This story was originally published by In These Times on Feb. 11, 2025. It is shared here with permission.
President Donald Trump relishes deploying the “weave,” his vulgar stream-of-consciousness spiels in which his vengeful fantasies and antipathy towards a cast of enemies become punchlines in an insult-comic routine. His far-right former adviser Steve Bannon has termed the Trump administration’s psychological warfare approach “flooding the zone.”
“Every day we hit them with three things,” Bannon told PBS’s Frontline in 2019. “They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”
“We want to put them in trauma,” said Russell T. Vought, Project 2025’s man in the Trump White House, who has returned to lead the Office of Management and Budget, in a 2023 speech. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”
Since taking office, Trump and his effective co-president Elon Musk have mounted a frontal assault on workers through executive actions, aimed at rooting out disloyal workers in the federal workforce, illegally firing members of the National Labor Relations Board and and dismissing a member of the Federal Labor Relations Authority, and threatening to freeze funding for healthcare (especially gender-affirming care), education, transportation and other services, while also conducting immigration raids that have ensnared U.S. citizens and stoked fears of racial profiling.
Whatever you call it — a hostile takeover, a blitzkrieg — the effect is the same: overwhelm workers and befuddle the opposition as billionaires carry out a rolling coup. In terms of union organizing, you could liken the volleys of attacks from the Trump White House to bosses holding the country’s working class in a massive captive-audience meeting, using shock-and-awe tactics to divide us up.
Even though there are divisions between the tech billionaires and the nationalist populists in the MAGA camp, Trump and his cronies are broadly united in a war of attrition against the working class. One of their chief means is a propaganda war against the media. “The opposition party is the media,” said Bannon in the 2019 Frontline interview. “And the media can only — because they’re dumb and they’re lazy — they can only focus on one thing at a time.”
Trump himself has also taken aim at his political opponents, likening them to foreign enemies that the United States fought in World War II. On the campaign trail last year, Trump said, “Our country was at war with the enemy, and they wanted to extinguish our way of life forever. This time, the greatest threat is not from the outside of our country, I really believe this. It’s the people from within our country that are more dangerous.” He has also compared his political enemies to “vermin” that he has pledged to “root out.”
Three weeks in, we know the administration’s field of opposition has now expanded to include the entire working class. In the midst of this class war, we can look to military strategy to help us understand their maneuvers. According to Sir Lawrence Freedman’s Strategy: A History, the German military historian Hans Delbrück slotted strategy into two categories: annihilation, which involved a crucial battle to eliminate the enemy, and exhaustion, also termed attrition, which is about wearing the enemy out.
The far-right billionaires’ plan is clear, now we need one — and fast.
The class war is on
The U.S. working class has been thrown onto the battlefield with no organization. And we are in disarray. We must get our forces to coalesce into a united front, fusing the powers of disruption and solidarity. We need to fight back. But how?
“They have built our coalition for us by virtue of the wide range of attacks by race, class, gender, legal status and more,” says Gene Bruskin, who led a successful union campaign at a Smithfield pork processing plant in North Carolina in 2008, a campaign that also involved immigrant workers striking over deportation raids. “It is on us, in particular the labor movement with its 14 million members, to recognize this and organize our movement of opposition accordingly. This will open the door for our future victories,” Bruskin tells In These Times.
The plutocratic forces aligned against the working class don’t have a broad mandate for their assault, but they are projecting power by using the media to stoke fear and demobilize us. One clear target they are focusing on in an attempt to carve up the working class is the immigrant population.
It would be a mistake to dismiss their attacks as merely smoke and mirrors. Rather, the media-inflated chaos is part of their plan, an effective way to control the narrative, literally rehashing old stories to incite fear. Last week, the Guardianpublished an article exposing how Immigration and Customs Enforcement is re-releasing decade-old press statements with new dates to give the impression that ICE was ramping up deportations close to Trump’s inauguration. It’s a common tactic of psychological warfare with historical echoes in this country’s past.
Kelly Lytle Hernández, a professor of history and African American studies at UCLA, toldPolitico ahead of Trump’s inauguration: “Strongly encouraging and frightening people into leaving will be a main strategy.” Up until 1929, Lytle Hernández has argued, immigrant workers could enter the United States without official permission, but then “Congress outlawed border crossings with the specific intent of criminalizing, prosecuting and imprisoning Mexican immigrants.”
In the 1930s, historian Greg Grandin notes in The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, anti-Mexican nativism allowed President Herbert Hoover to run for president on the promise of expulsion of Mexicans from the country, with intellectuals openly fretting about “racial replacement.” The head of the unemployment office in Los Angeles at the time wanted Mexican workers eliminated from the workforce, saying: “We need their jobs,” and offered as a solution deploying cops to set up high-profile raids “with all publicity possible and pictures,” a “psychological gesture” meant to “scare many thousand alien deportables.”
“There wasn’t a lot of work, so they wanted what little there was to go to citizens,” said one Mexican worker who spent two decades working in the country, according to historian Dana Frank’s book What Can We Learn from the Great Depression? Stories of Ordinary People & Collective Action in Hard Times. In Texas in 1932, a man threatened to blow up City Hall if jobs weren’t taken from Mexicans and given to white workers, writing to the mayor of El Paso: “Brother we passed the court house the other day. Look who was a clerk, a Mexican. A Mexican, can you beat that? In a white man’s place.”
According to Grandin, estimates put the figure of those who were forced to leave the country in the 1930s at between 300,000 to two million people — among them many U.S. citizens. In California’s San Fernando, as chronicled by Frank, a worker told a local Spanish-language paper how immigration officials “rode around the neighborhood with their sirens wailing and advising people to surrender themselves to the authorities. They barricaded all the entrances to the colonia so no one could escape,” said the worker describing the arrest of workers in lemon groves. “We the women cried, the children screamed, others ran hither and yon with the deputies in hot pursuit yelling at them that their time had come to surrender.”
In a cruelly ironic twist, repatriations and ethnic cleansing by deportation later created a labor shortage addressed by legally bringing into the United States millions of Mexican workers to work the agricultural fields, a cheap and highly exploitable labor source managed through the Bracero Program from the 1940s through the 1960s.
The power of fear
“Real power is — I don’t even want to use the word — fear,” said Trump in 2016. Performance is Trump’s métier, and inciting fear is the most common bit in his drama repertoire. As the political scientist and author Corey Robin has noted, “political actors use fear when there is a mismatch between their power-mongering and the capacity of the state. As is true of all performance on stage, fear is designed to amplify the voice of the actor, far beyond the confines of the theater. Contrary to what people think, the purpose of fear is not sadism or cruelty. It never has been. It is to compensate for a lack of state capacity.”
Then there’s what the historian Timothy Snyder has called “anticipatory obedience” and the imperative command: “Do not obey in advance,” which has been making the rounds on social media posts and countless news stories. But as M. Gessen argued in the New York Times on February 8, obeying in advance can be a perfectly rational response, as humans take responsibility for others and seek to avoid “collective hostage-taking.”
The example of collective hostage-taking is especially resonant for union members who organize collectively, as Gessen describes, “the phenomenon when individuals cannot be free to act because of a constant, credible threat of collective punishment. Collective hostage-taking is particularly insidious because it pits different sets of values against each other.”
As one worker recently wrote to me when asked to comment on a source of division in their union: “Unfortunately I have to think of the consequences for others. I’m not concerned with the impact upon myself, but others get blamed for my actions.”
Under these conditions, it’s critical to support any worker who speaks out and organizes within their union to refuse to bend the knee to Trump and Musk. Will rank-and-file workers defy their accommodationist leaders in unions that are going along with Trump’s plan to decimate the working class? And will labor leadership join together to resist these attacks, even when they’re trained on workers outside their own union’s membership, such as federal workers?
Weeks into Trump’s second term, we’ve already seen that he isn’t invincible and have witnessed the limits of executive power. Trump backtracked on his initial threatened tariffs on Canada and Mexico. Many of his executive orders are tied up in the courts. Thousands of people have rallied nationwide since Trump’s reelection to protest mass deportation sweeps, attacks on programs that acknowledge race and gender inequality (part of a right-wing effort to destroy the post-Civil Rights settlement, such as ending President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 ban on racial discrimination in federal employment or government contractors), and restrictions on transgender rights, including banning gender-affirming care for young trans people.
“The first days after Trump’s inauguration were the coldest days here in Chicago, and I don’t know if it was the bad weather or anti-immigrant threats they heard in the news, but people didn’t show up for work,” says Juan Vargas, a Teamsters Local 703 grocery worker. But one week later, he tells me in Spanish, “either people lost their fear or went back to work to afford to eat.”
While raids are still very much on people’s minds, immigrants in Chicago have had the support of a community and local political leadership that has largely stood against Trump’s threats of deportations, and workers are informing each other of their rights in the face of intimidation from ICE officials. Sanctuary cities like Chicago, complained Trump’s border czar Tom Homan, “are making it very difficult” because residents are “educated” about how to avoid immigration sweeps.
Workers’ centers like Arise Chicago, Chicago Community and Workers’ Rights, Centro Sin Fronteras, as well as unions including the Chicago Teachers Union and others have held numerous trainings since the presidential election to get residents prepared, building on what they learned and experienced during Trump’s first term in the White House.
Martin Unzueta from Chicago Community and Workers’ Rights says 60 Latino Teamsters from Local 703 attended the Know Your Rights trainings. Countless more training sessions have been held across the city.
Where the sticks of ICE agent intimidation won’t do the trick, the Trump team is bringing out the carrots to chip away at the workforce. Musk has offered bribes to federal employees to purge them from their government jobs, but only 20,000 have accepted the buyout, according to Axios. Jacob Morrison, member of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 1858 in Huntsville, Alabama, says the annual churn rate is more than 100,000. In 2022 alone, according to the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, voluntary attrition from the civil service included 150,000 federal employees leaving the government, including 70,000 who retired and 77,000 who quit their jobs.
The upshot? Rather than reduce the size of the federal workforce, Musk and his minions have actually so far helped grow federal union membership to the highest in its history to 321,000. AFGE has been recruiting new members to resist Musk’s attack while also picketing to prevent him from gaining unauthorized access to buildings and Treasury Department data and rallying on Capitol Hill. Where he has been foiled, Musk has upped the ante by threatening mass layoffs.
There’s no coherent pole of opposition in the labor movement or anywhere else, especially among the feckless and corporate-owned Democrats.
Now the Trump administration is facing numerous lawsuits, including to block the so-called deferred resignation plan, and protests are starting to spread, such as the AFL-CIO and other major unions trying to repel Trump’s assault on the Department of Labor. But there’s no coherent pole of opposition in the labor movement or anywhere else, especially among the feckless and corporate-owned Democrats. Meanwhile, the far-right has cohered an insurrectionary vanguard of professional self-professed “revolutionaries.”
Musk thinks it’s a do-or-die moment for an oligarchic takeover of the U.S. government, and has brought in his twenty-something cost-cutting henchmen to lend axes: “This is our shot. This is the best hand of cards we’re ever going to have,” the neo-Nazi sympathizer said in December.
“The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country,” said Vought in 2024 under the Biden administration. “Our adversaries already hold weapons of the government apparatus, and they have aimed it at us.”
The truth today is the opposite — the struggle we face is between worker power and billionaire rule. Vought and his cronies have hijacked the government, but they’ve also outlined how we can fight them: “The hour is late and time is of the essence to expose the charade, rally the country… and seize every leverage point to arrest the damage,” said Vought.
We are living through a moment in which the economic and political spheres are more tightly joined than ever with corporate capture of both parties, creating an opening as barriers between the two spheres disintegrate and the unity of corporate and state power melds into what can only be described as an oligarchy.
“At this point in any argument like this one, the question arises of what should be done and, more critically, what can be done.” wroteNew York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie on February 5. “The sad answer is not that much. Those with the direct institutional power to slam the brakes lack the will and those with the will lack the power.” This may be true when it comes to the political establishment, but there is another potential source of power: the labor movement, where the resistance must be one of polarized classes, workers vs. the bosses.
“Attacking immigrant workers hurts the entire working class, as employers take advantage of the fear caused by threats of deportation to undermine wages and working conditions, and weaken unions,” said the United Electrical Workers in a statement. “The actions of Trump and his billionaire supporters have already begun to generate popular resistance, and we can expect to see more. The labor movement needs to play a key role in channeling that anger into an effective fightback.”
Opposition time
The labor movement is facing an existential crisis, but it does have leverage. There’s no other organization of the working class with a membership base of 14 million in key industries that can disrupt the economy, and a war chest as plentiful as the labor movement’s coffers today. We know that any resistance requires organization. And the labor movement is best positioned to provide it — in coalition with other progressive forces.
It’s high time for a united front coalition — a broad working-class movement that fights for all workers, welcoming everyone, regardless of gender or immigration status. What’s needed is nothing short of a coalitional bloc premised on organized labor’s highest values and unifying ethos: An injury to one is an injury to all. The question is which unions will step up and take on the mantle of leadership.
In their book Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World, Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce offer a set of strategies rooted in the history of past struggles for a new generation of organizers. Among the various forms in which workers can wield power, Bhargava and Luce list solidarity and disruption, harnessing our strength in numbers and wielding a credible threat to shut things down.
Rather than large noisy demonstrations with no clear aims, workers can take part in the types of actions that block traffic to prevent ICE from conducting workplace raids. If a private-sector employer is collaborating with ICE or discriminating against transgender workers, workers can throw up obstacles by mass strike action, shop-floor action and sabotaging the boss to prevent them from getting their way through hammering their profits, wresting power from them and prying free of their control. To counter the power of billionaires, we are going to “need strategies that chart a path [workers and their communities] can travel, from the world as it is to the world as it could be.” The difficult path we must traverse is from an America First to a Workers First world.
That’s going to require unlikely alliances across the working class rooted in a solidarity strong enough for workers to act together in sufficient numbers to disrupt the status quo. Tactically, because we don’t have enough power in numbers, we’ll have to work alongside broader liberal formations like Indivisible, a volunteer-driven group of progressive Democrats, as well as loose online groupings such as #BuildtheResistance.
This coalition will also require peeling away support from MAGA, either when Trump’s supporters become disaffected or when we make it too costly for them to continue to align with a president that’s all in for the super rich. Drawing them in will require an orientation to class-struggle politics. Musk and his billionaire pals represent everything that is wrong with capitalism, in which the relationship between workers and bosses is one of domination and exploitation, which grinds us down every day, leaving us overworked, underpaid and unfree.
That capitalist system has been the daily experience of workers for far too long. But it’s now turbocharged into an extreme version of political oligarchy, in which bosses are looting the federal government for parts and threatening to destroy the livelihoods of millions without as much as a pretense about democracy. They know they can’t survive under real democracy, so they’re ready to abandon it. It would be foolish to chalk up what’s going on to a defeatist lament of “same as it ever was.” It’s not. Workers didn’t vote for a billionaire takeover of their lives at work and in society. “They voted specifically to lower the cost of living,” Bouie reminds us. “They certainly did not vote for a world where the president’s billionaire ally has access to your Social Security number.”
Pointing to one of the greatest struggles for freedom in the nation’s history, Bhargava and Luce write, “the abolitionist fight was complicated and messy, and involved alliances of unlikely subjects. Slavery ended in the United States through the actions of people with a wide range of motives and positions. Such unlikely alliances will be necessary today.” The organizing that we must undertake will require us to “assess what sources of power are available” to us, and “what strategies are possible given the context.”
This moment calls for a broad coalition that knits together an anti-billionaire revolt from below. We need to peel away the soft core of persuadable voters who cast a ballot for Trump. While the AFL-CIO has so far failed to coordinate mass actions nationwide to stop Trump’s assault on the working class, it’s not for nothing that the federation is collecting stories to put worker faces on the attacks from Trump and his billionaire cabinet, and has created the “Department of People Who Work for a Living,” as an organized response to Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Federal workers organizing across unions through the Federal Unionist Network (FUN) have called for a national day of action on February 19. “We are nurses, scientists, park rangers, protectors of our country, researchers, and attorneys who serve our communities every day,” FUN wrote in an email on February 10, announcing the day of action. “If we speak out together, we can make it clear to the public why the Trump administration’s attack on our jobs is designed to make all of our lives worse, all to benefit billionaires like Elon Musk.”
Higher education workers are holding a strategy session on February 13 in the face of illegal budget cuts, including to the National Institutes of Health. “The billionaire class is waging a war on workers, putting our nation’s healthcare, research, education, and jobs at risk,” the cross-union group called Labor for Higher Education, which is organizing under the broad banner of “Hands off our healthcare, our research, our jobs,” recently wrote on its website.
Educators are also coming together locally to defend themselves and their students and in the process are building a movement infrastructure that could be used to fight back. “We believe this is a crucial moment for CTU and allies to bring together a number of large locals and community organizations who are strategically situated in key sectors and geographies,” says Jackson Potter, CTU’s vice president. “There is a distinct possibility that May 1, 2025 could resemble the movement moment that we saw on May 1, 2006, when 400,000 people marched in Chicago [for worker and immigrant rights].”
In late January, Homan vented his frustration on national TV about how well organized workers and communities are in Chicago. “Hundreds of schools have mobilized walk-ins and sanctuary teams to fight back against the Trump attack,” Potter tells In These Times. “In order to spur our defense of immigrant rights, civil rights and labor rights, we are working to help anchor a convening in March with unions facing contract expirations and groups planning May Day marches, to surface shared demands, tactics and solidarity.” The United Electrical Workers are also part of the effort.
But we also need a national pole of opposition where partisans of labor’s troublemaking wing can come together to make sense of how immigrant workers, trans workers, Black workers on a “DEI Watch List” and other targets of the billionaires aren’t faced with the blame for austerity budgets nor for corporate decisions to offshore jobs.
From below
We may be in the beginning of a new movement upsurge, which opens up both new dangers and new possibilities. The dangers include an onslaught of repression, co-optation and absorption by stronger coalition partners, which could lead to a large yet unaccountable organization capable of throwing its weight around to divert the public’s will to fight into political dead-ends, including running cover for the feckless and corporate-dominated Democratic Party, stifling the flames needed to broaden movement disruption. It’s a fraught dynamic to build power. But there are also possibilities to jumpstart new cross-union political vehicles of worker power from below.
To take advantage of the possibilities, we need to expand public debate on how we fight back, which in turn can build the capacity of organizers to generate strategy on the basis of their rank-and-file experiences fighting the boss. In Labor Notes, UE organizer Mark Meinster argued that moments of upsurge are not usually led by the top national leaders, but a small minority of militant labor unions ready to take action because they are independent from the mainstream.
“So where does organizing capacity come from in an upsurge?” Meinster asked. “Historically, three places: a) the minority of unions willing to take militant action, b) new formations that come together during the upsurge, such as the new CIO industrial unions in the 1930s, and c) people fighting for profound changes in society, such as the civil rights movement of the 1960s, socialists in the 1930s, or anarchists in earlier periods.”
Union locals can host strike schools nationwide and create political education programs. Worker education also includes vital labor education programs at public and private universities. Other efforts will have to be more explicitly socialist—the New York City chapter of Democratic Socialists of America’s Academy for Socialist Education, for example, is offering classes on striking, political economy, the making of the MAGA coalition and the crisis of the neoliberal ruling classes.
Opposition efforts will have to emerge from workers themselves. UPS Teamster John Elward said he discussed an idea with a UNITE HERE organizer to hold mass membership meetings to bring together local union members. “The idea is to build rank-and-file power rather than just officers or delegates at a labor council,” wrote Elward on the social media platform X. “Labor councils are incredibly important, but we need members to build solidarity across the ranks rather than be isolated and misinformed about labor issues.”
“Holding open membership meetings for all union members across sectors in geographic locations is a great idea to build credibility again with our members and re-teach the values of solidarity,” responded Jimmy Williams, Jr., president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades.
We need to be teachers and learners in schools of class struggle. And that begins with members feeling less isolated. “UFCW Local 663, like many union locals, is an amalgamated behemoth representing tons of different employers,” says Paul Kirk-Davidoff, a steward at Seward Community Co-op in Minneapolis. “When I was working at a food co-op, we started hosting bonfires where we would invite other union co-op workers. We used this to plan out our contract campaigns, and to build connections at the rank-and-file level. My friend works at a small suburban chain and has taken the mantle of leading these. His partner is a talented artist and they make lots of fun buttons together. We have started contract negotiations and he has held several get-togethers to hang out and make art. We’re at square one so making the union more than just a contract at your shop is critical. I’m extremely proud of the work that all of us youngsters in this union have done to form connections. We’re all pissed off and lots of us are looking for a place to fight back; by reviving a union culture, we’re opening up that space.”
To create a broad base of class fighters, we need to massively scale up what Kirk-Davidoff describes. As Mark Brenner wrote in Labor Notes in 2010, “if labor’s going to find our own way — and bring everyone who’s been steamrolled by corporate America along with us — we need to rethink: what is it that makes a union strong?…The work ahead of us is simply too much for smart staffers to handle it all. It requires an exponential increase in the number of members who have authority to develop strategy and take action.”
International solidarity is another component of worker strategy as bosses seek to polarize us along nationalist lines. “Grocery stores get food from across the world,” says Kirk-Davidoff. “I take note of where my meat and seafood comes from, and track it. Our crab legs mostly come from Newfoundland, which has a strong food processing union, the FFAW. When the tariffs were announced, I sent an email to the union rep for the plant where they process our crab legs and got in touch. If the tariffs actually go through, it will be cool to see where we can go with this connection.”
Another point of discussion and connection is how to prepare for May Day 2028, the call by the United Auto Workers to align contracts for a potential general strike. “Cross-union efforts that bring members together to decide and wage their electoral strategy could take this work even further, helping grow a class-wide vision,” Keith Brower Brown of Labor Noteswrote recently. “The run-up to May Day 2028 could build that kind of multi-union, member-led political discussion, even for unions who don’t align their contracts in time.”
One key division to tackle through political education is between native-born and immigrant workers. In New York, Trump and Musk might strip building trades members of thousands of jobs if they follow through on threatened cuts to infrastructure spending, which includes more than 500 projects in the state, worth $22 billion. That’s an opening to reframe the conversation among union members in the building and construction trades from immigrants taking jobs to bosses rigging the economy to devastate their livelihoods.
Recent social movement protests in defense of immigrant workers or other causes have had little staying power and have dissipated in the face of counterattacks by elites to hold on to their concentrated power. But social protests can build layers of organizers even in defeat. Previous immigrant struggles have produced leaders ready to fight back. Now the question is: how do we cohere veterans from these past fights and newer ones into lasting rank-and-file leadership?
When discussing immigration policy, we must understand immigrant workers in their class relationship to their employers — because the fundamental dynamic is about the economic power imbalance between workers and bosses — rather than framing their plight solely as a wedge issue about immigrant rights. Instead, their labor struggles should be placed at the center of the fight against billionaire rule.
That’s where boycotts of employers can play a role. If Trump and billionaire CEOs hamper the functioning of the National Labor Relations Board, we should organize strategic secondary boycotts—legal caveats be damned. That’s us wielding economic power, moving as fearlessly and audaciously as Musk’s illegal sacking of federal workers. Let’s draw inspiration from the United Farm Workers’ grape boycott in the 1960s, made possible because agricultural workers aren’t covered by federal labor law, as well as the unsanctioned red state teacher strikes in 2018 and a more recent illegal strike wave in Massachusetts.
For example, we can help make the Tesla brand synonymous with Nazi apologetics and Musk the poster child for CEOs nationwide trampling on workers’ rights. Musk needs to be the face of a public backlash, holding him responsible for all calamities that befall workers and their communities from the gutting of the government. Some of this work is already starting to be done. According to Politico, new polling show’s Musk’s popularity “in the toilet,” which could help to hinder his efforts on behalf of the Trump administration.
And Musk’s more controversial actions are having economic consequences in the United States and across Europe, including Sweden where Tesla mechanics have been on strike for more than a year. In California, the U.S.’s largest market for electric vehicles, the company’s sales have plummeted with the company’s operating profit down 23 percent. In Germany, sales dropped by 59 percent as Musk told the country’s population to get over their “past guilt” over Nazi-era crimes against humanity, and Tesla’s market share in the country is down from 14 percent to 4 percent.
Ending billionaire rule
Like the abolitionists of the 19th century arrayed against the planter class, today we need to break the economic, ideological and political foundations of billionaire rule. “The international movement, with enslaved and formerly enslaved people at the heart, fought to pass laws, boycotted consumer products, rallied in mass meetings, petitioned legislatures, marched, engaged in mass public education, ran away, took up arms, operated underground railroads, and created a new common sense about the evils of slavery,” write Bhargava and Luce.
Our approach needs to be similarly multifaceted — narrative shifts through storytelling, lawsuits, direct action on the shop-floor, sabotage, mass strikes, boycotts, political education, large nationwide marches — adjusted for the present context. Not everyone who opposes this corporate takeover of American society will be our friends. Some in the united front will certainly disagree with us on some issues, just as many abolitionists were racist, and many anti-fascists were pro-capitalist. We may have to work in alliance with them, while also refusing to compromise our values or goals.
Wherever Trump and Musk’s attacks have galvanized members of the working class to fight the billionaires, we need to welcome them into the fight. The Right’s strategy is attrition. Ours is additive. May a million opposition efforts bloom, from the ground up. It’s time for the labor movement to lead in building a majority bloc of the working class against billionaire rule.
Federal employee union members have been speaking out, rallying, and suing, as agency after agency has been hit by Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) — a private unaccountable entity which has been demanding access to all government records while spreading wild lies about waste and fraud. Around 20,000 workers have been summarily fired so far.
