us because we saw how much the system we believed in and that we believed we could work within to make a good life for ourselves was so nakedly rigged in favor of the very people who had caused millions of families like ours to lose everything. And it was our going government bailing them out, and it was our media saying, Hey, the economy’s great while I’m sitting there on a couch with my dad in the house we were going to lose in two years.
So I started doing labor journalism on my podcast because I did not want my father to go to his grave feeling like a failure. And I kept doing the podcast because I saw how much, and I knew how much pain you accrue as a human being in such an inhuman system that chews us up and spits us out until we have nothing left to give that gets us accustomed to being paid so little and treated so poorly and what that does to your heart and your psyche. I wanted people to have a space to talk about that and to tell the stories of labor through the human stories of regular people. And it was years in the making that I came to understand a, people don’t deserve this. Well, I mean, I knew that from the beginning, but there’s something they could do about it. And that’s how I came to understand, oh shit, they had unions. I am seeing people come to the same conclusion. I’m seeing how they’re improving their lives by struggling together to exercise that, right?
Hamilton Nolan:
It’s really like one of the best parts of being a labor journalist. The stuff that we do, and you would probably agree with this, I don’t want to speak for you, but it is just like when I was at Gawker during the recession out of 2008, 2009, I did this series of unemployment stories. So I just had people who had become unemployed right in and tell their story. We published this every week for 40 weeks, 40 week long series, hundreds and hundreds of people telling their own stories. I got more thank you notes from people about that than probably anything I’ve ever written. And I didn’t write any of it. It was all their stories. And just giving people the ability to tell their own stories is such a blessing. And in unions, when I’ve been on book tour most of this year, I’ve been like all over the country and everywhere I go, I meet people who would just be like somebody who has worked in their union for 20 years, 30 years, been a member, been active, been elected, been a shop steward, whatever it is, and nobody’s ever told that person that was important that you did that it was actually important.
And so I think that’s what we do. We’re very lucky because in a sense you get to let people speak and you also get to tell people that they’re legitimately important in a way that they might have never even heard before.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, I think that’s beautifully and powerfully put. I mean, I am reminded of it week in and week out, just how much we all need that and how little we all get it. And there’s a hopeful note in that because that’s a gift that we can all give one another, listening to each other and talking to each other, showing your scars, telling your stories. That’s how workers learn that they’re being paid different rates all the way up to, again, the raw human stuff. That is, that’s what labor journalism is about. It’s not about unions, it’s about people struggling for a better life, a good life, and that manifests in the need that you can’t move anymore because of a work-related injury. So you can’t play T-ball with your kids, the life quality of life you lose because of someone else’s greed and negligence. I mean, it comes through in stories like that.
And there’s so many in Hamilton’s book, there’s so many in the work, in the articles he’s written, the interviews that I’ve done. And I think we all have a duty to sort of try to reconnect with each other on that human level for nothing else, to remind one another that we’re not alone. We’re not worthless. We deserve better than this. And every life is beautiful, and people need to be seen that way before they can see themselves that way and believe that they can even fight for a better world and that they deserve one. And so in that regard, I wanted to bring, I actually brought a prop, which was like, I didn’t expect this to be so relevant, but I have here in my hand for those listening to this, a cup from Tudor’s Biscuit World in West Virginia. I won’t go into the backstory of how I got this cup, but I found myself in Huntington, West Virginia and saw this restaurant that looked like a throwback to the eighties.
And I was like, oh, shit, I want to get a biscuit and I’m going to get a cup. But then I read your book and I was like, I wanted to throw the cup at the wall. So I wanted to ask, just by way of, again, really bringing us back to the book, there’s a really important story here about Tudor’s biscuit world. I wanted to ask if you could tell us a bit about that, the incredible person at the center of it, and also what this story says about everything you’re talking about, both the need for unions and also the reality that working people are up against when they try to exercise their rights.
Hamilton Nolan:
So the book is about, as you said, the gap between the potential that unions have to really, and I completely still believe today, and the seed of this book was being a labor reporter and getting involved in unions myself, organizing my workplace and all this stuff. And you’re like, wow, unions are so powerful. Unions are the tool. All these things that were broken, here’s the tool that can fix ’em all. This is so great. We just need to give everybody unions and we’re going to fix all these problems. And then you get involved in the actual labor movement and you start looking around, you’re like, this shit is broken, and that shit’s broken and they’re not organizing and nobody has unions and people don’t know about you. And it’s like it’s all a mess. So the gap between the potential of unions to sort of save this country innocence, and then the reality of the labor movement and organized labor being broken in a lot of ways is kind of the seed of this book.
So one of the chapters in the book I want to write about just something which should be one of the most basic things that anybody can do, which is a person organizing their own workplace. Every union started somewhere. And generally it started with one person who’s like, we should have a union here. So I went to West Virginia. Tudor’s Biscuit world is like, if any of you’re from West Virginia, you already know what it is, but it’s like West Virginia’s homegrown fast food chain biscuits and breakfast and stuff like that. People love it. In West Virginia, there was a woman named Cynthia who worked at a Tudor’s biscuit world, tiny town called View West Virginia. She had grown up in a union family. Her dad was in a union. So she, like many people in West Virginia, which has really strong union culture, knew about unions, had connections to unions.
And after she retired, she got a job at Tudors of Biscuit World. She was there for a while and she was like, these people aren’t paying our overtime. My colleagues aren’t getting their time off. The manager’s abusing us all. And she was like, we need a union. Her dad was in a union to her, it was a very natural thought to have. So she was like, I’m going to unionize this tutor’s biscuit world. She called her husband’s union, which was like the operating engineers. They were like, we don’t really do Tudor’s Biscuit world, but eventually put her in touch with the guy at UFCW who agreed to help her out with this organizing campaign, came out there to Elk View, helped her run a union campaign inside tutors, which little did she know at the time was one of the only fast food union campaigns in the United States of America.
I mean, you could count on one hand the number of even organizing drives at fast food stores in the United States at that time. So very, very unique thing that she was doing, even though to her it seemed completely natural and normal. And as she went to organize this workplace, which probably had 25 workers at this tutors, tutors sent in the union busting team, the corporate union busting team arrived, and new managers start showing up at work. And this is a very, very small town, LVUS Virginia. And so people start getting threats. Some people start getting bribes, we’ll give you a watch, we’ll give you a promotion, vote against the union. One person at one point, somebody knocked on their door and their kid was getting ready to go to I think the University of West Virginia, and they were like, the scholarship might be in danger if you vote for this union.
That was the kind of thing that was happening at a freaking fast food restaurant. And so when the vote came around and people got fired, of course, and they lost the vote by only a couple of votes, and failed to successfully unionize this tutors and filed a bunch of unfair labor practice charges, which got upheld, but everybody went and got new jobs because you’re getting paid $8 an hour, $9 an hour at this job in the first place. So it’s just such a story of an uphill battle. And the thing that she set out to do was so basic. It’s something that ideally really, you should be able to do that in a day. You work at a bookstore, you talk to the people that you’re like, we should have a union set up the election. Bam. That’s how easy it should be to form a union at your workplace. And the reality of what a struggle was for her, I think is illuminating story for us and also for the labor movement itself and for the labor movement to look at and be like, why are we unable to provide the resources that people need to successfully accomplish this thing at a fucking 25 person fast food restaurant, much less a 2,500 person factory or on and on.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I want to drill down on that for a second because I think there are two crucial points there. One, about the reality of the past few years and the uptick in organizing, the increasing militancy, the creativity of strike strategies, the voting in of more democratic caucuses and major unions like the UAW and Teamsters and so on and so forth. So there’s been a lot of movement in the movement over the past few years, and we’ve been there covering it, and it’s exciting, and that’s how a lot of people know who we are. But one of the things that constantly freaks me out and stresses me out and bums me out is that we are still living in a kind of time and place and media ecosystem that conditions us to have no long-term memories, no long-term commitment to struggles that even we deeply care about.
And we see the results of that when strikes the Pittsburgh Post Gazette are still going on, and people have forgotten about ’em, just like we forgot about the coal miners in Alabama. And they effectively lost just like everyone loved the Starbucks drive, but they’re still fighting for first contracts. A lot of those stores that got closed aren’t reopened. A lot of people’s lives have changed and they moved on. We keep talking about the labor wave as if it’s still going unabated, but we’re not dealing with the reality of that people trying to exercise that right, have run into over these past few years. But then there’s also, and this is what I wanted to ask you about on the larger labor, organized labor side, all the way up to the leadership of the a Ffl CIO, current president, Liz Schueller said at the convention that our goal is to organize a million new workers in 10 years. That is such a small dream for such a big crisis. So I wanted to ask you for your thoughts on that. And also we need to be dreaming bigger. What are the bigger dreams that workers and the movement need to be having right now?
Hamilton Nolan:
Yeah, I mean, today 10% of workers in America are union members. That’s the last stop before single digits,
And there’s no stop after single digits. That’s the last stop on the elevator. So we are in a fucking crisis, man. And the first thing is the world of organized labor, which still, by the way, has 16 million people in America and unions have billions of dollars. And there is a considerable amount of resources in organized labor, even though it’s been weakened for many decades. They need to see it as a crisis. First of all, the leadership of the institutions of organized labor, and I compare it a lot to climate change because it’s like this slow moving crisis. It gets a little bit worse every year, but it goes slow enough that you can kind of ignore it. So it gets a little bit warmer every year and the water comes up this much, but you can kind of ignore, it’s not in your house yet.
And the same way union density goes down every year, 0.2%, 0.3%. If you’re running a union, you can kind of ignore that. It’s not really destroying what you have, but over time, that leads you to oblivion. The first thing we really need is a sense of urgency among the leaders of the labor movement. And then we need them to open the checkbooks and start from the premise that we need to double the amount of union members in this country. We need to organize the next 10 million people. What you touched on the story of Liz Schuler, the A-F-L-C-O convey, I went to the a Ffl CO convention in 2022, which is like the presidential convention of the labor movement. And there was a new president taking over the Scheller, and she made a big splashy announcement for her introductory speech taking over the A-F-L-C-O. And her big announcement was, we are going to commit to organize a million new workers in 10 years.
And everybody clapped, it’s like a million sounds big. And so I pulled out a calculator and did about one minute worth of math. And it turns out that if you unionize a million new workers in 10 years, union density will continue to go down because it’s not even enough to keep up with the new jobs that will be created in that time. So the goal, the aspiration of the biggest institution in the union world was to keep declining. And that to me is so emblematic of the fucking problem at the center of organized labor. And it’s interesting because at the same time as a labor reporter, you can go all over the country and meet the most inspiring people you ever met in your whole life in unions, in the labor movement, organizers, local presidents, activists, workers, all these people, brave people, smart people fighting, dedicating their life to this cause. I mean, there’s a bazillion incredibly inspiring stories and incredibly inspiring people inside the labor movement, but the farther up you go, the less inspiring it tends to get. And one of the things I read about in my book is I followed Sarah Nelson, who’s a great labor leader, the head of the Association of Attendants, and she sort of wrestled with the question of how to be a leader of this movement. She’s sitting right there, by the way, she’s in the house tonight.
But I think the importance of that was sort how do we wrestled the leadership of this movement into the right place, tons of great people in the labor movement, and yet the leadership is so disappointing and it’s hurting us and it hurts us every year continually until we figure out how to fix it.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, you anticipated my final question before we open it up to q and a, but if I can, I actually wanted to pose my final question to both you and Sara. A) because, yeah, Sara Nelson features heavily in this book and you learn a lot about Sara, her career and just what an incredible human being and fighter she is and what she’s fighting for. But also, if we recall, we saw this woman on the news a few years ago during the first Trump administration, during the government shutdown saying, fuck this. We’re going to general strike till you assholes get back to work. And that’s what stopped the government shutdown. So I really don’t want to put you on the spots here, but I kind of do and kind of already have. I wanted to ask both of you guys, what can we take from the first Trump administration to really get our heads and hearts right for the fight ahead, moving into a second Trump administration, but also again, in the vein of dreaming bigger, what do we need to correct or expand in this next dark period that we didn’t do in the last administration?
And then I’ll ask everyone to applaud and we’ll open up to audience questions. But yeah, Sara, I would love if you could answer that question as well.
Hamilton Nolan:
Alright, I’ll give a quick answer and then you can give a more inspiring answer or whatnot. I mean, we got to get more. The response to where we’re going is to get more hardcore. And the thing that makes me fearful in this moment is not, and I don’t think the people in this room are going to be the problem. I mean, if you’re sitting in this room, we’re probably fairly copacetic in the sense of when you’re faced with fascism, you have to organize more, build the labor movements stronger, fight more or fight back harder. But I think that the Democratic Party, for example, and the portion of this country that coalesces around the Democratic party, there’s going to be a big section of that whose impulse is going to be to compromise this time and to the way that strong men like Trump work is like he makes it so pleasing him is the only way to get anything done.
And so there’s a very powerful incentive for people in the world of politics on all sides to start kissing his ass, start licking his boots, start compromising. You see the president of the Teamsters taking buddy buddy pictures with him. Why is that? It’s because it’s like, well, this is how you get things done in this. But all that does is empower him more. And so it’s like a downward spiral where you give the strong man more and more power. So I think we got to fight harder. I don’t know if we will, but Sarah, what do you think?
Sara Nelson:
All right. Glad I had some bourbon for this. No. Okay, so Max, I could give a lot of answers to this question. First of all, I just want to say that I was back here getting emotional because these two men were sharing very personally and very openly about why this shit matters. And anyway, that was some good stuff, max. That was some good stuff. Okay. So what I’m going to say though is that of course, we got to organize more. We got to take this on. We got to fight, fight, fight. We got to do what Mother Jones said. She said she told the ludlow strikers after they had been gunned down and their tent, that they were sleeping in the cold depths of the Colorado winter while they were on strike against the co barons. And their intensity was burned and women and children were burned in the process.
She came to Ludlow and she said, you will fight and win. You will fight and lose, but you must fight. And part of the story that’s not ever told is that actually minors came with guns and a lot of spirit in their hearts to chase the militia out to chase the Colorado National Guard out, and they set up their own government there in Ludlow for the next six weeks, and they had their funerals and they took care of each other. And ultimately that went away. But that part of the story is never told. And so that is the power of our solidarity. But what did those people learn from that fight? I mean, they were out in that tent city to start with because the coal company was not even following the laws of the state at that time. They were, in some ways, they were just fighting to just enforce the law because they were all immigrants who spoke 28 different languages in that tent city.
And one of the reasons for that is because the co Barrons thought we’re going to hire people from different countries who won’t be able to communicate with each other because that is also going to be a way to make sure that we don’t have a union come in. And what they don’t understand at that level, and I’ve met these people, right? I’ve been in a lot of board rooms. They do not have the corner market on smarts, let me just tell you. But what they don’t understand is that when there’s a mine explosion and the mothers are left to tell their children that not only are their fathers not coming back, but they’re not sure how they’re going to be able to take care of them because none of the mothers can get work. They’re going to have to find another man in order to survive, and they’re trying to comfort their kids and figure out how they’re going to put their lives back together.
You don’t have to speak the same language to understand what’s going on in the heart. So that’s how the union was built. And I think about the last Trump administration, and I’ve really worked at not saying his name, no, it’s really fucking important. Let me just be clear, because our union learned after Carl Icahn fired all the TWA strikers in 1989, that we had to have a different way of striking. And so we looked at creative tactics and we created this strike tactic called chaos, create havoc around our system. And the idea was that we were using this provision of the railway Labor Act that had never been used, that allowed for intermittent strikes to go on strike and off strike. And we decided we would add an element to this, the element of surprise, we were not going to tell you when or where we were going to strike.
And so at Alaska Airlines in 1993, we struck seven flights and brought this deeply anti-union company to its knees who wanted to settle a contract overnight by fax machine that gave the flight attendants a 60% raise. We asked them if they wanted to meet and talk about it. They said, no, no, no. Every time we meet with you, something bad happens. We just want this over with. And so when I’m watching the government shutdown and seeing what’s going on there, and they’re saying that this is because Trump wants to build his southern border wall for security, for national security for our country, that was a bunch of bullshit. It was a 50 year campaign by the GOP to try to privatize everything in our country because if there had been a terrorist attack, that would’ve accrued incredible power to the executive to say, I’ll take care of it.
We’re going to make all these changes. If there had been an aircraft accident, same thing would’ve happened. If nothing had happened, they would’ve said, see, it’s a bunch of bureaucracy that we don’t need, and so we’re going to privatize. And so that was really what was at stake. And once we understood that this was not a political discussion between Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell, this was actually an attempt to try to distract people’s so much with the racist fearmongering, xenophobic, racist fearmongering, and keep people focused on all of that and create his own chaos campaign. I’m like, I know this one. We’re going to create a little chaos too. And so we set about talking about a safety strike for flight attendants, and we called on the rest of the labor movement to talk about a general strike because there were 800,000 people either out of work or forced to come to work for free, and another million contract workers who were just out of work with no hope getting anything in return.
This was a crisis and everyone could see it. And the cab driver in DC as I’m talking about this from one place to another, and I’m getting out of my cab and handing him the money, he turns around and grabs my hand. He’s got a tear going down his cheek and he says, thank you. You’re fighting for me too. You don’t think about this shit. But there was no work going on in DC so he didn’t have any cab fairs, so he couldn’t make a living for his family. So it’s all connected and we’re all connected, and if one person is mistreated, we’re all mistreated. But what we have to understand with this next incoming administration is that we cannot talk about Trump. We need to talk about the people who created Trump, the people who are going to give Trump power like you were talking about, and we need to hold them accountable, every one of them.
And we can’t think people think about this stuff in terms of red states and blue states. That’s bullshit. There’s working people everywhere, working people to be organized everywhere, working people to defend everywhere. And that’s how we need to approach this next administration. So the one thing I will say is that during that time, people were like, oh my God, which is what always happens in chaos campaigns. They don’t know where the ball is. So they’re like, oh my God, this is amazing. And one thing we learned is that instead of the typical strike coverage where it will say, how long can the union hold out? People are going to start crossing the line the next day, or people are not going to be able to hold out. They couldn’t say that because we weren’t telling ’em when or where we were going to strike, and they didn’t have their normal playbook. So all of a sudden they had to report on the issues that the workers were fighting for. And so we took control of the narrative, we took control of the schedule, we took control of the situation, and that’s what we as working people can do if we understand that this is all of our fight. But during that time, all these reporters were covering this and they were like, wow, this is amazing. And the one person who asked the question, yeah, but how are you fucking going to really do this was Hamilton Nolan.
So when he said, I’d like to write a book and I’d like to follow you around for a year, I was like, I don’t know. I is. This guy’s going to see right through me. And you did follow me for the worst year of my life. Thanks very much for doing that. But no, I mean, this is a really important book, and if all you do is read the intro and the last chapter, you’re going to know how to fight this next administration and how to take this on. But if you also want to hear some really inspiring stories about people who are trying to make this work and people who have won fights against all odds, read this book. And then the last thing I’ll just say is that laws do not give us power. We have power when we decide to come together and use it. Yes.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Let’s give it up for Sarah Nelson and Hamilton, Nolan, yo
Sara Nelson:
And
Hamilton Nolan:
Max Alvarez.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right, man. I’m like, I’m crying, I’m cheering. I’m like, there’s a roller coaster here. So we want to open this up to questions. We know you all have questions for Hamilton, please, yeah, flag analysis down so we can get your questions and everyone can hear ’em also. Yeah, the recorder is going. We will have the audio for this published at the Real News. So if you’d prefer to ask a question but not on recording, Hamilton and I will be available afterwards.
Analysis:
And there’s so much to get into, so much thank you for such a rich discussion that we could talk for hours. Guess what, we don’t have ours. So we want to keep our questions and comments relatively brief and truncated so that we can get a few in. And we have one question here, and then we’re going to take a couple more hands.
Audience Member 1:
And I apologize because usually I don’t do this and I talk shit about people who do. But I’ve got three questions and you don’t have to take, I’m going to ask them, but you don’t have to take any of them. We can take one. So there are not red states and blue states, but there are red counties and blue counties. How do you do the organizing in those red counties? Two is that we’ve had a number of folk like Susan, but also high powered folk like feign at UAW, who’ve actually taken a different approach to labor. Could you talk about their approach to organizing? And then there are three different identities that we’re trying to navigate as workers. So one is our identities as consumers, the other is our gender identity. And then finally, and I think it’s most important actually, is our racial identity because all those things are related to organizing and how we think about ourselves as workers. How do you think about how our successful unions navigating those identity dynamics? Again, you don’t have to take any of them, but the questions are still important.
Hamilton Nolan:
I try to give a sort of broad answer that maybe touches on most of them at least. I think the thing about red states and blue states and red counties and blue counties goes to the heart of why this stuff is so important, particularly in this time that we’re in, where that is held up as such a strong divide in this country. And every election gets stronger. The two sides of the media, the two sides of politics, the two sides of everything. And people think that that is an unbridgeable gap, that this country is going down a road that we’re going down that is actually getting worse and worse, and the divide is getting starker and starker between red and blue. And when, to me, the one thing that can bridge that gap and that can close that gap and erase the distinction between red and blue is the labor movement.
Because I’ve been all over the country, I’ve been in red states and blue states and red counties and blue counties, and working people have common interests. And the fact that the labor movement is weak and that people don’t have access to unions is why they don’t think about that. And they don’t think in those terms. They think in terms of Fox News and CNN and M-S-N-B-C, and that’s not the real story, and that’s not the real story of politics is not Democrats and Republicans. It is working people building their power. And so I think the labor movement gets more important, the starker that red and blue divide gets, because it is the one thing that can bridge that gap and bring working people together. I always think of when the Warrior met coal strike was going on in Alabama, which was the longest strike in America, they had a big rally in Brookwood, Alabama, way out in country Alabama.
Sarah Nelson was there, a bunch of labor leaders were there, and thousands of united mine workers were there. This is country ass Alabama, and it was the most integrated event that I have ever been to in my life. I grew up in the south. I’ve never been to an event that integrated apart from maybe a football game. And this was everybody in that community there. And they were all talking about the evil private equity firm that was stepping on the necks of the workers. And I guarantee that most of those people were probably Trump voters. Oh, no,
Sara Nelson:
I’m sorry. I went to the first week of that strike, and at that first rally, people were real skeptical about the union. They were pissed, so they were out on strike, but they were not sure that they liked their union. And it was not an integrated event. The black workers were over here, the white workers were over here. They were all staying about as far as they could from the union stage where we were having this rally. And they were not talking about who the villain was either. They were just mad. And so after being on strike for six months, I’ll hand it back to Hamilton because that’s what we have to recognize too, is that when we’re out on the picket line and we are defining our issues together, suddenly what our differences are don’t matter as much anymore because we’re all human beings fighting for the same thing.
And you suddenly start to see people differently and you start to hear their stories too. You start to understand those stories better, so you start to understand why the strike matters to them, and then you start to feel connected to why you’re not just fighting for yourself, but you’re fighting for the person next to you too. And so this is where we have the opportunity to break through these gender identities and race identities, and not to wash them away, but to celebrate them and find the strength in that. Because I’m telling you, max, I’m going to fight fucking harder because I heard your story about your dad. That’s what this is about.
Maximillian Alvarez:
There you go. I mean, yeah, give it up and to pile on here, I mean, I can’t stress enough that this is the conclusion that you come to doing the work that we do at the Real News, right? I mean, you hear these stories week in, week out. You can’t help but be affected by them, and you can’t help but feel a duty to not give up on people and to help them fight the fight that needs to be had so that this kind of shit doesn’t happen on the regular. And this is by way of addressing a question about red counties, blue counties, and where the rural urban divide really kind of comes into that. Because like Hamilton has for this book, I mean, we are out there not just interviewing union workers in dense urban areas. We are out there reporting on family farmers in Wisconsin who are the last few hanging on as big agriculture has taken over the entire rural landscape and wipe generations of knowledge, of pride, of land ownership off the board and swallowed it up into the gaping maw of corporate America.
It’s still there. It just looks a little different. And the names on the sides of the trucks are different in rural America, but the same monster is destroying the fabric of our society, whether you live in a red county or a blue county, I see it all the time, not just in the conditions that workers are living under the declining quality of life and access to basic public services and higher cost of living, yada, yada, yada. But I’ve been in deep red Trump country, places like East Palestinian, Ohio, sitting on the stoops of deep red Trump voting Republicans who will say to me, he is like, yeah, look, I don’t care that you’re a socialist weirdo from Baltimore, but because you’ve been there talking about our stories, you’ve been interviewing us, you’ve heard what we’re going through and you keep showing up. And then we got unions to show up and we got environmental justice groups to show up.
We got residents from other sacrifice zones or people living near other rail lines who didn’t want to happen to their communities. What happened to East Palestine? And it was like when, to Sarah’s point, the Hamilton’s point when we’re all there standing in a room talking about the shit that is impacting all of us and how we are all effectively fighting off different tentacles of the same corporate monsters and Wall Street vampires and bought off like corrupt government systems and bureaucrats. I mean, we realized very quickly how much all the shit that they used to divide us and how it all comes down to that human connection and sharing stories that melts that shit away like that. And then when you work in common struggle to address those things, you build the working class consciousness and movement that everyone keeps talking about. There’s some great recipe.
What’s the messaging that we got to get to get a working class movement? There’s no fucking message. Just go and be there for each other, fight for one another, struggle together. See one another as human beings who deserve better than this and who are in fact the solution that we are waiting for all of us, right? You do that, you learn more about each other. You become less scary to your coworkers who look different from you, right? I mean, you’re forced to stand next to a burn barrel and talk stories about your kids in school and you realize that they’re friends and you deal with a lot of the same shit. You build solidarity through struggle, not through carefully curated messaging that I think you got to touch grass to do that. You got to talk to people to do that. You can’t just do that all online.
You can’t do it in your own little reality bubbles. We’re all living in those reality bubbles. So whatever we do, it has to help people break out of them because our social worlds have gotten so much smaller over the past 50, 60, 70 years, and that went into hyperdrive with Covid. More people went underground or socially distanced and more of their connection to the outside world was being mediated by a screen. And so we’re seeing people sharing the same physical plane, but they’re not living on the same plane of reality. And that is a big reason why Grifters like Trump and the GOP are so able to convince working people that their neighbors are their enemy. You break that through struggle. You break that through being there. You break that through being the face behind the headline and behind the kind of scary archetypes that people are fearful of. Sorry, that was a long answer.
Analysis:
I’m watching our time, so let me just take, I know we had a couple hands, I just wanted to see what the hands were in the room. So one, two. So I’m going to come here and then I’m going to move right that way.
Audience Member 2:
Thanks for this inspiring discussion. Something I’ve been thinking about a lot, which is kind of related to what we’re talking about is that we’re in a moment of record distrust with the government and with media and the Trump administration has made clear their plan to demolish what’s left of our social safety net. And so I’m spending a lot of time thinking about what the next steps are going to be. It was a poll that found that people, people’s leading source of election news is other people, they’re not going, people are avoiding the news, they’re not trusting the news, they’re going to social media. So you’ve talked about the of organizing and unionizing and building solidarity. What I want you to dig into more is how can we use that to actually reach people and educate people and build trust and actually get information out to people who need it to hear it.
Hamilton Nolan:
I don’t know if you figured that out. Let me know because journalism is, that’s what journalism tries to do. That’s what journalism is. That’s what Max does every day. That’s what I do every day. And you have a career in journalism and you’re constantly thinking about the very question, well, we got all these great super important stories. How do we make everybody listen to ’em? How do we make people care about this? How do we make people read this? How do you make people see this? The only answer I know I could make up an answer, the only answer I know is just keep doing the work. Just keep doing the work. Just keep writing the stories. Just keep recording the interviews. Just keep publishing the podcast. Just keep putting it out, keep putting it out. And over years it will come to people. And I’ve been in a million, just like Max has panel discussions and meetings and blah blah where people are like, what’s the magical solution to make these story make everybody learn about the Starbucks union and blah blah?
You just got to keep telling the stories and telling the stories and telling the stories and write this story and write this book and write the next book and do this podcast and do the next podcast and keep talking. And for us, and that goes for everybody. If you think this stuff is important, tell somebody else. Talk to somebody else. You write the story, you do the story you tell the people. This spreads by word of mouth, it spreads through the media, spreads through independent media. There’s not a magical solution. But the thing we have going for us is that this shit actually is important and it actually is dramatic and actually is a good story and actually is something that people want to know about and need to know about. And that spreads through the power of itself.
Analysis:
See, we’re going to take two more right here and here.
Audience Member 3:
Alright, I’m going to steal 30 seconds for a quick relevant announcement. I work with the Baltimore Amazon Workers Support Network and organizing campaigns are one on the inside. Often what a support committee can do is kind of minimal, so we chip away as best we can. But there’s one thing that I want to let you guys know about tonight. We’re trying to find people who might be salts at Amazon. Assault is a person who takes the job in order to help with organizing a union. We have some friends on the inside, especially down at Sparrow’s Point. So if anybody here is interested in the work of our committee or might be assault or might know somebody who’s looking for a job or labor sympathetic or whatever, we’re trying to find people to get our friends on the inside some support. And I have one quick question and I’ll get right to it.
It’s pertinent to Amazon. To Amazon. And what about your title? I’m surprised that you guys have never gotten around to talking about why that title The hammer. Yeah, we do have a lot of different identities to work with, but some of us believe that working people should be at the heart of the matter and there’s a reason for that. The potential power of working people. Amazon, for example, fits into the whole discussion about what they call choke points, which is mainly a transportation warehousing. Amazon calls ’em fulfillment centers. Were just off the longshoreman strike. There was the railroad workers. The postal service, it seems to me has been just a scratch away from something breaking there. Old thirties song that the farmer is the man that feeds them all, but the transportation workers are the people who move it all. So that’s one kind of pressure point. I’d like to get you on that topic of choke points or any other pressure points.
Hamilton Nolan:
Yeah, thank you. First of all, it’s salting Amazon, a noble thing to do with your life. I hope somebody here does that. And then when you finish, you call me a max and we’ll write a story about it. So thank you for that announcement. The book is called The Hammer because a union is a tool, a union is a tool that you wield to express your own power that you already have. When you give people the means to have a union, you’re not telling ’em what to do. I’m not telling you what position you should have. I’m not telling you what you should ask for. I’m not telling you what you want, what you should fight for. It’s giving people the means to exercise their own power. And all workers have labor power inherently. We all have power as workers because we can all not work. That’s the heart of our labor power. But the only way to exercise that power is to have the union. You got to have the hammer to do the work. And so the labor movement is a hammer to me. It’s a tool that we need to give everybody to exercise their own power.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I think there’s a really, that dovetails with how I was going to respond to your question, right? Because I think I want to get to the choke points point in a second. But I think one of the pitfalls there, which you obviously know about, you guys are strategizing about this, but I’m more talking about the average person who’s cheering this on but doesn’t know a lot about how it works. I think that people who don’t know how organizing works and don’t talk about it, but they see it and they cheer it on and they see the power that we all see in unions in the labor movement, but again, have less first person contact with the realities of that, it becomes more of a strategy that forsakes the human reality that everyone needs to, we need to organize everyone everywhere. I mean there’s a moral political and in fact a self-fulfilling need to have that mentality that can be forsaken if we only focus on the most strategic points and people can then lower in their head the priority of someone organizing it.
Tudor’s biscuit world, obviously if we’re trying to take down capitalism, yeah, the choke points are more important for the amount of damage we can do. But in terms of the people harnessing the power that has been left slumbering inside of us or wasted away for our employers, the power that we actually have to make the world and to remake the world again into something better. I mean, that’s the power that you see in the eyes of people who take that fateful step in their workplaces to say, we deserve better than this and we’re going to be the ones to do something about it. We are going to change our circumstances and not just be, as Kurt Vonnegut would say, the listless play things of enormous forces. We take that step into our own power. And I see every day Hamilton sees, Sarah sees, you guys see in Amazon, when people start doing that shit themselves and they start working together, they see in fact the power that they always had.
But that if so many of us feel powerless, it’s because we’ve never experienced that. Maybe we’ve never exercised it. Maybe we’ve been, I didn’t know about unionization when I was a warehouse worker. I thought you either quit and find another job or you stay and take it. So that step, getting people to take that step into believing that they have power and that they do have power, like every working person, everyone needs to feel that be part of it. We need to fan those flames anywhere and everywhere they are because that is the larger necessity for building a grassroots working class movement of movements. People like leading the charge. That’s how we put the working class at the center. Now to quickly return to your question about choke points, again, I think there is such a huge argument for why salting at Amazon is such a noble and necessary calling right now.
And it’s what we were talking to workers about in Bessemer, Alabama when they were trying to unionize on Staten Island when they were unionizing is that look at Amazon, look at them taking everything over. I watch who watches football. Has anyone seen how much Amazon’s got its tentacles into the NFL? I mean, this is the second largest private employer in the country. This is one of the biggest international behemoths that’s only getting bigger and bigger and bigger owned by one of the most wealthy people in the history of the world. And we as working people have fucking no say over what they do. They just keep encroaching more and more into our lives. And so it was a band of workers in Bessemer, Alabama, hollowed out de-industrialized majority black, like twice the national poverty rate, Bessemer, Alabama, who were leading this charge to bring Amazon to the table and say, we are going to have a say in what you do. That’s why this is fucking important. It’s a testament to the very thesis of Hamilton’s book. You want to wield that hammer against Jeb Bezos, go salted Amazon, build that power. And then my larger point is that we just need to build it anywhere and everywhere that we can.
Analysis:
Let’s take this last question.
Audience Member 4:
Good evening. And I want to thank you first for the message and I’m seeking tools because we already have a union, but we have the public sector and the private sector. And because of the Janus rule, you have people that work with us that don’t pay the union dues. So I’m looking for tools to fight that, to fight the people that don’t want to pay into the union. But because we are union representatives, we still have to represent them. And I don’t mind representing everybody, but we can’t fight in the public sector. Does that make any sense?
Hamilton Nolan:
Yeah.
Audience Member 4:
And I probably wouldn’t be here tonight if it wasn’t for my coworker here who’s very young and so excited about coming here tonight because she wants to be in the neighbor movement, but we don’t have any tools to fight with. So we here to find tools.
Hamilton Nolan:
Yeah, it’s a great question. And Janice, what you mentioned is the Supreme Court ruling that made the whole public sector right to work. Meaning that if you have a union or workplace, you can’t force anybody to pay union dues. So you get a situation where you can have a union and people can choose not to pay dues and they become what we call free riders and they’re basically, they get the union contract and they don’t pay their fair share and it can eat away the power of the union. And that’s what you’re experiencing and what people like you in public sector unions all over the country experience. I think one aspect is, one thing you see is that people who go through an organizing campaign and they go through that struggle to win the union, they tend to be really jazzed up and fired up about the power of the union.
But sometimes when there’s a union that’s been in a workplace for a long time and people just get hired into it, they kind of take it for granted. They take that contract for granted. They don’t really appreciate the struggle that went into building that and winning that and maintaining that. The work that people like you got to do just to maintain the power of that union. And so it can become hard to inspire people. And what I saw reporting in my book and reporting all over the place is that unions in right to work states, unions that are successful in right to work situations. They just do a shit load of internal organizing all the time. Meaning that they are constantly talking to the members of that union about what the union is doing, why it’s important, why you need to come to this meeting, what the meeting’s about, what issues are facing us, what issues is the union fighting on.
Everything. You have to constantly be talking and internally organizing the people in that workplace. There’s a chapter in my book about the culinary union, Las Vegas, which is a private sector union, but it’s in a right to work state. Nevada’s a right to work state, and yet this union has managed to successfully organize the entire casino industry in Nevada, the entire Vegas strip. They’re one of the most powerful unions in Nevada. And how do they do it even though it’s right to work and people could choose not to pay dues. They do it by constantly, constantly, constantly talking to all the members in that union. They got lists, they’re coming to your apartment and knocking on your door, hi, I’m here from the union, I’m here. We’re having a citywide meeting four times a year. We’re getting everybody together in the union. We’re talking about our issues. So it’s just work, work, work, work, work. Constant, constant talking to people. And I don’t think there are any shortcuts to that process. And it can be a real pain in the ass as you know if you’re doing that work is hard. But just talking to people about what the union is, what is it doing, why it’s important, and why they need to pay those dues and what they’re getting for those dues is the path that I see work in unions that make that work. Powerful,
Powerful.
Analysis:
I was trying to figure out what word I wanted to choose, but your words are the right coda for this discussion that has been very, very necessary. Loved all the questions they were necessary questions and the beginning, not the end of a conversation this evening, but certainly the beginning. Some more convos and organized. I need you all to give up a final red Emmas round of applause for Max Alvarez and Hamilton Nolan.
Hamilton Nolan:
Thank you Red Emma’s. Thank you, Max Alvarez.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Some 15,200 Chinese millionaires were expected to relocate in 2024, according to Henley & Partners.