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The mission of the Department of Labor is to “foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage-earners, job-seekers and retirees of the United States, improve working conditions, advance opportunities for profitable employment and assure work-related benefits and rights.” That is the mission of the Department of Labor, and it’s a mission that is more important now, in my view, that it has ever been.
For the past 50 years, our economy has been doing extraordinarily well. Never done better for the people on top. Top 1%, right now, is enjoying wealth and power in a way that has never existed in the history of America.
We now have the absurd situation – the disgraceful situation – where three people, Mr. Musk, Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Bezos are now worth over $900 billion. That is more wealth than the bottom half of American society: 170 million people. Is that really what America is supposed to be about?
In America, we have more income and wealth inequality than we have ever had. Over 60% of our people, as we speak right here, 60% of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck. I grew up in a family living paycheck-to-paycheck. That ain’t easy. Stress level: enormous. People trying to find out how they are going to get health care, how they are going to pay their rent, how they’re going to feed their kids, which is one of the reasons working-class people live six years shorter lives than the people on top.
Given this reality, of an economy working well for the billionaire class but not for working families, we need a labor secretary who, in fact, is going to be a champion of working families – not be ambiguous about it, but stand up for the working families of our country.
We need a labor secretary who understands we must raise the minimum wage. Now, $7.25. Federal minimum wage. Anybody think that anyone anywhere in America can live on $7.25 an hour?
We need a labor secretary who will work each and every day to make it easier, not harder, for workers to exercise their constitutional right to form a union and collectively bargain for better wages and working conditions.
We need a labor secretary who understands that we must end, once and for all, the disastrous right-to-work laws in 28 states by repealing section 14B of Taft-Harley.
We need a labor secretary who understands we must end the international embarrassment of America being the only major country on Earth that does not guarantee paid family and medical leave, or paid sick days. Imagine that. Only major country on Earth that does not guarantee paid family medical leave.
We need a labor secretary who understands it is unacceptable that women earn 75 cents on the dollar compared to men.
So Ms. Chavez-DeRemer, I have reviewed your record, and in many respects, especially given the nature of the nominees that Mr. Trump has brought forth, it is very good. You’re one of the few Republican members of Congress who cosponsored the PRO Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, to make it easier for workers to form unions.
You have been a defender of union apprenticeship programs and you have fought to expand the concept of employee ownership – something I feel strongly about. Many unions have come out in support of your nomination, and that is an interesting development. I have spoken with you and union leaders who support your nomination.
But here is my concern: If you are confirmed, you will not only be in charge of enforcing more than 180 labor laws that are on the books today, you will be the president’s chief labor advisor. That is what you will be.
When it comes to labor policy, you will have to make a choice: Will you be a rubber stamp for the anti-worker agenda of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and other multi-billionaires who are blatantly anti-union? They don’t make any bones about it. Or will you stand with working families all over the country?
That is really the main issue. It’s not just your record. This is an unusual administration. In my view, we are moving toward an authoritarian society where one person has enormous power. Will you have the courage to say, “Mr. President, that is unconstitutional, that is wrong, I will not stand with you.”
This story originally appeared in Labor Notes on Feb. 14, 2025. It is shared here with permission.
The second Trump administration has the federal workforce in its crosshairs. Spearheading the effort is Elon Musk (the richest man in the world) and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (not actually a government department).
Trump and Musk have taken a shotgun-blast approach: instituting a hiring freeze, shutting down whole agencies, telling workers to stop coming in, offering buyouts to 2 million workers, ordering remote workers back to the office in violation of union contracts, and mass-firing workers still in their probationary periods.
In a flurry of executive orders his first day in office, Trump opened the door to moving federal workers out of positions protected by civil service rules and targeted remote work policies and diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.
The changes appear designed to create chaos among federal workers, their unions, and those who rely on federal programs. They have come fast and numerous, seemingly without regard to legality.
Many changes have been challenged legally, and some have already been stopped in the courts. But while only some will ultimately stick, there’s a lot of damage that will be hard to undo—and the chaos is meant to keep Trump’s opponents occupied, afraid, dispirited, and on the defensive.
Federal unions have begun to respond by filing lawsuits and holding rallies. And workers are organizing themselves to share information and begin to fight back. A rank-and-file group called the Federal Unionists Network is planning a nationwide “Save Our Services” day of action on February 19, targeting the dealerships of Musk’s car company Tesla—sign up here to participate locally.
“I’ve never seen a billionaire carry the mail,” said Mark Smith, a patient educator at the Veteran’s Administration in San Francisco and the president of National Federation of Federal Employee (NFFE) Local 1. “I’ve never seen a billionaire put out a forest fire. I’ve never seen a billionaire make sure people get their Social Security checks on time. I’ve never seen a billionaire answer a phone call from a suicidal veteran on a crisis line. So I don’t trust a billionaire to decide what happens to our public services—and that’s why we’re fighting to get this billionaire’s hands out of them.” (All the people quoted in this article spoke to Labor Notes in a personal capacity, not as representatives of their agencies or employers.)
HEAD-SPINNING PACE
The federal government is the largest employer in the U.S., with 2.4 million civilian workers (excluding the Postal Service). Attacking this workforce has become a central plank of Trump’s program.
In his first term, he claimed that the “deep state” and the “swamp,” meaning civil servants, were constantly undermining him through inaction or sabotage. This time, with increased vigor (and more planning), and aided by Musk and his acolytes, Trump has made a head-spinning number of moves to reshape and undermine federal agencies and the federal workforce.
Three months before the end of his first term, Trump signed an executive order creating a new class of at-will, political-appointee federal jobs into which his administration could move workers who were typically covered by civil service protections. These workers could now be fired much more easily.
Biden quickly undid this order, but when Trump returned, he immediately resurrected it. He has since made administrative moves to get ready to shift an unknown number of workers into these so-called “Policy/Career” positions (originally called “Schedule F”).
After announcing plans to eliminate tens of thousands of jobs, Musk and Trump sent out an email to 2 million federal workers offering them a chance to resign now and still get paid through September. The email mirrored one sent to Twitter employees after Musk took over the social media company, down to its “Fork in the Road” subject heading.
Among the workers who received the email were air traffic controllers. It appeared in their inboxes the day before a deadly crash in Washington, D.C.; the control tower was understaffed.
Musk, with Trump’s blessing, has targeted agencies one by one for scrutiny and partial—or full—shutdown. The U.S. Agency for International Development, which provides foreign aid, was unceremoniously shut down—7,000 workers were put on administrative leave or fired; even the agency’s nameplate was removed from the entrance to its headquarters.
Seventeen hundred workers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which was created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to provide oversight of the financial services sector, were instructed not to show up to work and to stop many of their investigations. Days later, dozens of these workers who were still in their probationary periods—and thus, the government claims, not covered by union protections—were fired in an after-hours email.
Trump has since put 200,000 more workers in their probationary periods on the chopping block, and announced deep cuts to the IRS, the Energy Department, Housing and Urban Development, and the Forestry Service.
OUTRAGE AND RESISTANCE
Besides confusion and fear, these moves have provoked outrage in the federal workforce. In the week after the “Fork in the Road” email, hundreds of workers took to Reddit and other social media to denounce the offer as an unenforceable scam.
In another measure of resistance—or at least mistrust—workers have not flocked to take the resignation deal, despite the vague threat of future layoffs. Musk said he hoped five to 10 percent of eligible federal workers would take the deal; the government-reported number shows that 75,000, or around 3 percent, did. For comparison, around 150,000 federal workers retire or quit every year.
Less than 24 hours after receiving the emails that they had been fired, CFPB probationary workers organized pickets in New York City, Washington D.C., San Francisco, and Chicago.
“On Tuesday night, we each started getting these cryptic emails to our personal accounts,” said Chris Fasano, an attorney in the CFPB’s enforcement division and a member of National Treasury Employees Union Chapter 335. “We immediately got on a call with 60 or 70 of us. We talked about everything that was wrong, and how we had to notify the national [union] leadership and have a legal strategy—but that that wasn’t enough and that we wanted to take to the street.”
By 10 p.m., they had decided to hold an information picket at noon the next day. They scrambled to reach out to co-workers and allies, and to make signs and flyers. In New York City, “we were expecting maybe a dozen people,” Fasano said. “We had maybe 100 show up.” They included CFPB workers (fired and not), other NTEU members, and members of other unions and community groups.
Hai Binh Nguyen, an enforcement attorney at the CFPB, helped organize the San Francisco rally and reported a similar outpouring of support. “There’s a lot of support for the Bureau and our work,” Binh said. “It was amazing to have everyone see that we’re just the first domino to fall.”
MEMBERSHIP SURGES
Federal workers are spread across a handful of unions, the largest of which are the American Federation of Government Employees, representing 800,000 workers, and the NTEU, representing 150,000.
There’s also the NFFE, a Machinists affiliate; the Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), which represents 30,000 workers at agencies like NASA, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Tennessee Valley Authority; and National Nurses United, which represents 15,000 nurses at the Veterans Administration.
Federal worker unions are relatively limited in what they can bargain. Wages are off the table—those are set by Congress, and wage increases have to be passed as law. But they do negotiate over working conditions issues like discipline, scheduling, and remote work. (Postal workers are an exception; although they work for the federal government, they have collective bargaining rights and are covered by the National Labor Relations Act alongside private sector workers.)
The federal sector is “open shop”: workers represented by a union aren’t required to join it. So while AFGE represents 800,000 workers, it has 321,000 members. While NTEU represents 150,000, it has 87,000 members.
But AFGE and other federal unions have reported significant membership increases since the election and particularly after Trump’s inauguration. According to the Federal News Network, AFGE gained 8,000 members in January and 8,200 in the first 10 days of February. Compare that to the 7,400 members it gained in all of 2024, including newly organized workplaces.
“We’ve seen a massive increase in new membership,” said Lauren Lieb, a land law examiner at the Bureau of Land Management in New Mexico, and a chapter president and chief steward with NTEU Chapter 340, “including former holdouts who are finally coming on board and getting really engaged.” Lieb’s BLM group unionized relatively recently, in 2020, and they’ve been hearing from workers at other agencies asking how to do the same.
Smith at NFFE Local 1 reports a similar uptick. He and others have started holding weekly “Unions 101” sessions at the V.A. for federal workers; he says 170-180 people participate every week on their lunch breaks to learn about “unions—what they do, how they work, and updates about what’s going on.” Membership meetings are drawing the highest turnout ever in the local’s 25-year history.
AFGE and other groups of workers have held rallies in D.C. and around the country, denouncing the attacks. Unions and other organizations have also filed lawsuits over a number of Trump and Musk actions—including the email offering resignation, the attempt to move workers out of civil service categories, and Musk’s access to sensitive Treasury Department data.
Legal actions have succeeded in temporarily stalling some policy changes, but not yet overturned any. Lawsuits move slowly; they can’t match the frenzied pace at which Trump and Musk are operating.
A FORCE MULTIPLER
At the grassroots, activists are building connections across unions—sharing accurate information and strategies to fight back. One formation is the Federal Unionists Network (FUN), which has added thousands of federal workers to its rolls in an explosion of interest since the November election, through email lists, group chats, zoom calls, and in-person events and rallies.
FUN grew out of informal cross-union attempts to pressure Biden and the Democrats over changes to federal worker policies, as well as reform efforts inside particular federal unions. It held its first meeting at the 2024 Labor Notes Conference in Chicago. “That really catalyzed our efforts,” said Smith, who is active in the network.
After that, he said, “FUN was humming along, a little smaller, more informal, building more slowly, and then all of a sudden it was an emergency, and we started growing and expanding very quickly.”
FUN held a meetup in Washington, D.C., in the middle of AFGE and IFPTE’s legislative conferences, bringing together union leaders and activists from eight federal agencies to talk about what’s happening and how they’re taking on the challenge.
Union locals in the federal sector are extremely uneven. Some are essentially paper locals, with membership under 10 percent and little to no activity. So FUN has also been a place for workers to get accurate information about the administration’s attacks and learn how to get organized.
“We’ve been able to share resources like filing info requests, coordinating strategies together that we can execute independently within our own locals—it has been a really great and powerful tool to be able to stay in the fight,” said Lieb.
“Historically union locals in the federal sectors have been fragmented, isolated, and there haven’t been a ton of resources for support,” said Smith. “To be able to connect with hundreds of really engaged unionists all across the country has been such a force multiplier. People are developing as leaders, activists, at such a rapid pace because they’re able to get support and help.”
2400 striking behavioral health care workers in Southern California have taken to the streets – literally. On February 8, workers sat down in the middle of Sunset Blvd in Los Angeles, blocking traffic in front of Kaiser Permanente’s Los Angeles Medical Center. The strikers, members of the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), blocked traffic until a dozen of them, as well as California Labor Federation President Lorena Gonzalez and other supporters, were arrested. The sit-in marked day 110 of the strike. The strikers want parity with Kaiser’s workers in Northern California, workers who won significant gains in a 2022 10-week strike.
The Southern California workers want their patients to have timely visits. Today, they complain, members (Kaiser has 4.8 million fee paying members it provides services for) can book in for treatment, but frequently endure four weeks or longer for return appointments and treatment. This even though California mandates a maximum wait time of 10 business days for both initial and return visits. They also want time to do their jobs, to provide mental health care for the Kaiser members who deserve it and pay for it. They want seven hours per week to prepare for appointments, devise treatment plans, provide resources, file mandated reports, go to the bathroom, and so on.
It is astonishing that Kaiser, the largest HMO in the country with profits of $4.1 billion in 2023 and $64 billion in the bank will cancel thousands of appointments rather than meet these minimal demands. And blatantly oblivious it seems to a national crisis in mental health, compounded no doubt by the new regime in Washington. This is in defiance Medicare standards, of its own employees, also of the Southern California labor movement which provides many thousands of members, and an array of elected officials who have called out the giant HMO for having shown no urgency in reaching an agreement. These include Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas and Senate President Pro Tempore Mike McGuire who have urged Kaiser to “resume good faith negotiations with NUHW as soon as possible, and to agree to the union’s reasonable contract proposals in order to ensure the delivery of timely and appropriate behavioral health services to your patients.”
Governor Gavin Newsom, in a February 6 letter to both parties, wrote, “Getting our full behavioral health workforce back to work gives us the best chance to address the needs that will undoubtedly grow in the weeks and months to come in the Los Angeles region and elsewhere,” noting that in the wake of the wildfires “thousands of Californians are grappling with extreme loss and displacement” and offering to assist in “identifying a mutually agreed-upon mediator.” As of now Kaiser hasn’t responded to Newsom’s offer of mediation to help settle the strike.
Instead, Kaiser executive Dawn Gillam has doubled down on maintaining the disparity between Kaiser’s Northern and Southern mental health systems, insisting “we are two different business models… and we have two different geographic markets that are very different.” Really. Kaiser’s slow-motion bargaining is set to resume on February 17, it will not schedule another until March 6.
It is a great tribute to these workers that they have held out for more than 100 days and show no sign of weakening. 82% signed a petition committing them to support the strike as long as it takes. I can only say that forcing these workers away from their jobs, without pay, for so long including through the holidays – these are people with lives to live and families to support – is purely and simply unconscionable, cruel.
The National Union of Healthcare Workers is a member-led movement that represents 19,000 healthcare workers in California and Hawaii, including more than 4,700 Kaiser mental health professionals: psychologists, social workers, psychiatric nurses, addiction medicine counselors, licensed clinical counselors, and marriage and family therapists.
The Trump administration has wasted no time attacking worker rights and bestowing even more power to employers through a barrage of anti-worker executive orders since Trump’s second term began. Within his first two weeks in office, Trump rapidly targeted LGBTQIA+ workers and undid civil rights protections. He fired two Democratic commissioners on the five-person Equal Employment Opportunity…
Instead of the conservative motto, ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!’ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: ‘Abolition of the wage system!’ Karl Marx, Value, Price, and Profit
Today, the point that Marx made in his 1865 address to the First International Working Men’s Association is largely lost on the trade unions and even with many self-styled Marxists. The distinction between the goal of “a fair day’s wage” and the goal of eliminating exploitation– the wage system embedded in capitalism– is lost before a common, but unfocused revulsion to the exploding growth of inequality. It is one thing to deplore the growth of inequality, it is quite another to establish what would replace the logic of unfettered accumulation.
Marx offered no guidelines for a “fair wage”. Indeed, his analysis of capitalism made no significant use of the concept of fairness. Instead, he made the concept of exploitation central to his political economy. He used the concept in two ways: First, he employed “exploitation” in the popular sense of “taking advantage of” — the sense that the capitalist takes advantage of the worker. “Exploitation of man by man” was a nascent concept, arriving in discourse with the expansion of mass industrial employment and borrowed from an earlier, morally-neutral usage regarding the exploitation of non-humans. Its etymology, in that sense, arises in the late eighteenth century.
Marx also uses the word in a more rigorous sense: as a description of the interaction of the worker and the capitalist in the process of commodity production. Even more rigorously, it appears in political economic tracts like Capital as a ratio between the axiomatic concepts of surplus value and variable capital.
As a worker-friendly concept, exploitation is most readily grasped by workers in the basic industries, especially in extractive and raw-material industries. Historically, an early twentieth century coal miner– bringing the tools of extraction with him, responsible for his own safety while risking a more likely death than a war-time soldier, and accepting the “privilege” of going into a cold, damp hole to dig coal for someone else’s profit– intuitively understood exploitation. A reflective miner would recoil from the fact that ownership of a property could somehow– apart from any other consideration– confer to someone the right to profit from a commodity that someone else had faced mortal danger to extract from the earth. What is a “fair day’s wage” in such a circumstance?
Organically, from its intuitive understanding by workers, and theoretically, from class-partisan intellectuals like Marx and Engels, as well as their rivals like Bakunin, exploitation became the central idea behind anti-capitalism and socialism.
Today, most workers’ connection to the exploitation relation appears far removed from the direct relation of a coal miner to the coal face and to the owner of the coal mine. The immediacy of labor and labor’s product in extraction is often of many removes in service-sector or white-collar jobs. Moreover, the division of labor blurs the contribution of the individual’s efforts to the final product.
Well into the twentieth century, “labor exploitation” fell out of the lexicon of the left, especially in the more advanced capitalist countries, where Marx thought that it would be of most use. Left thinkers, as well as Marxists, rightly attended to the colonial question, focusing on the struggle for independence and sovereignty; they were discouraged by the tendency for class-collaboration in many leading working-class organizations; Communist Parties correctly felt a primary duty to defend the gains of the socialist and socialist-oriented countries; and the fight for peace was always a paramount concern.
Exploitation was attacked from the academy. The Humanist “Marxist” school trivialized the exploitation nexus to a species of the broad, amorphous concept of alienation. The Analytical “Marxist” school congratulated itself by proving that given an inequality of assets, a community of exchange-oriented actors would produce and reproduce inequality of assets, a proof altogether irrelevant to the concept of exploitation, which the school promised to clarify. Both schools influenced a retreat from Marxism in the university, followed by a stampede after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Liberal and social-democratic theory revisits the “fair day’s wage” with the explosion of income inequality and wealth inequality of the last decades of the twentieth century that was too impossible to ignore. But what is a “fair wage”? What level of income or wealth distribution is just, fair, socially responsible, or socially beneficial? The questions are largely unanswerable, if not incoherent.
Thanks to the empirical, long-term study of inequality shared in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century, we learn that capitalism’s historical tendency has been to always produce and reproduce income and wealth inequality, a conclusion sobering to those who hope to refashion capitalism into an egalitarian system and making a “fair wage” even more elusive. Piketty’s work offers no clue to what could constitute a “fair wage.”
Others point to the productivity-pay gap that emerged in the 1970s, where wage growth and productivity took entirely different courses at the expense of wage gains. Researchers who perceptively point to this gap as contributing to the growth of inequality often harken back to the immediate postwar era, when productivity growth and wage growth were somewhat in step, when the gains of productivity were “shared” between capital and labor. But what is magical about sharing? Why shouldn’t labor get 75% or 85% of the gain? Or all of the gain? Is maintaining existing inequalities the optimal social goal for the working class?
Where the concept of a “fair wage” offers more questions than answers, Marx’s concept of exploitation suggests a uniquely coherent and direct answer to the persistent and intensifying growth of income and wealth: eliminate labor exploitation! Abolish the wage system!
Thus, the return to the discussion of exploitation is urgent. And that is why a serious and clarifying account of exploitation today is so welcome.
*****
Jack Rasmus takes a step toward that end in a carefully argued, important paper, “Labor Exploitation in the Era of the Neoliberal Policy Regime.” I have followed Rasmus’s work for many years, especially admiring his respect for the tool of historical inquiry and his scrupulous research, interpretation, and careful use of “official” data. On the other hand, I thought that his work failed to fully consider the Marxist tradition, unduly drawn to engaging with the pettifoggery of academic “Marxists.”
However, his new work proves that assessment to be mistaken. Indeed, his latest work reflects an admirable reading of Marx’s political economy and offers an important tool in the struggle to end the wage system.
Rasmus understands that we are in a distinct era of capitalism, forced by the failure of the prior “policy regime” and typified by several features: intensified global penetration of capital and trade expansion (“globalization”), a massively growing role for financial innovation and notional profits (“financialization”), and most significantly, the restoration and expansion of the rate of profit (“the intensification of labor exploitation in both Absolute and Relative value terms that has occurred from the 1980s to the present”).
It should be noted that Rasmus does not discuss why a new “policy regime” became necessary in the 1970s. Both the stagflation that proved intractable to the reigning Keynesian paradigm and the attack on the US profit rate by foreign competition (see Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence, NLR, 229) necessitated a sea change in the direction of capitalism.
I might add that while so-called globalization was an important feature of “the neoliberal policy regime,” the 2007-2009 economic crisis has diminished the growth of global trade. Indeed, its decline has fostered the rise of economic nationalism, the latest wrinkle on the “neoliberal policy regime.”
Rasmus carefully and methodically documents and explicates the intensification of labor exploitation in commodity production (what he calls “primary exploitation”) over the last fifty years. He recognizes the important and growing role of the state in enabling this intensification. This is, of course, the process that Lenin foresaw with the fusing of the state and monopoly capitalism– a process associated in Marxist-Leninist theory with the rise of state-monopoly capitalism. Today’s advanced capitalist states fully embrace the goal of defending and advancing the profitability (‘health’) of monopoly corporations (‘a rising tide lifts all boats’), including intensifying labor exploitation.
Just how that intensification is accomplished is the subject of Rasmus’s paper.
*****
Rasmus is aware that Marx expressed the exploitation nexus in terms of labor value. He avoids the scholasticism that side-tracks academically trained economists who obsess over the price/value relationship — the so-called transformation problem. Value– specifically a labor theory of value — is central to Marx because it explains how commodities can command different, non-arbitrary exchange values and how the different proportionalities between the exchange values of commodities are determined. That is the problem Marx sets forth in the first pages of Capital, and value — as embodied labor — is the answer that he gives.
Using labor value as his theoretical primitive enables Rasmus to discuss exploitation in Marx’s framework of absolute and relative surplus value– exploitation by extending the working day or intensifying the production process. While Rasmus offers a persuasive argument that his use of “official” data couched in prices can legitimately be translated into values, it is unnecessary for his thesis. The relations are preserved because the proportionalities are, in general, preserved. It is a reasonable and adequate assumption that prices and values run in parallel, though a weaker claim than that prices can be derived from values.
Methodological considerations aside, Rasmus sets out to show — and succeeds in showing — that exploitation has accelerated in the “neoliberal” era in terms of both relative and absolute surplus value:
Capitalism’s Neoliberal era has witnessed a significant intensification and expansion of total exploitation compared to the pre-Neoliberal era. Under Neoliberal Capitalism both the workday (Absolute Surplus Value extraction) has been extended while, at the same time, the productivity of labor has greatly increased (Relative Surplus Value extraction) in terms of both the intensity and the mass of relative surplus value extracted.
Regarding Absolute Surplus Value, he demonstrates:
[I]t is true the work day was reduced during the first two thirds of the 20th century—by strong unions, union contract terms, and to some extent from government disincentives to extend the work day as a result of the passage of wages and hours legislation. But that trend and scenario toward a shorter work day was halted and rolled back starting in the late 1970s and the neoliberal era. The length of the Work Day has risen—not continued to decline—for full time workers under the Neoliberal Economic Regime.
Through a careful combing and analysis of government data, as well as original arguments, Rasmus shows how capital has succeeded in extending the workday. His discussion of changes in mandatory overtime, in temporary employment, in involuntary part-time employment, in paid leave, in changing work culture, in job classifications, in work from home, internships, and other practices form a persuasive argument for the existence of a trend of the lengthening of the average workday.
Similarly, Relative Labor Exploitation has accelerated in the “Neoliberal” era, according to Rasmus:
Rising productivity is a key marker for growing exploitation of Labor. If real wages have not risen since the late 1970s but productivity has—and has risen at an even faster rate in recent decades—then the value reflected in business revenues and profits of the increased output from that productivity has accrued almost totally to Capital.
In this regard, the numbers are widely recognized and non-controversial. Labor productivity has grown significantly, while wages have essentially stagnated. Rasmus tells us that it is even worse than it looks:
So, wages have risen only about one-sixth of the productivity increase. But perhaps only half of that total 13% real hourly wage increase went to the top 5% of the production & nonsupervisory worker group, according to EPI 10 (Economic Policy Institute, February 2020). That means for the median wage production worker, the share of productivity gain was likely 10% or less. The median wage and below production worker consequently received a very small share in wages from productivity over the forty years since 1979. It virtually all accrued to Capital…
According to the US Labor Department, there were 106 million production & nonsupervisory workers at year end 2019—out of the approximately 150 million total nonfarm labor force at that time. Had they entered the labor force around 1982-84, they would have experienced no real wage increase over the four decades.