After 11 weeks on strike, behavioral health workers at Kaiser Permanente’s Southern California offices will head back to the bargaining table on Jan. 9. 2,400 members of the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) have been manning picket lines across Southern California since Oct. 21, 2024. At the heart of their struggle is a fight to push California’s largest healthcare provider to bring Southern California workers’ pay, pensions, and working conditions up to the level of their Northern California counterparts, and to solve the chronic understaffing crisis that has plagued Kaiser SoCal mental health clinics for years.
The quality of patient care in Kaiser’s Southern California system has dropped precipitously for over a decade, long before the start of the strike. These conditions have only worsened since workers walked off the job last October. Now, as the strike enters its 11th week, workers and patients are increasingly concerned that if Kaiser continues to drag their feet at the bargaining table, behavioral health care for the nearly 5 million enrollees in Southern California will remain interrupted, with potentially devastating consequences. Workers and patients alike say that an improved contract will drastically improve the quality of mental health care that enrollees receive.
For patients seeking behavioral health care within the Kaiser system, the process is stressful, even retraumatizing. Even before the strike began, patients and behavioral health workers complained that Kaiser continued to impose an illegal “non-quantitative treatment limitation,” or one-appointment-at-a-time rule, which disallows patients from scheduling multiple mental health appointments at the same time. As a result, some patients are forced to wait weeks or even months between mental health appointments, effectively preventing them from accessing regular behavioral health care.
For some patients, these extended wait times can mean the difference between life and death. Patients like Ezekiel Koontz have found the process of securing regular therapy appointments to be “arduous,” even with their particularly emergent case. Koontz, who survived multiple suicide attempts, described being subjected to a revolving door of therapists and waiting six weeks or more for a therapy appointment. “Kaiser constantly, kind of… throws you around and around [and] for me, in my case, I was constantly waiting for months and months between appointments while I was suicidal,” Koontz said.
“It’s very rare that a patient ends up with a therapist at Kaiser that sees them regularly and for the duration of time that they need them,” said Jeremy Simpkin, a case manager who has been with Kaiser for five years. “For the most part, it is a revolving door.” He says certain things have improved over time, but clarified that other processes like the external referral system, which allows patients to access behavioral health care that Kaiser doesn’t provide (programs like dialectical behavior therapy, for example), are often byzantine and demoralizing for patients who are forced to navigate them.
A mountain of complaints from behavioral health providers about the deteriorating conditions inside Kaiser’s behavioral health clinics and patient experiences like Koontz’s led the NUHW to file a complaint with the DMHC in 2018. A lengthy investigation by the DMHC found that Kaiser had broken state law numerous times, finding that, “[w]hile the [Kaiser Health] Plan has worked to address [maintenance of adequate provider networks and effective and functional quality assurance programs], despite multiple enforcement actions, and comprehensive corrective action plans, the Plan’s shortfalls have continued and have impacted the Plan’s ability to ensure adequate and timely access to behavioral health services to its enrollees.” In 2023, the DMHC issued a $50 million fine against the plan (the largest in state history), and required that Kaiser enter into a settlement with the DMHC to correct the issues that had plagued employees and patients for over a decade.
The union maintains that, despite the detailed corrective actions laid out in the 2023 settlement, Kaiser has continued to fall short of the settlement’s objectives. Patients have continued to suffer long appointment wait times, high provider turnover, and lack of access to emergent mental health programs that would improve their chances of recovery. Koontz blamed their frustration with the process on Kaiser itself, saying, “I keep having very well meaning people [therapists] offer me everything because they really do want to see the best for their patients… Kaiser is not a human. Kaiser is a company that wants your money. And so while the people are genuinely trying to do what they can for, you know, people like me, who, again, nearly died multiple times, it doesn’t seem like anyone’s really capable of that, of actually making good on many of the promises that they genuinely want to keep.”
“I keep having very well meaning people [therapists] offer me everything because they really do want to see the best for their patients… Kaiser is not a human. Kaiser is a company that wants your money.
These issues have only worsened since the strike began, despite Kaiser’s promises that there were comprehensive contingency plans in place. The union alleges in a new complaint filed with the DMHC that, since the start of the SoCal strike, Kaiser has routinely failed to “provide timely and appropriate individual treatment” for enrollees, among other issues. According to the complaint, filed Dec. 20, 2024, “Kaiser’s practices constitute violations of multiple California laws… Patients who do not receive timely and appropriate [Substance Use Disorder] care are more likely to experience relapses and other harms, including death. NUHW has confirmed relapses among Kaiser’s Southern California enrollee[s] since October 21, 2024.”
A new, similar complaint filed Jan. 4 with the California Department of Health Care Services also alleges that Kaiser “failed to provide required mental health services for parents and families at Fontana Medical Center NICU and PICU, leaving patients at risk of not receiving critical care.” According to the union, Kaiser has repeatedly understaffed the two critical care units since workers began their strike last October, which has affected dozens of patients.
For Koontz, the options that Kaiser has offered them while workers are on strike have been inadequate for their needs. Kaiser has offered Koontz and other patients the option of seeing a new therapist, but it’s unclear if they will be able to return to sessions with their regular providers after the strike is over. Additionally, the union alleges in their new complaint that, in some cases, temporary staff covering caseloads in Kaiser’s addiction medicine clinics during the strike are only working in two-week rotations, placing undue stress on the patients who are in need of their services.
The therapeutic relationship in behavioral therapy is often the most important aspect in determining how successful a patient is in reaching their therapeutic goals. In short, patients must be able to stick with a therapist long enough to build a relationship of trust and open communication. The revolving door, as some call it, doesn’t allow for that relationship to be built. “In my experience, how would you expect to have a meaningful connection with somebody who you know is only there because Kaiser doesn’t want to pay the person you’re normally there with?” Koontz said. “Are you going to realistically have a connection with somebody who you know is going to vanish?”
“What they’re offering is stabilization, not care,” Koontz continued. “They’re trying to make sure we don’t off ourselves in between, because that looks really bad for their bottom line. You know, people can’t pay when they’re dead.”
Striking workers worry about the quality of care that their patients are receiving while they walk the picket lines. “There’s a lot of major worries for the patients, and that was from the very beginning. Knowing that even though Kaiser is saying, ‘We’ll provide comprehensive care and people will get therapy while you’re out,’ we know that that’s not happening,” Simpkin said. Simpkin added that while the striking providers feel anxiety and concern for their patients while out on strike, they know that this new contract will have an immediate positive effect on their patients. “We wholeheartedly believe that what we’re striking for will immediately and directly improve the [sic] patient care,” he said.
Striking Kaiser workers believed that many of these long-standing problems could be addressed at the bargaining table, and negotiations began in late July 2024. When negotiations failed to produce a new agreement before their previous contract expired at the end of September, workers began preparing for a strike and walked off the job in late October. There have been no negotiations since the first week of the strike. In December, Kaiser finally allowed a bargaining date to be scheduled for Jan. 9 after state lawmakers weighed in and urged the health plan to get back to the table.
The union has prioritized solutions in their proposals that have already been proven to have a positive impact on patient outcomes in the wake of the Northern California strike in 2022, where behavioral health workers walked off the job for 10 weeks in order to secure a contract that would improve working conditions for themselves and, by extension, their patients.
In a Dec. 23, 2024, press conference by the union, NUHW President Emeritus Sal Rosselli made a statement underscoring this fact, saying, “There is no reason for Kaiser to be fighting us at the bargaining table, because what we’re proposing isn’t anything that the vast majority of Kaiser employees [don’t] already have. What we’re proposing are prerequisites for Kaiser to live up to the [2023] settlement agreement: end the chronic understaffing of its mental health clinics and provide behavioral health care that meets state standards and the needs of its patients.”
Among the proposals that NUHW is bringing to the table are pay parity with their Northern California counterparts, restoration of pensions for newer Southern California employees, and more time to work on patient care duties outside of face-to-face appointments. Improved working conditions, pay, and benefits would certainly make the job more competitive in an already competitive behavioral health care market, meaning that Kaiser can maintain safe staffing levels and reduce turnover. This, in turn, translates directly into better patient outcomes for Kaiser’s enrollees.
For workers like Simpkin, who began his Kaiser career working in Northern California, there’s no reason for Kaiser to refuse the terms laid out by the union. He says that the NorCal contract already drastically changed the lives of the workers and their patients for the better. “I saw it happen in Northern California,” he said. “It doesn’t fix all of the problems. There’s still a lot of work to do. But as soon as we started implementing those contract changes in Northern California, the working conditions improved, the patient care [and] conditions improved. People’s morale improved. They were able to hire more people. People stayed in their jobs. So I know that it will work, because I’ve seen it.”
“As soon as we started implementing those contract changes in Northern California, the working conditions improved, the patient care [and] conditions improved. … I know that it will work, because I’ve seen it.”
Still, the delayed bargaining schedule has signaled to some workers that Kaiser remains unwilling to work with the union to come to an agreement, before more of their patients fall through the cracks. “If something was really important to you and you wanted to resolve it right away, you wouldn’t wait, you know?” said Jade Rosado, a striking licensed clinical social worker in Southeast LA County. “So that’s what that tells me, that was my initial reaction, like, oh, they’re really not serious.”
From her place on the picket line, Rosado has received positive feedback from patients and community members alike. Despite their frustrations, the focus remains on Kaiser’s inaction in maintaining a continuity of care that meets patient needs. “The feedback that we’ve gotten, even from the community when we’ve been on the picket line, it’s been supportive,” Rosado said. “I’m sure that there are people that are frustrated too—patients that are frustrated that are not getting the care that they need. So while they support us, they’re also frustrated.”
As Rosselli told reporters at NUHW’s Dec. 23 press conference, “Instead of working with its behavioral health professionals to improve care, Kaiser is trying to cement their second-class status at the expense of its nearly 5 million patients in Southern California.” Despite these scheduling setbacks, the union is ready to get back to the bargaining table on Jan. 9 and work to come to an agreement. In the meantime, spirits are still high on the picket line, with workers hunkered down for the long haul. Rosado credits the solidarity she shares with her fellow union members as having a galvanizing effect. “Even though this is hard, like, we’re gonna get through it,” she said. “We’re gonna be okay. We have each other, and we’re supporting each other, and we got this.”
If I did kill myself, what would Kaiser think? They wouldn’t blink. I’m just a random guy, another number that just vanishes off their list.
As Kaiser continues to cancel appointments and force patients through a confusing external referral process, patients’ ongoing care remains in limbo. For Koontz, they hope that Kaiser will come to the table ready to come to a solution, but they worry that further delays in negotiations will create an untenable situation for their own recovery, and are skeptical that Kaiser even cares in the first place. “But also realistically, though, I’m just truly being completely honest, if I did kill myself, what would Kaiser think? They wouldn’t blink. I’m just a random guy, another number that just vanishes off their list. Who cares? It is a very impersonal system.”
The Real News has reached out to Kaiser for comment about these patient concerns, and will update the story when they respond.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has flamed Elon Musk and the right over his support of H-1B visas, saying that the program in its current form is another tool for corporations to exploit workers and line billionaires’ pockets with the fruits of the abuse. “Elon Musk is wrong,” Sanders said on social media on Thursday. “The main function of the H-1B visa program is not to hire ‘the best and…
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This story originally appeared in Pittsburgh Union Progress on Dec. 19, 2024. It is shared here with permission.
They began arriving shortly before noon on a frigid day last week, each one stepping into the warmth of a Darlington, Pennsylvania, office and the embraces of friends. In all, the gathering included more than a dozen people, and they quickly got busy, unloading boxes of donated hams, produce and canned goods, and setting up a makeshift food bank for their financially strapped neighbors, some of whom were already showing up. One member of the group passed around a clipboard and a pen so those waiting for food could write down their names.
You’d think it was a church group bringing their community a bit of holiday cheer until you wandered through the room and heard the conversations. Three people standing around a small table listened while one man described the nosebleeds that continue to haunt his family. In fact, he said, he’d had a real gusher the night before — it was so bad he’d had to wash the blood out of his beard. He showed pictures of blood pouring from his daughter’s nose.
Such photographs may be too gruesome to display in most places, but not here. Pictures are proof. Later, one woman showed photographs of deep, ugly ulcers on her arms and hands. Then she raised her sleeve to show the scars, which she tries to hide with makeup. She’s kept a detailed diary of everything that’s happened to her since the night of Feb. 3, 2023.
That’s when a Norfolk Southern freight train ran off the tracks 6 miles from away, in East Palestine, Ohio. Broken rail cars filled with toxic chemicals burned all that night and into the next day. Two days after the crash, officials announced some of the cars in the tangled pile still contained their toxic loads, and those cars were heating up. They could explode, officials said, so the next day they drained the chemicals into a ditch and set them on fire. (The National Transportation Safety Board later reported that the cars in question were, in fact, cooling down.)
The resulting pillar of black smoke looked like a special effect in a disaster movie. You’ll hear people in East Palestine describe it with one word: evil. Certainly it shocked even those who set the fire. You wonder what went through their minds as they watched the plume rise and then flatten as it hit an inversion and spread like an airborne oil spill. Did the hair on their necks stand on end? What thoughts entered the minds of Norfolk Southern executives sitting safely in their offices and homes in distant cities and, we assume, watching the video images on TV? What plans were they making? Within a few days, they had their trains running through town again. Business as usual.
Those passing out hams and canned food in Darlington last week saw the cloud and figured their community had been poisoned. Nearly two years later, they’re still angry about it. Their anger builds when they hear stories of sickness.
And there are plenty of those. People describe rashes and sore throats, sinus infections, heart ailments, cancer, headaches, hair loss, depression, brain fog. One Pennsylvania resident says she recently lost her sense of time while driving. She arrived at her destination and wondered, “How did I get here?”
Nadine Luci has a story. Her health went haywire the day of the big burnoff. She was unlucky. Nadine lives in East Rochester, Pennsylvania, which is 16 miles from the derailment site, but on the day officials burned all those toxic chemicals she happened to be shopping in an area along Route 51 that is within a few miles of East Palestine. She went to Aldi, Walmart and a place called Tractor Supply Co., where she bought dog food. At one point, she looked through her windshield and saw that giant cloud of black smoke.
Nadine didn’t think much about it. She certainly didn’t connect the smoke to the derailment. She wasn’t following events in East Palestine very closely — TV news is just background noise to her, she says. She figured an 18-wheeler had overturned and caught fire farther west on Route 51. Big trucks roar along that road all the time.
So Nadine finished her errands and, before heading home, pulled into the drive-thru at a KFC restaurant to pick up dinner. While waiting in her car, she noticed a burning sensation on her lips. That was weird, she thought. Soon she felt the same irritation in her tongue, eyes and skin. At the drive-thru window, she asked for a cup of ice, which she rubbed on her lips as she drove home.
Back at her place in East Rochester, things got worse. Nadine’s mouth and throat felt like they were on fire. She developed a pounding headache. Her chest tightened, she had difficulty breathing. Stranger still was this: inside her body, she felt ice cold. It freaked her out.
“What’s happening?” she wondered. She called her brother Anthony in Maine. Anthony keeps an eye on the news; he knew what was happening in East Palestine. He sent her a link to a video of the chemical burnoff and suggested it had something to do with her symptoms.
Nadine saw the video images of the fire and the roiling black cloud and thought, “Oh, my God!”
“You better get to the hospital,” Anthony told her.
The continuing health problems rising out of the East Palestine area raise a lot of questions. To a layperson, some of the issues make sense — the burning sensation in the throat, for example, and the rashes. After all, chemicals get into your airways; they settle on your skin. Lots of people have experienced irritation from solvents they use at home and work; they know how this works. But how can a toxic exposure cause gastrointestinal issues? Or brain fog? Or depression? Those who experience these things say friends and family members, and sometimes even doctors, tell them the problem is psychological. “You’re stressed out, see a therapist,” they’re told.
And stress can certainly play a role, but Texas physician Claudia Miller suggests there’s something more going on. A professor emeritus at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, Miller has spent decades studying the effects of toxic exposure. She first appeared to East Palestine-area residents months ago, during a Zoom meeting organized by activists concerned about the health of those affected by the derailment.
In his book “They’re Poisoning Us! From the Gulf War to the Gulf of Mexico — An Investigative Report,” author Arnold Mann describes Miller as “one of the most prominent voices in the field of environmental medicine.” Before becoming a physician specializing in allergy and immunology, she worked as an industrial hygienist for the United Steelworkers. There, in the early 1970s, she helped set standards for workers exposed to emissions in coke ovens, electronics assembly plants and lead smelters.
Miller says toxic agents unleashed by the derailment and subsequent fires altered certain immune cells in the bodies of many who were exposed. Those cells, called “mast cells,” are dispersed throughout the body, which is why residents report such a wide range of symptoms, from skin sores to bloody noses to reproductive and gastrointestinal issues.
Researchers are just beginning to understand how all of this works. In fact, it was only three years ago, in 2021, that Miller and a few of her colleagues published a paper exploring the interaction between toxic substances and mast cells. Most local physicians simply don’t yet know about it.
This lack of knowledge is a problem that needs to be resolved if patients are to be properly diagnosed and treated, Miller said. She notes that Peter Spencer, a professor of neurotoxicology at Oregon Health Sciences University, recently sent a letter to more than two dozen academic colleagues from across the U.S., urging them to incorporate toxicant-induced loss of tolerance, or TILT, into their toxicology programs. Spencer is considered a pioneering neurotoxicologist, so his recommendation could carry some weight.
So, what are mast cells?
Miller calls them the “first responders” of the body’s immune system. The Cleveland Clinic website describes them as “your body’s alarm system.” They’re white blood cells — you’re probably already familiar with these — but instead of residing in the bloodstream, they live in tissue throughout the body. You’ll find mast cells in the skin, lungs, brain, heart, the respiratory tract. Like other white blood cells, they protect your body from foreign substances such as viruses, bacteria, parasites and toxic substances — but not by destroying the invader.
Instead, when mast cells sense a threat, they release chemicals that open blood vessels and bring other immune cells into an affected area. Activated mast cells create mucus and cause contractions in muscles in the airways and gastrointestinal tract — all in an effort to push out harmful substances.
People experience activated mast cells in many ways — often as swollen itchy skin, a runny nose, a cough or sneeze. Sometimes even vomiting or diarrhea.
Problems arise if mast cells are altered to the point where they activate when they normally wouldn’t or shouldn’t. Chemical exposure can cause this alteration, Miller says, resulting in a disease process toxicant-induced loss of tolerance. That process may be well underway in East Palestine, Miller said.