Rasmus notes that the US maintained the same share of global manufacturing production through the first two decades of the twenty-first century, but doing it with six million fewer workers. This, of course, meant a rising rate of exploitation and a greater share of surplus value for the capitalists. Though the job losses struck especially hard at an important section of the manufacturing working class relegated to unemployment, the remaining workers lost further from concessionary bargaining promoted by a business-union leadership. Thus, they were unable to secure any of the gains accrued by rising productivity. They experienced a higher rate of exploitation.
*****
Demonstrating that labor exploitation has increased in the last 45-50 years in terms of absolute and relative surplus value does not, according to Rasmus, close the book on labor exploitation. Drawing on a suggestive quote in Volume III of Capital, he develops an original theory of “secondary exploitation.” Marx writes:
That the working-class is also swindled in this form [usury, commerce], and to an enormous extent, is self-evident… This is secondary exploitation, which runs parallel to the primary exploitation taking place in the production process itself. Capital, Volume III, p. 609
Rasmus explains secondary exploitation this way: “Secondary Exploitation (SE) is not a question of value being created in exchange relations. It’s about capitalists reclaiming part of what they paid initially in wages. It’s about how capitalists maximize Total Exploitation by manipulating exchange relations as well as production relations.”
To be clear, Marx is not using the technical sense of “exploitation” here, but the popular sense. However, the fact that the worker has “earned” a measure of value and that capitalists can wrest some of it away in various ways is exploitation and important and worthy of study.
Here, however, Rasmus digresses, reverting back to the price form in his explanation of secondary exploitation. He seems to assume, without elaboration, that systemic “taking advantage of workers” outside of the production process must be explained in terms of prices and not values. He also seems to believe that all means of secondary exploitation must be within the exchange nexus. And he seems to believe that all secondary exploitation must be systemic. It is not clear why these assumptions should be made.
These methodological questions, however, bear little relevance to his fresh and original insights on secondary exploitation. Rasmus presents five mechanisms for capital to “claw back” from the working people the variable capital captured by the class in the value-producing process: credit, monopolistic price gouging, wage theft, deferred or social wages, and taxes. Importantly, Rasmus connects much of this exploitation to the active intervention of the state on behalf of capital.
Credit: Allowing workers to acquire commodities through deferred payment is not a sympathetic act by the capitalist, but a method of furthering accumulation in an environment where demand is restricted by the inequalities of income and wealth. The capitalist extracts additional value from the worker through interest charges. Additional value is “swindled” from the worker through the credit mechanism. Rasmus points out that interest-bearing loans to working people have expanded from $10 trillion-plus in 2013 to $17 trillion-plus in 2024, with dramatically higher interest rates in the last few years.
Monopolistic price gouging: Rasmus is fully aware that when prices go up, they are the result of decisions by capitalists to secure more revenue– that action is not to benefit society, not to help the workers, but to secure more for investors. Insofar as they succeed, their gains are at the expense of workers– a form of secondary exploitation.
Our current run of inflation is the result of a cycle of price increases to capture more of the consumers’ (in the end, the workers’) value and to catch up with competitors. But the impression must not be left unchallenged that this price gouging is painlessly left to the capitalist at his or her whim or that it is without risk. The impression must not be left, as it was in the 1960s with Sweezy/Baran, Gillman, and others, that monopoly concentration meant a sharp decline in the power of competition to retard and even thwart monopoly power to do as it liked. That lesson was sharply brought home in the 1970s with humbling of the US big three automakers and the US electronics industry. Monopoly and competition play a dialectical role in disciplining price behavior around labor values.
Wage theft: While theft is not exploitation, when it is common, frequent, and rarely sanctioned, it resembles exploitation more than theft! Rasmus provides an impressible list of common ruses:
The methods [of wage theft] have included capitalists not paying the required minimum wage; not paying overtime wage rates as provided in Federal and state laws; not paying workers for the actual hours they work; paying them by the day or job instead of by the hour; forcing workers to pay their managers for a job; supervisors stealing workers’ cash tips; making illegal deductions from workers’ paychecks; deducting their pay for breaks they didn’t take or for damages to company goods; supervisors arranging pay ‘kickbacks’ for themselves from workers’ pay; firing workers and not paying them for their last day worked; failing to give proper 60-day notice of a plant closing and then not paying workers as required by law; denying workers access to guaranteed benefits like workers’ compensation when injured; refusing to make contributions to pension and health plans on behalf of workers and then pocketing the savings; and, not least, general payroll fraud.
Deferred or Social wages: Rasmus shows how the government mechanisms that are meant to socially meet needs are skewed to draw more from workers proportionally while benefiting them less proportionally. He has in mind retirement, health care, and welfare programs that politicians persistently demand more sacrifices from working people to fund, while restricting their ability to draw the benefits through various tests of eligibility.
Taxes: Rasmus reminds us that the dominant political forces espousing the “Neoliberal policy regime” have dramatically increased the tax burden on workers:
Since the advent of Neoliberalism, the total tax burden has shifted from capitalists, their corporations, businesses, and investors to working class families.
In the post-World War II era the payroll tax has more than doubled as a share of total federal tax revenues, to around 45% by 2020. During the same period, the share of taxes paid by corporations has fallen from more than 20% to less than 10%. The federal individual income tax as a percent of total federal government revenues has remained around 40-45%. However, within that 40-45%, another shift in the burden has been occurring—from capital incomes to earned wage incomes…
Not just Trump, but every president since 2001 the US capitalist State has been engaged in a massive tax cutting program mostly benefiting capital incomes. The total tax cuts have amounted to at least $17 trillion since 2001: Starting with George W. Bush’s 2001-03 tax cuts which cut taxes $3.8 trillion (80% of which accrued to Capital incomes), through Obama’s 2009 tax cuts and his extension of Bush’s cuts in 2008 for another two years and again for another 10 years in 2013 (all of which cost another $6 trillion), through Trump’s massive 2017 tax cuts that cost $4.5 trillion, and Biden’s 2021-22 tax legislation that added another $2 trillion at minimum—the US Capitalist state has reduced taxes by at least $17 trillion!
Reducing capital’s taxes, as a proportion of tax revenue, increases future national obligations– national debt– that will ultimately be paid by working-class taxes. Or, if that proves unfeasible, it will be met by a reduction of social spending, which reduces social benefits for workers. Either way, the working class faces secondary exploitation through ruling-class tax policy.
Interestingly, Rasmus acknowledges that the state plays a big role in what he deems “secondary exploitation.” Yet, he also suggests that the proper province of secondary exploitation is in the bounds of exchange relations. This seeming anomaly can be avoided if we understand the increasing role of the state in engaging, broadly speaking, in the arena of exchange, as well as regulation. It is precisely this profound and broad engagement that many twentieth-century Marxists explained as state-monopoly capitalism.
*****
Jack Rasmus’s contribution is most welcome because it argues that returning to the fundamentals– the concept of exploitation– can be a fruitful way of looking at contemporary capitalism. It establishes a firm material base for an anti-capitalist politics that addresses the interests of working people as a class, the broadest of classes.
Further, the theory of exploitation unites people as workers, but allows for the various ways and degrees of their exploitation. And it links the material interests of the protagonists in the class struggle to the many forms of social oppression and their contradictory interests in promoting or ending those oppressions: the capitalist sows oppressive divisions to gain exploitative advantage; the worker disavows oppressive divisions to achieve the unity necessary to defeat exploitation. That is, exploitation motivates the capitalist to divide people around nationality, race, sex, culture, social practices, and language. Ending exploitation motivates the worker to refuse these divisions.
In an age where capitalism owns a decided, powerful advantage because of the splintering of the left into numerous causes and where capitalism elevates individual identity to a place superseding class, the common goal of eliminating exploitation is a powerful unifying force.
Today’s left has too often interpreted anti-imperialism as simply the struggle for national sovereignty, rather than through the lens of exploitation. Consequently, the dynamics of class struggle within national borders is often missed.
Of course, for Lenin and his followers, an advanced stage of capitalism — monopoly capitalism — was the life form of imperialism. And its beating heart was exploitation.
The vital tool that Marx, Engels, and Lenin brought to the struggle for workers’ emancipation was the theory of exploitation.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again trade wars have revealed the limits of international solidarity by U.S. based unions, especially the Teamsters, to their counterparts in Canada.
The institutional links between U.S. and Canadian unions are more intimate than almost any of the trade union movements in the world. Many affiliates of the Canadian Labour Congress and the AFL-CIO in the United States, as well as unions like the Teamsters that are not members of the AFL-CIO, claim to be “international unions.” Yet, from the U.S. side of the border, this “internationalism” is more rhetorical than meaningful.
Many U.S. union members may refer to their national union offices as the “International,” but what this largely means is that aside from a handful of affiliated local unions in Canada, the unions have locals in Puerto Rico and other American colonies. Some of the big U.S.-based industrial unions, such as the Steelworkers do have a substantial presence in Canada. While they have called for Canada to be “exempt” from any tariffs but not Mexico.
The Teamsters Canada has a smaller presence but has around 140,000 in a wide variety of industries mirroring the U.S. Teamsters. Major logistics employers such as UPS and Rail are represented by Teamsters Canada, but others, such as DHL are represented by Unifor in Canada. T-Force Freight, formerly UPS Freight represented by the Teamsters, was sold to the Montreal based TFI International a few years ago. There are few, if any, cross-border contracts, so there are few opportunities for joint contract campaigns or strikes.
Tensions between U.S.-based unions and their Canadian affiliates, notably in the case of the autoworkers, exploded into public view. Jim Stanford, director of the Centre for Future Work, a labor economics think tank and a former economist in the Research Department at Unifor (and previously with the Canadian Auto Workers), wrote a few years ago:
For the first half-century of industrial unionism, unionized Canadian autoworkers belonged to the UAW, which included workers at the Canadian plants of GM, Ford, Chrysler, and then American Motors (eventually acquired by Chrysler) beginning in the 1930s. But after years of tension over strategy (reflected in the Canadians’ opposition to wage concessions, profit-sharing schemes, and two-tier wages), the Canadian branch of the UAW split away to form the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) in 1985. At the time, the UAW had about 1.2 million members, one-tenth (120,000) of whom belonged to its Canadian branch.
The Detroit-based leadership of the UAW — ironically headquartered at “Solidarity House” — gave little option to the Canadians led by Bob White to breakaway after years of concessions and plant closings without a fight. They eventually formed the Canadian Auto Workers Union (CAW). Solidarity House could do little about it.
The SEIU, considered a “progressive union” for many years, has practiced trade union colonialism in Puerto Rico and exercised repressive trusteeshipsagainst its local affiliates in Canada that disagree with its policies. The Teamsters practice their own colonialism in Puerto Rico, where Local 901 is affiliated with and subject to the discipline of the New York City-based Joint Council 16, which seems pretty far from Puerto Rico.
Teamsters Canada
The Canadian Conference of Teamsters was founded in 1976, later it renamed itself Teamsters Canada. The Teamster magazine reported at the time, “More than 100 hundred representatives of Canadian local unions were participants [on] March 9, 1976 in Toronto at the Founding Conference.” Also present were the Teamsters’ top leaders, General President Frank Fitzsimmons and General Secretary-Treasurer Ray Schoessling. Tensions between the Canadian and U.S. Teamsters over the years were largely contained by granting of autonomy to the Canadians formalized at the 2001 Teamster convention.
However, the autonomy of the Teamsters Canada had the unintended effect of turning them into an insular fiefdom ruled by a crew of old guard officials. There had been a vibrant reform movement centered in British Columbia whose most prominent activist was Diana Kilmury, a construction driver in Teamsters Local 213, beginning in the 1970s. Kilmury would go on to be the first woman elected to the General Executive Board of the Teamsters in 1991 and re-elected in 1996 on the Ron Carey slate. A reform movement in other Canadian Teamsters locals didn’t get off the ground.
Today, Teamsters Canada is led by François Laporte, who was elected president in 2015, as well as being an International Vice-President. LaPorte is an old guard figure who supported James P. Hoffa, Jr., the previous leader of the Teamsters, and ran on the winning O’Brien-Zuckerman Teamsters United slate in 2021. Yet, the Teamsters Canada are in a different country and operate in a different labor movement that is now the subject of menacing threats of annexation and economic ruin from U.S. President Donald Trump, who is supported by Sean O’Brien.
While millions of Americans struggle with exorbitant medical costs and lack of affordable insurance, Canada has a universal healthcare system that ensures every citizen has access to medical care without the fear of financial ruin. Canada also consistently ranks among the most educated countries in the world, having a higher percentage of college and university graduates than our southern neighbour.
Workers in Canada benefit from stronger labour protections, including paid parental leave, mandatory vacation and sick leave. Our country is officially bilingual, recognizing both English and French as official languages, reflecting our diverse heritage and reinforcing our unique cultural identity.
Canada also has a strong social safety net that provides employment insurance, affordable postsecondary education, childcare and pension plans that help ensure financial security for retirees. While both countries are diverse, Canada takes pride in its commitment to multiculturalism, not just as an ideal but as a fundamental part of our national identity.
And, finally:
Donald Trump’s threats aren’t just geopolitical posturing. They are a direct attack on Canadian values and families who depend on jobs in transportation, manufacturing, and agriculture. A 25% tariff could have severe impacts on the lives of hardworking Canadians and Americans. Canadian Teamsters, like other unions across the country, have always fought to defend Canadian jobs, and we will continue to do so.
LaPorte made some important points, but glossed over the fraying Canadian welfare state, including its woefully underfunded healthcare system, and the longstanding bigotry directed at French-speaking Canadians, and the indigenous the peoples of its First Nations. Yet, there are important differences between the U.S. and Canada that has driven figures on the U.S. Right to froth at the mouth. Tucker Carlson, Trump’s best-known public advocate and the host one of Sean O’Brien’s favorite venues, said:
First of all, anybody with any ambition at all, or intelligence, has left Canada and is now living in New York. Second, anybody who sides with Canada internationally in a debate between the U.S. and Canada, say, Belgium, is somebody whose opinion we shouldn’t care about in the first place. Third, Canada is a sweet country. It is like your retarded cousin you see at Thanksgiving and sort of pat on the head. You know, he’s nice, but you don’t take him seriously. That’s Canada.
Meanwhile, the Teamsters led by Trump supporter Sean O’Brien have said nothing in response to Trump’s threats against Canada. What is the point of Canadian Teamsters being in this “International” union, if O’Brien is complicit in Trump’s mad schemes? O’Brien promotes T-shirts to his membership emblazoned with the slogan: “Teamsters vs. Everybody.” Such an insular perspective in a world that demands global solidarity will lead to disaster.
“Now, more than ever, is the time for states to lead.” This assertion by leaders of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) opens the organization’s Essential Policy Solutions playbook for 2025. “On Election Night 2024, the American people overwhelmingly embraced the path of lower taxes, fewer regulations, and a fundamental shift of power back to the states. In other words…
Four thousand workers at a North Carolina Amazon warehouse are voting February 10-15 on whether to unionize with Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity & Empowerment. RDU1, in the town of Garner, outside Raleigh, would be the second unionized Amazon warehouse in the United States. It’s an ambitious campaign. The workers are organizing across racial and ethnic divides…
What can state advocates, state-level labor agencies and state legislatures do to preserve and advance labor protections for workers in the face of the anti-worker actions being handed down from the second Trump administration? Since his inauguration, Trump has taken aim at nondiscrimination protections for federal contract workers. He has also installed people close to the Project 2025…
Hoarfrost still coated the Capitol lawn in Olympia, Washington, as Alfredo Juarez led 16 farmworkers across the grounds to the first of three meetings with lawmakers from the state’s 40th legislative district. The cadre marshaled by Juarez, the campaigns director for the farmworkers union Familias Unidas por la Justicia, was 1 of 5 making rounds, lobbying policymakers, and inviting them to a people’s tribunal that the union and a partner organization were hosting that afternoon.
For the last 12 years, Familias Unidas and Community to Community Development, an ecofeminist nonprofit that supports farmworkers, have convened a tribunal where farmworkers share the injustices and indignities they face and advocate for policies to improve the well-being of their families and communities. These tribunals started as small affairs that seemed to make little impact on the business occurring at the Capitol, but over the years their influence has grown, and organizers have notched tangible policy victories and gained sway with elected officials.
Rosalinda Guillen, the founder of Community to Community, or C2C, has been an organizer since the 1980s. She has long believed in the importance of participatory democracy, and has convened all kinds of assemblies to bring people together to discuss problems, imagine solutions, and develop strategies to advance them. But as Guillen and her colleagues in C2C continued to reckon with the fact that policymakers were writing laws without engaging affected populations in a meaningful way, they realized that if they wanted to be heard, they’d have to make the hike to Capitol Hill.
Their people’s court has no legal standing. They are overseen not by judges but by women with a track record of trust and leadership in marginalized communities. Their role is to hear testimony, compile a report detailing common and recurring themes, and outline the policies and regulations required to address them.
Past tribunals have helped win guaranteed overtime pay for farmworkers, which the legislature passed in 2021 with support from labor unions and others. They’ve helped press the state Department of Labor and Industries to adopt permanent heat protections that took effect in June 2023, mandating cooling breaks when temperatures top 90 degrees. The tribunal was also instrumental in the creation of the Agricultural and Seasonal Workforce Service Advisory Committee, which provides additional oversight and protection for the state’s seasonal farmworker program.
These accomplishments highlight the effort’s growing political influence and provide a model for organizers beyond Washington. “The tribunal used to be just us in a tiny room,” said Familias Unidas’ political director, Edgar Franks. “And now it’s filled to capacity. We need overflow rooms. And legislators and senators show up. They want to be there and listen and participate.”
This year, at least 60 farmworkers filled the chairs on one side of the hearing room, while some 70 allies and supporters sat in chairs, knelt on the floor, and stood along the walls on the other. Another 40 or so gathered in a nearby church to watch the proceedings on Zoom. Half a dozen legislative staffers attended, listening and taking notes, but state Senator Liz Lovelett, who represents the district where C2C and Familias Unidas are based, was the only lawmaker to attend.
Lovelett has attended four tribunals in the six years she’s been in the senate. Not only does attending them help build trust and credibility with farmworkers, it also helps ensure she can explain to colleagues what these workers are experiencing to “try to underscore the importance of any particular policy,” she said. On a human level, she finds the testimonies powerful. “Can you think of another group of workers that has to ask for things like shade and bathrooms and basic dignity?” Lovelett asked.
Alfredo Juarez’s 14-year-old sister, Alia, skipped school to testify to how this nation’s system of farm labor — a system that Guillen often reminds people is rooted in slavery — impacts her family. With a weary voice, Alia spoke about how, as the eldest daughter still at home, she has to cook and clean and care for her siblings while her parents work long hours for wages that barely support their family. That burden means she struggles to keep up with school, and her youngest sister has taken to calling her “mom.” So what Alia wants is for her parents’ income to reflect how hard they work, so they can spend more time at home.
But beyond the recurring themes of wages and hours, a major point of concern throughout the day was the rising threat of deportation. The state’s Republicans have introduced a bill that would reverse the state law barring police from supporting federal immigration enforcement; the bill would also prohibit cities from adopting policies that create sanctuaries for undocumented people. Throughout their lobbying meetings, the farmworkers called on legislators to vote against it.
In one meeting, Representative Alex Ramel, a Democrat, promised Juarez and his group that the bill had no chance of passing. (Democrats hold a majority in both houses of the legislature.) Juarez translated the assurance into Spanish and Mixteco for the workers around him, and many seemed relieved. As the meeting continued and subjects like rent stabilization and universal health care came up, Ramel said the tribunal and similar gatherings are key to enacting such policies because they demonstrate support and hold officials accountable to their constituents’ demands.
Still, despite the tribunal’s growing influence, Washington is the only state to regularly hold one. But Familias Unidas, which is 1 of just 2 farmworkers’ unions in the country, and C2C supported a binational farmworkers tribunal, hosted by the Food Chain Workers Alliance, in New York last March. It brought together dozens of workers in person and online who work in Canada and the U.S., but come from throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, to discuss their shared struggles and how to resolve them.
Guillen attributes the dearth of tribunals to the fact that most states lack farmworkers’ unions and the supporting organizations required to marshal the time, energy, and effort to bring something like this together. People also have to trust the organizers. Guillen and C2C have spent over 20 years building that trust so that people know that C2C will always be there to serve them. The tribunal is just one of the tools they use to do that.
Most people’s tribunals, however, occur as one-off affairs that only resurface if some gross injustice has taken place. But for Guillen, C2C, and Familias Unidas, they have made a commitment to support farmworkers through these forums and others until the workers themselves feel like justice has been delivered. “It’s their vision, it’s their goal, and we’re supporting it to the end,” Guillen said.
“No matter what the political environment, no matter what happens, we’re moving forward together.”
From the attempt to broadly freeze federal grants and loans to high-profile firings at the National Labor Relations Board, TRNN Reporter Mel Buer and Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez break down this week’s chaotic directives from the Trump administration and what they will mean for working people and the labor movement. Mel and Max also lay out what we know about the tragic collision of a US Army Black Hawk helicopter and American Airlines regional passenger jet, Trump’s broad attacks on federal workers, including air traffic controllers and members of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, and how those attacks have been going on long before Trump. Then, from the historic union victory by Whole Foods workers in Philadelphia to Kaiser Healthcare workers on strike in California, we will highlight key labor stories taking place beyond the chaos in Washington, DC.
Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Welcome to the Real News Network and welcome back to our weekly live stream. Alright, week two of the new Trump administration has been a characteristically chaotic one, but make no mistake, while this all feels kind of familiar, because we have the last Trump administration to compare it to from the avalanche of executive orders and the baffling press conferences to the spectacles filled Senate confirmation hearings, the past two weeks have brought us undoubtedly into historically unique and unfamiliar territory. And we can see that just by looking at this graph from Axios, comparing the current administration’s pace and number of executive orders to those of passed administrations, including I might add the first Trump administration. As Aaron Davis notes in his first nine days in office, president Trump unleashed a flurry of executive orders. Unlike anything in modern presidential history, Trump is reshaping the federal government with a shock and awe campaign of unilateral actions that push the limits of presidential power.
Only President Biden and President Truman issued more than 40 executive orders in their first 100 days in office. So far, Trump has signed 38 after less than two weeks, and the shock and awe effect is very real and it’s very intentional. Faced with a barrage of executive orders and administrative shakeups, some that are purely theatrical bs, others that are deadly serious and could trigger full on constitutional crises from pulling the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement, yet again to declaring a national emergency at the southern border to pardoning the January 6th insurrectionists. There’s just too much here to process at once our brains and our hearts get overwhelmed and we end up immobilized. But our goal with these live streams and with all of our real news productions is to do the exact opposite. And that’s why today my real news teammate Mel Buer and I are going to focus in on a few key stories from this week that have direct implications for workers, our lives and safety, our rights in the workplace, and for the labor movement writ large. And Mel and I are going to try to use our skills as reporters with long histories of covering labor, including on our weekly podcast, working people to answer your questions and give you the information, perspectives and analysis that you need so that you can process this, you can get mobilized and you can be empowered to act. Alright, so Mel, what are we digging into?
Mel Buer:
Okay, so we’re starting with three pretty major headlines from this week. The first is going to be last night’s horrific plane crash in dc. It’s the deadliest on US soil in over 20 years where 64 civilians and three military service members are dead. And there’s a lot we don’t know and new information is coming through at a pretty fast clip. So we’ll lay out what we do know and why that matters. Then we’re going to get into the most pressing headlines coming out of the White House as it relates to Trump’s executive orders, namely the funding freeze fiasco and what that means for workers here in the us. And then we’re going to talk about the recent shakeups at the NLRB General Counsel, a bruso firing and the abrupt termination of the NLRB chair Gwen Wilcox and what that means for the future of labor organizing in this uncertain moment. When you look at these stories together, they reveal a lot about how this administration sees government workers, contractors, and the working people around the country who depend on their services, how it’s approaching governance, using union busting and anti-worker tactics from the private sector, and how explicitly targeting the agencies and precedents that exist to enforce labor law and protect workers’ rights has become kind of a key issue for this administration.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright, so let’s dig into the most pressing story that we’re all thinking about right now. Let’s talk about what we know and what we don’t know about this horrific plane crash. And we are going live right now at 4:00 PM on Thursday as I speak, president Donald Trump is holding another press conference his second today, it’s a live briefing on kind of an FA debrief. So there’s going to be things said at that briefing that we can’t comment on now, but we will of course follow up on this story and we’re going to try to give you as much of what we know. Now, let’s start with the basics. What do we know what’s happening? The AP reports, the basics here. A mid-air collision between an Army helicopter and an American Airlines flight that was coming from Kansas killed all 67 people on board the two aircraft.
And the reasons for this crash, the causes of it are still under investigation. That is the official word. So we want to temper all of our collective expectations here and allow for the investigatory process to proceed so that we can get more information. Now, of course, we’ll comment on this in a minute that hasn’t stopped many people in the government from opining and blaming and directing blame at what they perceive to be the causes of this horrific crash. And we’re going to talk about those in a second. So AP continues in their report, which was updated this morning. At least 28 bodies have been pulled from the Potomac River already. Others are still being searched for the plane that carried 60 passengers and four crew members included a number of children who were training for to be in the Olympics and skating one day. This is a truly, truly tragic and horrific loss, and those families will never be whole again.
And we send our thoughts and prayers to them and our love and our solidarity because let’s not forget what really happened here. People lost their lives. So John Donnelly, the fire chief of the nation’s capitol, announced that they are at the point where they’re switching from a rescue operation to a recovery operation. This is very similar to what we experienced here in Baltimore of March, in March of last year when the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed and Trump and Republicans tried to blame that on DEI too. We’ll get to that later. But there was a harrowing number of hours where loved ones community members were hoping against hope that their loved ones who were working on that bridge, these were immigrant construction workers working in the middle of the night who as we reported here at the Real News Network, received no warning that they were about to meet their deaths in a ship that was about to crash into the bridge they were working on.
So we were in that same wait and see. Mode two we’re hoping to retrieve living people turned into trying to recover deceased people. And as per the official notice, there are no expected survivors. This is a recovery mission, not a search and rescue mission. As Mel mentioned, this is the deadliest air crash over US airspace. Since the nine 11 attacks that happened in 2001. Collectively, those attacks killed 2,996 people on the day of the attack. There’s no immediate word, as I said on the cause of the collision, but officials have said that flight conditions were clear as the jet arrived from Wichita, Kansas with US and Russian figure skaters and others on board, quote from American Airline CEO, Robert Isam, he said on final approach into Reagan National, the plane collided with a military aircraft on an otherwise normal approach. Now, a top army aviation official did say that the Black Hawk crew was very experienced and familiar with the congested flying conditions of Reagan National Airport.
For those who don’t live in and around dc this is a extremely busy airport in a densely populated part of the city that has been increasing air traffic for years. And Mel and I will talk about that more in a minute. But point being is that from the American airline side, from the military side, there appeared to be no interceding conditions like extreme weather that may have caused this crash that we know of so far. Investigators are going to be analyzing the flight data that they can retrieve from these two flights before making their final assessment. The transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, who was sworn in this week, said that there were early indicators of what happened, but he declined to elaborate on those pending a further investigation. Now I’m going to wrap up here in a sec. As I mentioned, president Trump is giving a second press briefing as we speak.
He gave another one this morning. I’m sure many of us saw it or at least saw the headlines to it because in this press conference where the leader of the country is expected to lead, Trump did what Trump does best and blame everybody else without evidence. Trump blamed the air traffic controllers, he blamed the helicopter pilots and he explicitly called out democratic policies at federal agencies. Trump claimed that the Federal Aviation Administration, the FAA, was actively recruiting workers who suffer severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiatives. So as usual, the typical boogeyman of DEI being like the thing at the root of all of our problems was the thing at the root of Trump’s press conference this morning. And MAGA Republicans have spared, have wasted no time reaffirming this line. And we’re going to talk a little more about that as the stream continues. But those are essentially the basics of what we know and what we don’t right now. This is an unfolding story, but we think it does have a lot to tell us. And so Mel, I want to kind of toss it to you and give us some of the broader context here that maybe people aren’t seeing and they’re sure as hell not hearing from the White House press briefings right now.
Mel Buer:
Well, I think it’s important to kind of note here that just like with our railroad reporting that we did in 2022, that’ll oftentimes what we’re looking at is kind of a breakdown of policy among decision makers, right? We know that the A-F-A-C-W-A and other unions that are involved in the aviation industry have been sounding the alarm about needing to have better staffing conditions at airports across the country. Those conditions have been worsening for at least since 2013. So through successive administrations, including the Trump administration where you had the chance to solve that problem and chose not to, and especially in this DC airport, Freddie Booster, Lois partially and David Soda wrote for Jacobin that lawmakers brushed off safety warnings amid mid-flight near misses and passed an industry backed measure designed to add additional flight traffic at the same DC airport where this disaster unfolded. So really, I think the point that I’m trying to make here is that while the aviation industry is trying to bring more flights into these airports, which are welcome, right?
We want to be able to kind of reduce the sort of congestion in terms of wait times for flights, having more options as consumers for traveling across this country that also needs to come with heightened safety measures in terms of better staffing in the air traffic control towers and unions in the aviation industry have been really fighting for this for the last number of years, just like with our railroad reporting, what we learned with the railroads was that lack of staffing and disregard for really tried and trusted safety measures leads to accidents. And tragically, this is what happened here. That isn’t to say that folks aren’t fighting for this. That’s the big point that I want to make. And I think that unfortunately Trump’s blaming of these various groups really is not to put it as lightly as possible, not helpful,
Maximillian Alvarez:
And it’s also not helpful. Let’s also be clear, right, falling into the partisan trap of trying to blame Trump for all of this too, right? Because as we are trying to show here, and as we show in our work at the Real News, these are longstanding problems that have had bipartisan support for many years. Trump is definitely making these problems worse, but he is not the originator of the problem. And you can see that in the question of under staffing. Now of course, a number of pundits and politicians have pointed to the fact that just last week, Donald Trump put a hiring freeze for federal employees, which would include hiring new air traffic controllers at a moment when we’ve been experiencing an extended air traffic controller shortage. And we’ll talk a bit more about that in a second. But also, of course, like Trump’s firing of high level officials, even the heads of the TSA, the FAA and members of the very commissions that are there to ensure air flight safety.
And so of course the impulse is to look at that and see like, well see Trump did this last week and now this week we have a plane crash. It’s a little more complex than that. As I speak to you now, there is a live update from the New York Times that came out just 10 minutes ago, sparse on information. But the information reads, live update control tower staffing was not normal during deadly crash. FA report says, an internal report suggested that the controller on duty the night of the accident was doing a job usually handled by two people. And so what we are trying to show y’all is that that situation did not come from nowhere, and it is not a situation that is sadly particular to air traffic controllers. This is something that Mel and I hear in the worker interviews that we do in industries around the country, the crisis of deliberate understaffing in critical industries, including those that have a direct bearing on our own public safety.
And with the railroads, Mel mentioned, to refresh your memories, a couple years ago, if we all recall, the US was approaching its first potential railroad strike in 30 years. We had been interviewing railroad workers across the industry, engineers, conductors, signalmen, Carmen dispatchers, all of whom were telling us different versions of the same story, which is that the corporate consolidation, the government deregulation, and the Wall Street takeover of the rail industry had created this sort of process that has built into a crisis over decades where the railroads have become more profitable than ever by cutting their costs year after year after year. And so what does that mean? It means cutting labor costs, cutting safety costs, making those trains longer, heavier, piled with more dangerous cargo, while having fewer and fewer workers on the trains and also fewer and fewer workers in the machine shops checking the track in the dispatch offices.
The point is, is that when these layoffs happen, when these corporate restructurings happen, like these policies are implemented in key industries like logistics industries like federal, like aviation, you are not just firing people, you are removing layers of security that are there for a reason and you’re doing so for the benefit, the short-term benefit of higher profits, while the long-term costs are born by the workers in those industries, the public that is being hurt by them and even by the customers who use those industries, rail shippers are as pissed off as rail workers are right now. So the point just being is that Mel and I hear this in education teacher shortages, more students piled on to fewer teachers leading to worse education outcomes, healthcare hospital workers who have been burnt out before covid even more so since covid, more patients piled onto fewer nurses leading to declining quality of care, treating patients more like just a kind of grist for the mill.
Get ’em in, get ’em out. This is a system-wide problem that we are seeing the effects of across the economy, and we can see it here in this tragic plane crash that has claimed the lives of nearly 70 people. In fact, this is much like the horrific train accident that occurred in East Palestinian, Ohio on February 3rd. The anniversary’s coming up, the two year anniversary of that, and the workers on the railroads warned us that something like that would happen and then it did, just like workers in the aviation industry, as Mel mentioned, have been warning us that something like this would happen and now it has. But we have been sort of dancing on the lip of this volcano for a long time. We’re just waking up to the reality now. And I just want to kind of underline this point by quoting from a really great Jacobin article that was published in 2023 by Joseph a McCarton titled The US is Facing a Growing Air Safety Crisis.
We have Ronald Reagan to thank for that. And again, this was not published this week, this was published during the Biden administration. McCarton makes the very clear point that on March 15th, 2023, the Federal Aviation Administration held a safety summit in McLean, Virginia, gathering more than 200 safety leaders from across American aviation to discuss ways to enhance flight safety. What prompted the unusual summit was by the FA a’s own admission, a quote string of recent safety incidents, several of which involved airplanes coming too close together during takeoff or landing. And McCarton also notes in that same article that a, a recent internal study by the Inspector General of the US Department of Transportation found that 20 of 26 critical facilities, 77% of them are staffed below the FA a’s 85% threshold. So again, don’t get it twisted. What Trump is doing is making the problem worse. It’s pouring gasoline on the fire, but this fire was burning before Trump came into office.
And Mel, as you said, this is something that we’ve had workers in these industries decrying for many, many years. And this is also something that we need to sort of have a long historical view on, right? Because as McCartan mentioned in that article, we do have Ronald Reagan to thank for a lot of this. And I just wanted to kind of hover on that point for a second because as we know, one of Ronald Reagan, president Ronald Reagan’s most infamous acts in his first presidential term was to fire striking air traffic controllers over a thousand of them. It was a significant massive percentage of the existing air traffic controller workforce in 1981. Not only did this sort of unleash a new age of union busting across the private sector and elsewhere, but it also is directly relevant to what we’re talking about here because when you fire that many air traffic controllers, as Reagan did, this was 11,000, approximately 70% of the controller workforce at the time that Reagan fired in 1981 and then tried to replace.
So a point that maybe we don’t think about, but that actually connects to the air traffic controller shortage now, is that when you in one year eliminate 70% of that workforce and then you replace it with new hires in the next two to three, four years, you are creating essentially a generational problem where those new hires in the 1980s are retiring in 30 years, and then the process starts again, where suddenly you have kind of a massive aging out of the existing workforce and a dire need to replace those understaffed agencies. So we are still feeling the staffing ripple effects and the safety impacts that has from Ronald Reagan’s original firing of the air traffic controllers. We have not fixed that problem. And as we’ve said a number of times, like air traffic controllers continue to be chronically understaffed, which means all of us who fly are flying at the mercy and our safety hangs on the overworked shoulders of understaffed air traffic controllers across the country right now. And I don’t know, does that make you feel safe, Mel? It doesn’t make me feel safe.
Mel Buer:
No. I take the train. I already have enough air anxiety. The reality is I think as well when you’re talking about, particularly with the PATCO strike, but in any industry where there is high turnover, there is not really a space for the sort of concentration of expertise. And PATCO is a huge example of this where you have career air traffic controllers who have amassed collectively hundreds of years of collective experience and how to work this industry and do it safely. And you’re training new hires who may or may not have the same sort of experience or you’re shuffling folks into these departments. You’re not going to get the same level standard of expertise. We see it in healthcare, we see it, and really any industry that has high turnover from the people who make your coffee drinks all the way up to the engineers who make your planes that you write on.
So this is a huge problem, and we will discuss this a little bit later when we’re talking about what’s going on in the federal government as well. But that is an important point to make that what we’re seeing with this lack of staffing is really a lack of expertise. The ability to have internally these checks and balances that create the safety conditions that we rely on in order for us to live our lives without fear of falling out of the sky literally. And so that’s a really important point here. And again, unions like the A-F-A-C-W-A and the machinists who work with Boeing are acutely aware of that and are willing and able to bolster this workforce. But you cannot attract a new generation of smart, capable, hardworking, willing people to buy into this industry and provide their expertise to this industry if you don’t have a competitive job to offer them.
And that happens a lot in healthcare as well. So it’s kind of a top-down problem. It’s not that folks don’t want to do these jobs, it’s really is this job going to be doable? Am I going to be able to pay my bills? Is my family going to be okay? Am I going to be able to get a pension? Am I going to be able to do this job to the best of my ability without working 120 hours a week and get paid nothing really functionally for it? And again, these unions are really acutely aware of this issue and are bargaining hard to solve these problems. And unfortunately in many cases, they’re coming up against an intractable management who cares more increasing profits for shareholders than actually creating a workplace that is competitive and that is also operating at a higher standard.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And let’s kind of talk a little bit while we’re sort of closing out this section. It does hook into another key sort of subject that we wanted to talk about today, which is Trump and the Trump administration’s all out attack on federal workers and the vilification of federal workers as nameless, faceless, useless, even evil bureaucrats of the deep state who need to be chucked out, fired, eliminated, disciplined. And if we’re not kind of understanding who those people are and what they do, that may sound good and people are going to cheer on Trump’s policies. But what we’re trying to say here is that we need to have a clear-eyed vision of actually who these people are, what they do, and how it directly impacts our lives. And the point being is that you cannot solve these potentially society, destroying society and periling problems if you are not correctly diagnosing the problem itself.
And that is why the sort of attacks on DEI and using the harnessing of DEI to sort of create an explanation for all of this is really, really sinister, right? Because like I said, they tried to do this when the Baltimore Bridge collapsed. They blamed it on DEI here too when the LA fires where Mel and I are from our homes are burning and have been burning for the past two weeks. And while we’re trying to sort of talk to our loved ones and find out if they’re okay, this whole media cycle is blaming the fires and the destruction on DEI and woke democratic policies. And now this plane crash happens, these people die and immediately before their bodies are retrieved from the Potomac River, Donald Trump is out there from the White House press office saying that it was DEI that caused the problem. And I don’t know how it can get any more obvious that this is political snake oil.
It is a built-in perennial excuse crafted by the very same corrupt business lobbies and politicians who are endangering our lives for profit so that they can quite literally get away with killing us and then blame it on a fictional boogeyman. We can talk about the issues with DEI, we’ve got plenty of them. But trying to explain tragedies like this through a DEI only lens is nuts. It’s stupid. It is ignoring the realities that are screaming in our faces and in the workers who are living those realities and who are telling us what the problem is. And there’s something really telling about that because this attack on DEI and this attempt to turn DEI into the catchall explanation is in fact capitalists their own fake solution to the problem that capitalists themselves have created, capitalizing on the pain that they have caused through decades of rampant union busting layoffs, disciplining of labor, focusing on only maximizing short-term profits for executives and Wall Street shareholders while putting us all at long-term risk by removing necessary safety measures and checks and balances and accountability, the onslaught of deregulation over the course of decades.
And the point being is that I want to be very clear and apparent here. I grew up conservative. I’ve said this many times, I’ve been open about it on our show, on this network. And so I have a living memory of being a Republican and championing other Republicans throughout the nineties and early aughts who kept saying, we need to break the backs of unions. We need to privatize government. We need to unleash the genius of the free market and deregulate as many industries as possible so that the genius of the market can lead us to a better society. I believed in all that stuff. I cheered it on, and it’s like no one remembers that the same Republicans Trump himself included, who cheered this on 20 years ago, the same corporations that didn’t want to take ownership over it are now trying to turn around and blame DEI for the things that they got what they wanted.
And it screwed up society the way that people were saying it was going to. And now the same people who profited from that, the same people who push that policy are turning around and trying to create a boogeyman in DEI and woke him to sort of get off scot free. And we are letting them, the corporate criminals, the Wall Street vampires, the corrupt politicians who have put us in this dangerous position, get off scot free and convince us to blame our neighbors and coworkers and policies like DEI for the problems that they’ve created. And that’s absurd. And I want to bring us to the way to fight. This is not in a conceptual policy only way, but to again, look at the ground level and understand who and what we’re actually talking about and where the problems are and where they are not. And I think that this horrific tragedy does really point us instructively to a couple of core truths and that are deeply relevant as we watch what the Trump administration is doing right now using the corporate crafted language of inefficiency and bloat and overstaffing importing these tactics from the private sector into government.
And it reveals how that kind of thinking from the private market fundamentally misunderstands what and who the government is, right? The evil bureaucrats of the deep state, they are people like the members of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee that Trump fired last week. They are the overworked air traffic controllers that are making sure that our planes don’t crash while they’re getting no sleep. They are the civil servants throughout the government who are being pushed to voluntarily resign and who are being reclassified under Schedule F so that they become at-will employees who are easier to fire. You may not like the government for many justifiable reasons, but without the people who make it work, nothing works for us. And I want to kind of show how the leaders and labor folks in labor that Mel was talking about have actually been telling us this for many years.
On the Real news here, last week I interviewed the great Sarah Nelson, the International President of the Association of Flight Attendants, C-W-A-A-F-L-C-I-O. If you recall, Sarah Nelson became a household name during the Trump LED GOP LED government shutdown of 2018 and 20 19, 6 years ago, it was the longest government shutdown in our country’s history. And Sarah Nelson steps out of the world of organized labor and into the public limelight as this shutdown, which furloughed 300,000 federal workers while keeping 400,000 federal workers working for 35 days without pay. So people like air traffic controllers working all that time while also working second jobs so that they could feed families. We were at the verge of another horrific tragedy like this back during the government shutdown in 20 18, 20 19, but Sarah Nelson and the flight attendants were the ones who were making that point because in DC it was all, oh, this is about Trump’s border wall. This is not about Trump’s border wall. It was the same kind of thing like we’re talking about DEI and woke him now, but we’re not talking about the actual goddamn problem. So let’s tee up these clips of Sarah Nelson speaking to the public in January of 2019, making that case during the longest government shutdown of the US history.
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 it.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So I would highly recommend that everyone watching this stream live or after the fact, go watch that full interview that we did with Sarah Nelson, listen to what she says and apply it to the situation that we’re seeing now, especially those final words, that this is not about an ideological battle between Trump, MAGA and the Deep State and woke and DEI. This is about a corporate class of tyrants who are destroying the people, jobs, and agencies that our basic safety and needs depend on. And so there’s something I think really important here about the lessons that unions and labor specifically can teach us about what’s going to happen here, who’s fighting back against this. Mel, I wanted to toss it to you to just kind of give folks a few points about that before we move on to the other stories.
Mel Buer:
Well, it’s like I’ve been saying, unions across this country in small shops, in large shops, in regions, all across the country from a small coffee shop that’s taking on Nestle to the UAW getting plants reopened in Illinois, all of these struggles are sort of tapped into what I think is a really key thing that we as labor reporters pay attention to, which is to say, workers are experts in their own workplace. They know what’s working, what’s not working, because they’re there every day and they have generally pretty good ideas about how to improve these industries for the people who work in it and for the consumers and the individuals who are touched by these industries. So when you see these labor struggles where you might, oh, I don’t know, disagree with tactics or find certain things to be a little odious, or you’re not sure why a certain thing is being offered in a contract or in a bargaining session or on a picket line, you might open up a conversation with those workers if you’re there and ask them why.
It’s important, because ultimately, from the federal government all the way down to the smallest shop in your city, individuals kind of know what’s going on and their ideas might actually improve our lives. And that’s really what the A-F-A-C-W-A is trying to do is what the machinists tried to do at Boeing. I mean, we’re seeing this play out in successive industries all across this country, and even especially now in this new administration that has already sort of styled itself through its actions as being adversarial to the labor movement, it’s important. It’s important for us to pay attention to these things. So that would,
Maximillian Alvarez:
Just to underline what Mel just said there, I mean, again, as two reporters co-hosts of working people who talk to workers about this stuff every single week, if we sound like broken records, we keep hearing the same thing from all these workers and we’re trying to get people to listen to them. But that’s a really, really critical point here. If it feels like there’s no solution to these problems in DC right now, that doesn’t mean there’s no one fighting for a real solution. Over 30,000 machinists, as Mel mentioned, went on strike at Boeing earlier or late last year. Let’s not forget Boeing’s role in all of this. Let’s not forget the Boeing planes that have been falling out of the sky over the past decades and the way the same corporate Wall Street brain disease that took a once the most vaunted airline company or airline manufacturer in the world had the best reputation for its product in the world.
How it went from that to being the laughing stock of the world and the kind of plane no one wants to get on because we’re all terrified that the plane’s going to fall out of the sky. Who’s fighting for that? And how did that happen? It didn’t happen overnight, but the workers who went on strike at Boeing last year, they’re fighting to have a say in that they’re fighting to have a say in the corporate policies that have put all of us at danger, just like the railroad workers were not only fighting for pay for themselves and better time off policies for their families, but they were doing that so that they could actually do their jobs well and safely and not put us in danger when their trains are bombing past our T-ball games. So there is an inherent connection between what workers in specific industries, unions in specific jobs are fighting for that we have a vested interest in, and we should really kind of think about that, not only in terms of why we should support those struggles, but what that says about alternative pathways for solutions when it feels like the bipartisan politics in DC are presenting none.
So just wanted to really underline that great point that Mel made and let’s, we got more to talk about here, but if nothing else, we hope that you take that point away from what we’re saying here.
Mel Buer:
I think a great way to kind of move forward in this conversation is to kind of take a moment here to see what break down what’s been going on over the last week at the federal level. One of the big things, and it’s been probably the most dominant in headlines over the last five days or so, is this funding freeze fiasco that’s been going on. On Monday night. The Trump administration sent out a late night memo essentially freezing all federal grants and not allowing them to be dispersed to the states and organizations that were scheduled to receive them. Keep this in mind when we’re talking about this, as I’m sure you’ve read about over the last couple of days. But these are funds that Congress has already approved for disbursement to all 50 states. State governments use these funds for a wide variety of items, from SNAP benefits to Pell grants for students to research grants and everything in between to the tune of trillions of dollars.
These grants pay the rent for workers, they keep folks employed, they keep families fed, and in the last couple of days, representatives and governors from states all over the country have registered their alarm and outrage at the move, and they began maneuvering to try and kill the order before it had a chance to really be implemented. But I really do want to underscore something here as I would like to read a piece from this memo that was sent out and ultimately rescinded as of yesterday to kind of underscore the breadth of it and also what may have caused some pretty intense confusion. So this is a quote from the original memo that was sent from the Office of Management and Budget, and it says, financial assistance should be dedicated to advancing administration priorities, focusing taxpayer dollars to advance a stronger and safer America, eliminating the financial burden of inflation for citizens, unleashing American energy and manufacturing ending wokeness, and the weaponization of government promoting efficiency in government and making America healthy again.
The use of federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism and Green New Deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve, this memorandum requires federal agencies to identify and review all federal financial assistance programs and supporting activities consistent with the President’s policies and requirements. And to implement these orders, each agency must complete a comprehensive analysis of all of their federal financial assistance programs to identify programs, projects, and activities that may be implicated by any of the President’s executive orders. In the interim, to the extent permissible under applicable law, federal agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all federal financial assistance and other relevant agency activities that may be implicated by the executive orders, including but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, non-governmental organizations. DEI woke gender ideology, and the Green New Deal.
Now, here’s the issue with this, and this was the issue that many people have pointed out, and that is the subject of many lawsuits as well, is that this is very broad, and I’m kind of taking a little bit of a charitable reading here, but I really shouldn’t. It’s nonsense is what it is. It’s called impoundment. It’s been illegal for many, many years that the federal government, specifically the executive branch, cannot withhold these funds on the basis of political differences, which is essentially what this is when you include things like woke gender ideology, and the Green New Deal. And understandably, 23 states sued to create a temporary restraining order on this, which was a big piece of news on Tuesdays that there were moves from a variety of different places to try and stop the implementation of this directive and ultimately, the executive order as it stands, right? Why does this matter? I mean, this is what running the government a business looks like. It’s not how you run a government max. I don’t know about you, but I think it’s a absolutely ridiculous idea, and I think a lot of people agree.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, I mean, again, I’m smiling because as a younger me who used to be a full-fledged Republican loved the idea of running government like a business, and it just kind of baffles me the more that I’ve grown and learned and seen in the world, just kind of how dumb I was to believe that that was a right headed sort of way to look at things. And I’ll kind of touch on that in a second, but let’s step back and when we’re asking why does this matter, there are two key points here that Mel teed up that we really want to drive home. The first reason why this matters is because it is blatantly unconstitutional, but that on its own, sadly, doesn’t mean a whole lot to a lot of people out there today. So if we just say, oh, it’s against the constitution, what do we mean when we actually say that?
If there’s one thing that every four to 5-year-old in this country knows about our country and our national mythology, it’s that America was founded because our ancestors didn’t want to be ruled by kings anymore. They did not. They had spent generations, centuries living under top down futile style king type power structures, and it sucked, right? It was a bad way to run societies. And so we came to this new world and created a more democratic system. I say more democratic, not fully democratic. We know there are plenty of reasons in American history for why we were never a full fledged democracy, but the promise of democracy was meant as a direct refutation of the proven evils and inefficiencies of kingly rule. And so that’s why we have the damn system that we have set up as imperfect as it is, there was a point to it.
And so that’s what we mean when we say it’s unconstitutional, is it is violating that basic social contract upon which this whole country is founded, where a president should not have by definition and by principle, the unilateral authority to just govern by shooting at the hip through executive orders, and totally circumventing the power of the purse that Congress has been democratically endowed with. There is a reason why the house has the power of the purse, why Congress has that power, because it’s meant to be the most beholden to the people, the most representative of the people. And so the should in theory be the ones with that control over how this country spends its money. And so the President, by definition, by principles should not have and does not have the authority to just freeze trillions of dollars that have already been appropriated by that democratic or more democratic system and just decide that they’re going to halt that freezing.
They’re going to review stuff, and they’re going to determine who gets their funding and who doesn’t. What happens in corporations, that’s what happens in, again, king societies run by kings and queens. That’s not what’s supposed to happen in a democratic society, and there’s a reason for that. So when we say it’s unconstitutional and that matters, there’s a really deep kind of principle at work here that we should not be ruled by the whims and unilateral authority of one person. I think that’s a good thing. I mean, again, otherwise, everything that all of us have ever learned in school about our country and why it’s good is wrong. So there’s that. But then there’s also another reason why this matters that Mel mentioned, right? This just really underlines the stupidity, the inappropriateness of thinking of government, like a business thinking of things like the US Postal Service in the terms of the private market and not thinking about the essential service that a functioning postal service provides to a functioning democracy.
That is what the postal service is there to do to make sure people get their damn mail, not just the people who can afford it. And so if you’re judging things like the US Postal Service by its profit margins or its returns on investment, and you’re not including that social investment and that social benefit, that political benefit, then you’re not going to be able to assess the success of that agency or the government writ large. And so, yeah, I wanted to kind of just tee up a clip that we had poll for a previous section, but I think it’s really apt here, but it’s a clip from James Goodwin who is the policy director for the Center of Progressive Reform. Now, I actually spoke with James on when I was guest hosting an episode of Laura Flanders, a show. Shout out to the great journalist Laura Flanders and her show Laura Flanders and friends.