Nadine needed to get to an emergency room but felt she was in no condition to get behind the wheel of a car, so she called her friend Cindy, who drove her to a health care facility in Cranberry, Pennsylvania. A doctor listened to Nadine describe her symptoms, then ordered an X-ray of Nadine’s lungs and a CAT scan to check her brain. Both revealed nothing out of the ordinary.
“All I had was high blood pressure,” Nadine recalls. “They thought I was crazy.”
Nadine returned home with no answers. The symptoms persisted. She took acetaminophen tablets and bought eye drops at a health store in hopes they would alleviate the dryness in her eyes. A week or so after the burnoff, she visited her primary care physician. By then, ulcers had developed in Nadine’s eyelids. and blood sometimes dripped from her nose. She saw an otolaryngology specialist, who used a scope to examine her throat. She remembers him telling her, “It looks like a bomb when off in there.” Nadine saw the image and saw what she describes as “scale.”
Doctors prescribed steroids and a medicinal gargle. She ate soft foods such as soups, scrambled eggs and mashed potatoes because they caused less irritation to her mouth and throat. Her tongue bled. She sucked lozenges and chewed gum to relieve the dryness in her mouth.
Her physician had recommended she see a toxicologist in Pittsburgh. It took her forever to get an appointment, she says, but during a visit in June the toxicologist recommended Nadine leave the area for a month. Nadine acted quickly. She scheduled a visit to a remote section of northern Maine where her brother lives. Of course, she’d be joined by her 6-year-old pit bull terrier, Nina, a rescue dog.
It takes 15 hours to drive to her brother’s house. Nadine didn’t think she could do it alone, so she bought a plane ticket for a friend from Maine, who flew to Pittsburgh to accompany her.
Once she was in the Pine Tree State and breathing clean air, Nadine felt better. Her symptoms disappeared. “I was jumping for joy,” she says. “I could taste spaghetti. I could taste steak.” At home in East Rochester, a lingering metallic taste had tainted every meal.
After a month, it was time to return home. Nadine bought another airline ticket so a friend could fly to Maine and accompany her and Nina on the drive back to East Rochester. Within a week, her symptoms returned. Nadine was devastated.
TILT occurs in two stages, Miller said. It starts with a person’s initial exposure to toxic chemicals. This can happen in a few different ways. There can be a big exposure event — soldiers serving in the early 1990s Gulf War, for example, were exposed to toxic smoke from oil well fires. Another example is the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings in New York on 9/11, which exposed thousands of people to smoke from burning aircraft fuel and building materials — virtually everything inside the Twin Towers and the two airliners — as well as dust from the pulverized structures.
(Miller’s experience extends to both of these events. She was the first to document chemical intolerance in Gulf War veterans and testified at a 1996 congressional hearing into Gulf War syndrome, and she serves as an adviser to the World Trade Center Health Registry, which monitors the health of those who were exposed during and after the terrorist attacks.)
The East Palestine train derailment and burnoff fall into the “big event” category. Nadine could have entered this first stage during her shopping trip on the night of the burnoff.
But people can become exposed in more subtle ways at home and at work. Building materials, adhesives, cleaning supplies, molds — all exude toxic gases that, over time, have the same effect as a cataclysmic exposure.
No matter how it occurs, this initial exposure to chemicals alters the body’s mast cells, which become much more sensitive and can spring into action when they perceive even the slightest threat. This is stage two: the triggering of sensitized mast cells by chemicals that previously caused no reaction.
This is a problem because we live in a country awash in chemicals — more than 86,000 are included in a 2024 EPA inventory. Products that can cause reactions surround us in our homes, cars and workplaces. Air fresheners, nail polish, household cleaners, new carpet and furniture, tobacco smoke, exhaust — all of these can trigger sensitized mast cells.
Once triggered, those mast cells release thousands of inflammatory chemical messengers called mediators. The result: symptoms that can strike several different systems in the body. They can turn up in the stomach and intestine, throat and lungs, the skin, the brain — anywhere mast cells are found.
That’s why some people who’ve suffer from TILT experience “brain fog” — or problems thinking clearly and focusing — as well as memory difficulties, confusion and depression. Chemical intolerance can wreak havoc in the limbic system, the portion of your brain that manages anxiety, irritability, emotions, behavior, motivation and memory. “Sudden rage is another symptom,” Miller said. “Some Gulf War veterans gave away their guns because they were afraid they’d use them on their children, and this was totally out of character for them.”
Many of those veterans are still sick and have to be careful about exposing themselves to agents that “trigger” reactions. These can include foods, drugs, cleaning solutions, even barbecue smoke and barbecued meat that had absorbed triggering chemicals.
Chemically intolerant people who talk to health professionals about their symptoms are often diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and then sent to a psychiatrist, although the root cause may be chemical intolerance.
Miller and her colleagues developed a tool designed to identify and assess people who may have become intolerant to multiple chemicals. Called the Quick Environmental Exposure and Sensitivity Inventory (QEESI), it’s a questionnaire used by researchers and clinicians around the world. Completion takes about 10 minutes — it’s an easy process, and users can even create a graph of their symptoms and how they’ve changed over time. Users can share the results with their physicians.
Not everyone reacts the same to chemical exposure, Miller said. Those with a history of allergies, for example, may be more sensitive than others. That fits with Nadine. Respiratory illness has haunted her since she was a child growing up in Beaver, she said. “I’m a product of these mill towns, a product of the rust belt,” she said. “I was the allergy child, the asthma child.”
If Nadine experienced stage one of TILT when she was exposed to airborne contaminants on the day of the burnoff in East Palestine, then what could be causing stage two, the triggering of her mast cells? One answer may lie in the bright reddish glow she can see in the distance when she looks out her bedroom window at night.
The Shell Pennsylvania Petrochemicals Complex lights up this part of Beaver County. The “cracker plant,” as people call it, covers nearly 400 acres along the Ohio River. It utilizes ethane to produce millions of tons of plastic pellets. Since production began in 2022, the plant has been fined numerous times for sending pollutants into the air and water.
Nadine reported no health issues from those contaminants before the derailment. Are they now triggering her symptoms? Something in her environment certainly seems at fault, because her health improved dramatically when she left the area to live for a month in a cleaner environment in Maine.
Once a person has experienced TILT, they can be triggered by extremely low levels of exposure — amounts that are measured in parts per billion. Miller tried to get the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences or a university to use equipment capable of detecting such small levels of contaminants in the homes of a few people experiencing health problems in the East Palestine area. She got no takers, so she funded the testing herself. She asked toxicologist George Thompson to conduct the air sampling.
So far, Thompson has tested the air in three homes. He focused his efforts on rooms where people became ill. The tests revealed low levels of cresol, an organic compound that can act as a sensitizer.
Once the affected person’s home is contaminated, it’s extremely difficult to remove all the agents causing health issues. Chemicals and toxins travel through any opening — holes in walls, for example, and electrical outlets — and work their way into a home’s drywall and wood. “It’s a nook and cranny problem,” Miller said. “These are microscopic particles, and gases and vapors, at very low levels. They will follow any avenue they can.”
Miller told the story of a Texas woman suffering from TILT after a fire inside her family’s home. She was repeatedly exposed to cleaning agents used inside as workers cleaned and restored the home. She began experiencing health problems and developed an autoimmune disease called scleroderma that disfigures the skin. Workers removed all the wallboard in the house, but it didn’t help. The combustible products from the smoke that were the source of her sensitization had even been absorbed into the wood framing.
“She just dwindled, and her health went down the drain,” Miller said. The woman died a few years ago. The case sticks in Miller’s mind.
The threat may not end with the person sensitized. Research indicates the gene alterations can be passed along to children, and even grandchildren, who could become more susceptible to diseases and other health problems. One recent study found that parents with high chemical intolerance scores had an increased likelihood of having children with autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
“You have to start protecting people,” Miller said. “The next time this happens, you get people out of there. And you may have to buy out their homes if you can’t get them cleaned up.”
Nadine’s symptoms continue. A few days ago she said, “Last night it felt like somebody just stuffed my nose with chlorine tablets. That’s how much it burns.”
She figures she must leave the area in order to be healthy. She had been saving to buy a house somewhere far away from East Palestine and the cracker plant, but the trip to Maine ate up about $6,000 of that money — she’d had to buy food and gas and plane tickets and pay for several nights at an Airbnb and a hotel.
And if she did leave, where would she go? Her son lives in Wheeling, West Virginia, but he says it’s polluted there, too. She thinks Maine or Vermont would work, but she’s not sure about the cold, especially in Maine.
Leaving is something she dreads. Her Beaver County roots run deep. She has a history here and friends and a community. The thought of saying goodbye to everything brings tears to her eyes.
“My parents are buried here, my grandparents are buried here. My little brother lives in Ellwood City. To leave everything … it would be heartbreaking.”
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
This post was originally published on Al Jazeera – Breaking News, World News and Video from Al Jazeera.
This post was originally published on Al Jazeera – Breaking News, World News and Video from Al Jazeera.
Conor Smyth (FAIR.org, 1/19/24): “The history of debates over the minimum wage is filled with claims about the detrimental effect of raising the wage floor that have repeatedly flopped in the face of empirical evidence.”
In September 2023, California passed a law requiring fast food restaurants with more than 60 locations nationwide to pay workers a minimum of $20 an hour, affecting more than 700,000 people working in the state’s fast food industry.
Readers will be unsurprised to hear that corporate media told us that this would devastate the industry. As Conor Smyth reported for FAIR (1/19/24) before the law went into effect, outlets like USA Today (12/26/23) and CBS (12/27/23) were telling us that, due to efforts to help those darn workers, going to McDonald’s or Chipotle was going to cost you more, and also force joblessness. This past April, Good Morning America (4/29/24) doubled down with a piece about the “stark realities” and “burdens” restaurants would now face due to the law.
Now we have actual data about the impact of California’s law. Assessing the impact, the Shift Project (10/9/24) did “not find evidence that employers turned to understaffing or reduced scheduled work hours to offset the increased labor costs.” Instead, “weekly work hours stayed about the same for California fast food workers, and levels of understaffing appeared to ease.” Further, there was “no evidence that wage increases were accompanied by a reduction in fringe benefits… such as health or dental insurance, paid sick time, or retirement benefits.”
Judd Legum (Popular Information, 12/3/24): “The restaurant industry provided a distorted picture of the impact of the fast food worker wage increase.”
In June 2024, the California Business and Industrial Alliance ran a full-page ad in USA Today claiming that the fast food industry cut about 9,500 jobs as a result of the $20 minimum wage. That’s just false, says Popular Information (12/3/24).
Among other things, the work relied on a report from the Hoover Institution, itself based on a Wall Street Journal article (3/25/24), from a period before the new wage went into effect, and that, oops, was not seasonally adjusted. (There’s an annual decline in employment at fast food restaurants from November through January, when people are traveling or cooking at home—which is why the Bureau of Labor Statistics offers seasonally adjusted data.)
The industry group ad starts with the Rubio’s fish taco chain, which they say was forced to close 48 California locations due to “increasing costs.” It leaves out that the entire company was forced to declare bankruptcy after it was purchased by a private equity firm on January 19, 2024 (LA Times, 6/12/24).
As Smyth reported, there is extensive academic research on the topic of wage floors that shows that minimum wage hikes tend to have little to no effect on employment, but can raise the wages of hundreds of thousands of workers (CBPP, 6/30/15; Quarterly Journal of Economics, 5/2/19). Media’s elevation of anecdotes about what individual companies have done, and say they plan to do, in response to the minimum wage hike overshadows more meaningful information about the net effect across all companies in the industry.
The Wall Street Journal (12/28/23) said last year that “it defies economics and common sense to think that businesses won’t adapt by laying off workers.” Since that hasn’t happened, does the Journal need better economists—or more sense?
And what about agency? The Wall Street Journal (12/28/23) contented that “it defies economics and common sense to think that businesses won’t adapt by laying off workers” in response to the new law. But why? Is there no question lurking in there about corporate priorities? About executive pay? About the fact that consumers and workers are the same people?
The question calls for thoughtfulness—will, for example, fast food companies cut corners by dumping formerly in-house delivery workers off on companies like DoorDash and Uber Eats, which are not subject to the same labor regulations? How will economic data measure that?
That would be a story for news media to engage, if they were interested in improving the lives of struggling workers. They could also broaden the minimum wage discussion to complementary policy changes—as Smyth suggested, “expanded unemployment insurance, the Earned Income Tax Credit, a job guarantee, and universal basic income.”
The narrow focus on whether a Big Mac costs 15 cents more, and if it does, shouldn’t you yell at the people behind the counter, is a distortion, and a tired one, that should have been retired long ago.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
The assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has gripped the nation and revived a passionate debate on the dismal state of healthcare in the US. With suspect Luigi Mangione now in custody, the police manhunt is over—but the real political fallout may have only just begun. In this special edition of Inequality Watch, Taya Graham and Stephen Janis react to the media’s response to the killing, and also speak with Kat Abughazaleh of Mother Jones, Prem Thakker of Zeteo, and activist Jeff Singer on the predatory nature of the US healthcare system.
Produced by: Stephen Janis, Taya Graham
Technical Director: Cameron Granadino
Studio Production: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden
Written by: Stephen Janis
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Taya Graham:
Hello, my name is Taya Graham, and welcome to a special breaking news edition of the Inequality Watch, our show that seeks to analyze, comprehend, and seek solutions for the existential threat of unjustly concentrated wealth. Now I’m calling this a breaking news edition because of the events that transpired late last week. I’m sure most of you already know. UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson was gunned down on Thursday while arriving at a midtown Manhattan Hotel by a mass man who police now allege was Luigi Mangione. Now, Mangione was arrested earlier this week in McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He has been charged with a crime of second degree murder. Police found a manifesto on him critical of our unequal American healthcare system. But while Mangione is fighting extradition from a Pennsylvania jail, the murder has prompted massive fallout on social media that has launched a different conversation altogether, namely the company where Thompson worked and its role in the healthcare of millions of Americans, UnitedHealthcare and beyond that, the obvious cruelty of a system predicated on denying care and pursuit of profit.
Now, first I do want to be clear, violence is not the solution to any problem, let alone our dysfunctional healthcare system. And we do not condone or in any way think the problems we’re about to discuss justify violence. However, the job of independent media is to drill down into these issues that are often given superficial coverage by our mainstream media brethren. So we cannot ignore the outpouring of criticism about UnitedHealthcare’s business practices that have accompanied this event. It is a wave of pain and sorrow about a system that regularly denies the care people need, and a system predicated on profit that often fails to achieve the goal of the most expensive healthcare system in the world, treating people with dignity and improving their lives. And also, we want to know what you think about our callous healthcare industry and what you’ve learned about it from firsthand experience and what if anything you think can be done to fix it.
So please let us know your thoughts in the chat and comments, and I’ll try to get to some of them as well as to those who took the time to comment on our YouTube community post. I’ll make sure to show some of those comments at the end of our discussion. And one other point I want to make before we get started, this broken system has nothing to do with the people who deliver our healthcare. There are nurses and doctors and physical therapists and specialists of all kinds who do heroic work daily, and we all appreciate their dedication. I mean, just remember the critical care workers who stayed on the job during the pandemic to take care of patients under horrible conditions and many actually gave their lives to save ours. So first, we’re going to discuss the public reaction and then provide some context as to how the American Health Insurance operates, and we’ll share facts and figures to reveal why America pays more for healthcare than any other country and why that massive financial commitment leads to less than stellar results.
Then we’ll talk to Jeff Singer, the former executive director of Healthcare for the Homeless, a Baltimore-based nonprofit that provides health services to the people who can least afford them, and he has been fighting for healthcare justice and equity for decades. And then we’ll be discussing the massive online response and the mainstream media elites with two people who can analyze it better than any journalist out there, namely Kat Abu of Mother Jones and Prem Thakker of eo. So we have got a great discussion for you today, but first I want to go to my reporting partner, Stephen. Janice, just to set the stage. I want to play some clips just before we get started. And these clips flooded TikTok and other social media apps after Thompson’s killing. Let’s take a look.
Speaker 2:
UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, fatally shot and mute. No, let me fix that for you. Greedy man who siphoned $10 million a year from sick and poor people who was the CEO of the health insurance company that denied the most claims while simultaneously being number four on the Fortune 500 list was clapped today in New York City.
Speaker 3:
I’m going to be honest with y’all, defend, deny, depose sounds a whole hell of a lot like Liberte egalite for eternity, which was the battle cry for the French Revolution. Do not be surprised if we start seeing defend, deny depose spray painted on buildings.
Speaker 4:
I think that this guy is going to be this generation’s DB Cooper. They are just never going to find him. He’s going to turn into an urban legend. He knew exactly what he was doing and he disappeared immediately. And the best part about all this is that he drastically amplified class solidarity because no matter if you voted for Trump or Kamala, a lot of people are agreeing that insurance agencies are some of the most predatory companies out there. You pay into them for your entire adult life. And then they deny 32% of claims that could have been for lifesaving care that probably resulted in the suspect’s loved ones or family members passing away unnecessarily.
Speaker 5:
So I got a question for you. If they catch this person who un alive the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, if they catch this guy, how big you think the GoFundMe is going to be for his legal defense? I mean, I’m just curious because I know a lot of people I bet who throw $10 at this guy’s legal defense because I think the American public is just fed up with all these rich pricks, especially in the healthcare industry where they’ve been over the middle class in the working class since way before I was even born.
Speaker 6:
Hey, if you’re an electric bike backpack and firearm enthusiast who happen to be hanging outside a certain hotel in New York City this morning and you’re looking for a place to lay low, I got you. Send me a message. I’ll come pick you up at the time and location most convenient for you, and you can crash here as long as you need. Drinks are obviously on me, but honestly, so is everything else. Food, clothing, whatever you need, your money is no good here.
Taya Graham:
So that young man was actually talking about providing an underground railroad for Luigi Mangione, and I just want to mention I do keep my eye on the live chat. I noticed sth, Lord Prince said that it’s corrupt, not broken. That’s just me. And FPV Frodo said, everyone must stop paying all medical bills until the insurance companies come to their sense, it must be unanimous. Let’s stop paying all medical bills. Now, Stephen, I just want to get your thoughts about the outpouring of anger regarding our healthcare industry.
Stephen Janis:
What astounded me when I watched some of the outpouring after this was that we had talked about consistently why aren’t the Democrats or why isn’t healthcare an issue in the presidential campaign? It really didn’t come up. And then you see the universal passion for the problems with this healthcare system. I was just kicking myself because I’m like this great consulting campaign that we just watched, which was funded by over a billion dollars, never thought that maybe people care about this issue. So to me, in many ways it showed how the Democrats have lost touch with the working class. And I know this has been a point that many people have made over and over again, but still it’s really almost like, what were you guys thinking? Were you listening? And then to watch Josh Shapiro, who’s the governor of Pennsylvania during a press conference after the young man was caught scolding people for two or three minutes about the moralizing, about saying, how can you bring this up in this context? Well, you didn’t listen before. You don’t listen at all. And if you don’t listen, people get angry and they find other ways to express it. And I think the shock of the democratic elites and the consultants that avoid this were probably the biggest thing that just struck me right away.
Taya Graham:
Stephen, to your point, while I was watching this, I couldn’t help but wonder why this issue didn’t engender much discussion during the campaign. It made me think about our previous discussion regarding billionaires, specifically the group that we called conflict
Speaker 8:
Billionaires,
Taya Graham:
Which are the uber wealthy who profit off dividing us with their social media companies. And it really seems like this applies to the issue, especially because despite the anger we’re seeing now, neither party campaigned on the issue. I mean, Stephen, what do you think?
Stephen Janis:
Well, on the inequality watching is the Real News Network. We try to give people a handy guide to identify billionaires in the wild,
Taya Graham:
Right?
Stephen Janis:
So we had the carbon conflict and the conflict billionaires are the ones who make money off getting us to hate each other, and basically profit people who own social media platforms like El Musk, Elon Musk, and let’s remember Elon Musk probably doesn’t have a copay when he goes to the doctor. And I don’t think Elon Musk has to worry about his healthcare. Well, I mean, come on, that’s a fair point. And then he’s on Twitter making us all hate each other while we’re sitting there with this horrible healthcare system that doesn’t really serve us. And I think the absurdity of it is apparent to the people out to live with it, but none of these conflict billionaires have to live with it, so they don’t care about it. And so they sort of construct arguments between each other instead of actually paying attention to the problem, which they don’t have to worry about it. Elon Musk can pay his medical
Speaker 8:
Bills.
Stephen Janis:
He doesn’t have to worry about it. So I just thought conflict billionaires, this is a perfect example of how they keep an important issue out of the public forum and discussion.
Taya Graham:
As a matter of fact, I think you could probably help out with everyone’s medical bills actually, but just
Speaker 8:
About
Taya Graham:
Not to be callous
Speaker 8:
Though, true,
Taya Graham:
But just to put your thoughts in perspective, let’s provide some context on how the Uber rich get richer as we get sicker. And so I’m going to just throw some numbers on the screen. So private health insurance spends more money administering healthcare than Medicare, and this is multiple times more expensive. Administration costs about 2% for Medicare versus 12 to 20% for private health insurers. Now, the CBO estimates that we could save roughly 500 billion annually with Medicare for all. The United States will spend a projected $4.7 trillion or 18% of the national economy on healthcare in 2023. On a per capita basis, United States spends nearly double the average of similarly wealthy countries. Nonetheless, health outcomes are generally no better than those of other countries, and in some cases are worse, including in areas like life expectancy, infant mortality, and diabetes. Now, United Healthcare Group is the umbrella company that Mr. Thompson worked for, and it shows just how profitable this system is. The company has earned nearly 30 billion over the past four quarters. So there is no doubt that this system is making people rich.
Stephen Janis:
Can we make one quick point? Sure. It’s really interesting is the A a, the Obamacare actually limited the amount of money that an insurance company could spend on administration, but what they did is they bought other healthcare concerns so they could overcome that. That 20% is kind of meaningless now because these bigger companies are buying pharmacy benefit managers. So it just shows why people are frustrated even when legislation has passed to limit their profitability, they find ways around it. I just wanted add that.
Taya Graham:
No, that’s an excellent point. And I found this graphic to emphasize how profitable this company is and how profitable the industry is. So lemme just throw just one more graphic on the screen.
Speaker 8:
Okay, one more.
Taya Graham:
Okay. So this is a list of the Fortune 500. Number one on the list is Walmart. Number two is Amazon. Number three is Apple. And number four on the Fortune 500 is the United Healthcare Group. United Healthcare Group is the parent company of United Healthcare, and it’s on the Fortune 500 list. And in fact, if you take a look at the bottom, they’re making more money than ExxonMobil. Okay. So how is that for the tip of the iceberg in terms of how bad healthcare is good for a very wealthy few, but we are very lucky to have someone help us sort through this, namely Jeff Singer who spent his entire career fighting to deliver healthcare to the people who can least afford it. He’s the former executive director of Healthcare for the homeless in Baltimore City, our hometown, and he’s been the advocate for affordable dignified healthcare for decades, and his activism extends to a variety of topics, including affordable housing, living wages, and law enforcement reform. Professor singer, Jeff, thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. So I’m having a little trouble hearing Jeff,
Stephen Janis:
But why don’t you ask him the first question,
Taya Graham:
But I’m going to go ahead and ask him the first question in the hopes that he’ll hear me shortly. So Jeff, first, you were surprised by the response to, were you surprised by the response to the killing of CEO Thompson? I mean, you’ve seen some of the worst aspects of this system. So what were your thoughts when you saw how people were reacting to crime when you saw how the public was responding? Oh gosh. It looks like I’m still not hearing Jeff. That’s unfortunate.
Speaker 8:
Yeah,
Taya Graham:
Well, oh, he can hear me now. Okay, great. Hi, professor Singer. Can you hear me?
Jeff Singer:
I can.
Taya Graham:
Okay, terrific. Terrific. So I gave you, I know you didn’t hear me, but I gave you a glowing introduction and told everyone out there how much we appreciate you and how you are literally an institution in Baltimore for the activism that you have engaged in over the decades. So I just want to ask you our first question,
Speaker 8:
Which
Taya Graham:
Was if you were surprised by the public’s response to the killing of CEO Thompson, because like I was saying before, you have seen some of the most cruel aspects of this system firsthand. So what were your thoughts when people were reacting and responding to his murder?
Jeff Singer:
I was pleased that there was such an outpouring of political and political economic analysis. So yeah, that’s what we used to call propaganda by the deed, and haven’t seen too much of that in this country in a long time.
Stephen Janis:
Jeff, why do you think politicians took such a, they didn’t really want to engage in the discussion about healthcare. They wanted to shame people for this outpouring of anger. Why were they so reluctant to speak to the people about it and not engage with people rather than kind of say scold people for responding to this?
Jeff Singer:
Right. The mainstream media has been its usual heedless self, and there’s been very little analysis of what any of this means, particularly in Baltimore, the mainstream media here, the sun and the banner. There’s just, and the governor who just announced that, of course he isn’t in favor of violence. Well, yeah, we kind of knew that, although that remains to be seen, but that’s true throughout American society, that nobody’s in favor of violence and the people in power aren’t in favor of doing anything about it
Stephen Janis:
In the sense of doing anything about the healthcare system. You had another question. I’m sorry.
Taya Graham:
Oh, well, professor Singer, I was hoping that you could help us by maybe unpacking some of the myths regarding Medicare for all. I mean, there are a lot of falsehoods out there. The idea that Medicare for All or universal healthcare would be, let’s say even a form of socialism. What are some of the falsehoods people believe and what is the truth?
Jeff Singer:
Yes. Well, only if were a form of socialism, but it isn’t necessarily, that’s one of the ways that the ruling class tricks people into not working for what they want and for what they need by using the derogatory form of socialism that of course, all good Americans are supposed to be opposed to. And they’ve been very successful with that for 150 years.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting. We were talking before the show with our esteemed editor in Chief Max Alvarez and a couple other people who have had access to nationalized healthcare. He was in England, he said, that was amazing.
Speaker 8:
Yes.
Stephen Janis:
Why have our politicians been successful in scaring people about a nationalized health system? It seems like it makes total common sense, but on the other hand, we have this sort of running through that we all like our private insurance or whatever. Why have they been so easily able to tarnish the idea of a national healthcare system?
Jeff Singer:
I don’t precisely know the answer to that, but as I mentioned, there’s been almost 150 years of negativity around the term socialism. Although nationalized health insurance isn’t really a socialist solution. On the other hand, England has had socialized medicine since World War ii.
Speaker 8:
It’s
Jeff Singer:
Very, very popular and it’s very, very effective. The Commonwealth Foundation released a report a few months ago called Mirror Mirror, and it evaluates the healthcare situation in 10 countries, 10 advanced industrial countries,
Ben Shapiro:
And
Jeff Singer:
One that spends the most and has the worst outcomes is of course, the United States.
Speaker 8:
Right.
Jeff Singer:
Number three in their analysis is the United Kingdom, which is socialized medicine.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah. I mean, technically speaking, Medicare is socialized medicine. I mean, technically speaking by definition, right? Medicare.
Jeff Singer:
Well, Medicare though paid private providers.
Stephen Janis:
Well, there’s a Medicare advantage, but then there is a Medicare system that doesn’t, right. Or I guess you’re right, they’re providers. So yeah, I see what you’re saying. That’s very distinct. They don’t have private providers in England or other countries. You’re right.
Jeff Singer:
Very few in the United Kingdom. Now, other countries like Germany and France, they do have private providers, but treated pretty differently than they are here.
Taya Graham:
Jeff, I wanted to ask you something just so that you could speak from your personal experience. I mean, you have really dealt with a system that denies healthcare for poor people or for people who can’t afford housing, and you actually did something about it by helping build healthcare for the homeless. What did you see and experience trying to get people who are left out of our system and denied by it?
Jeff Singer:
Well, it’s interesting Teya that most of the people with whom we worked, and that was, well, a hundred thousand different people that we worked with for 25 years at healthcare for the homeless then, and that was 15 years ago. So there’s more now, but they were and are people who have not had access to health services, which exacerbates all their health problems. So they can’t take advantage of the wonderful possibility of advanced health services that the United States does have. But it benefits a small number of people.
Stephen Janis:
And you’re in the process. You were working, we talked about the administrative costs in our private health insurance. How much was that administrative state a problem in terms of delivering healthcare because it’s so expensive and sort of usy, how much was that a problem for you to deal with?
Jeff Singer:
Well, we were required financially speaking to become integrated into the existing health system. And that is complicated and expensive. There’s lots of reporting that has to happen, and computer systems. We had spent a lot of money building, buying computer systems. People spend a lot of time using the systems that exist, and a lot of that is unnecessary. Not all of it, but a lot of it is, there’s a huge amount of money that is wasted on those systems.
Taya Graham:
I wanted to ask just about some of the lessons that you’ve learned from doing healthcare at such a grassroots level that maybe we could learn from to help us push for a more comprehensive healthcare plan. I mean, is there a way to change this system and perhaps you could share with us some of your ideas to do so
Jeff Singer:
Aside from having a socialist revolution?
Stephen Janis:
No, you can talk about that
Jeff Singer:
Until we do that I don’t think will have an equitable and effective healthcare system. But there are non socialist countries that have much better healthcare systems or a lot more equity for sure. And higher life expectancy and lower morbidity. So all of the data shows that when everybody has access to decent healthcare, everybody benefits not just their health but their pocketbooks. It is so much cheaper to make sure that everybody gets good preventive care, and maybe that’ll happen with our new health secretary.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah. Well, I want to ask you, if you’re organizing a ground this idea, what is the biggest roadblock to, I mean, there’s a million of them, okay. I mean the political system we have now, who’s in power, but is it like entrenched special interests like the A MA or something? What makes it impossible to even have this conversation? Or is it propaganda? I mean, just curious what you think.
Jeff Singer:
Yeah. Well, the A MA has been involved in assuring that there isn’t equitable healthcare for many, many since there was an A MA every time a national figure would advocate for healthcare for all, not necessarily Medicare for all. That’s one example. But the A MA would spend as much money as they could, and that’s a lot of money to make sure that the discussion isn’t a real one. That people are tarred and feathered when they talk about socialized medicine or when they talk about healthcare for all. And it is unfortunate that so much time and money is spent on making sure that we don’t have the system. Well, that’s
Stephen Janis:
Amazing.
Jeff Singer:
We spend twice as much as any other country, and yet our health outcomes are the worst among advanced industrial countries.
Taya Graham:
Jeff, I wanted to ask you a question. I had been looking, I was on open secrets and they do great work. If you ever want to find out what your local politician is receiving in their campaign coffers, go take a look. You’ll see, and I was looking and I saw that there was a lot of donations from the healthcare industry, and in particular, I was looking at the United Health Group and Vice President Harris received a large sum of money, actually even larger than the sum of money President-elect Trump received. But there was plenty of money sloshing about both with Democrats and Republicans. And I was wondering, I mean on your thoughts of how many layers do we have to unpack here? I mean, if our politicians are, let’s say, being influenced by this money, I mean, can you give us some suggestions on how we can start taking this power?
Jeff Singer:
I wish I could effectively do that because the health industry is one of the largest and most profitable in the US, and they spend more money on lobbying than anyone else except maybe the oil industry. I don’t know. I haven’t seen the figures recently. But because so much money is spent on maintaining this system, that does not work well for most people in this country. But that’s backed up by the propaganda, as you said, Stephen, they reinforce each other. The industry, I mean, there’s billions. Hundreds of billions of dollars are made by these profiteers. And until that gets addressed, nothing changes. Right? Well, who supports that? Some nice people do, but not the captains of industry because that’s how they have their three houses and jaguars. So they’re going to do whatever they can to assure that real changes don’t happen. Obamacare, that’s not a real change that didn’t in any way interfere with the privatization and financialization of health.
Taya Graham:
Well, professor, lemme just ask you one last question before we bring on our guest Kat and Prem. I mean, I am starting to think here, we just, I’m getting the impression from you that perhaps Professor, we might just need a revolution. I mean, is it time for us to just start getting in the streets and protesting and ringing our Congress people? I mean, is it time for us
Stephen Janis:
To folks have a revolution on
Taya Graham:
YouTube? Well really take action and pushing our politicians to do what we want, which is reform the system.
Jeff Singer:
Yeah. Well, my old friend Gil Scott Heron famous, said that the revolution will not be televised, but it might be on YouTube. Yeah,
Speaker 8:
It could be. Well,
Jeff Singer:
This could be a time when some changes will happen. And that’s exciting about the reaction to this event.
Taya Graham:
Thank Well, professor Singer, thank you so much for your time. And I want to quote of that, the revolution might not be televised, but it might be on YouTube. That makes a lot of sense. I need that.
Stephen Janis:
I
Taya Graham:
Need that t-shirt right now.
Stephen Janis:
Thank you, professor. We
Taya Graham:
Appreciate it, professor, singer, it’s always so great to see you. We really appreciate you.
Stephen Janis:
Thank you.
Jeff Singer:
Yes. Delightful to speak with you all.
Ben Shapiro:
Thank
Taya Graham:
You. And we also really appreciate the service he has done for our community, both as an educator and a healthcare provider.
Stephen Janis:
Listening to him, it’s like we had talked about the political economy, which is when sort of politics and business fuse. And I feel like we’re in this huge glacier of political economy that seems immovable at this point, but we’re not going to give a pope. But still, it’s a pretty solid sort of fusion between business interests and the government in this case. And that makes it, I think, pretty hard for us to have real change. But we got to keep talking about it.
Taya Graham:
And I just want to throw up a few. I’ve been keeping the
Stephen Janis:
Island, which just might becomes irrational, but No, but seriously, it’s why people react to a murder and with glee and everyone’s like, why would this happen? It’s because the system is completely immovable. It doesn’t respond to people’s needs. And when democracy becomes incapable of responding to people’s needs, people respond in other ways. I mean, just listening to it just, anyway.
Taya Graham:
No, Stephen, you make a very fair point and there’s some really great comments in the chat. And I just want to throw a few on screen before I bring on our guests. Bud. Roland said, the CEO shooter appears to be connected to the radical middle. We have, I know they have some great comments here. A Ophelia Moon Monroe said that I think if Luigi goes to trial, they’re going to have to stack the jury to get a guilty verdict. They don’t stack it. They will stack it. Don’t be fooled.
Stephen Janis:
Thank you, Ophelia.
Taya Graham:
And let’s see this person Anon Mouse. Good to see you again. Anon Mouse. It says, heart attack stent installed with insurance, $74,000 heart attack stent installed without insurance. $198,000.
Stephen Janis:
So to pay $74,000.
Taya Graham:
Yeah, that’s horrifying. And I just want to also to acknowledge Dre with without, it’s very weird that we, the people have to be nice about someone who knowingly profits from destroying lives. We have to be nice because he has a family owe the family. And a little thanks for no name coder who said the people should have hit that thumbs up button. So thank you. You cool? No name coder. We appreciate it. And now
Ben Shapiro:
To
Taya Graham:
Talk about the online reaction to and some of the, let’s just say hot takes on the state of American healthcare. I’m joined by Kat Abu and Prem Thakker.
Speaker 8:
Welcome
Taya Graham:
Kat Abu and welcome. Kat Abu is a freelance video creator as well as a contributor for Mother Jones and sat her explainers on right-wing journalism have accrued tens of millions of views. Wow, that’s cool. And Prem Thakker is SAT’s political correspondent also writing a weekly column called Sub, excuse me, subtext with prem. And please make sure to follow their work. We should have their social media tags on this screen and hopefully in the live chat for you as well. So I just want to thank you both so much for joining us. We really appreciate it.
Stephen Janis:
Thank you.
Taya Graham:
Thanks for having us
Stephen Janis:
Be here. Thank you.
Taya Graham:
So I’d like to put my first question to Kat. You have seen the outrage from the public when scolded by various politicians and media figures for not having enough empathy for Brian Thompson and his family. How do you view or explain what you’ve seen online?
Kat Abughazaleh:
I mean, I’ve seen what everyone else has been seeing. Not a lot of empathy. And honestly, I mean, can you blame them? Can you blame this country where our healthcare system is so messed up? Where when I was a bartender, my coworkers and I used to take fish antibiotics because we didn’t want to pay to go to the doctor if we were sick. And you just got to hope that it’s an infection. If you’re living in a country like that where you’re paying $74,000 instead of $148,000 to get a heart stint, it’s really hard to feel empathy for the person that is making $10 million minimum per year off of your misery. And honestly, except for people with power and influence, and of course boot liquors, I haven’t seen many people rush to defend this guy. I can feel bad for his family. I can acknowledge that vigilante violence is not a good solution.
I mean, that’s a fun thing about the right is there’s people on Fox News, for example. People that have power on the right are super upset about this. But they’ve spent the last four or five, 10 years cheering on vigilante violence. Kyle Rittenhouse attacks against trans and gay people. So many Tucker used to go when he was on Fox monologue for 20 minutes about how he need more vigilante violence. And then you have to act surprised when this guy gets iced. I mean, you can recognize that there’s a very slippery slope here. And also not be surprised.