So Laura and I spoke with James last summer about project 2025. Its authors, its plans, but also one particular aspect of Project 2025, which is Schedule F, which is the order that Trump has already brought back in that recategorize, thousands of federal employees who have certain protections that are there for a reason, reclassifies them as at-will employees, the same way that like workers in this country, most workers in this country are, you can be fired like that without just cause. So I asked James what the effect of this was going to be if these federal workers with their worker protections were suddenly made at will employees under this regime, what effect would that have? So let’s play that clip really quick.
James Goodwin:
Yeah. So what makes the foundation of our administrative state is the people, professional, apolitical experts. This is something we started building in this country in the late 18 hundreds to replace what was known at the time as a spoil system. These jobs were essentially done by friends of the president or people in political power, and that was just a breeding ground for corruption and incompetence. This is what Schedule F would do, is it would return us to this system. And so under this proposal, we would take all these experts, these tens of thousands of scientists, engineers, attorneys, what have you, we’d fire them who they’re getting replaced with as somebody who’s somebody whose only real skill is unquestioned loyalty to the president.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right? So we’re not on the campaign trail anymore. This is no longer a what if situation, this is happening. This is what they’re doing. Now, Russ V, one of the primary authors of Project 2025 is having his hearing right now to be in charge of the Office of Management and Budget so that he can implement the things that he has laid out, and the other authors of Project 2025 have laid out in project 2025 itself, but we don’t have to get into that. The point just being is that let’s talk about this now that it’s actually happening instead of like, is this going to happen or not? Right? The point to really make here is what James said. Again, you can have all the justifiable problems that you have that we have with the government as such with certain government agencies that are not working properly or doing enough to serve the people.
We all get that. But when you take the people who are actually making the government work as much as it is, and you turn them into an unprotected, easily fireable kind of class of employee who are, again, through this sort of memo that was sent out to over 2 million government employees asking them to voluntarily leave the government while also pushing folks back to work in person, trying to get them to leave all reclassifying workers under Schedule F so they could be more easily fired. The cumulative effect here is to purge the government of non ideologically federal workers and restock what’s left of those agencies with Trump aligned loyalists. And this sounds great when you’re thinking in 21st century terms of running government like a business, but as James rightly points out, we’ve had this before. It’s the whole reason that the civil service exists. Because in the 18th century, we had a system that’s working like how Trump and his administration wanted to work now where appointees were loyalists, friends, family members, and it was a corrupt nightmare, and nothing got done, and people were furious about it. So they spent the 20th century trying to get the government to not be that. Now we’re going back. That perspective’s important. That’s why this also matters.
Mel Buer:
Yeah, agree. I think this kind of makes a, I don’t know. It’s a rising mass of corruption that is just getting larger. The farther we get into the Trump administration, they have a very clear policy agenda that they, I think know that they might not realistically be able to slim through via legislative means, which is why the executive orders are happening in this way because they know that many of these bills that they would like to see happen will not get passed. They’ll get stopped. They’ll get sued out of existence. So the best thing they can do is do an executive order. And this is what’s happened with this particular federal funding freeze memo, right? The outcry was really big this week. We had governors going on the TV to say, this directly affects my constituents. These people rely on unemployment insurance and SNAP benefits, WIC and everything else in order to make sure that their families are fed.
I’ve been receiving phone calls from panicked constituents for two days. This is not okay. This needs, there needs to be some pushback. What ended up happening is that there are multiple lawsuits that have been filed, including one where I think 23 plus states filed a lawsuit against this directive. They’re trying to get a judge to grant a temporary restraining order on it after that lawsuit was filed. The White House rescinded that memo yesterday and the White House press secretary leave, it took to Twitter to clarify that it was just the memo itself that was rescinded and not the original order to begin to examine which federal funding could be frozen based on the investigations that they want to do into these appropriations.
Lawyers took that quite reasonably, I would say, to mean that the lawsuits they filed were still worth pursuing. Right. I know there was some confusion on social media yesterday that the memo being rescinded meant that the entire executive order was rescinded, and the press secretary’s clarification on Twitter keyed us into the fact that it was just the memo itself and that they were absolutely planning on continuing to move forward with the directives in the executive orders relating to this. So lawyers made that case to Rhode Island, US District Chief Judge John McConnell yesterday, and they quoted that tweet in their case that despite resending the memo, the plans were still in place to freeze funding at some point in the future, if not in the next week. And the judge agreed and allowed that TRO suit to proceed. So where we’re at with this right now is that the memo has been rescinded, the plaintiffs in this case, for a temporary restraining order.
The lawyers representing 23 plus states refiled their suit last night that seeks to prevent any blocking of federal financial obligations now and in the future, and also prohibits any reiss issues of the now rescinded directive. So the White House can’t, or the Office of Management and Budget cannot put out another memo under different wording. They can’t kind of wiggle their way around it by directing only some agencies to freeze their funding while this TRO is in effect. So they’ve submitted this proposal to the judge, the DOJ has 24 hours to respond, which as of right before we went live, I don’t think they have responded quite yet. And then the judge will signal that a ruling is likely going to come at some point in the next couple of days. So if he grants this TRO on this particular thing, that means that for at least 14 days, there is no federal freezing of the funds.
It means that SNAP benefits will be funded. It means that Pell Grants will be paid out. It means that federal work study will still be available to students at universities and all the way down the list. And that TRO proposal also says that if needed, they can extend that by another 14 days. So what we’re looking at is 14 to 30 days. Presumably it gives additional lawsuits, the chance to kind of move forward with this or the Trump administration can take the L and back away from this policy and rescind this executive order. I think this amongst the 38 that have been filed, and I’m sure more that will be signed today and tomorrow and the next day. This seems to be the one that really kind of kicked up a lot of dust and also kicked the opposition into gear a little bit more than what we’ve been seeing over the last two weeks to three months, because it really is confusing and broad, very, very broad and affects a lot of people.
So in terms of that litigation, hopefully it’s successful. We’ll see in the next couple of days. One thing that I do just want to end on with this specific issue is that there’s a lot of information that’s blurring past your tl, right? We’re getting headlines every other day about some absolutely obscene, harrowing directives coming out of the White House, and they’re coming at this breakneck speed. And there is a tracker that you can follow. Just security publication has a tracker specifically about executive orders that the Trump administration is putting out, and any litigation that is trying to challenge those orders in the future, including updates, they have a pretty solid team that’s doing this across the board, not just about the executive orders, but the tracker that they have is specific to that. And I know that I was looking yesterday on Blue Sky trying to find someone who is aggregating all of this, because you can only listen to so many group chats before you start getting stuck and not spiraling a little bit because the information is, ah, we will just say that there’s so much of it. So I found this tracker, I went through it, and I think it’s really great. We’ll put a link in our description, we’ll drop it in the chat for you, because if you’re like me and you want to stay informed, but you want to stay informed without doom spiraling and see how folks are actually challenging these things to varying degrees of success, then that’s a good place to start. I think I
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. And again, please let us know here at The Real News in the live chat now, reach out to us on social media. Email us. That is our explicit goal too. As I said at the top of this live stream, it’s more important now than ever when it is an explicit tactic of this administration. It is an explicit prerogative of the social media platforms that we use to bombard us with information so that we stay on those platforms like waiting for the next bit of information to come, but we’re not actually doing anything with that information except consuming it, fearfully reacting to it, or angrily reacting to it, and then moving on quickly to the next thing. And the more of us who are in that position, the less mobilized we are as a populace. And we here at The Real News believe that people, real people, working people across this country and around the world are the solution to the problems that we’re experiencing.
Like we are the ones who are going to work together to build the world that works for all of us. We fundamentally believe that you me, everyone watching this is part of the solution. And so we want to provide information, updates, analysis. We want to give you access to the voices. You’re not hearing the workers on the front lines, the people living in these sacrifice zones, the people brutalized by the police, the people brutalized by our broken healthcare system and our war industry that is wreaking death and destruction across the planet like we are trying to bring you in touch with those people, those voices, the movements that are trying to address them, and to get you to feel that you are part of that and to understand that you can be part of these solutions. So we want to hear from you if we’re doing a good job of that, and if there’s other kinds of information, other voices, other perspectives that you want us to provide so that you feel more empowered to act and to do something and to be part of the solution here.
So please do also reach out to us and share with us any suggestions or recommendations that you’ve got there. And we’ve got about 25 minutes left in this live stream. We also want to hear if this was helpful to you, and we are not going to be able to kind of get to some questions from the live chat itself today, but we have been sourcing questions from y’all leading up to this live stream on social media, we have a text service that you can get real news updates on through text messaging. And folks have been sending us great questions ahead of this live stream through that service, and you can learn more about how to sign up for it in the live chat right now. So we are going to end in a few minutes, kind of like Mel and I will step back a bit and sort of assess based on these questions that we got before the stream began in the final 15 minutes here. But before we get there, I know Mel, there are kind of another key story that we’ve both been really concerned about, but you really want to impress upon viewers why this is one of those headlines passing your timeline that you should actually focus on.
Mel Buer:
Yeah, so in the last week or so, there’s been a bit of a, I hesitate to use the word shakeup, but there has been some changes with the NLRB and what we’ve been seeing is that NLRB, Jennifer General Counsel Jennifer Bruso was fired. Honestly, I think most folks were kind of expecting that there was sort of a changeover. And what she does is she’s kind of the top adjudicator prosecutor investigator for the NLRB. She’s been really good at bringing forth some really important sort of policy changes and also rule changes that really kind of have helped workers organize. She’s been really tough on bosses and really holding corporations like Amazon to feet to the fire kind of expected that to happen. It happened when Biden took over in 2021. There was a shakeup there with the general counselor, if I believe correctly. And so we kind of expected that to happen.
What is surprising is that the NLRB chair G, when Wilcox was also fired, she was appointed in December, I think appointed and confirmed in December, and she is the first black member, black woman member of the NLRB. She is also supposed to keep her job through the next couple of years, and that as it stands, the NLRA and the various policies do not have provisions. These board members are not at-will members. They’re supposed to serve out their term unless there is some sort of malfeasance or a specific event that someone can point to in the administration to fire any member of the board. You can’t do it. And so it was very surprising to see G when Wilcox fired at the beginning of this week. And there is a statement here from the A-F-L-C-I-O President Liz Schuler, that I kind of want to just read a little bit here that says, president Trump’s firing of NLRB member Gwen Wilcox, the first black woman to serve on the board, is illegal and will have immediate consequences for working people by leaving only two board members in their posts.
The president has effectively shut down the National Labor Relations Board’s operation, leaving the workers at defenses on their own in the face of union busting and retaliation alongside the firing of NLRB General Counsel bruso, these moves will make it easier for bosses to violate the law and trample on workers’ legal rights on the job and fundamental freedom to organize. Now this is important and we’ll kind of talk about this just in a moment about what exactly the NLRB does on a sort of granular level. But the way that the NLRB essentially operates is that the board is the sort of adjudicators. They make decisions on union elections, they make decisions on investigations into workplaces. They make decisions on unfair labor practice charges that will bring consequences against employers when they treat their workers badly. Break the law, retaliate fire workers for union organizing, any number of things in order for the board to operate, there has to be quorum.
So of the five members, there has to be at least three appointed working members of the board. Right now, there are vacancies, which is also surprising. Normally in the normal course of things, an incoming president will use those vacancies to kind of shift making. And there were two vacancies on the board that would’ve, I think if you’re talking about the strategy here would have changed policy at the NLRB by itself. Now, there’s only two members of the board after Gwen Wilcox has been fired, which means the board doesn’t have quorum. They do not have the authority to make decisions until they have quorum. So any of the sort of things that the board could do to uphold the NLRA, which is to say the enforcement of the law that protects worker rights in this country can’t happen until a new person is appointed and confirmed or until Wilcox is reinstated, which she has indicated that she will pursue whatever legal avenues that she has to be reinstated to fight this firing.
Because again, it’s illegal. It’s illegal. What Trump did, and I’m not trying to create this doom spiral, but this is concerning. It’s very alarming and it’s important that we kind underscore that I know that there are folks among the labor movement who would love to see the sort of wild west of labor organizing return. We may actually see that at some point in the future, but at the moment, what we have with the NLRA is workable. It’s not great, but it is workable and it does keep individuals employed. It keeps individuals from getting hurt on the job. It keeps individuals from being fired for organizing. And if we don’t have an NLRB that can enforce that because it’s been hobbled by this particular thing, it’s not great Max,
Maximillian Alvarez:
No. It’s like, yeah, I forget who the quote came from. I think it was a democratic legislator, but it was like the message right now is workers are on their own. And functionally that is correct because the NLRB insufficient as it is, and we have reported on that too. We’ve reported on how understaffed, underfunded and the NLRB is and has been for years. We’ve reported over the years about how the NLRB should be more aggressive in enforcing labor law. Again, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. The NLRB cannot be perfect, but things can be a lot worse without it, right? We’re capable of having that conversation, but we need to understand also what that means in real terms. And so I want to kind of tee up a clip here from Mellon MA’s podcast working people where I spoke with workers at the National Labor Relations Board, like rank and file workers, labor lawyers, people who are doing the work of the agency and who are also both representatives in the NLRB Union.
So this was actually an interview that we did when we were approaching the threshold of a government shutdown in, I think that was September, 2023. Remember that was the kind of congressional Republicans internal fighting over more spending cuts, border security, no military aid to Ukraine. It was a high stakes fight between McCarthy and Matt Gates. So it was in that period that I spoke with Colton Puckett and Michael Billick legislative co-chairs of the NLRB Union and full-time NLRB workers about just what it is that they and other NLRB staff do and the role that that work plays in our daily working lives. So let’s listen to that clip right now
Colton Puckett:
At a high level sort of the core functions that we do that I think most folks that know about our agency know about what we do and that’s we investigate unfair labor practice charges. So someone believes that their employer or their union has violated the law in some way. They can file a charge with us and we investigate it and figure out whether or not the charge has merit. That’s a big portion of the work we do and I’ll talk a little bit more about what that means. But another big thing that we do is we run union elections essentially, right? And so when workers come together, they decide we want to form a union, we want to join a union, they’ll file a petition with us. There’s a certain process that entails. And then when it comes time to actually hold the election, we in the field go to wherever that election is taking place and we make sure that it’s done and done as fair and impartial away as is possible.
And then the last thing we do, another big thing that is sort of a part and parcel with unfair labor practice investigations is we try cases. And so if we find that there is merit to one of these unfair labor practice charges that we get, we always will try to settle a case of course, but sometimes it doesn’t work out. And so that means we actually go to trial before an administrative law judge and we litigate the case and we try and prove the violation. And it’s similar to, it’s not exactly like going to federal court, but it’s the same general idea. And so that’s another sort of big portion of the work that we do. And so that’s kind of the big three things at a very high level. But I think sometimes getting into sort of the day to day, some of that can get lost.
And so as field staff, I think Mike mentioned sort of at the top, we work in offices spread all around the country. And so we are essentially the frontline of the agency for working people all across the country. And that means that we interface directly with workers every single day, whether that’s a charging party, we’re trying to help them figure out how to e-file their evidence, for example, or figure out what they need to send to us that might be useful versus what not to, or if we’re just answering questions about where their cases in the process or what certain processes means. Because a lot of this is like legalese, right? And we don’t expect everybody to know exactly what an unfair labor practice is. That’s a big portion of the work we do. One of the things that we do, there’s in every regional office, there’s an information officer on duty every day.
And so you can call your regional office, they might not answer immediately, but leave a voicemail and you will talk to a live person that day and they will walk you through any questions that you have. If you want to file a charge, they can assist you in preparing the charge and informing you how to do that. And I don’t necessarily know that a lot of other federal agencies have that type of direct person to person interaction in that way. And so that’s a big thing that we do. We talk to folks all the time and then just try and help them understand what it is we do and what it is their rights are.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright? So that’s not nothing, that’s not evil bureaucracy, that’s real shit that real working people depend on. And in the final kind of minutes here, Mel and I just wanted to drive this point home because we could be playing clips for the next five hours of real world examples that real world workers have told us on our podcast about when they needed the NLRB to adjudicate an injustice, a violation of their rights, and how important that was to their livelihoods, how important it was to their union drive, how important it was for the labor movement itself. But that’s what we’re trying to get y’all to see is that this is not just conceptual, nameless, faceless bureaucratic stuff. That’s what they do. That’s what folks at the NLRB do. And just to give one example, that was the first field report that I did when I started here at the Real News in the middle of Covid in 2020.
Let’s not forget that early in 20 21, 1 of the biggest stories in the country was that workers in Bessemer, Alabama majority black de-industrialized Bessemer, Alabama with twice the national poverty rate that they were leading the charge to form the country’s first unionized workforce at an Amazon facility. Now we know that they ended up being unsuccessful in that union drive, but that drive sparked so many of the other labor struggles that we’ve reported on over the past few years, including it contributed to the Amazon Labor Union successful unionization drive in New York. And so that’s a real world example. I was there on the ground, Mel was talking to these workers, I’ve talked to these workers, I’ve been in their union hall. They tried to hold a union election, which is their right, that is their Democratic right to vote on whether or not they want a union, even if it is at the second largest private employer in the country and one of the biggest international behemoths in the world.
These workers had that right? And they exercised it. And the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Amazon had illegally interfered in that election by placing a US Postal Service mailbox on Amazon property right in front of the employee entrance with the Amazon cameras pointed on it. And so the NLRB said, Hey, that’s not a free and fair election. This is intimidation, this is surveillance. You guys have to have another election. They had that enforcement ability to give workers in Bessemer an another chance, a fair shot at a union election. So that’s just one example of a high stakes ruling that both shows how Amazon is a much bigger behemoth than the NLRB can take on by its own. But that ruling really mattered for workers who were really fighting for what they believed in. Mel, I know you’ve seen tons of others. Are there any few you want to highlight here real quick?
Mel Buer:
Well, I think I want to just, I could name ’em all up top of the bat. We can do Pittsburgh Post Gazette. Strike is A ULP strike, right? We can do half of the walkouts it Starbucks started with ULPs fired because bargaining wasn’t starting fast enough. We can talk about pretty much I would say a sizable chunk of a worker’s ability to withhold their work legally begins with the filing of A ULP. And the NLRB has to reach a certain place with that, right? Where you are filing this grievance and you say, we have checked our boxes and we’ve filed this ULP that says bargaining is not going well. The company’s bargaining in bad faith, which means they are not actually giving a good faith effort to sit across the table and work through this contract negotiation like we are. They have actively endangered workers, for example, at Starbucks during the LA firestorm.
They have enacted policies that are retaliatory. They have held captive audience meetings. When we are trying to form a union, all of these rulings that the NLRB rules on are designed to free and fairly investigate these complaints and then to actually offer some sort of recourse for workers, whether that means ordering a management back to the table and telling ’em to stuff it and get the job done, or whether that means enacting no captive audience meetings in workplaces, right? Whether that means allowing individuals to be on company grounds to organize off hours, to pull in people and have conversations to work on a union campaign that’s gone public. All of these things are what the NLRB helps us do. And there are dozens, dozens of people, dozens of campaigns that I’ve talked to that I’ve reported on in the last just year where the outcome in some way or another depends upon what the NLRB can do for them.
And that’s just the place that we’re in. And that’s really the recourse that we have right now. We have to kind of thread that needle and to use the law as inadequate as it is to our benefit and be able to work within that and use the NLRB as an agency for what it’s there for, which is to say often I look at the nlrbs sort of policies in the last 10 years or so. And when we have a board that is really focused on pro worker focus, a lot of things can happen. Final example I’ll give is that in 2017, the NLRB was full of pro business folks that Trump had appointed and during Trump’s administration and then the subsequent administration after, there was really this kind of watershed moment with graduate student organizing where during Trump’s administration there was restraints on which type of graduate students could organize on college campuses.
That rule changed in the last five, six years as a result of a more pro worker NLRB makeup. And there has been an explosion in new organizing on university campuses that we didn’t see before. And by some metrics, it is the fastest and most consistent organizing that has happened in this country in the last five years. So it kind of underscores the importance of what this agency can do for us as and what this agency can do for us as a worker’s movement. And so when it’s hobbled by an administration as it has been in the Trump administration, things become exponentially more difficult.
My fellow union workers at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette waited for a year and a half for a decision on the ULP that they filed. They’ve been on strike for over three years at this point, trying to get the company at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette to bargain fairly and to stop playing games with their health insurance and their livelihoods. And the NLRB is really the thing that’s driving those consequences so that they can get back to the table and get back to work. And so as much as we want to sit here and say that, oh, it’s just another bunch of feckless bureaucrats, no, it has real world implications for how we can organize in the future. And I truly believe that in terms of movement building in this country, the labor movement is an integral part to that for all its faults. And that institution needs to use the tools that it has at its disposal. So when an administration, any administration, because I’m not saying that democratic administrations in the past haven’t used the NLRB as a cudgel, haven’t deliberately underfunded it and understaffed it because they are also only worker in name, but not really in action.
It’s important for us to be able to uphold this institution because it helps us maintain some semblance of control over our workplaces, at least for now. We will see what the next 10, 15 years look like. As Hamilton Nolan has said, the Democrats squander their chance to really rebuild the labor movement. I agree. And we are now in single digits a little bit in terms of union density, but we’re not cooked by any stretch of the imagination. And if we can pay attention to and internalize the fact that some of these agencies and the work that they do is actually really useful for our movement building, then I think we have a better chance of staving off the worst impulses of this fascist government. So
Maximillian Alvarez:
No, I think that’s powerfully put melon just again, a plea to everyone watching. If you’ve been watching our reporting over these past few years or other people’s reporting on the Starbucks Union Drive, the Amazon Union Drive, but not just those, I mean healthcare workers going on strike for their patients, teachers and educators going on strike for their students, their communities like manufacturing in the auto industry and beyond. John Deere workers journalists at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette entertainers at medieval times. I mean these struggles of working people where people like you and me have realized that if they band together exercise their rights form a union and work together as a union, that they can actually change their lives, they can change their circumstances, they can even change our society circumstances like the machinists going on strike at Boeing or the railroad workers fighting for rail safety that impacts all of us like we were talking about earlier in the stream.
All of that is going to be so deeply impacted by a nonfunctional NLRB or an LRB that is functional but actively hostile to the worker’s side of the struggle and is doing the bidding of the employer class. I don’t know what the stories we report are going to be. I don’t know what the workers we interview are going to say in the coming years if that is the case, but I promise you it’s not going to be what it’s been in the past few years where workers have seen this groundswell and they’ve wanted to be part of it and they’ve seen a path to unionization with an NLRB that actually is functional enough to serve the needs of working people trying to exercise their rights. We are not in that territory anymore. And so even if you don’t give a shit about anything in dc, which I would totally forgive you for, if you give a shit about the labor movement and working people, this is going to impact that this is going to impact you.
And we don’t know what the ripple effects are going to be to the business class, to the private sector, to all the employers out there who now know that workers are on their own like they did after Reagan fired the PATCO strikers in 81. We don’t know what the cascading effect is going to be if employers decide to go more on the offensive in squashing unionization efforts, more on the offensive in rolling back workers’ rights, treating workers with shit, knowing that they’re going to have fewer options for recourse through the NLRB. So if nothing else, let’s remind ourselves that matters. And that concerns us, our neighbors, our coworkers, but also that we, as Mel said, are not cooked here. We are not powerless here. We have a vested interest in the story and we ourselves are part of the outcome. I say, I don’t know how this is going to shape out because I don’t know what you are going to do about it.
I don’t know what everyone watching this is going to do about it, but that’s going to determine what the outcome is. And so again, if anything, we want to leave y’all with that note that this is meant for you for us to figure out what we do next. And with that kind of wrapping up the 90 minutes where we’re sort of looking at these key headlines, I wanted to just have 10 minutes of bonus time here so that we could Mel take a step back and sort of breathe a bit and address these really great questions that some of our supporters and viewers sent into us that helped us think about how to frame this live stream in a way. We’ve been trying to answer the questions over the past 90 minutes, but I wanted to just toss these out there and get your thoughts.
And also what you guys in the live chat think about this. But one of the key questions that we got from Giovanni R, which was really great, which was how much do you estimate this regime will affect what’s left of workers’ benefits and safety standard? So we kind of started to addressing that now, and we’re going to talk about it a little more in a second, but that’s one key question that we’ve been trying to answer here. Another question that we got from David B, which I think is also really crucial is David asked, will labor only present a front for or a front of resistance and fight back, or is it actually going to push the limits of what we as working class people need and demand? Will labor stop seeing the Democratic party as the vehicle for that fight back and resistance? Will labor exert itself as if it understands and believes that the laboring class is the Sina quinan of production and wealth?
Great question so much that we could say about there. But yeah, I want you guys watching to think about that. And the last question that I wanted to throw up on the screen here, which helped us kind of prepare for this live stream was from Edward S. And so Edward wrote to us saying, when will the unions educate their membership about labor history and that the GOP is their foe? It’s atrocious that a huge percent of union members vote for Trump. And so Mel, I wanted to just kind of, now that we’ve gotten through the last 90 minutes, do you feel like there are any kind of other lingering answers to those questions that we didn’t get to or things that are really kind sticking in your mind?
Mel Buer:
I think I’ll start with the first one with Giovanni’s. Maybe we can just kind of do a couple of minutes for each one. But I think when we talk about how much this regime will affect what’s left of workers’ benefits and safety standards, I think one thing that I’ve learned over the course of my reporting, whether it’s been on OSHA agencies in California or in the healthcare industry on the West coast or the railroad industry in the Midwest or wherever else, is that oftentimes these agencies can be equipped with the ability to maintain safety standards, to maintain workers’ benefits. And oftentimes there’s no political will to maintain those subsequent administrations may cater to lobbyists, to understaff these agencies to re-appropriate funds away from these agencies. Just like anything else in the government, you need money to operate. And if you’re being appropriated less and less money each year, that means you’re hiring less and less OSHA inspectors each year.
That means there’s less OSHA inspectors to handle the complaints that happen that are called in, and then they start making hard decisions about which ones to investigate and which ones not to. Or it sits on a waiting list as what happens with the NLRB, where oftentimes, for example, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette complaint was essentially on a waiting list for investigation for over a year because there’s just not enough people who have been tasked with investigating these things. And so I think what we’ve kind of been talking about Max is there’s a bit of a breakdown in the system itself that perpetuates these problems. Something that happens a lot is that workers see this breakdown in an acute area like the aviation industry, like the agriculture industry, like the healthcare industry, and the fight at their disposal is, for example, I just did reporting in Southern California on the Kaiser health system and mental health professionals who are still on strike after a hundred days, who saw these breakdowns in the system that was disproportionately affecting their patients because there weren’t enough people getting hired.
And these are critically, acutely mentally ill patients who require regular treatments who aren’t getting that illegally so in the state of California. And so what they do is they view these as workers’ rights issues, patient issues or workers’ rights issues in the healthcare industry. So what do they have at their disposal? They went on strike, their contract expired, and they’re not going to get off the picket line until they get real written in stone, in paper, signed by Kaiser that these conditions will cease being as horrendous as they are because that means that they can take care of their patients better. So in that sense, subsequent administrations have done something to the effect of deregulating portions of the industry to serious, they create serious problems. The railroad strike happened, almost happened under the Biden administration and was stopped last minute. And if you talk to some railroad workers, they aren’t happy about that. They feel like they lost leverage because the Biden administration stepped in at a critical time where he could have said, actually, I don’t have to do this. So I don’t know, man, I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better are obviously we are looking down the barrel of four years at least of extreme MAGA GOP policies that have their own ideology. Obviously they have their own plan and a lot of us are going to get left out in the cold.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Or
I wanted to jump in on that point too, because when I think about what these conditions are going to be for our fellow workers, current generations and future generations, to answer Giovanni’s question, I guess what we would say is what railroad workers told me and Mel, when we first started investigating that story years ago, every single worker we talked to told us the same thing at the top. What you need to understand is this goes way back. And so if anything, that’s an argument for why all y’all out there should stop fucking watching mainstream political news or even independent news junkie stuff that only focuses on bipartisan politics and follows the news cycle of Washington DC because it rots your brain and you lose the ability to think like a real regular person. Now when you talk to other real regular working people, you get a better frame on the problems that we’re experiencing.
And so when railroad workers are saying, here’s the problem, now here’s how far back this goes, and that’s how far back our memories go because we’ve experienced it. And that is decidedly different from the political election cycle. And this is something that we’ve been bringing up on our reporting here over and over again, is that Donald Trump Biden, these last few election cycles have been characterized by a sort of like, what did the previous administration do that the next administration’s blaming them about and overturning? And why are people voting for Trump? Because they’re mad at Biden and his policies. But really what we are talking about here in the political world is that voters are responding every two to four years to a crisis that’s been building for the last 40, 50, 60 years. And so the cumulative effects of this death by a thousand deregulatory cuts, that is kind of what we’re trying to get a handle on here because that is the frame you need to have to understand how conditions have gotten this bad.
And as Mel said, they’re probably going to get worse before they get any better. I mean, from the air traffic controller staffing shortage to the pollution of industrial pollution of communities in sacrifice zones around the country from East Palestine to South Baltimore. I mean, this stuff starts happening in more and more places year after year when unsexy uninteresting legislation gets kind of passed through, doesn’t really, it’s not really a blip on people’s radars when it happens 15 years ago and then 15 years later, you end up living next to a lake that you can’t swim in that you’ve swam in your whole life. Public policy bioaccumulates, it accumulates in our bodies, it accumulates in our jobs, it accumulates in our communities. It doesn’t all happen overnight. But I guess that’s the point I’m getting at is that we are still in the process of experiencing and feeling the full weight of decisions that have already been made that were made in Trump’s last administration and Biden’s last administration and Obama’s administration in Reagan’s administration, right?
We are still finding out the repercussions of those decisions that have already been made, and we are laying the groundwork for even more impactful decisions to hurt us well into the future. And that’s why I jumped in when you said that we’ll be left out in the cold and I said, or even in the heat, because that’s another storyline that we follow here too. What are workers and workers’ rights and labor unions going to do as the climate crisis continues to spiral out of control, which it sure as hell is going to the more we do this drill, baby drill crap pull out of the Paris Climate accords while LA is burning Western North Carolina is obliterated by hurricanes. We are barreling in the exact opposite direction. But what makes me think of that example is that I remember when the Supreme Court overturned Biden’s attempt to require workplaces of over a hundred people to have covid vaccine mandates, or for folks who didn’t want to take the vaccine that they did regular testing.
The Supreme Court said that they rejected that order and it was hailed as a victory for the anti-vax crowd for the Trump MAGA crowd. But what you and I saw, Mel, and what we talked about because we actually read the ruling, was that the Supreme Court said, because COVID-19 is a general condition that it just exists in the world, no one employer can be responsible for implementing these kinds of policies to address it. And so what they were doing was laying the groundwork for employers off scot-free as the climate gets worse, as people are working in hotter conditions when they’re dying in the summer heat or they’re breathing in toxic chemicals. And basically, we have set the stage for employers to not be liable for our deaths when they’re putting us regularly at hazard in our working conditions as the climate crisis worsens. That’s what I’m trying to point to is these decisions are going to have ripple effects for generations.
So there are things we can do now, but we have to have a full kind of clear sense of the problem. And that’s what we’re going to try to keep taking apart and analyzing piecemeal in these live streams in our reports. Like I said, at the top of this live stream, our goal is to not get overwhelmed by the news cycle, but to practice focus, to use our journalistic tools to give you the information you need to act and not be immobilized and hopeless. And so that’s what we’re working on doing and doing better here. And so we really want to hear from you guys and let us know if we are doing better, if there are things that you’d like us to see do people you’d like us to have on subjects that you really need help breaking down in our team here, not just our journalists, but our incredible whole team of editors, producers, studio technicians, let us be usable to you.
Let us know what you need and we will use our skills to try to help. But ultimately, you are the solution. You are the one who is going to determine with your neighbors, your coworkers, your fellow working people, what happens in the future, what kind of future we are leaving for our children. And so our job here at The Real News is to make sure you’ve got what you need to make change, and we want to hear from you, and we want you to hold us accountable if we are not following through on that. And so please let us know what you thought of this live stream, let us know what you’d like us to cover in future Live streams, and please keep sending questions so that we can be answering them better and more directly. We’ve got so much to say on it, but ultimately what matters is that we’re saying what you are looking for and need to hear and not just listening to ourselves talk, right?
And so that’s the goal here. That’s what we at the Real News are here to do. We are a team that is here for you, and we’re a strong and mighty team. And Mel, I could not be more honored to be on this team with you guys in the back, our whole studio team, Adam, cam, Dave, Kayla, Jocelyn, James, looking at the live chat, everybody on this team is here to help and we are here for you and we really appreciate your support and we look forward to seeing y’all next Thursday when we go live again. But until then, please support our work so that we can keep bringing you important coverage and conversations like this. And more important than ever, take care of yourselves and take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones will not recontest the next federal election, leaving the frontbench amid the federal government’s renewed push to get social media giants to pay for news. Mr Jones has spent the last 15 years as the Member for Whitlam, having been elected back in 2010. He was eventually appointed Financial Services minister and…
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Jan. 28, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
A union that represents over 800,000 employees of the federal and District of Columbia governments on Tuesday responded with alarm to U.S. President Donald Trump’s effort to pressure some workers to leave their jobs.
“The number of civil servants hasn’t meaningfully changed since 1970, but there are more Americans than ever who rely on government services,” said American Federation of Government Employees national president Everett Kelley in a statement. “Purging the federal government of dedicated career federal employees will have vast, unintended consequences that will cause chaos for the Americans who depend on a functioning federal government.”
“This offer should not be viewed as voluntary,” Kelley added, referring to a memo emailed to federal employees on Tuesday. “Between the flurry of anti-worker executive orders and policies, it is clear that the Trump administration’s goal is to turn the federal government into a toxic environment where workers cannot stay even if they want to.”
Another labor group for federal workers, the National Treasury Employees Union, filed suit last week over one of those orders, which reinstated, with some amendments, the “Schedule F” measure that Trump implemented near the end of his first term.
In response to the administration’s actions regarding the federal workforce, some critics have pointed to the Heritage Foundation-led Project 2025, from which the Republican president unsuccessfully tried to distance himself while on the campaign trail. As Common Dreamsreported earlier Tuesday, a U.S. tech researcher revealed that the authors of policies published by Trump’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) have ties to the far-right organization and its infamous initiative.
Congressman Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) said in a Tuesday night statement that “Donald Trump is trying every trick he and his Project 2025 cronies can think of to circumvent established civil service protections so they can purge the civil service of experts and replace them with political loyalists.”
“The victims here, as is always the case with Donald Trump, are the American people who will see government services and benefits allocated not by nonpartisan civil servants, but by partisan hacks,” added Connolly, ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
Once again, I was repeatedly told I was overreacting when predicting the implementation of the unitary executive theory—the main goal of Project 2025.www.axios.com/2025/01/28/t…
Connolly and Kelley’s and comments on Tuesday came after a senior Trump official told Axios that “the government-wide email being sent today is to make sure that all federal workers are on board with the new administration’s plan to have federal employees in office and adhering to higher standards. We’re five years past Covid and just 6% of federal employees work full-time in office. That is unacceptable.”
While Axios broke the news of the “acceleration in President Trump’s already unprecedented purge of the federal workforce,” other media outlets also swiftly published related reports. Government Executivecalled out the debunked 6% figure, noting that “more than half of federal workers cannot telework because their duties are portable, and employees who telework spent around 60% of their work hours in person, per 2024 Office of Management and Budget data.”
Many initial reports framed the message to federal workers as a “buyout” program, but after OPM posted the full memo on its website, experts including Alan Mygatt-Tauber, an adjust professor at Seattle University School of Law, emphasized that it “is absolutely NOT an early resignation offer with eight months severance pay.”
Slate journalist Mark Joseph Stern similarly stressed that “this is NOT a buyout! Those who take the offer simply get permission to telework through September, at which point they lose their jobs. Media coverage of the details has been pretty misleading.”
The OPM memo emailed to workers explains that the “reformed federal workforce” will be built around four pillars: a return to the office, performance culture, a more streamlined and flexible workforce, and enhanced standards of conduct.
The memo states:
If you choose to remain in your current position, we thank you for your renewed focus on serving the American people to the best of your abilities and look forward to working together as part of an improved federal workforce. At this time, we cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency but should your position be eliminated you will be treated with dignity and will be afforded the protections in place for such positions.
If you choose not to continue in your current role in the federal workforce, we thank you for your service to your country and you will be provided with a dignified, fair departure from the federal government utilizing a deferred resignation program. This program begins effective January 28 and is available to all federal employees until February 6. If you resign under this program, you will retain all pay and benefits regardless of your daily workload and will be exempted from all applicable in-person work requirements until September 30, 2025 (or earlier if you choose to accelerate your resignation for any reason).
The offer “applies to all full-time federal employees, except for military personnel, the Postal Service, and those working in immigration enforcement or national security,” Axios detailed. The White House expects 5-10% of workers will take the deal.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk, who is now in charge of Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, famously sent a similar email to employees shortly after he took over Twitter, which he renamed X, asking them to opt in to keep working at the company.
White House officials wouldn’t say whether he was involved in the current effort. But the subject line of the email that will be sent to federal workers is: “A fork in the road.”
Musk now has a post pinned on X of an art piece he commissioned called “A Fork in the Road.”
Although “department” is in the name of the Musk-led entity, it is actually a presidential advisory commission—and although the billionaire initially suggested that it would lead the effort to cut $2 trillion in annual spending, he has since tempered expectations.
The commission and Musk, the world’s richest person, have faced intense scrutiny from watchdog groups and progressive lawmakers, though some have also offered advice on how to pursue significant cuts without harming the lives of working people, including: ending privatized Medicare, reducing prescription drug prices, and slashing the Pentagon’s massive budget.
This post was updated after the Office of Personnel Management memo was officially released to clarify the buyout language and add comment from Congressman Gerry Connolly.
On the campaign trail and beyond, Donald Trump and MAGA right have repeatedly presented themselves as the true representatives of America’s beleaguered working class. And yet, like the Capitol rotunda on Inauguration Day, Trump’s administration is filled with billionaires, mega-millionaires, and corporate oligarchs whose staggering wealth is increasing year after year while working people struggle to get by. How are people, voters and nonvoters alike, supposed to square this seeming contradiction? In this special post-Inauguration interview, returning guest and legendary economist Dr. Richard Wolff explains how the naked oligarchy on display in Trump’s inauguration and in his administration is not a contradiction, but a clear sign of a society hastening its own collapse under the weight of historic, unsustainable levels of inequality.
Studio Production: David Hebden, Adam Coley, Cameron Granadino Post-Production: Adam Coley, Cameron Granadino Written by: Stephen Janis
Transcript
Taya Graham: Hello, my name is Taya Graham, and welcome to our special postinaugural report, and it’s an extension of our reporting for our Inequality Watch show. And today we’ll break down what we like to call here at The Real News the Second Gilded Age, and that seems perfectly aligned with Trump’s ascent to power.
Now, the first one occurred nearly 100 years ago, and it didn’t end well. Now the chasm between the rich and poor is as extreme as it was in that era. Now, back then, wealthy industrialists like J.P. Morgan and Rockefeller ran the country while elected officials stood by. Now it’s tech bros like Tesla’s Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai of Google. All of whom, mind you, had front row seats at President Trump’s inauguration. And we thought this was worth discussing in light of his inauguration, which seemed to us like peak Gilded Age.
In fact, there were so many billionaires in attendance and so many in his cabinet — I think it’s more than 10, right? — That we were wondering if it was some sort of fire code violation in the Capitol when there’s more than 50 billionaires in a room. What do you think?
Stephen Janis: Well, I think billionaires are accelerants. So yes, it’s possible that they were treated differently in terms of counting for fire code, yeah.
Taya Graham: I think you’re right. But you know what? In all seriousness, it’s pretty odd that an administration that purports to be the champion of the working class is pretty much run by union busting, employee downsizing, planet killing, and private equity hoarding vulture capitalists.
Now, the reason this seeming contradiction exists and what it means for us and how we can understand it will be the focus of our show today. We’re going to delve into the reasons why we’re witnessing this growing marriage between a boomer and a bevy of tech bros and what it means for all of us, because, as obvious as it might seem, there’s way more to this coalition of a few than meets the eye. Mechanisms that make this work that might surprise you, right, Stephen?
Stephen Janis: Yeah, yeah. No, I mean there’s mechanics to this. This is all purposeful. This is not some sort of surprise. We’ve been building towards this for years. So it’s a feature not a bug of this system, and we’re going to talk about that with Dr. Wolff.
Taya Graham: So Stephen, as we know, the upcoming Trump administration is stacked with billionaires, from Elon Musk to the former worldwide wrestling executive Linda McMahon. Media outlets estimate the cumulative net worth of this incumbent aristocracy is hovering around $460 billion.
Stephen Janis: Wow.
Taya Graham: And that’s why today we’re going to discuss what we like to call an economic imbalance and to see it for what it really is: a scam against humanity. To start, we’re actually going to borrow a phrase from President Trump’s speech, which we’ll listen to in just a moment. You’ll hear how he talks about how elites have extracted wealth and the American dream from the working class.
And that is a critical concept: extraction. Now, technically he said extracted, but we’re going to expand it a little bit. So let’s take a listen, and I think we might actually agree with this statement.
[CLIP BEGINS]
President Donald Trump: For many years, a radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens while the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair. We now have a government that cannot manage even a simple crisis at home, while at the same time stumbling into a continuing catalog of catastrophic events abroad. It fails to protect our magnificent, law-abiding American citizens, but provides sanctuary and protection for dangerous criminals.
[CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: Now, I think it’s interesting he would use the word “extracted”, and I wouldn’t disagree with the statement that wealth has been extracted from our citizens. It’s a pretty important word when we’re talking about the assorted billionaires that will be running his administration. But it’s also crucial for another reason — Stephen, maybe you can talk a little bit about it.
Stephen Janis: Well, I think we’ve moved into an extractive economy [where] there is no value given to the people who are supposedly building this economy, who are creating this wealth, no value exchange. The idea is we’re not going to give you something, anything meaningful, anything substantive. We’re not going to give you good healthcare. We’re not going to give you the ability to afford education. We are going to extract wealth from you.
And I think that’s the only way you can have this much wealth amassing at the top in an extractive economy. You can’t have it in a balanced economy. And I know there’s some people who say, well, capitalism, whatever. But that’s the system we live in, and that system has been corrupted to the point by this massive wealth into being extractive of us.
And it creates a psychology. It creates a psychology where people actually cheer the people who are oppressing them; we love you. And they build systems that put us in conflict. So it’s important to think about psychologically what that means. We are being extracted. We are not part of an economy. We are part of an extraction system that serves the people that were up on that dais or podium.
Taya Graham: I think that’s an excellent insight.
And I know our guest needs no introduction, but I’m pleased to give him one. Professor Richard Wolff is one of the most renowned and respected economists of our time, and he is celebrated for his ability to unravel the complexities of capitalism and inequality with clarity and depth. As the author of numerous groundbreaking books, including Democracy at Work and Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens, and he’s the host of his own YouTube channel, Professor Wolff has dedicated his career to exposing the structural forces behind our economic system. And his expertise in worker-centered economics and his passion for empowering workers makes him the perfect person to help us understand the political and economic shifts we are witnessing today.
Please join me in welcoming Professor Richard Wolff. Professor Wolff, we are so happy to have you join us again.
Dr. Richard Wolff: Thank you, and I will work hard to live up to your very generous introduction.
Taya Graham: Well, thank you. Well, Professor Wolff, last time you were here, you helped us break down this extractive economy and what consequences it does have for working people. So what did you see on Monday with Trump’s billionaire-stacked inauguration? What do you think people might be missing, and what kind of concrete impact do you think this could have on our lives?
Dr. Richard Wolff: Well, sometimes the most impressive reality about a situation like that is not what’s present, but what’s absent. As a philosopher once said, sometimes absence is the most powerful part of what is present. And that’s how it was for me watching the inauguration. Because for me as a professional economist, the most crucial aspects of the American economy today were carefully and studiously kept away. It was like an absence, which, at least for me, was screaming louder than Mr. Trump or anybody else.
So let me briefly explain, and for that a little history is in order. Many years ago, about 75, at the end of World War II, the United States emerged as the absolutely dominant economic power in the world, a position it had never held before; Before, the British Empire dominated the world. Indeed, what became the United States was a small colony in a corner of that global empire.
In 1945, by contrast, Britain was destroyed. So were Germany and France and Britain and Japan and Russia and China. They were all either destroyed by the war or destroyed before and as a consequence of the war, leaving the United States — And we all know that. The dollar became the world currency. America spread its military bases, 700 of them now all over the world, just to let everybody know who the policeman on the corner was or is. The American economy produced so many goods and services that we could and did help Europe rebuild, et cetera, et cetera. We were dominant. We set up the World Bank, we set up the International Monetary Fund. We literally organized, managed, and ran the world economy. And we made America grow very spectacularly in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, even into the ’90s. Very impressive.
But as anyone with the slightest knowledge of history would have known — And there were plenty who did — They said, this is an exceptional moment. You’re not going to have this situation of being the only one at the top. It comes out of the worst war the world has ever seen — And we don’t have that every day, thank God — And therefore it’s going to erode. It’s going to fade. Also, remember that every single empire that the world has ever seen: British, French, German, Dutch, Russian, Greek, Roman, it doesn’t matter, they all went up, and then they all went down. The American empire built up after World War II, went up. So it was only a question of when would it go down?
Here comes the first reality that was nowhere in sight on the inauguration. What are we as a nation going to do? How are we going to go through a declining empire? And lest anyone have a doubt, we are declining, the United States now, the dollar is less and less a global currency. A few years ago, central banks around the world kept 80% of their reserves in the dollar. It was considered as good as gold or maybe better. Now that number is about 40%. The dollar is still important, but nothing like it was.
Let me give you another example. These are big numbers everybody knows. The United States has a group of seven nations, of which it is one, called the G7, the Group of Seven: the United States, Canada, Japan, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. That used to be the powerhouse core of the economy of the world. The United States as the big one in the middle, and then the other six as its allies. Well, let’s look at it today. If you add ’em all up, they together, all of them, the US and the other six, produce about 26%, 27% of the world’s output.
But there’s another group that has emerged. It’s called the BRICS, B-R-I-C-S, that stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. And the original five, they started about 15 years ago. Now they are 22 countries.
Now let me tell you very briefly about them. If you add up all the goods and services they produce in a year, the way I just did for the G7, the total portion of world output that they account for is about 35%. Let me remind you, the US and its allies account for 27% world output. BRICS, China and its allies, account for more, much more. They’re an alternative pole in the world economy. That is the more enormous reality about our economy than anything else.
Stephen Janis: But that brings up a great question, Dr. Wolff, when I was listening to you, I was thinking about this, and yet our economy is not producing as much or not growing in the way you’re talking about the other economies, but we have more billionaires than any other economy. What does that say about the way our economy operates, that even when we’re declining, there is a smaller and smaller group of people becoming wealthier and wealthier and wealthier and wealthier? How are those two…? Those seem contradictory to me. How do we reconcile that?
Dr. Richard Wolff: Not at all, not at all, because it’s exactly what happened in every other economy, every other empire, and it’s easy to understand why. When an economy is going up, the people at the top can afford to be generous. They’re making a ton of money, they’re becoming wealthy. Sure, they can pay an extra 4%, 5% a year to their workers, keep ’em happy, avoid a strike, and there’s so much money in the growth period that you can afford it.
But when the economy goes down, what the people at the top have always done — And are doing now in America — Is those at the top, the CEOs, the people who we all know who they are, they use their wealth and power, shouldn’t surprise you, to hold on. And because they have wealth and power, they can do that, they can hold on. Which means the costs of the downturn, we, the rest of us, it’s offloaded onto us. So what you’re seeing is that the inequality in the United States gets worse.
And look at the irony — I’ll give you a statistic. Earlier this week, the most important research outfit in the world — Oxfam, located in Britain, keeps track of this — Gave their annual report, and it added up the experience of the roughly 3,000 billionaires that exist in the world today. And, as you rightly said, many of them are American, not all by a long shot, but many of them. And here’s the statistic it gave: across the year 2024, just ended, the collective wealth of the 300 billionaires rose by over $6 billion per day.
Taya Graham: Oh my God, that’s incredible.
Dr. Richard Wolff: OK, so look at what I’m telling you. Capitalism as a global system is making those already super wealthy even more super wealthy.
Stephen Janis: But what’s amazing, extraordinary is that you’re saying as our economy declines, as working class people’s lives get worse, their wealth gets more concentrated and higher. That really seems, to me, a horrible prescription for people.
Dr. Richard Wolff: Unfortunately, if we had better leaders, they would be talking to us about it. What are we going to do as a nation, the road we are on of a declining empire becoming more and more unequal? Look, you don’t need rocket science to understand that’s not sustainable. That situation is going to blow up, and it’s not going to be pretty, not even in a country that didn’t have everybody with a gun. We are in a very strange [place]. That’s what our leaders should be talking about. What do we do about it?
Instead — I have to say this, in all honesty. Instead, what I’m watching at the inauguration and in the days since is a kind of lunatic theater. It’s a theater in which the lead actor, Mr. Trump, pretends to be the world’s tough guy. I’m going to take back the Panama Canal. What? [Crosstalk]
Stephen Janis: You’re saying he’s not?
Dr. Richard Wolff: I’m going to snatch Greenland for a golf course. I’m going to make Canada the 51st state, and I’m going to stick it to the Mexican — My God. Every one of those issues, whether it’s drug traffic or anything else, the war on drugs is at least 65, 70 years old. Every president has announced he’s going to fight it, and every single president has lost that fight. We are [crosstalk] with drugs today every bit as much as when I was 10 years younger, 20 years younger, 30 years younger. I’m not fooled, and I don’t think anyone in America is.
The biggest change in drugs is that we, the Sackler family, which just made a settlement, produced enough opioids to kill 700,000 people over the last few years. We don’t even need Mexico. We’ve got a drug problem in which Mexico doesn’t figure.
And as the new president of Mexico said, and she’s quite right, the drug problem is a problem of supply and demand. Part of it is the supply that comes up, in part, through Mexico, but an enormous part of it is the demand. There is no drug trade unless America, as the single largest buyer of that crap, weren’t doing it. I mean, what are you doing? He’s trying to suggest to a frightened America that the problem is over there, the bad Panamanians, the bad Canadians. This is childish. [These are] gestures of desperation.
There’s an old scene that comes to my mind to explain this. It’s in the cowboy movies we all saw when we were younger. It’s when the sheriff can’t prevent the bad guys from riding into town and robbing the bank. And there he looks. The useless sheriff didn’t stop it. So he says, with great bravado, round up the usual suspects. He wants to look like he’s tough because that’s better than looking like the failure he was.
Stephen Janis: That’s a really good point.