Stephen Janis:
Just to get your take too on this sort of outpouring, what’s your take on it? And as a journalist who reports on a lot of this stuff, what do you think about it?
Prem Thakker:
I think,
Stephen Janis:
Oh, prem. Sorry. No prem. Sorry. Prem.
Prem Thakker:
Well, just going off what Kat said, I think let’s start by just setting a premise. You and I, we have with this collective odd life, this also shared burden of existence, it is kind of this sacred experience. They all kind of share. And so taking that away from someone is vulgar. In many ways. It’s personified, vulgar what more can be said. So let’s work backwards from that premise to then figure out, as Kat’s gesturing towards why so many people can either make jokes about a killing to be indifferent or to even cheer at the thought of it, at the symbolism of it. And one thing that we wrote on at the EO is that there’s a lot of contradictions that need to be addressed in something like this. I mean, you guys talked about this in the intro of the show. Some of the same politicians who insist that such a killing of an innocent man, a father, a husband, is indefensible, have spent the past 15, 14 months not only defending, but funding the mass killing of tens of thousands of parents, husbands, and wives and kids, to use their words of how we describe people.
Days after Thompson was killed, two migrant teens were stabbed after being asked if they spoke English, no mass police or media mobilization. And of course, as we saw as Mangione was apprehended, Daniel Penney was acquitted after choking. Jordan Neely, a homeless black man brought to desperation to death on the subway. And the point is not to equalize these case, but to realize that putting them together sort of brings us to look at these contradictions of who we see are human asks, or for us to ask who gets our empathy and to figure out what kind of society we tolerate. How many migrants has this government killed either by causing havoc all over the world and creating these migrants in the first place, or when they try to come here and meeting the militarized border that we have, how much tax dollars have gone to those campaigns and wars? How many people do we live without a bed and then meet them with violence? And doesn’t this violence just beget more violence? So these questions are worth asking and interrogating.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, and I mean, I think as you point out, if there’s one system that lacks empathy, one government institution, it has to be our healthcare system seems completely devoid of empathy. And so that’s a really good point. Tay, you had want to,
Taya Graham:
Actually, I wanted to ask Kat a question. Do you think this public frustration with the healthcare costs could actually catalyze broader support for Medicare for all or some other form of universal healthcare? Do you think this could become a movement?
Kat Abughazaleh:
I mean, it already is and isn’t. People by and large want Medicare for all? Especially if you take away the politicization of it. It’s why so many people support the Affordable Care Act, but they hate Obamacare. If you’re just saying everyone gets healthcare, everyone supports that. And it’s been like that since forever. I mean, some people buy into the propaganda, but once again, when you strip it all down, that’s what every average American, every average person wants. And our politicians know that. Our lawmakers know that. Our health insurance companies know that. Every single organization of power in this country knows that. And they have purposely stopped us from doing that. They have purposely kept us from getting the care we need. And that’s not an accident. This country loves to pay more to make their own people miserable. I was listening to a Behind the Bastards episode the other day while I was cleaning my house. I was re-listening to some of the old ones, and there was one about the creation of the FDA, which started because we were cutting milk with horse piss and there was just poop and everything, and every food was disgusting. It was like barely even food. Highly recommend
Not the food, the podcast, and any of the sources in there. And so that’s Make
Prem Thakker:
America healthy again,
Kat Abughazaleh:
Make America healthy again. That’s why the FDA was created because people realized this was a problem. But before it was created, all of these giant food manufacturing, meat packing industries got together and tried to launch a campaign saying they are trying to stop your freedom. They are trying to stop you from drinking milk with sawdust and wriggling worms in it. This was an actual campaign by them, and it worked for some people, but it’s the same idea at that point. It’s just cheaper to pasteurize your milk, just boil the milk. Oh my God. But they refused because they would rather continue to hurt others.
Speaker 8:
And
Kat Abughazaleh:
It’s the same thing now. It’s cheaper to have healthcare for all, but we continue to pay so much money just to put those dollars in 50 guys’ pockets.
Stephen Janis:
That’s a great
Kat Abughazaleh:
Point.
Stephen Janis:
That’s a really great point. Per prem, a lot of people, a lot of corporations now are beefing up security. I heard they spent $250,000 to protect the CE of UnitedHealthcare. But do you think this outpouring will actually, they’ll ever say, well, maybe we need to change our behavior a little bit, or maybe we need to alter the way we do business. Do you think this kind of pushback can actually have an effect on corporate behavior? I know it’s a strange question, but I’m just curious if you think any of it’s working or getting through to them.
Prem Thakker:
I think when I think about this question, I think about 2020 where we had this coalescing moment of millions of people across the country, regardless of their politics and backgrounds, all for a moment being forced to think about a lot of questions at once. One is with regards to race, their relation to race, their relation to the people around them, their neighbors no less. During a time where this awful, unpredictable, uncertain pandemic is sweeping the nation, bringing people to, in some respects have much more relatable experiences than they had had previously altogether. And all this combined in the lead up to the election, I think brought a lot of people in this country, again, regardless of their politics, to ask these bigger questions about what kind of society they want to be a part of and to contribute to and how do they want to be alongside their neighbors. But then of course, in the ensuing months, we saw a lot of that energy, a lot of that frustration, questioning intellectual humility that is very beautiful, get quelled or subside or just brought into very antithetical to solidarity type of spirits and movements. Yeah, true. We saw a lot of radicalization that we’re seeing the consequences of now in this election over the ensuing months because there was no vessel for that. There was no
Welcoming of that. The people who tried to channel that in something where we’re set aside, we’re pushed aside. And of course, it’s hard to bring a lot of people who are all dealing with all sorts of questions and their own relation to those questions into one sort of coherent movement. But to at least welcome those questions and to give space and time to people, to ask them regardless of who they are is important. And so moving forward in the next weeks and months, I think we will get a cousin of that and seeing will this energy and these questionings and these very sincere and earnest grapplings by all sorts of people, will they be welcomed by not just the people in power who maybe want to push that aside, but also all of us, we all play a role in that.
Stephen Janis:
That’s a good point. And I mean, I think one difference in this, well, you talked about maybe the George Floyd movement, which really did change policing. We saw it on the grassroots level here. We saw in our legislatures when they actually passed reform. And I hope that the fact that people are trying to focused on healthcare with a focus on something specific, it can translate into a movement that focuses on something specific right here. We have to change healthcare. We’re not just trying to change everything all at once, but even though that is kind of everything everywhere all at once, however, hopefully that kind of focus can maybe bring some fruition in terms of actual change.
Taya Graham:
I hope so as well. And I have to say what Kat’s comment on why we needed the FDA just keeps ringing my ears. Oh God. Because I remember learning about how, let’s say problematic, our food distribution system could be beforehand.
Kat Abughazaleh:
Don’t worry. Read the book, the Poison Squad, by the way, just going to plug that book. Really good.
Taya Graham:
No, that’s great. I appreciate it. I really want to follow up. Sorry,
Stephen Janis:
Cable fixes. Don’t worry.
Taya Graham:
But what I wanted to do is I have a clip that I think kind of speaks to some of the things you were talking about earlier, Kat, and it’s a clip, and I think some of the people we’re watching right now, they might find it a little puzzling.
Speaker 8:
And
Taya Graham:
It’s a video from Ben Shapiro where he responds to the murder of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Now, I’m sure most of you are familiar with fax over Feelings. Ben Shapiro, he is a conservative firebrand, best known for his work as host of a Daily Wire. And his YouTube videos receive millions of views where he’s primarily known for destroying those who dare to discuss policy with him. But what’s interesting about the video, or at least what I think is interesting about the video I’m about to play, is that Shapiro tries and fails to characterize the reaction to violence as a left versus right story. And namely, that was the left that was insensitive and even blood thirsty. So let’s just take a listen.
Ben Shapiro:
According to the New York Times, none of this stopped social media commentators from leaping to conclusions and showing a blatant lack of sympathy over the death of a man who is a husband and father of two children, thoughts and deductibles to the family. Read one comment underneath the video of the shooting posted online by CNN. Unfortunately, my condolences are out of network. A TikTok user wrote, I’m an ER nurse and the things I’ve seen dying patients get denied for it by insurance. It makes me physically sick. I just can’t feel sympathy for him because of all those patients and their families. And these sorts of messages were incredibly common across the internet. Be discussed yesterday, a Columbia professor who wrote something very similar, unfortunately bubbling under the surface of all this, is something very serious, really serious. What is that serious thing? The revolutionary left is creeping into the mainstream. Yesterday we talked about liberals versus the left. Liberals are people who disagree with me on public policy but aren’t in favor of the murder of their opponents. The left is a different thing. The shooting of Thompson has unleashed a wave of evil from members of the left. Thompson was not a criminal.
Taya Graham:
So as you see, he blames Democrats and in particular, the left for the
Stephen Janis:
Revolutionary left, which is creeping into the mainstream
Taya Graham:
Really for the apathetic and negative online response. So Kat, I was wondering what your take was on Ben Shapiro’s rendering of the public response.
Kat Abughazaleh:
Oh, I am so glad you asked. Thank you so much. I had to bounce after this question. But if you look at the comment section of this video, it’s pretty much just people who are identifying as right leaning or even fully right wing, realizing the entire point that there’s no war but the class war, they realize, wait, you just want us to hate us hate each other, because guess what? I grew up conservative. I’m from Texas. I know plenty of people are. We all get fucked in the ass by health insurance premiums. It’s death taxes and being screwed over by the American healthcare system left or right. It doesn’t matter. It’s just rich or poor. And I don’t just mean like a hundred K, 200 KA year, rich, I mean obscenely rich. You can get bankrupted so fast in this country if you just get cancer like curable cancer. That’s unbelievable. And so his characterization, I have seen some people express sympathy over Brian Thompson and I recognize that, and I think that’s totally valid. That’s how you’re feeling. But they also recognize why other people are angry or see him as a symbol rather than a person, because for him, we’re all just faceless bags of cash when he was alive. And so it makes sense that people would see him the same way, but rather a faceless corpse for the healthcare industry.
And Ben Shapiro just completely misses the point. He’s so focused on protecting the rich and powerful because he’s part of them that he forgot to do his fake populism thing. His, oh, I’m not from California, and desperately wanted be in Hollywood, but no one would take me shtick. It’s pathetic. And I was just thinking, this is how a lot of people get to class consciousness. I’m down, but some people won’t be convinced on Fox. They switched to Daniel Penny real fast to talk about how great he was. And the cognitive dissonance probably didn’t click for a lot of viewers, but will that racism still override their hatred towards the healthcare industry next time they’re signing a hospital bill? That’s what I keep thinking right now. People are mad, but of course it’ll die down. It’ll ebb and flow, especially as trial comes all this stuff. But what about every time someone has to sign for their chemotherapy or hell, when I get my narcolepsy medication every month and I never know how much it’s going to cost left or right, it doesn’t matter. All of us are going to be dealing with this.
Stephen Janis:
Well,
Kat Abughazaleh:
Wow,
Taya Graham:
KA, that was amazing. And
Stephen Janis:
That was the first time I saw our editor-in-Chief Smile during the, that was his first smile with your
Taya Graham:
Use. Used
Stephen Janis:
Some colorful language. I
Taya Graham:
Think there was some smiles that I wish you could have seen behind
Stephen Janis:
The first time. Most time he’s been kind of glaring at us. I just wish you could have seen. Thank you for that. Thank you for
Taya Graham:
That. Yes. Well, thanks for having me, guys. Sorry we have to let you go, but next time, we’re going to have to keep you for a little bit longer. Okay? Yes, absolutely.
Stephen Janis:
Thank you.
Taya Graham:
Bye. Y all. Okay. We appreciate you.
Stephen Janis:
Now, crem, I know you’re a fan of Ben Shapiro. I’m sure I can just tell by your thoughtful commentary that Ben wrote, but do you think this is an issue that can transcend ideology? Is this an issue where people can actually come together and say, let’s push back rather than just fight amongst these other?
Prem Thakker:
Yeah. Yeah. I think there has been for years and years and years, just a broader appetite by people of all political stripes for something different, something that feels different in your experience of living in this country. And a lot of that obviously relates to the political nature of this country. And I think Kat put it so beautifully that there’s certain things for which that experience of how a medical insurance company treats you is radicalizing in so many ways for people, as we’ve seen over
The past week in terms of how people are expressing their interactions with companies like this. And for many people who have gone through political changes, I know I’ve gone through many worldview shifts, a benefit of just wonderful people around me, teaching me things, strongly things, opening my eyes to things. All it takes sometimes is one thing, and especially if it’s a personal thing. And that can just be a gateway to seeing that you deserve more, that to being a society and to contribute to it and to be part of it and to be just screwed over and over again is just a dissonance, a discrepancy that can become so overwhelming to lead someone to even do something as drastic as we’ve seen this week.
Stephen Janis:
It’s really interesting, given some beautiful metaphysical descriptions of this problem, is this in some sense a spiritual crisis for people not being able to reconcile the irrational nature of a system with their own views of their own country. And somehow this is creating a certain anger and separation from the system itself. I mean, it’s, you brought up so many interesting ways of looking at this that I didn’t even think about.
Prem Thakker:
Yeah, I guess I’m just so, and I apologize if any of it seems just too
Stephen Janis:
Cloud. No, I thought it was really cool. That’s why I
Prem Thakker:
Just wanted to get some, I guess I’m just so in this moment, keyed into this sense of contradiction, putting these cases all together, juxtaposing them together to really think what we’re building, what we’ve inherited also as well, of course, we are individuals that are inheriting something, but by permission or not, we have inherited it by choice or not. We haven’t inherited it. And I think as much as there is exhaustion, especially over recent years for so many understandable reasons, regardless of your politics, there’s also just this keen thirst for this exhaustion to either end or to lead towards something. And so
Stephen Janis:
I agree.
Prem Thakker:
I guess one thing I think of is with regards to Thompson, who, again, to me, Thompson shouldn’t have been killed. And in this question, what is also at stake that we should ask is how can we be in a society for which Thompson or a symbol now of the echelon that he represents can rise, can climb the ladder to oversee a company that denies healthcare coverage through artificial intelligence, through algorithm that leads to all this mass suffering that thousands of people have been expressing over the past week to us. How can someone over time come to oversee that and look it in the eye and not want to rip up that crushing status quo?
So we should ask whether he Thompson should have been brought up in a world where he could have risen to such a position for such a position to exist for such consequences to it be real. In the same way that we worry about the dehumanization of migrants, of people in Palestine, of the homeless. There is this sense of the way we set up society now to also dehumanize us in the roles that we play in either allowing this to continue or for someone to rise up to have that job that separates someone from their own humanity. You’d imagine, for instance, you or I or any person listening that you could say, oh, if I was in that position or if I had all this money, I’d want to help people. And that might be true, but somehow some way for a lot of people that get to that level of power, they don’t do what we think we would’ve done. And so there’s a sort of different kind of dehumanization that’s at stake here as well that I think is worth interrogating.
Stephen Janis:
That is profound.
Taya Graham:
Yeah, it is actually an excellent point, and I’m glad you added that layer of depth to the conversation. We really appreciate it. And so I actually kind of feel bad because I’m going back to Ben Shapiro now after a beautiful moment like that, but I thought it might speak to some of the conversation we were having earlier. And I just want to share just a few of the comments from his subscribers and from his longtime viewers. And please don’t think I was being petty by doing this, but I went and looked for the dislikes ratio on the video. Now, I took this screenshot, I think probably two nights ago, and there’s a good chance that it has increased since then. I think it’s probably increased quite a bit. So let me share some of the comments that were in the YouTube section. I just pulled out just a few
Stephen Janis:
To his video,
Taya Graham:
Specific video.
I’m not buying this left versus right S anymore. Ben, I want healthcare for my family. According to Ben, I went from Trump voter to revolutionary leftist in the span of a month. Remember guys, Ben has more in common with that CEO than he has with any of us. One death is a tragedy, 1 million is a statistic, except Ben took this at face value. Ben’s net worth is around $50 million. He’s a peer of Brian Thompson, not of us, the average American citizen. He makes money by generating hate and division. Oh, and last one, not going to lie, these comments are making me feel patriotic. That has 7,200 upvotes.
So as you can see from the comments, this issue is hardly partisan. Many of his viewers expressed their own pain and difficulties with healthcare. As a matter of fact, there’s one comment I want to put up there, but it was very long. But suffice it to say there was a young man who would be considered a Democrat, and his uncle is a Republican, and he said they both watched his father die. And he said, when his father, me, his uncle was on Facebook, he basically put F that CEO. And that’s a divided household there. And they both agreed that the healthcare system is, let’s say, leaving people short. So just to emphasize this point, these are not unsympathetic radicals that Shapiro had described as barbaric and homicidal leftists. So I’m sure it was probably to his surprise that this was not a left right issue and instead seems to be a class issue. And it seems to span the political spectrum. And I’ll just say this, after a very contentious election, it was actually a relief to see something that all of us could agree on.
Stephen Janis:
I think that what most of us, someone say said the prem, and we’ll get back to prem in one second. It’s just interesting that for people, this isn’t political, but it’s very personal, I think is what he’s saying in the sense that you are seeing something that’s supposed to work absolutely fail, and you feel helpless that you can’t do it. It just seems like it’s set up to make us helpless. And I think that’s kind of the spiritual crisis that we’re talking about for people because how do we fix it? I mean, Jeff Singer who’s seen it from the ground up was not, let’s say, optimistic about fixing this. So
Taya Graham:
Yeah, and just to be fair and balanced and to show how deeply entrenched the problem is of let’s say our media elites not understanding how the healthcare system can be so devastating. Let me share with you the story that comes from Democrat and former C Nnn anchor, Chris Cuomo, brother of New York governor Andrew Cuomo. Let’s take a short listen to his analysis.
Speaker 13:
Now, what is the reaction to this? To me, it’s the biggest surprise I get. Not liking insurance companies. My family is sideways with one right now, but these tweets, these tweets that came out about this, I’ll get to ’em in a second. Don’t put ’em up yet. Don’t put ’em up yet. What does history tell us about when things like this happen? CEOs are killed very rarely. Okay. When it does happen, it is usually for political purposes, like when in this country. I can’t give you any examples until this one. Great. But here’s one things for sure. There are a lot of people who are happy about this. Yes, hiding in the nice anonymous dumpster fire that is Twitter, but show these tweets celebrating his death. Even people who called themselves journalists, Ken Klippenstein and Taylor Lorenz tweeting about how bad a man he was the day he died. Don’t these people understand? Won’t someone in their life if these are their real names, explained to them, you are worse than what you oppose when you celebrate murder as a justifiable end for disagreement over policy. I mean, what the hell is going wrong here?
Taya Graham:
Wow. Worse than what they oppose. And amazingly, both Ben Shapiro and Cuomo cited Taylor Rez and Ken Klippenstein. So I thought it was really interesting how a right wing, conservative and a Democrat could somehow come to the same conclusion that these reporters tweets are the problem, not the system or the profiteering and prem. I would love for you to respond to seeing this Democrat media elite from a family of Democrat political elites respond to the public. I mean, I think some might see this as multimillionaires perhaps banding together. How would you interpret both the Democrat and Republican elite outrage with the public response?
Prem Thakker:
So when I see reactions like this, or ones we’ve seen in the so-called papers of record, the magazines of record, for some reason, my mind goes back to the late and great Michael Brooks, who of course told us to be kind with people and ruthless with systems. And I think of how many of these institutions of power really focus on the former, but only kindness towards certain people amongst themselves, and certainly do nothing with the latter of being ruthless with systems. It is, of course, again, so important that Thompson should have been killed. It’s awful that he was killed. And still at the same time, the stakes here is not about, or rather, the stakes is about a much larger thing that these people in these establishment circles really do not want to engage with, which is this broader frustration that sure people might be projecting onto one individual, but it’s not about Brian. And as a human, of course, we care of as humanity. The issue at stakes is something that these people are apparently not interested in engaging with of the system that so many people feel so shut down from. I think of another headline that I saw today, I think it was in The Atlantic that talked about how this moment was a moment of civilization
In a similar respect to what Cuomo was saying of when you look at history and you think about moments like this, we are living through current history of mass de civilization, of mass dehumanization, no less than over the past 14 months of tens of thousands of people on US taxpayer dollar, a dime being killed, being ethnically cleansed, displaced. There was just a headline from the other day that I believe it was upwards of 90% of children in Gaza find that their death to be imminent, that scores of them would want to even maybe end their life. That these people and their livelihoods, their lives as they know it, are fundamentally changed, if not
Speaker 8:
Over.
Prem Thakker:
And so this concern that we see among some circles of the media now with regards to de civilization dehumanization, strike me as I mean insensitive, to put it lightly, but really out of touch in a functional sense. And I think sure, you can be concerned about someone being killed, and I think we all can get behind that.
Speaker 8:
There’s
Prem Thakker:
Just also, not even just, there’s many more people who deserve that same proportional level of concern. If we are going to have a nationwide media frenzy, police frenzy over one individual being killed, and then at the same token, the same tax dollars that pay those police also bomb 45,000 generously, probably more. That is a stakes contradiction of our humanity. And so I would invite Ben Shapiro or Mr. Cuomo or people of the Atlantic to engage with those questions. I am very glad that they’re so concerned with the humanity and life of one husband, of one father. I would love to see that same energy in those same words towards tens of thousands of people over the past 14 months withstanding the millions of people in this country that in a variety of ways, whether it’s because of the way that we’re destroying their environments, whether the way that we allow them in the richest country on earth to be one mistake away from poverty, from homelessness, from doing all that with injuries that are just devastating for the rest of their lives. I would love to see if they could spare that same humanity towards those people too.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah. It seems like rather than dec civilization, we’re going towards mass insanity. When you talk about the contradictions that we see in the response to things like Gaza versus the response to the killing of the CEO, and I wondered how much that has to do with, in your mind, the algorithmic insanity that has been constructed by these billionaires in which we’re supposed to have these conversations and where we’re supposed to have empathy and connect. I mean, how much are we just subject? I mean, because very interesting how the algorithms all point us toward the humanity of A CEO and away from the humanity of people in Gaza. And I wonder how much that corporate, billionaire, algorithmic world that we inhabit is responsible for this lack of empathy and then the defensiveness of the people who constructed it. Basically what it is, Cuomo is being defensive because he has benefited from the system he has constructed around us under the auspices of journalism, which to me is ridiculous. All he is advocating for the elites, in my opinion. So how much do you think they’re just responding to protect themselves in some ways?
Prem Thakker:
Yeah, yeah. I think there’s a lot to that and it’s very frustrating. You speak to these algorithmic forces that kind of push us one way or another. One thing that I found frustrating is especially over this whole Twitter, blue sky situation of describing blue sky as more of an echo chamber than Twitter, when in reality every space to a certain extent is an echo chamber. And I mean, of course that’s not meant to be a reductive meta statement. I mean,
Whether it’s Twitter, whether it’s blue sky, whether it’s Facebook, whether it’s a physical space, whether it’s the bar across the street that you and your friends go to every week, there is a certain level of normalized conversation that you experience. And what’s been frustrating for me is that of course, things have gotten much worse in the online landscape over the past few years. And with conversations like this, when you’re talking about contradiction, when you’re talking about things that people can either empathize with or intimately understand themselves, it’s not always that hard to really connect with someone. As much of a cliche as it sounds when you just sit down with them and then chat about where you’re seeing something and where they’re seeing something, it really isn’t that impossible when you come into something with a lot of humility and openness and generosity, but also candidness and also conviction. And of course, places like Twitter, places like Blue Sky, or not necessarily Blue Sky, but places like Twitter, places like Facebook, especially in this moment, incentivize the exact opposite places like YouTube. And so to your point about these people who have become the fore, the standard bearers, the protectors, the defenders of these spaces, their reaction right now is so telling, because it’s this, in some ways it feels almost desperate, this
Stephen Janis:
Last
Prem Thakker:
Ditch effort to defend these spaces, these positions that they’ve been able to accrue over time, these almost captive audiences that in some ways they’re preventing them from connecting with you or or anyone else on our common humanity.
Stephen Janis:
Can we just take a Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.
Prem Thakker:
I’m sorry. I was just going to say, I guess as a final note, it’s just like on this question that in some ways it’s up to independent new media that we occupy to really try to meet that challenge.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah. And Taya, just before you ask your next question, I just want to say, I want to say thank you to all the million dollar consultants in the Democratic party who decided that healthcare was not an issue worth raising during this campaign. I just want you to enjoy your yachts and your boats and your condos and all the things you bought because you told the Democrats not to talk about healthcare. I hope you enjoy your money. I hope it was worth it. Sorry, tey, I just had to say that.
Taya Graham:
No, that’s okay. I mean, I thought it was an
Stephen Janis:
Interesting premise, inspiring
Taya Graham:
Prime, talking about engaging with humility and you chose to engage with sarcasm, but I think they’re both
Stephen Janis:
Effective tools useful, both useful.
Taya Graham:
They’re both valuable tools. Oh,
Stephen Janis:
Call me out live. That was not sarcastic. I was sincere.
Taya Graham:
Oh, okay. Pardon me.
It’s actually interesting you brought up campaign and politics because this economic discontent, it’s showing self in other areas. This is just, as we were talking about earlier, a very, very personal place where it’s showing, I think almost everyone has some sort of interaction with the healthcare system or a loved one of theirs, ASN interaction with the healthcare system that went could have gone better. So I think it’s very, very personal. But the thing is, in the most recent election, you can’t argue Republicans swept the board and they have in the past voted against any form of universal healthcare. But as I was mentioning earlier, my research showed that Democrats also receive a great deal of campaign support from these health insurance companies and Super Prep pacs. So I was just curious, prem, if you thought that this discontent and particularly the energy that and emotion around healthcare, do you think there’s a chance that it could help shape the political landscape? The next elections that are coming up? Do you think that you’re seeing a movement build here?
Prem Thakker:
Yes. So as we saw after November the election, there was a lot of, whether it’s anguish, shock, no surprise at all, we told you so all sorts of reactions. But one particular thing is that there’s this broader exhaustion amongst a lot of the liberal base, whether it’s organizations get out the vote efforts, pundits figures, members of Congress. And there’s also seemingly this, even before the events of the past week or two, this soil rife for some sort of something for some sort of planting of something different for hunger and anger at how the election played out, particularly amongst the left. And I find that a lot of people on the hill, members of Congress, people who work within and inside of outside of Congress are really trying to figure out, again, even before this week, how to really affirmatively present a new case, a stronger case, a different case, a case that rejects maybe some of the features of the campaign we just saw by the Kamala Harris campaign that really distinguishes itself a movement more than just a one year campaign.
And one thing I think about with regards to the moment now in terms of whether there will be really a stronger push to change, not just the way Democrats go about things, but also how they treat this issue of healthcare, is this question of persuasion that keeps coming up amongst a lot of the pundits of how do you meet these Trump voters? How do you change their minds? Clearly it seems like a lot of people of all political persuasions believe things need to change. There’s these sort of veering on condescending questions of, oh, these people keep voting against their interests. And I think one aspect that parts left I think are really trying to hone in on is that persuasion is not just about trying to code switch in different dialects and try to appear like everything and nothing all at once. We’ve seen that in fact, that fell on its face this past year,
And I think Kat was getting to as well, is that part of persuasion is seeing people as individuals that are not just definitively a MAGA Republican or a liberal or what have you, these labels and not sort of no labels fashion, but I mean quite sincerely that these labels really prevent us from understanding that people are dynamic. They’re not static, they’re not chess pieces, they’re people in the same way that you and I have changed our opinions or viewers on something. So of these people, which is to say voters. And so I think there’s this burgeoning appetite on the left to view voters as such and to thus treat them accordingly, which is to have an affirmative message to not water it down based on who you’re talking to, but to actually argue the case and to say, look, you might see yourself as this political identity or a Trump voter or what have you, part of the MAGA movement or a never Trump Republican, and that you don’t necessarily want to go so far. But these are ideas we’re talking about. We’re not talking about political identities. Go,
Stephen Janis:
I’m sorry, go ahead. I was just saying it was just so frustrating to watch the campaign where they said, well, Kamala Harris has perfectly positioned herself in the middle because she went against her idea to have Medicare for all. And then I watch a response of people like Josh Shapiro who is literally lecturing people for having an emotional outburst about a horribly unjust system. And I don’t know, do you think the Democrats get it at this point, how off they were and how wrong they were? They see that it is a communication and narrative problem when you can’t make the connection between people’s anger at healthcare and there’s a better system we can sell you. If we could just tell the story. I mean, they seem to be horrible storytellers and they seem to be amazingly insulated. I find it very frustrating. Do you think that Democrats are really getting it at this point?
Prem Thakker:
I think the question is less about the individual actors and more about a struggle between those actors, which is to say the question is not whether the Harris campaign staff or the DNC will all of a sudden wake up. It’s rather a matter of who’s going to take the switches, who’s going to take the steering wheel. I think that over the next coming weeks and months in terms of not just committee assignments, who’s going to be the ranking member of what committee, but moreover, who is going to really try to take charge, whether by official levers or by messaging and by just getting more of the will of the people point to get them to trust them. I think that is the bigger power struggle that I think is only starting to brew. I think there’s a lot of people who are really trying to figure out, again, both members of Congress and also people who work with and around them, how they can sort of jockey and figure out which message can sort of carry the day, which one will be the Democratic party. So I think it’s reasonable to ask to your point of seeing how insular some of these people were, if they’re all of a sudden going to listen or learn. And I think, again, I see individuals as individuals as much as I can, but I think the question is much more interesting and pressing as far as who will win the broader power struggle as far as will the critique, the criticizers, the people who are critical, the people who are sort of fielding these criticisms and thoughts, will they be the ones to actually get to make
More of the decisions? I think that’s something we’ll have to watch for.
Stephen Janis:
That’s interesting. Leads us back probably to Bernie Sanders, but go ahead, te, sorry.
Taya Graham:
But a prem, we were all talking about Democrats and Republicans and the Democrat run city of New York as well. And in your article in eo, which is titled 2 26 year Olds, one killed a Homeless Man, another is suspected of killing Healthcare, CEO. You mentioned that two young non-English speaking migrants were staffed and one was killed. How would you characterize the responses to the death of A CEO versus the death of a teenager, although now currently police are alleging that this was related to Venezuelan migrant gang activity. What has your reporting revealed about the bias in the media?
Prem Thakker:
Right. Yeah, I think the question itself is kind of brings about the self-evident contrast, which is that some of your listeners might not have even heard about the latter case. And of course, this is not unsurprising to us. We live in a society for which, not to say we live in a society, but we live in a society for which this is almost to be expected that of course, someone who is a CEO of big company, the face of success, someone who perhaps has rubbed shoulders with the same people who govern, legislate or oversee editorial agendas of newsrooms would then get more attention than two migrants. And I think this also gets to this other sort of question of, or even just dynamic of accepted, normalized dehumanization. This reminds me again of a sort of unsurprising dynamic of which, and something that’s been concerning for me, especially over the past few weeks, is this almost getting approaching towards normalization of the suffering. And Palestine even in some respects, Lebanon and so on the Middle East, broadly amorphously in so far as how people think about that region. Much of this country especially, particularly those in power, I should say, not necessarily everyday people see that side of the world as again, definitionally in almost a static way, a hotbed of violence, a place where those people over there were always find something to fight about, to kill each other about.
It reminds me of politicians who sort of superficially say, oh, Israel Palestine has been going on for thousands of years, which what are you talking about? And so in this same respect, not only is this sort of dichotomy of, oh, how much priority is there for a rich person versus migrants in this country, especially given how both parties tell us we should treat migrants. It doesn’t shake the boat at all that two migrants would be stabbed, if anything, it’s like, oh yeah, right, of course. And so it’s sinister, it’s horrifying. It again, I think gets to this broader question of accepted dehumanization, accepted civilization that we’ve allowed to be normal for far too long in this country. And it’s unfortunately, yeah, self-evident when you look at the cases just juxtaposed together. Of course, again, there’s different contexts for every killing, every murder that exists, but broadly speaking, in terms of just the generic human concern and what is manufactured concern is obviously drastically different.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, it’s interesting that we would elect someone in this particular cycle speaking about what you’re speaking about, who is inherently cruel. I mean, Trump is, if anything, just a cruel man. And it seems like we’ve sort of submerged ourselves in a sense of cruelty that sort of transcends almost every ideological boundary that we just want to be cruel. And I wanted to ask you a question because this show is the Inequality Watch, and we deal a lot with questions of inequality, economic inequality, and we’d had either Professor Reich on the last show or it was, I don’t know if it was Dr. Wolf, but they talked about the Gilded Age period and how much wealth inequality is very similar in terms of the extent and the extreme. And I was wondering what your thoughts are about wealth inequality and driving some of these issues and some of the conversations that people might be reacting to a healthcare system, but they’re also unnerved by the incredible inequality, especially when they’re lectured by millionaires and billionaires who seem to control the conversation. I mean, how much is inequality driving the conversation and the anger that people are feeling about our healthcare system?
Prem Thakker:
Definitely, definitely. And I would just note that of course, this is a huge conversation that Val has raised, class, gender and so on. Understood. I’m certainly not going to flatten race, gender, or No, no, I wasn’t asking. Of course, of course. I just as a preface to say that regardless, I mean putting that, factoring that in there is this broader sort of, and I think this relates to something I was getting at in the beginning, which is that there is this general experience that regardless of who we are, we share in how we live our lives, which is just this uncertainty of what life even means of the beauty of it and the pain of it. And again, taking into account that of course our relations to that obviously very fastly on our backgrounds, on our race and so on, but there’s this flailing that many people relate to mentally, spiritually, physically, when you live in such a society for which the contradictions of the haves and half nots are often on such brazen display.
And again, this is not to somehow say that this country is just a bed full of sleeping class conscious people waiting to be woken up. It’s not necessarily to glamorize that or to simplify it. It’s just to say that there is a sense, especially particularly in this country, more than just any western capitalist nation on earth, particularly this country, that we ought to be living in a different way. That the daily flailing, frustration, anguish, or even just confusion or uncertainty that we have doesn’t have to be as such. And some people feel that in an optimistic way. Some people feel that in a very pessimistic way, in a way that this sucks my life sucks that I feel insecure in a certain way, I feel whether it’s financially or otherwise or socially I feel lonely, I feel depressed. This country has a flavor and variety of sicknesses that I think all relate to this broader flailing, this broader separation from one another. That is, to your question, fomented fostered, encouraged by those at the top because it supports them, it allows them to continue to be there, it benefits them, and it prevents people from asking, what if we could have something different?
And so it’s this ever present question of given that broader, relatable experience in one way or another for most people, how can there be a tap in into that given? Of course, people have their own individual lives and life stories that brings them to want to see each other as each other and to figure out where we go from here. And of course there’s no easy answer to that, but I think engaging in those questions are more interesting and compelling and necessary than these superficial hollow incurious and insincere narratives we’re seeing from some of these bigger box outlets.
Taya Graham:
This is going to be, first off, I want to thank you for staying with us and adding the level of depth that you’ve had to this conversation. Absolutely.
Speaker 8:
It’s been,
Taya Graham:
I have a final question for you, and I feel like we’ve got the right person for this question. Honestly, I wanted to know what you thought storytelling and journalism would play in shifting public opinion and creating accountability for the healthcare industry because already social media has had an impact allowing people to share their feelings and their uncensored thoughts. But surely media, both independent and mainstream, has an obligation here as well. But places like ProPublica and the nation and democracy now, even the Real News, we’ve been reporting on healthcare for years, so what do we need to do different? What more can we do? What is the obligation of a journalist right here?
Prem Thakker:
So I think back to what we were talking about earlier when we were talking about Cuomo, the Atlantic, the New York Times and so on, where by benefit of being in the power center of being in the establishment, they get to have the monopoly on objectivity, the monopoly on
Norms, the monopoly on what is and is not radical. And I think it’s important to underscore, and it cannot be said enough that there is no journalist in the business that has no bias, that has no lens for which they’re looking through things too, because that is definitionally inhuman, that is definitionally not how we work. We come to whatever we do with our experiences, and you can say you remove yourself from them, but then you’re serving something else. You’re serving someone else. In the same way that our media ecosystem can be described as political or radical or this or that or what have you or not objective, the people who are saying that are often making a judgment case, they’re making a value judgment, they’re making their own subjective view on what is and is not objective. But I can tell you what, I might not be a lawyer.
I might not be a scientist, but I might not even be a weatherman. But I can tell you if it’s raining outside and I look outside, it’s raining, I will tell you it’s raining. And I think about this with regards to the US government’s response to what’s happening in Palestine where human rights groups, where the United Nations, where people themselves who are suffering this tell us this is a genocidal war. Again, I might not be an international lawyer, but I can look at that. I can look at the facts of the matter and say it’s a genocide. So there’s this, firstly to answer your question, this basic understanding and really ownership that, yeah, we are coming into this business, the royal we with certain premises of what is and is not true, is or is not sort of a world that we see as radical or not radical.