Dr. Richard Wolff: [Crosstalk] Trump has been the president before. Let me assure you, during his time as president, inequality in the United States, by all its measures, got worse. Now I don’t want to be unfair — They got worse under Biden too, and they got worse under Obama too, so he is not outstanding. But did he stop it? Not at all.
The tax cut that he gave in December of 2017, the first year of his office, was the worst blow to equality we could have had — Made the government bankrupt because it didn’t have all the revenue that corporations and the rich no longer had to pay. So the government had to borrow, growing the deficit. And who did it borrow from? The corporations and the rich. The money they didn’t have to pay in taxes, they turned around and lent to the government instead, which means we the people are on the hook to repay all that money plus interest because our leader, Mr. Trump, gave them that tax cut. Instead of being shamed, he goes around celebrating it. And we live in a country — And this scares me, this is what’s scares me —
Stephen Janis: It’s pretty weird. Taya, you had a question?
Dr. Richard Wolff: [Crosstalk] We live in a country of denial, and that is a very big danger we have to face
Taya Graham: Professor Wolff, I really appreciate that you brought up the historical context, talking about that, perhaps, we are in an age of decline. When you were last on the show, we were talking about how we might be living in a Second Gilded Age, but now what I’m hearing from you is that we are an empire in decline. Well, just like with the Gilded Age, that didn’t end well. What does it look like for America to be an empire in decline, like on the ground for us regular folks trying to hold onto our jobs? What does the decline of empire actually look like for us?
Dr. Richard Wolff: Well, I’m afraid it means that we are now governed by those people you saw up on the dais during the inauguration. The only dynamic center of the American capitalist system today is high tech, Silicon Valley. Those people now are the ones that are still making money. Everything else is either better done, or more cheaply done, or both, elsewhere. Indeed, the United States’s corporations have moved, ever since the 1970s, in huge numbers.
Look, half the cars produced in China now are produced by subsidiaries of American companies. The abandonment of America is something led by the corporations. Mr. Trump likes to point to the Chinese, but they didn’t do it. They couldn’t make the corporations go there. Those corporations went there because it was profitable.
Here’s my fear: The United States’s mass of working-class people are being prepared to function the way the poor of the rest of the world function. They are the backwater. They are the hinterland. They’re what you see when you leave the capital city and you go to where the mass of people are much, much poorer. Look at it. This government wants to attack social security and Medicare and Medicaid. It wants to take away the few remaining supports.
Look at us another way. When my fellow economists from around the world ask me, they ask me about the minimum wage. The federal minimum wage in this country is $7.25 per hour. It has been at that level since 2009. Every year since then, prices have gone up, some years only 1% or 2%, other years, 9% or 10%. That means for the last 16 years, 2009 to now, the poorest of the poor amongst us, people living on $7.25 an hour, have been savagely abused. Because every year with rising prices, that $7.25 buys you less. What kind of a society goes to people with $7.25 and does that to them? We are seeing levels of cruelty —
Stephen Janis: It’s interesting you bring up that policy, because one of the things that people that blame, liberals that blame, or we blame, is the idea of neoliberalism, where you have public-private partnerships, and that’s led to this bad policy. But I was wondering, are we now, because listening to you right now, what I’m thinking is, are we in the postneoliberal age? Should we just cast aside that boogeyman we use a lot of times to explain bad policies and think about this whole what we’re seeing now as something different?
Dr. Richard Wolff: Yes, it’s different. It is important that you understand over the last 40 years until 10 years ago, we lived in an age called neoliberalism, globalization. You might remember we were told over and over again that it’s good for the whole world that corporations close their shops in Cincinnati and move them to Shanghai, that we will all be better off to get these marvelous… For 30 years. And the corporations went; They had to, their competitors were going, and they would’ve been outcompeted if they didn’t go. China offered cheaper wages than Americans demanded. China offered the biggest growing market in the world because of their size. So every corporation sent its people over there.
I teach in business schools. We teach people if you want to have a successful business, go to where the wages are low and the market is growing. They listened to people like me and they went over there. That’s why this is the area that is growing. We are becoming what they were, and they are becoming what we were, and that’s very upsetting. But you don’t solve it by pretending that it isn’t there. We don’t have the empire anymore.
Let me remind folks, the war in Vietnam, which was a big turning point, was a war between the United States and the Communist Party of Vietnam. The United States lost the war. The people who have been running Vietnam since, to this moment, are the Communist Party who defeated the United States. I know this is upsetting, but you ought to face the reality. In Afghanistan, we went to war against the Taliban. That war is over. We lost. The Taliban now runs the country. In Iraq, we lost. In Ukraine, we are now losing. How many hints do you need? You are not the big cheese in the world anymore. The best rocket, the best missile in the Ukraine War to this moment is a Russian one.
Taya Graham: Professor Wolff, I have to ask you, because you brought up something really interesting about jobs. Basically, manufacturers sending jobs and goods to where it’s cheaper. If Chinese workers can produce a good for cheaper, then they’re going to produce their goods in China. But now President Trump is coming in at least saying that he has a focus on nationalism and protectionism. That might pit the US worker against global economic corporations. So I’m just wondering, how is this going to affect worker solidarity? How is this going to affect businesses? Some of our most important union movements were international solidarity movements. What do you see happening here?
Dr. Richard Wolff: Well, I think you’re absolutely right. We are shifting to a nationalism. That’s because we have to protect our industries because they can’t compete with others. All will blame the Chinese, and they’re all cheating. That’s very boring and very old. It is what every country that loses in the competition says.
But the fact of the matter is, to give you one example, 15 years ago, every automobile company in the world went to work to try to develop the best, cheapest electric car because that’s the wave of the future. And we now have an unqualified winner. One country and one company produced the best, cheapest electric car. It’s called the BYD corporation. And if you’ve never heard of it, it’s because it’s Chinese.
And you know what Mr. Biden, our president, did? He took the tariff — And remember, a tariff is a tax levied by the United States government on United States people, paid to Washington — The tariff of Mr. Biden on the BYD electric car was 27%; Mr. Biden raised it to 100% percent. That means if BYD produces a $20,000 electric car and you in America want to buy it for your company as an input or for yourself as your personal vehicle, you would have to give 20 grand to China to get the car, and then another 100% percent, $20,000, to Uncle Sam as a tax, costing you $40,000, which is why you don’t see BYD cars on the roads in the United States. But if you went to Europe, as I recently did, you’ll see them all over the road.
Here’s the irony: The United States thinks it’s isolating the bad guys around the world. What the rest of the world now thinks? Their job is to isolate a rogue capitalism in the United States. We are putting tariffs on everybody. We’re slapping everyone — Take back the Panama Canal, make Canada the 51st… You know what that looks like? Exactly. We all know what it looks like. Will Americans find it heady to think of themselves as powerful? Not as they understand. That’s not an expression of power. That’s a desperate theater because they can’t face the loss of power that is our reality, and which we could handle if we were honest enough to admit it.
Stephen Janis: Well, it’s interesting you bring that up because now that the Trump administration is saying they’re withdrawing from the Paris Accords and they’re not going to be really competing to build green energy, green products, alternatives, are we just conceding the future to these countries like China? Are we saying, you know what? We’re out of this. If you want a gas guzzler, come to the US, but if you want a nice, cheap electric car, go somewhere else. Are we conceding the future to these people?
Dr. Richard Wolff: Whether we understand it or not, we are making a future in which everybody who wants a green version of whatever there is will be buying not American goods, because they’re not made that way. We are so strong and tough, we won’t do it, and we’re screwing ourselves. We’re shooting ourselves in the foot. Every company in the world that competes with an American company and that buys cars and trucks as part of its business will be buying the Chinese car because it’s the best deal any capitalist around the world can get for a car, whereas the American can’t get it because of the crazy tariff. That means, sure, we’ll have a few more jobs for autoworkers, but everybody else’s job is becoming more uncertain because their employer can’t get the competitively lower priced goods around the world that the American… It’s awful to watch.
[Crosstalk] The American people by telling them, we’re going to protect you. You’re not. You can’t. We live in an interdependent world which the United States helped to create, and now it wants to withdraw, to which the answer that history will give: way too little way too late.
Stephen Janis: Wow, Taya —
Taya Graham: Professor Wolff, I have to ask you this because you made me think about something that’s actually quite personal, which is AI, and I saw that there was a $500 billion promise to create AI infrastructure for OpenAI and other companies. And it is mind boggling to me, especially because it’s not tied to any kind of regulation. And I would say there are a lot of reasons to be concerned about AI, whether you’re concerned about deepfakes being used to spread misinformation, or you’re worried about a friend becoming attached to an AI person instead of a real partner, or if you’re just worried about all the jobs that will disappear because of the chatbots because so many customer service jobs are being wiped out. And it’s even harming our industry as journalists. I know people who are graphic designers and writers that are in big trouble now. Or you could be worried that an AI bot is going to deny your healthcare just like UnitedHealthcare did.
So this seems like instead of our government protecting us, they’re throwing fuel on the fire. Professor Wolff, what are your thoughts on AI and its impact on our jobs, especially in light of this $500 billion promise?
Dr. Richard Wolff: Well, let me break that into two parts. First off, $500 billion, that’s just Mr. Trump bloviating. It has no meaning. And he got attacked by his buddy Elon Musk within minutes of issuing that because there’s no money to do it. It’s just I’m going to do $500 billion. Where are you going to get the $500 billion? Musk really raked him over the coals. How these guys are great buddies after this is going to be a mystery to watch — Unless neither of them listens to what the other one says, which I doubt. So this is all very early, vague speculation.
But now let’s turn to your bigger question: What about AI? My reaction to that is the same as what about computers? What about robots? What about all the big technical advances? They were always vehicles that could be used in different ways. Don’t listen when someone tells you AI or electricity or robots must be this way.
And I’m going to explain it with a simple example because it gets the idea across. Suppose there was a machine, AI, robot, doesn’t matter, that made workers twice as productive as they used to be. So instead of 10 widgets an hour, they could now make 20 widgets an hour. That typical AIG is supposed to allow one person to work the machine and get the output.
OK, here’s what happens in capitalism: The capitalist says, oh, great, he buys the machine, fires half his workers because he doesn’t need them anymore because the other half are twice as productive. What does he do with the money that he saves from the half that he fired? He keeps it; more profit for himself. He’s overjoyed. And that’s how he uses the technical breakthrough.
OK, now let me give you an alternative. Suppose there were an enterprise that looked at the new AI or whatever it is and says, wow, it’s twice as productive. Here’s what we’re going to do: We’re going to buy that equipment or that machine. We’re not going to fire anybody. We’re going to reduce the workday from eight hours to four hours. Why? Because now with the new machine, the AI in four hours can do us twice the work that it used to. We don’t need people to work four hours. We can be the same firm. Instead of firing the people, you lowered the workday.
Now let me ask you something. If you live in a democracy where the majority rule, we know which way the majority would want to go: Give me half my workday off as leisure because I can be more doubly productive. We don’t do what’s democratic, we do what’s profitable for the tiny minority of people who own the business, so they fire half the workers. That’s why we are afraid. It’s not AI that’s the problem, it’s capitalism that uses each technological advance in order to do what they say they’re going to do: maximize profit.
I have taught in business schools. That’s what businessmen and women think their job is, to maximize profit, but that helps the people who earn profit. It doesn’t help the people who live on wages, but they’re the majority. A democratic workplace would make the decisions that are best for the majority. We don’t live in such a system. Capitalism is the enemy of democracy, and it always was.
Taya Graham: Professor Wolff, that is so incredibly powerful what you just said, that we don’t actually need to be afraid of AI, that we need to be afraid of how capitalists might use it [crosstalk] to line their own pockets. I really appreciate your insights.
I almost feel bad that I’m going to ask you such an unserious question now in light of these important issues we’re discussing, but it’s being debated quite hotly across a lot of social media platforms, and that is, did Elon Musk give a Nazi salute? So just allow me to run a clip for you, and then I would like to hear your thoughts, and I’m also going to share with you a few of the social media posts and things people had to say.
[CLIP BEGINS]
Elon Musk: And I just want to say thank you for making it happen. Thank you [gestures]. My heart goes out to you.
[CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: So let me just share with you a few of the social media posts that were also made in light of that. Now, @JonathanPieNews posted, “Now, I know what you’re all thinking, but who hasn’t accidentally done a Sieg Heil on their first day in government?” Now interestingly, the Anti-Defamation League wrote that “[…] @elonmusk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute, but again, we appreciate that people are on edge.” And what was amazing is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded to the ADL with, “Just to be clear, you are defending a Heil Hitler salute that was performed and repeated for emphasis and clarity.”
Stephen Janis: It’s interesting too, Taya, that the epitome of capitalists there would be associated with a fascist symbology. It’s interesting the way — And I don’t know if Dr. Wolff feels anything about this — But does corporatism lead to fascism when corporatism has too much power and the profit motive becomes too embedded in the political system? Does it become fascist in some sense?
Taya Graham: And what did you think of his gesture?
Dr. Richard Wolff: Well, let me deal with Elon Musk first.
Stephen Janis: OK.
Dr. Richard Wolff: The gesture could mean a variety of things. I’m not inside Elon Musk’s mind. I don’t know what he intended or didn’t, if it were there all by itself. It’s open to interpretation. But Elon Musk has also gone out of his way to make himself aligned with the most right-wing forces in the world. He is now a major supporter of the right-wing party in Germany, a party which is widely considered in Germany to be the inheritor of the Nazi Party of Adolf Hitler. If he were concerned not to have his gestures misunderstood, why in the world would he choose to endorse a political party? Which makes, by the way, everybody else in Germany who doesn’t like this right-wing party, all of the other parties, all of the other parties have made a declaration they will not work with this right-wing party because of its… He’s chosen to go along with that.
He’s also wealthy because of what his parents got out of Apartheid South Africa. You’d think a kid with that in his background — I’m not blaming him for whatever his parents did — But a kid with that in his background might want to go out of his way not to do anything that might suggest that that commitment to Apartheid, which made his family rich, didn’t live on in him. No, this man is taking many opportunities to show that he is. He’s erased tweets — I won’t repeat them — But that also point in that direction.
Given all of that, I would have to join Ocasio-Cortez in wondering what in the world agitated the Anti-Defamation League, which is supposed to be on guard against symbols like this, from bending over for Mr. Elon Musk. Isn’t it enough to see our president do that? Do we all have to mimic this sort of behavior? That would be my first response.
Stephen Janis: Are we headed towards something? As inequality keeps rising, is it inevitable to be a collapse? Is there any way to fix it politically before we get to that point? Or are we in no way able to avoid the consequences of this historic inequality in the Second Gilded Age we talked about?
Dr. Richard Wolff: I don’t predict the future. I don’t believe in it. I can’t do it. I don’t think anyone else can. So “inevitability” is a word that I don’t think, it’s not in my vocabulary.
Stephen Janis: Got it.
Dr. Richard Wolff: I don’t know. I believe it’s always possible to make interventions, to change things, and in any case, that’s what we have to try to do, otherwise we’re not really full citizens and full human beings.
But I want to make it clear: I believe the United States is heading headlong into a dead end economically, and therefore also politically and ideologically. We as a nation were remarkable in the 19th and 20th centuries. We provided roughly from 1820 to roughly 1970 rising real wages for the American working class every decade for 150 years. That made us special. No other working class in any other capitalist country got that story. That’s why millions of people came to the United States from Europe, for example, during the 19th and earlier 20th centuries, because they expected a better deal here than they could get in Europe, and they got it.
Alright, that made us think we were very special. The religious amongst us thought that God somehow smiled more on America than he or she or whatever you think it is smiled elsewhere. But the reality is it had to do with a particular position in the world at that time that we occupied.
I don’t want to take us away. We made an effort, took advantage of that situation, and we did pretty well for a while. That is now over and it’s not coming back. And the question of the world right now is will there be a new empire to replace the American the way the American replaced the British? And will that new empire be Chinese? Is that one option? You bet.
Let me remind in closing, the United States and its G7 allies together comprise somewhere around, let’s be generous, 12% to 15% of the world’s people. The BRICS today, with their 22 countries, comprise roughly 60% of the world’s people. The future is with them, not with us. We can work a deal, we can work an accommodation, we can make it work for both sides, but we have to be willing to do that. Instead, our leaders are full of bravado, and ugly bullying, and we’re going to shut you down and close you off and bomb you into the — Wow. That’s not an auspicious sign for a loser.
And I know that’s hard for Americans, but that’s the reality. But we can make it work. I believe so, and we can make it a good time for the American people, if not for the billionaires. But we have to face the situation we are in and how to make the best of it. We are not doing that, and we’re losing precious years while we go through these desperate gestures of self delusional make-believe.
Stephen Janis: Well, thank you Dr. Wolff.
Taya Graham: Professor Wolff, thank you so much. Those are some hard truths that I think we all need to accept and understand so that we can chart a path forward that will actually benefit the majority of us.
Stephen Janis: Well, it’s interesting because the picture he paints, it makes Trump seem even more inevitable because if you’re in decline and wealth inequality is increasing, you’re only going to have one emotion that comes out of that, which is anger and resentment. If you don’t, as he points out, acknowledge it and say, look, this is a new reality. We’re not the same as we were 50 years ago. We have to acknowledge it before we can get through it. So what you have —
Dr. Richard Wolff: What Mr. Trump is doing is cashing in unjustified fear and anger, but carefully doing his job, focusing it away from the billionaires, away from the capitalist inequality, and making us learn to hate the Chinese, and maybe now the Panamanians, and the Canadians, and the Mexicans. It’s disgusting, but you understand the logic of why it’s unfolding that way.
Taya Graham: Professor Wolff, thank you so much for making that so clear for us. We hate to let you go, but maybe when you leave, you’ll just give us the promise that you will join us again soon.
Dr. Richard Wolff: I’d be glad to. I believe in these kinds of conversations. I think that The Real News Network is doing a great job producing them and disseminating them. That’s what the country needs. If Americans get a chance to understand the situation, something other than the drumbeat of the mass media, then we have a chance. So I’m as much in your debt as you ever are in mine.
Taya Graham: Thank you so much, Professor. That was very kind.
Dr. Richard Wolff: Good to talk to you.
Stephen Janis: Good to talk to you too.
Taya Graham: You as well.
So, Stephen, I have some thoughts. Do you have anything you want to say before I get started?
Stephen Janis: Well, again, I think it was interesting that everything he said, the psychology of it, is so natural. As a country loses its position of dominance, it turns in on itself, and there’s nothing more turning — And then meanwhile, there’s a few people, fat cats who are profiting off that decline. And that’s why we have this extractive economy, not an economy that improves people and their material existence, but actually puts them in a horrifying psychological position of being extracted from. So what he said made a lot of sense and really explains a hell of a lot.
Taya Graham: And it’s an extraction and distraction economy, which is fueled by those social media billionaires.
Stephen Janis: It’s so true. You need both distraction and extraction at the same time.
Taya Graham: So as we reflect on these sweeping promises and executive orders that President Trump has unleashed in his first days back in office, it’s clear we are facing a profound moment in American governance, and one that demands careful scrutiny, honesty, and compassion. From the deployment of ICE agents to Chicago to the aggressive push for more drilling, these policies seem to serve a really narrow set of interests, consolidating power, deepening inequality, and widening the chasm between the billionaire class and the rest of us. And let’s be clear: these moves are not just policy decisions. They are calculated steps towards entrenching a system of oligarchy where the very wealthy few dictate the terms of our lives.
When you see Tesla’s Elon Musk, or Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, or Google’s Sundar Pichai, or Apple CEO Tim Cook, or Amazon’s Jeff Bezos literally sitting at the right hand of our president, does that not concern you? Don’t you think they will leverage their money and power for more money and power? The appointment of individuals like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswami, and even Linda McMahon, and other billionaires to positions of power only underscore this reality. These are people who epitomize wealth hoarding and corporate influence, now wielding even more control over public policy. Musk, appointed to oversee government efficiency, has made his billions breaking unions and hollowing out the very safety nets that working families depend on. Oh, and I think Vivek Ramawwami, I think King Musk sent him packing.
But Tuesday, Jan. 21, we saw the anniversary of Citizens United. It’s an infamous case that gave corporations a say, literally a First Amendment protection to use their money as a form of speech. How are regular folks supposed to compete against the power of billions in lobbying dollars? Money talks, and billions can talk over us.
What we’re witnessing isn’t even an oligarchy; that might be more pleasant. What we’re about to experience is more frightening: a government that is run like a company store, where we have no other options and are forced to buy what they’re selling.
And just let me expand on that a little bit. So there was a time before unions were able to push back against rapacious capitalism when people lived in what were called company towns. Miners in particular were subject to these feudal arrangements. Employees lived in company-owned homes on company-owned land. They bought food and essentials from company-owned stores, and then they went and worked in the mine. The point is that every aspect of their lives was monetized and turned into profit. And if they lost their jobs, they lost everything.
Well, I think we’re headed towards something similar in outcome, but different in how it’s implemented. And that is how this extractive capitalism works: to extract from us constantly and mine our lives for personal profit.
It’s drilled down into facets of our personal existence that were once unthinkable. Zuckerberg and Musk literally make money every time we post something about ourselves. A picture of our birthday or an anniversary fuels the attention economy for their profit. The platform Musk now uses to impose his political will was, in large part, fueled by our industry, journalism, as we posted our stories and worked just to get a few crumbs of attention from his vast digital audience. And even worse, our worth was measured and is still measured by how many followers we have. In other words, our value as journalists is tied to how much we can enrich a tech bro, and that is not a great idea for journalistic integrity or even for a steady paycheck.
And if you want to get some of that scrip to spend at the company store, maybe you should pick up Trump’s meme coin. It’ll probably be part of the official reserve currency soon [both laugh].
But in relation to the company store analogy with our healthcare system, your healthcare insurance is often tied to your employer. If you are sick, you have no idea how much it will cost. You have no idea [if] your insurance will even cover it, and you could even lose the job that provides the needed health insurance. And if your debts are overwhelming, you try to purchase a digital lottery ticket of a GoFundMe page so that you can hope to pay off the debts that have been incurred by the private equity firms that have turned US medical care into a nightmare.
But I’m going to change my tune a little bit. I’m going to ask us to do something that might be the only option left: resist, resist it all. Tell them to take their overpriced medical bills and stuff ’em. Tell ’em to take their overpriced cars and park them permanently. Tell them to take their rents jacked up by algorithms and pay it themselves. And let’s stop creating content for and arguing amongst ourselves so that Zuckerberg can take Judo classes or buy another yacht. Let us all say enough is enough. Let’s resist making a few rich people richer and richer. Let’s resist the Second Gilded Age and end it now.
Stephen, thank you for being patient with me [Janis laughs]. I had to get that off my chest.
Stephen Janis: I totally understand. when you listen to some of this stuff that Dr. Wolff says, it affects you because you want to feel empowered on some level. And so I appreciate that.
Taya Graham: Well, I want people to know that we can resist. And I want to thank everyone for watching, for being here, for listening, and for caring. Until next time we see you, stay informed, stay passionate about your politics, and stay compassionate to your fellow Americans. Remember, united we stand, divided we fall. Let’s try to find some unity, because we’re going to need it. Thanks for joining us.
United Auto Workers (UAW) president Shawn Fain went quiet for a few weeks after Trump was re-elected in November. Just a few months ago at the Democratic National Convention, Fain was calling on workers to rally behind Kamala Harris to “defend democracy” and deriding Trump as a “scab” (though Trump is a capitalist billionaire who would more likely repress a picket line than cross one). Then…
Less than a month before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. addressed a crowd of 10,000 striking sanitation workers and their supporters in Memphis, Tennessee. “One day our society will come to respect the sanitation worker if it is to survive,” he said, “for the person who picks up our garbage … is as significant as the physician, for if he doesn’t do his job, diseases are rampant.
This story originally appeared in Labor Notes on Jan. 16, 2025. It is shared here with permission.
The following language was compiled from a series of unions and labor activists. It is intended as a resource for workers looking to include pro-immigrant provisions in their collective bargaining agreements.
BARRING ICE FROM ENTERING THE WORKSITE
The Employer will require that any federal immigration agent, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agent, or State and Local law enforcement officials comply with legal requirements before they may be allowed to interrogate, search or seize the person or property of any worker.
Should an ICE or DHS agent request to enter the worksite or obtain or review personnel records, the Employer shall verify the immigration agent’s credentials, ask the agent why the agent is requesting access, and require a criminal judicial warrant signed by a federal judge. Staff shall not admit ICE agents based on administrative warrant, ICE detainer, or other document issued by an agency enforcing civil immigration law.
Should an ICE or DHS agent demand access to the premises or seek to interrogate, search, or seize any employee the employer shall immediately notify the union by telephone call to the union’s office. The foregoing shall not require the Employer to deny the DHS or Department of Labor access to the I-9 forms, as required by law. If the Company is served with a validly executed search or arrest warrant, the Company shall arrange for questioning of workers to occur in as private a setting as possible.The Company will notify the Union if the Company learns of an immigration investigation regarding a worker within two (2) days.
PROTECTION OF RIGHTS DURING WORKPLACE IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT
If an immigration-related warrant, subpoena or other formal or informal request is issued by a governmental agency to the Employer, the Employer will inform affected employees as soon as possible and give them a copy of the request within three (3) calendar days. If the Employer provides the requested documents to the agency, or allows the agency to view them on-site, it will inform affected employees as soon as possible and give them copies of the provided documents within three calendar days.
The Employer will only comply with governmental requests, including requests to enter Employer-controlled workplaces, to the extent strictly required by law. The Employer will not comply with such requests if the Employer is not required to do so by law. All employees will be notified as soon as possible of the date and time a government agency is expected to enter a workplace. No employee will be required to work in the office that day if they reasonably believe doing so will put them at risk of governmental arrest or detainment.