Is it radical for millions or thousands, if not millions of people across this country to feel frustration at the industry? Or is it radical for that industry to do what it does to those people? These sort of basic parameters are I think, ones that our ecosystem should not be sort of shy to claim as premises we’re operating from. And to not only say that, to be transparent, because I think one thing that people always appreciate no matter where they come from is for you to be straight up with them, is to say, look, in the same way that we’re being honest with you about where we are coming from, you should take a look at these other entities to see how transparent they’re being with you about where they’re coming from. And B, if they’re pretending that they’re actually being just this sort of amorphous, unreal objective source, I think being honest, being real with people is really important.
I think that is the first sort of task that we have to really embrace rather than sort of tiptoe around. We have these premises about this world and our role in it. I think that’s the first big step. I think the second thing that I’ll add is just going back to something I said earlier, which is again, to really see the people that we cover as ourselves, which is to say regardless of whether we relate to them or sympathize with them as much as we can to empathize, sympathize with them, is that they are as dynamic as we are. They are as beautiful and interesting and worthy of consideration and generosity and humility as we wish others would treat us. And I think that is especially important both in how we cover stories, how we talk to people, how we interview people, how we navigate our work as journalists, and also just sort of how we navigate online.
I am definitely not one to be a scolder or a child by any means, but just it is also self-evident that sometimes the online world brings out the worst impulses in us and brings out the very true, just the worst reaction. It’s very easy to be very reactionary online, especially if you feel fronted in some way, but in the same way that you wouldn’t want to really be piled upon either online, you’d reckon the person on the other side of the screen probably wouldn’t either, and it’s surely not going to get you anywhere. It might feel good in the moment, but that in its own kind of lets you see people less as human and more as people you just got to be ready to go to combat with. And that again, in a lot of ways, violence begets violence. And then if we’re going to build a world for which there’s less of that, you sometimes got to be a little less combative yourself, which is not easy, especially we’re all subject to it. But those are some things that come to mind for me,
Stephen Janis:
Which is not easy when we’re talking about the death of a CEO E and then the reaction to it. I mean, what you say really brings up the complexity of the issue and how difficult it is just to navigate this, to think, to parse the people’s anger from the actual suffering of a human being, no matter how we feel about what that person did with their lives.
Taya Graham:
And I think you made several excellent points. I mean, something I had to learn even just in the process of becoming a journalist is that there really was no objectivity with a capital O. And I realized in this new space of independent journalism that I was in is that being transparent saying, look, we all admit that every one of us has a lived experience and that is going to affect how we view this world. So let me just be transparent about where I’m coming from, and that way I’m giving you the respect to judge for yourself and decide and look directly at what I’m doing. And I feel like our attempt to do so with our police accountability reporting, I think, I think people really appreciate that respect that we’re giving them by being transparent about who we are.
Stephen Janis:
To that end, I think on a very practical level, given all the people that have responded just to our meager posts about experiences they’ve had, we should just run a 24 hour seven channel with people talking about what they’ve experienced with this healthcare system.
Taya Graham:
Well, I
Stephen Janis:
Really
Taya Graham:
Did consider that we should do a show just all healthcare all the time, honestly.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, no, we talked about that a while ago because we had so many stories and people contacting us and saying, this happened to me. It was more so than police, bad police encounters.
Taya Graham:
That’s true.
Stephen Janis:
So to me it’s like, well, one thing we can do in journalism is just amplify the stories of the people that suffer from the system and just keep running it until somebody pays attention.
Taya Graham:
I think our editor in chief might be listening to that. Be
Stephen Janis:
Careful. Oh yeah, he just gave me a thumbs up. So again, he seems happy for now. But anyway, listen, we really want to thank you. Yes, you were incredible. And I think I love the fact that you brought up some of the metaphysical and philosophical aspects of this, which we should all pay attention to, just human empathy for everyone and some of the parallels between what we consider to be empathetic and what is not, which is clearly like when you said digitalization, which I did read that article, it seems like madness when you see what’s going on in Gaza versus, so I really appreciate you bringing that context to this discussion.
Taya Graham:
Thank you so much, premier, it is a pleasure to meet you. We
Stephen Janis:
Hope we have you on again soon.
Taya Graham:
Absolutely.
Stephen Janis:
Please thank you so much and keep much the great
Prem Thakker:
Work both. I appreciate both of you and the work that you guys do. Very much so. It’s really a treat to be joining you guys. Great. Great.
Taya Graham:
All right. Well then we’re going to hold you to coming back,
Prem Thakker:
Please.
Taya Graham:
Great.
Prem Thakker:
All right.
Taya Graham:
So just once again, I want to reiterate how much I appreciate both our guest Kat Abu and Prem Thakker for joining us and sharing their insights. And I really hope they’ll both be back to join us again soon. And remember, you can follow Kat’s work on Zeteo and a Mother Jones, and she’s got her own TikTok channel. Prem’s work is on EO where we mentioned the article that he wrote. He’s got plenty of other work there as well.
Speaker 8:
Absolutely.
Taya Graham:
Subtext with prem. So we might have some links dropped in the chat for you to look at. And I just wanted to just throw, just because I keep my eye on the live chat, I just want people to know I’m paying attention. Hi, Michael Willis. Hi Lacey. RI see you guys. Thank you for joining us. So lemme just throw up a couple comments for you to take a look at.
Stephen Janis:
Sure.
Taya Graham:
You don’t like my music set, I just have my hip replaced for free in the US It would’ve cost 30,000 to 40 grand concern, said the citizens in this country will go down in history as having the greatest amount of learned helplessness,
Speaker 8:
Which
Taya Graham:
I thought was a very interesting comment. Here we have Ramin Ives, and I do apologize if I’m not pronouncing the avatar names correctly, the widespread frustrations, denied claims, exorbitant costs and systemic corruption reflect a healthcare industry, prioritizing profit over people. Let me see here. You don’t like my music again, says I’m so sick of this left versus right bs. I want human rights. Any quality.
Stephen Janis:
I mean, is there any more?
Taya Graham:
Oh yeah, just a few more. Once upon a time said, won’t someone please think of the CEOs, I think was a response to some of the Cuomo and Shapiro’s takes. And Michael Willis noted, pulled out the same quote that really stuck with me,
Stephen Janis:
Be
Taya Graham:
Kind with people, be ruthless with systems. Wow, isn’t that powerful?
Stephen Janis:
Yeah,
Taya Graham:
I thought that was really
Stephen Janis:
Powerful. Well, it kind of reminds me of David Grabber talking about the sociology of indifference, how bureaucracies create this kind of violence of indifference to people who need help. And it’s always going to be there in some form or another, but it seems like other countries have learned how to do it better than we have. And I think that becomes irrational, right? It makes us irrational because there’s no good reason for us to suffer like this. And so I just still can’t get over the Democrats and their responsiveness and their lack of their tone deafness and how they just, people got paid so much money to be stupid, just professionally stupid about this and not this issue and how it’s been painted is medical has been painted as radical.
Taya Graham:
Why
Stephen Janis:
Isn’t the healthcare system denies care for profit radical? Why isn’t that radical? That seems much more radical on a common sense level, and I think that’s why people are so angry. Common sense. That’s radical to have a system in the wealthiest country in the world where you can die and go broke getting sick, that’s pretty radical. Medicare for all is pretty sensible, not radical.
Taya Graham:
I think
Stephen Janis:
That’s great one. We should remind people of that.
Taya Graham:
I think that’s an excellent point. And I think Vincent Massey actually made a good point
Stephen Janis:
Here
Taya Graham:
Saying 68,000 Americans die each year due to preventable sickness caused by the for-profit healthcare insurance industry. Their source, the Lancet, which is a medical journal.
Speaker 8:
So
Taya Graham:
Case closed is what they said here. So I just want to let you know that I appreciate you so much, everyone that was in the chat, everyone that was having such a fruitful conversation that we really do appreciate you joining us. And now I’m going to take a moment where I do a little speechifying and I’m also going to take the time to, I look
Stephen Janis:
Forward to it every
Taya Graham:
Time. I hope so. Is that that sarcasm again?
Stephen Janis:
No, no, I’m not being sarcastic.
Taya Graham:
Okay. Just
Stephen Janis:
Checking. I just want people to know I’m not a sarcastic person.
Taya Graham:
Okay.
Stephen Janis:
I said that one thing that sounded a little sarcastic and now everyone’s branded me because you did
Taya Graham:
Sarc me
Stephen Janis:
For a sec.
Taya Graham:
Was just checking.
Stephen Janis:
I
Taya Graham:
Was just checking. And also at the very end, I’m going to include one or two of the YouTube community posts because I did ask for your thoughts. And I want you to know when I do a YouTube community post, I do pay attention to what you write me and I will be in the comment section later as well, just in case people want to continue the conversation. Alright. Here’s my little speech. I am not a healthcare expert or an academic, but like most of my fellow Americans, my personal experience with the healthcare system has taught me plenty. I remember my mother spending hours on the phone attempting to get just an iota of reimbursement for the healthcare I needed. And I literally wouldn’t be sitting here today if she hadn’t fought so hard for my mental healthcare treatment. So let me state it in the simplest way possible how I see the problem.
We pay money every month into a risk pool that’s supposed to cover us when we need a doctor or treatment. But the insurance companies turn that very reasonable idea on its head instead of ensuring that we have access to what we need when we need it. They use algorithms and bureaucratic indifference to keep it, or actually I really should say, to steal it. And their indifference creates billions in profits for shareholders and for CEOs. And it is a uniquely grotesque scenario, delaying and denying coverage and healthcare profits to procure obscene profits all while we watch our loved ones wither and sicken and pain and confusion, fearful of dying and leaving us with a financial burden. Some families have continued to spend the rest of their lives paying off. So let me just read you some of the people that reached out to us via the YouTube community post on our channel who wanted to share their stories of their interactions with the healthcare community.
So I have from Bubs, Bubs 3, 3, 5, 6. Two years ago, I was slotted for back surgery to alleviate weakness and extreme pain. Less than 12 hours before I was scheduled to arrive, I got a call that BCBS denied my claim based on three criteria that were blatantly false. Luckily for me, I’m an RN and understood the language they used and was able to appeal it and have it reversed. But my procedure was delayed weeks and required numerous more appointments and copays. I thought a lot about people who perhaps didn’t read well or understand healthcare, who might just give up. And that was my first thought when I saw this news. And now I’m going to share a post that I think speaks to a pain that too many of us can understand. And it’s from most over 7, 9, 7 4. My sister told me she needed $30,000 to continue treatment.
She took her own life the day before she turned 65. And this particular comment just really broke my heart because I actually know people I love who would rather end their lives than be what they think is a burden to their family. And no one should ever have to feel that way. So now I have a screenshot of another comment from Ms. Penelope, 6, 3, 7 4. And she writes, being a good parent to your children does not cancel out or alleviate the evil decisions and actions made in one other arenas of life, particularly impacting millions of innocent people. The decisions of this person should never be forgotten. Human rights violations of such magnitude denying basic healthcare must be competently and thoroughly prosecuted. This is Marcus Aelius, 7 0 3 9 UHC, which is UnitedHealthcare denied me a CAT scan for lung damage post covid. And the last one is from Mr.
Sprint Cat. My father, 90 years old had a hematoma removed from his leg, walked after the surgery, doctor decided to put him in rehab, never walked again. Now they send bills, paid this by the end of the month. The highest bill so far is $3,000. How is an elderly person on a fixed income going to pay for that by the end of the month? What an impossible situation for someone to be put in draining someone of all their resources. So not only do they have nothing to leave their family, but they will be put so far in debt, they could lose everything and put their family in debt as well. Personally, I just don’t understand how someone can turn their back on people in pain like this and how the profit motive can harden your heart so that you simply can’t hear people’s cries for help.
And this is the soul consolation I’ve had is that for the first time since the election, I have heard my fellow Americans united on an issue that this system needs to change. So what can we do? Well, first we’ve got to acknowledge that both parties ignore this issue, which begs the question and why would they ignore this issue around which the working class us average citizens are actually united? And I think I know it’s because this issue of all issues points out the one truism of politics that the elites want us to ignore. The one thing we all have in common with each other and not with them, the system they created is meant to enrich them at our expense. And yes, sometimes actually kill us so they can profit. And they know if we figure this out together and come together that they are in trouble.
I mean, there will be no yacht big enough, no bunker remote enough, no hedge fund will be wealthy enough to stop people from taking power back through activism and protest and better policies. And that’s why they don’t bring up issues. They bring up issues like the culture wars because truthfully, they’d rather have us fight each other and snipe at each other over little things that don’t matter, instead of focusing on how they rip us off day in and day out. And let me be clear, life and death should never be line items on a balance sheet. Pain and suffering shouldn’t be a revenue stream and premature death should not be a cash cow. But there’s another truism about the issue that is even more potent. We can change this. We just have to have the will and the willingness to work together. Now, in one of our previous show, we created a category for billionaires.
And one of those categories was the conflict billionaire, the uber wealthy who actually get rich while we literally fight each other on their social media platforms. They sow discord. So we can’t think they create hatred so we won’t unite and they make a fortune on the synergy of the conflict. But if we want healthcare, it’s time to cast aside their social engineering. It’s time to stop filling their pockets while we empty ours. And it’s time to take the energy dunking on each other and owning each other and instead demand an equitable system for all, not just the few. And there are many people, including as Stephen mentioned, governor Josh Shapiro, who think it’s undignified to raise critiques of a cruel system after a man was shot dead. Be has not said a word about the cruel system that will literally deny care to a dying patient, make that thousands of dying patients who might have lived with the right care. So at least for now, let’s acknowledge the truth about this country and our healthcare that these elites want us to ignore. It is simply unacceptable and the people refuse to accept it anymore. Stephen,
Is there anything you would like to add to that?
Stephen Janis:
I’m not following up your amazing rant too. I think I said enough at this point,
Taya Graham:
But
Stephen Janis:
I appreciate everyone watching and sharing.
Taya Graham:
Well, thank you. I just wanted to make sure to say hi to Lacey R, our mods for help, and I want to thank everyone. I think I even saw David Boron out there, one of our cop watcher friends from our police accountability reporting. So I just wanted to say I see you all out there and I appreciate you so much and hopefully I’ll see you in the comments later. Also, all the people who reached out with sharing these stories, they can be difficult to share. They’re so
Speaker 8:
Personal
Taya Graham:
And we want to thank you so much for doing so.
Speaker 8:
Absolutely.
Taya Graham:
And of course, again, I have to thank Kat Abu and Prem Thakker and Professor Jeff Singer.
Stephen Janis:
Absolutely.
Taya Graham:
And of course the help of my real news colleagues, Kayla, Jocelyn, Adam, Cameron, David, and of course our editor in Chief Max Alvarez,
Stephen Janis:
Who I would say I’ve been monitoring the whole time. Yes,
Taya Graham:
You’ve been keeping a close eye on
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, it’s kind of tough because
Taya Graham:
You, okay, I look forward
Stephen Janis:
To your report. I look at your facial expressions. I’m like, uhoh, we need to veer a little this way.
Taya Graham:
Okay. I look forward to your full report later.
Stephen Janis:
Yes, I will give it to you.
Taya Graham:
And thank you all for watching, and if I don’t get a chance to see you before then, have a happy holiday or a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year and be safe out there. Thanks for joining us.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
This post was originally published on Al Jazeera – Breaking News, World News and Video from Al Jazeera.
Read RFA coverage of this topic in Burmese.
Myanmar’s economy is expected to shrink by 1% this year as war and disastrous flooding compound an already dire financial crisis, the World Bank said on Wednesday, as it downgraded its outlook for growth from a previous 1% increase in gross domestic product (GDP).
Myanmar’s economy has been in freefall since the military seized power in 2021, toppling an elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi, squandering progress made over a decade of tentative reforms and scaring off many investors and tourists.
Opponents of the junta have taken up arms around the country and disastrous floods triggered by a typhoon hit several regions this year.
“The recent natural disasters and ongoing conflict have severely impacted Myanmar’s economy, with households bearing the brunt of rising prices and labor market weakness,” said Melinda Good, World Bank country director for Thailand and Myanmar.
More than half of Myanmar’s 330 townships are in active conflict and the U.N. estimates that 1.5 million people have been displaced since October 2023, increasing the total number of internally displaced people to 3.5 million, or about 6% of the population.
In just one example of the impact of the war, Singapore’s Sembcorp Industries suspended operations at its Myingyan Independent Power Plant in Mandalay in August because of nearby fighting.
“Conflict-related disruptions to trade and logistics, sharp kyat depreciation, and the stepped-up enforcement of import licensing rules have led to increasingly severe shortages and higher prices,” the World Bank said.
“Persistent power restrictions have created further challenges for businesses and households,” it said.
Natural disasters had also hit agriculture with output expected to fall over the next financial year, the World Bank said.
“Estimates .. indicate that crop production is likely to decline in the FY 2024/25, with flooding directly damaging rice paddies, pulses, and oilseeds, while triggering additional shortages of key inputs including fertilizer and seeds,” it said.
Households were bearing the brunt with 14.3 million people, or 25% of the population, experiencing acute food insecurity as of October, up from 10.7 million people a year earlier, driven mainly by food price inflation and supply shortages, the bank said.
Overwhelming challenges
In the strife-torn central region, a resident said the war and poverty made things very tough.
“There’s danger from both the military and life in general,” said the resident of Ye-U town who declined to be identified for safety reasons. “There are no jobs anymore but it’s not just hunger that can kill us.”
“We can’t raise animals or grow things well … challenges for farmers are overwhelming.”
In the Dagon Industrial Zone in the main city of Yangon, which once carried the hopes for a booming garment sector, factory operations are more often suspended because of power shortages.
“We don’t have electricity, so workplaces generally aren’t doing very well,” said one manufacturer who also declined to be identified for security reasons.
“When we do get electricity, it’s very little … two days a week we can run the factory but the other three we have to take off.”
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The World Bank said the risks to an already bleak outlook “are tilted to the downside” after the expected 1% contraction in GDP in the year ending in March.
“A further escalation in conflict, including in the run up to possible elections in 2025, or another severe natural disaster could depress output across a range of sectors,” said.
“Even assuming no further escalation in conflict, growth is expected to remain subdued.”
Translated by Kiana Duncan. Edited by RFA Staff.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Burmese.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The post Banana & Duct Tape Tech Bozo Flaunts Massive Wealth Disparity appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.
This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire.
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.