ABSENCE FROM WORK DUE TO IMMIGRATION STATUS
The Employer agrees to work with all employees to provide an opportunity to gain extensions, continuations, or other status required by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service without taking a leave of absence. If a leave of absence is necessary, the Employer agrees to give permission for the employee to take an unpaid leave of absence for a period of up to ninety (90) calendar days and return the employee to work. No employee actively seeking work authorization will be terminated while on such leave.
The Employer will not discipline or discharge an employee who is prevented from working for 90 days or less due to arrest, detention, incarceration, or temporary national expulsion by law enforcement pursuant to the employee’s citizenship or immigration status. Such time away from work will be treated as paid leave. This paragraph will not apply if the law-enforcement action is based on or related to violent crimes, hate crimes, or other actions the Employer believes may jeopardize the safety of its staff or organizational integrity.
In cases where immigration status issues arise, the Employer will explore alternative employment options, including remote work from another country, in compliance with applicable laws.
Employees may choose to have a union representative present in all matters related to immigration status.
EMPLOYEE PRIVACY
Immigration status is confidential, and the Employer will not divulge personal immigration status information of employees to any parties except as required for the immigration sponsorship process, as requested by employees in question, as required by law, as required to defend the Employer or its employees in legal proceedings, or as expressly stipulated in this Agreement.
The Employer shall not disclose confidential information concerning employees to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or to its agents, except as required by law. To the extent permitted by law, confidential information includes name, address, and social security numbers. The Employer agrees to provide prompt written notice to the union if any government agency, including ICE, contacts the Employer for any purpose involving employees or if the Employer receives a search, arrest or administrative warrant, subpoena, or other request for documents. The Employer agrees to promptly provide the union with all information regarding these matters that the union requests.
NO-MATCH LETTERS
When and if ICE notifies the Employer that certain employees do not appear to be authorized to continue their employment, the Employer will notify such employees and provide them with two (2) weeks to present other documents, including those listed on the form I-9, to establish their work authorization. The employer shall not change the employee’s work status before such two (2) week period has passed.
The Employer agrees to promptly provide the union with all “no-match” information the Social Security Administration (SSA) provides the Employer. “No-match” information means employee names or social security numbers in the Employer’s records did not match those in SSA’s records. The Employer also agrees to promptly review all its records for any discrepancies and to update its records with all information it receives from the SSA or from affected employees.
STATUS VERIFICATION AND I-9 AUDITS
The Employer will not require or demand proof of immigration status, except as required by law. The Employer will not require an employee to re-verify their authorization to work except as required by law. In the event the Employer requires an employee to re-verify, it will provide them 120 days to do so unless a shorter period is necessary to avoid legal violations by the employee or the Employer.
The Employer will not participate in the E-Verify program unless the Employer’s participation in E-Verify is required by law. If The Company seeks to enroll in E-Verify or other comparable programs, it shall provide notice to the Union. The Union shall have the right to reject such enrollment unless the Company’s participation in E-Verify is required by law.
NON-RETALIATION POLICY
The Employer shall comply with all lawful requests of employees to change names and social security numbers (regarding immigration or otherwise) in the Employer’s records, without prejudice to their seniority or any other right under this agreement. The Employer shall not request information or documents from employees or applicants for employment regarding their immigration status, except as required by law. No worker hired before November 6, 1986, shall be discharged due to their immigration status, nor shall any employee be asked to show authorization to work if they continue their employment after a temporary absence as defined in the immigration law and regulations.
The Employer shall not use an employee’s immigration status or sponsorship as leverage to negotiate or coerce them into specific employment terms and conditions. This includes, but is not limited to, requiring an employee to commit to a specific length of employment, imposing economic conditions, withholding or threatening to withhold sponsorship for any reason, delaying or threatening to delay the immigration process, and using sponsorship to demand concessions from the employee. Any attempt to use immigration sponsorship as a tool for negotiation or coercion will be a violation of this Agreement.
IMMIGRATION SPONSORSHIP
The Employer is committed to supporting every member of the bargaining unit, including foreign nationals, by ensuring that they have access to comprehensive immigration support and protection from deportation.
The Employer will contact every new bargaining unit employee who is a foreign national within two (2) weeks of their start date to inquire about their current work authorization and immigration status. In collaboration with the employee, the Employer will design a tailored plan to extend their work authorization, renew their visa, or apply for new immigration status as necessary.
The Employer shall commit to sponsoring work authorization and other immigration- related legal processes for every bargaining unit employee who is a foreign national as soon as they become eligible. The Employer’s immigration team will contact eligible employees within two (2) weeks of their eligibility date to begin the process with their Consent.
The Employer will initiate discussions with employees who hold temporary work authorization at least 12 months prior to the expiration of their work authorization. These discussions will outline available visa and work authorization options based on eligibility, with a focus on aligning the process with the employee’s long-term goals, whether through temporary or permanent status. The Employer will prioritize the interests of the employee in this process.
The Employer will cover all fees related to an employee’s visa, green card, and other immigration sponsorship, including those required for work authorization renewals and premium processing services through USCIS.
LEGAL SUPPORT
The Employer shall assign an Immigration Liaison to each bargaining unit employee who is a foreign national. The Immigration Liaison will act as the primary contact for all immigration-related matters, ensuring that external counsel adheres to strict deadlines and providing the employee with updates throughout the process. Employees will be granted access to relevant information and resources as needed.
Supervisors overseeing foreign national employees will undergo mandatory immigration training, focusing on the legal nuances of immigration, cultural competency, and non-discrimination practices. Immigration Liaisons or HR Partners will also undergo similar training, ensuring all involved personnel are equipped with the knowledge necessary to support employees effectively. Updated training materials will be shared with all employees and the Union.
Foreign national employees undergoing visa applications or renewals will be offered weekly check-ins with their Immigration Liaison and legal representatives from the Employer while working on immigration paperwork. During periods of inactivity in the immigration process, the Employer will offer monthly check-ins to ensure employees are supported.
The Employer, in collaboration with outside counsel, will ensure that bargaining unit members receive all necessary documentation with reasonable timeframes to complete the visa process. Employees will be kept informed of relevant deadlines, typical approval timelines, and any legal implications that may impact them or their families. In cases of delays or complications, the Employer will promptly inform the employee and work to resolve the issue.
The Employer shall develop and distribute a comprehensive guide for visa holders, outlining their rights and options. This guide will be provided during the onboarding process and updated regularly. Additionally, protocols will be in place to protect employee rights in the event of immigration enforcement actions, with clear communication to managers on how to respond.
The Employer will host periodic Know Your Rights training sessions during work hours, educating all staff on their legal rights when interacting with law enforcement or immigration authorities at home, in public spaces, or in the workplace.
LANGUAGE ACCESSIBILITY
The Employer agrees to translate all employment-related documents, including disciplinary notices, policies, handbooks, procedures, notices, and a copy of the union contract, into the language spoken at home of its employees using a mutually acceptable translator. The Employer agrees to pay for a mutually acceptable translator to translate during all meetings that employees whose language spoken at home is not English are required to attend.
While English is the primary language of the workplace, employees may use the language of their choice among themselves.
UNION PARTICIPATION IN RESOLVING IMMIGRATION ISSUES
In the event that an employee has a problem with their right to work in the United States, the Employer shall notify the Union in writing prior to taking any action. The Employer agrees to meet with the Union to discuss the nature of the problem to attempt to reach a resolution.
DISCLAIMERS
The Employer will comply with all immigration laws. If compliance with immigration laws requires development of new policies which change terms and conditions of employment after the enactment of this Agreement, the Employer will negotiate with the Union over the effects of such policies.
Nothing in this Article shall require the Employer to violate the law.
PROTECTION FROM EMPLOYER I-9 AUDITS
See this memorandum of understanding from UE Local 115 (Refresco workers), available in both Spanish and English. And see this side agreement from UE Local 155 (Chasen Fiber Technologies) which has even stronger language.
SANCTUARY UNIONS
Want to turn your union into a sanctuary union? You can access the Teamsters Joint Council 16 resolution here, and the National Union of Healthcare Workers’ resolution here. In addition, you can access Arise Chicago’s training guide on building sanctuary unions here.
ORGANIZING TOOLKIT
Arise Chicago has produced an immigrant worker toolkit that provides an overview of rights and tools.
As fires continue to rage in Los Angeles, news of an imminent ceasefire in Gaza are raising hopes across the world. All this comes as Trump is about to enter office, ensuring that the system responsible for these catastrophes will continue. Mehdi Hasan, founder of Zeteo News, and Francesca Fiorentini of “The Bitchuation Room” podcast join The Real News as the world burns, and seems on the edge of an even greater conflagration.
Production: Maximillian Alvarez Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Welcome to the Real News Network and welcome back to our weekly live stream. You can catch our team here live every Thursday, and you can find us reporting on this channel every week, lifting up the voices and stories of real people on the front lines of struggle around the world and bringing together a diverse, wide array of truth tellers, analysts and fighters for global working class justice. So be sure to subscribe to our channel like this video and share your thoughts with us in the live chat right now. Alright, well, happy New Year and all that 2025 has wasted no time throwing us back into the burning trash heap of history, and we’ve got no time to waste here. So let’s get rolling. We’ve got two powerhouse guests joining us today. Returning to the channel, we’ve got the one and only Francesca Fiorentini, correspondent, comedian, and host of the Situation Room podcast.
Francesca is also the former host and head writer of the Web series News broke on AJ Plus and she hosted the Special Red White and who on M-S-N-B-C. And joining us for the first time, we’ve got the one and only Medi Hassan world renowned broadcaster, former host of the Me Hassan Show on M-S-N-B-C, an author of numerous books including Win Every Argument, which was published in 2023. Medi is also a Guardian US columnist and he is the founder, CEO and editor-in-chief of the Vital News Outlet eo. We’re going to start today’s stream in my home of Southern California where cataclysmic wildfires, which continue to explode in frequency and severity due to the manmade climate crisis, have killed at least 25 people displaced, tens of thousands obliterated entire neighborhoods and scorched wide swaths of the landscape. The entire region was on high alert this week with the National Weather Service warning that a new wave of intense winds could cause explosive fire growth.
But there’s some relief here in the latest reports. According to the New York Times this morning, dangerous winds were subsiding in the Los Angeles area on Thursday, delivering a boost for firefighting efforts, even as frustration grew among displaced residents desperate to return to their neighborhoods. After more than a week of devastating wildfires, nine days after the Blaze is ignited, no timeline has been announced for lifting many evacuation orders that have affected tens of thousands of Southern California residents. The Palisades Fire, the largest in the area, had burned nearly 24,000 acres and was 22% contained as of Thursday morning. According to Cal Fire, the Eaton fire covered more than 14,000 acres and was 55% contained. Now as the fires burn here at home across the world, Palestinians who have somehow managed to evade the civilization erasing fires of Israel’s genocidal assault for the past year and a half are rejoicing at the bombshell news that the bombing may finally end in a stunning development.
As Jeremy Scahill writes at Drop Site News, an agreement on a deal that will halt at least temporarily Israel’s 15 month long genocidal assault on Gaza was announced on Wednesday to scenes of celebration by Palestinians and Gaza. The agreement is divided into three phases, each spanning 42 days, and outline specifics on the first phase, including prisoner swaps, Israeli troop withdrawals, allowances for displaced Palestinians to return to their homes while leaving the details of the ensuing two phases to be determined through future negotiations. The deal will take effect on January 19th. The terms of the agreement being negotiated are nearly identical to what was on the table last May when outgoing President Joe Biden first announced it in his farewell address from the Oval Office last night, president Biden very noticeably tried to take credit for the deal being reached, but reports from inside Israel itself tell a very different story.
The Israeli newspaper Harts reported this week that Israeli sources say that the involvement of the incoming US administration led by Trump’s aggressive Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, revived hostage talks with Hamas. While Netanyahu’s propaganda machine claims that Trump has left him no choice. What happens inside his coalition will determine whether the Prime Minister approves the deal. So what does this all mean for Palestinians and Israelis, for the world and for us working people here in the heart of US Empire? What does that tell us about the legacy of the outgoing Biden administration and about the new international order in the Trump 2.0 era and with Trump’s inauguration just days away, what will next week reveal about what we’re actually facing in the coming four years with a second Trump administration and a fully magnified GOP effectively controlling all branches of government? So to dig into all of this, I want to go to our amazing guest, Medi Hassan and Francesca Fiorentini.
And a quick note to all of you watching live. We’re going to be talking with Medi and Francesca for the next hour, but we’ll be responding to your questions from the live chat in the last half hour of the stream. So if you’ve got thoughts or questions, please share them in the chat. Alright, Francesca, I want to come to you first sis, because you are back home in LA right in the middle of the madness and we’ve been following your social media updates on the wildfires for the past week. And first of all, I really just want to say that I and the whole Real news team have been thinking of you, your friends, your family, and we are sending you all our love and solidarity in these apocalyptic ass times. I want to ask if we can start with having you just lay out what the past week and a half have been like for you, what you want most people who don’t live in SoCal, to know about what you and others there have been seeing, feeling, experiencing, and where do things stand now,
Francesca Fiorentini:
That’s a huge question, but thank you so much for having me back and thank you for yes, all the kind words. And my heart also is going out to all the people who have lost everything. My sister-in-law lost everything and her family, but so many people are in this position and I just want everyone to know that we’re relying on mutual aid and solidarity from communities. That is what is happening. That is who is around right now. People are coming back to their homes, but the air quality is not okay. The A QI doesn’t measure things like toxic chemicals burning from electronics or toys or old homes that might have asbestos in it. There’s no way to measure that. Nobody’s out here telling us how to stay safe, what to do, helping us with air filtration systems, which can often be incredibly expensive. It is all person to person.
It is Facebook mom groups to community organizations that were already on the ground. I actually recently just did a piece for EO specifically about the people who are coming together in this moment to literally save lives. And one of those people are day laborers, migrant day laborers, shout out to the day Laborers Organizing Network and the Pasadena Worker Center. They are organizing day laborers who often have experience in things like landscaping. They know how to handle a chainsaw to get rid of some of this debris that is blocking people’s homes, has fallen on their cars, on and on and on. It is the people, and I hate that. I hate that we only have one another, but also it is a reminder that we are all we have. That push comes to shove. We are woefully unprepared in this country for this kind of climate chaos.
We are woefully unprepared as we were under covid for the kinds of pandemics that will be, again, all too commonplace with our public health infrastructure completely decimated and it’s only going to get worse. So it is really gutting, it is apocalyptic, it is scary, but it is also heartening. And the silver lining is to see some of this solidarity. And I think honestly, people just getting offline stop participating in the conspiracy theories and which again, are really, really running rampant right now. There is a lot more to say about what happens next. I’ll just say that LA has a massive fight on our hands and to me it also plays into the questions that have arisen ever since the 2020 George Floyd uprising about where our money in this city goes. Now, I want to caveat that by saying that no amount of money could have stopped a hundred mile winds spreading embers here and there and just lighting fire after fire after fire.
That is climate change. But on an LA specific level, we have a budget that is out of control, skewed towards the cops. We need to change that. And so many grassroots organizations here have been blowing the whistle. And as our elected officials become more representative, you’ve got a shout out to YIs Hernandez on city council who Soto Martinez also to Naia Ramen and finally recently elected Isabelle Rado. All of them are progressives and three of them who were in office at the time voted against that budget that gave more money to the police than any other place. So there is a national conversation we can also talk about that I’d love to talk about, but that is what’s happening here locally. There’s a fight ahead of us and it is on every front.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I think that’s beautifully and powerfully put, Francesca, and just to everyone watching not from Southern California, I am sure the images of the Santa Ana winds blowing those embers was quite shocking. They are nothing new to us, but this speed and this late, or I guess this early in the year that is, I remember my own parents being evacuated from their house in 2008 because the Santa S had blown embers over to our side of Brea and the fires were getting close to our home. This happens all the time, but the speed, the intensity, the ferocity, the fact that these winds are blowing this much in January when normally there’s something we expect in the fall like these to say nothing of the mega drought that we’ve been in the southwest for the past 25 years. I mean, there is so much to talk about here.
Francesca Fiorentini:
I’ve only lived here for a few years and I literally don’t know when the Santa Ana winds are supposed to happen every year. It’s like, no, it’s supposed to be in October. No, they’re in August. It’s very funny that no one actually knows when they’re happening. But yes, what hasn’t happened is rain in nine months
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I guess the Santa Ana’s are just year round at this point. So not great folks. And I also want to highlight what you said, Francesca, about just the impact of the diss and misinformation and medi. I want to come to you on this question in a second because it really strikes me as someone who was interviewing folks on the ground in Asheville, North Carolina in the wake of the hurricane a few months ago. They were saying the exact same thing about how Trump’s tweets, about fema far right conspiracy theories about anything immigrants, that it was actively hurting relief efforts and that those relief efforts were largely being driven by mutual aid, by people on the ground. So I want folks to really take that to heart and think about what that means for us as a society that is going to be facing compounding cataclysms more frequently.
Now, medi, I want to bring you in here first to give you a chance to respond to anything that Francesca said there. But also as someone who has worked in the upper echelons of broadcast news, I really want to get your perspective on how the media has responded to these fires from the manufacturer of bullshit. Pseudo stories driven by whatever Trump or Musk said about the fires to the media’s proven unwillingness to report on these environmental disasters in a continuing context of climate change. And actually in a searing piece that we published at The Real News earlier this week by columnist Adam Johnson, Adam points out that a survey of nightly news coverage from the first full day of the LA Fire showed that in 16 minutes of coverage, A-B-C-N-B-C and CBS Nightly News broadcast 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 address climate change at all. Severe weather events when they’re reported on at all, typically because they’re within the US are indexed in the oh deism 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 sort of kind of 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 gaw at the suffering and move on to the next extreme weather event right around the corner in a matter of weeks. Meam, please, your thoughts on the media response to the California wildfires and your advice for viewers about how we need to navigate this chaotic information ecosystem to get the answers we need in times of emergency.
Mehdi Hasan:
It’s a very troubling time when it comes to media misinformation. I am somebody who believes that most of our issues that we have in society right now do go back to the media, right? I’m one of these people who thinks that we need to have long, hard conversations about the information era that we’re in. I think people on the left have not done that. I think people on the right are enjoying the fact that people on the left haven’t done that. It’s became fashionable for a while to say, oh, you can’t blame the media for everything. Now look, a lot of this comes back to how you get your info. You mentioned earlier about the pseudo manufacturing of bullshit news. Adam’s spot on in his piece about the O ideaism and the idea from liberal media that if you talk about climate change, you’re talking about something political, right?
The right have so successfully turned science into a partisan issue that you no longer can talk about vaccines or climate science or any other obvious undeniable scientific issue without sounding like a liberal or a progressive or a leftist. It’s actually genius on their part that they’ve managed to turn science, objective science into a right left issue. And so of course, the liberal media cowed by the right doesn’t want to touch issues that they think at a time of storms, at a time of tornadoes, at a time of fires. You can’t talk about politics and therefore you can’t talk about climate change because climate change is coded political. And that is the success story that they’ve done on the liberal media side, of course, on the right wing media side, what they have done. And Adam mentions no villain, no victimizer, that’s the liberal view of the world. The right are the masters of understanding the importance of having a villain, right? What they have done so successfully is they’ve tapped into human beings basic psyches, basic fears, and understood that for any political crisis you have to have a bad guy. Democrats have failed to do that. Liberals have consistently failed to do that. The right have rightly understood the need for a villain. Now, the villains they’ve picked are horrible Mexicans, Muslims, trans kids, foreigners,
Maximillian Alvarez:
Immigrants, DI caused the fire
Mehdi Hasan:
DRT, and they apply that model to any crisis. It doesn’t matter what it is. So fires come along. I tweeted this earlier this week. It’s actually kind of admirable from a kind of, if you put your evil genius hat on, you have to admire the ability for the right to turn in a matter of days, some might say hours, an issue of objective, climate change, natural disaster. What do we do about this policy-wise into, no, it’s about the water hydrants and the pressure and the water hydrants and it’s about the number of helicopters. And why don’t we have drones in the skies? And why was Karen Bass in Ghana? And we can go down the list of what they’ve managed to do in terms of empty reservoirs and DEI, firefighters and all of the rest.
Francesca Fiorentini:
Why didn’t they use their weather machines?
Mehdi Hasan:
Why didn’t they use their measurements to control it for good, not evil? And that is actually admirable. I’m sorry. It’s amazing because a lot of people, I think 10 years ago, five years ago would’ve said, wait till climate change starts hitting the us. Wait till people start dying from it, then everyone will be forced to take it seriously. Actually turns out, no, even if you’re losing Americans in front of your eyes, they can make you look elsewhere. That is the power of propaganda. And in the old days, it would’ve been Rupert Murdoch and Fox. Today it is Elon Musk and social media and Mark Zuckerberg and Co and Musk has of course been driving a lot of this. There was that hilarious moment where he asked firefighters about water pressure. They were like, no, we were good on water. But that is the power of propaganda and misinformation.
And I was talking to a colleague earlier about this. We’ve had the right so successfully hijack the debate about media information, say it’s censorship, censorship. And Mark Zuckerberg last week came out and said, censorship, we’re going to get rid of our fact checking. And actually, no, I’m sorry. The debate has to be about content moderation. It has to be about responsible journalism. When people are dying, we can have inane abstract debates about free speech, but people are dying in a pandemic. Yeah, I do want Facebook to take down posts saying, put ivermectin in your body or inject yourself with disinfectant. Yeah, I do want people to be able to say, you know what? In the middle of a hurricane in North Carolina, don’t stay in your home because if you leave the government are going to seize your property, you might die even the local Republican congressman at that time. So I do think when people’s lives are on the lines, it’s very easy to have abstract First Amendment discussions. But in public emergencies, we can’t just have unlimited misinformation and people say, oh, that’s authoritarian. No, it’s how it’s always been
Until very recently when these libertarian freaks pretend that there should be no restrictions on their lies and gaslighting. So look, we need to have hard conversations about all this stuff. The moment Elon bus bought Twitter in 2022, that in itself told us the Democrats and the liberal side of the spectrum were not ready for this fight. The fact that they just rolled over and can you imagine if George Soros next month tried to buy Fox? You think the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress will be like, yeah, free market. Do what you want to do though they would do everything they could to stop it because they understand the power of those platforms. Liberals and leftists have not understood the power of those platforms,
Francesca Fiorentini:
Right? Or the efforts to reign them in move so glacially slowly, although they begin, and that inevitably if you don’t actually break up big tech, it will just get eaten by a bigger and bigger and bigger fish. And I want to just say that just on social media, misinformation and disinformation, it’s truly leading to online vigilantism that is terrifying so that everyone thinks that they are a particular sleuth to find out who started the fires, likely a downed power line. You dumb idiots, everything else that started wildfires here in this state of California. It’s a down power line. Okay? So just to say that it is really getting into a terrifying level of vigilantism and people are using apps to do exactly this. So it’s taking misinformation and applying it in real world and making citizens arrests and things like this.
Mehdi Hasan:
But also just to go back to your original question about what can people do who are not crazy freaks. I think people watching this need to understand that A, don’t play the game, participate in the kind of crap that Francesca highlighted and you’ve highlighted, but also, I mean the death of expertise and respect for expertise. I mean, look, I’m on the fence on this one. Elites have lied to us for a long time. A lot of foreign policy experts got us into Iraq and defended Gaza. But I do worry since the pandemic, when you saw Dr. Fauci became the villain of the right, not Donald Trump, the man who said, put disinfectant in your body, not Republican politicians who refuse to mask or do basic mitigation measures, but Fauci became the villain of the right wing movement. Scientists started going around with bodyguards. People like my friend Peter Hotez in Texas had people turning up at his home to try and film him. I think that is a reminder of there’s a great meme doing the rounds. Last week I was a covid expert This week I’m an expert on water pressure in California.
Speaker 4:
People
Mehdi Hasan:
Log in and overnight everyone on Twitter becomes an expert on whatever the de jore story is. That’s a real problem. Social media is really empowered, and Bill Bird did a great line on Jimmy Kimmel the other night saying some fuckhead in his underwear in his mother’s basement is now suddenly the world’s expert on California water pressure systems like get a grip on everyone, especially in the US where academia is seen as some kind of shadowy force. People are ivory towers are not to be trusted. It is really weird that we don’t go, oh, there’s a crisis about wildfires. Let’s ask the wildfire experts what we should do. There’s a crisis about covid. Let’s ask vaccination experts and disease experts and infectious disease experts watch No in this country. Let’s ask a pundit on cable news. What we should do.
Francesca Fiorentini:
Yeah, I mean there’s a lot to say. I do just want to talk about really quickly, just add to me’s point about a villain and creating villains. And obviously we know that the villain in the LA fire story is the fossil fuel industry, and that is so clear. But there’s a lot of sub villains within that. And right now you’ve got Republicans who are talking about tying aid relief for California to a budget that would enshrine the Donald Trump tax cuts four billionaires into law. So double whammy, quite literally the 1% that gave us these wildfires that giving us these once in a century flood, they’re going to enshrine that 1% even more. So the enemy is the billionaire class, and it is no clearer than when you look at climate chaos and what the billionaire class continues to, but people bring on all of us. Go ahead.
Mehdi Hasan:
Frankly, people just don’t see it, right? This is the problem right now, it’s obvious it’s the billionaire class. It’s obvious it’s the fossil fuel industry, but I’m talking about even apolitical people, not like fox junkies, but such as the power of the social media discussion and the background noise and such as discipline of the right wing media machine and rightwing pundits and rightwing politicians to say the message in unison in a way that Democrats or liberals or leftists don’t, is that today, for example, if you ask people, oh, California, was it really bad? Should there be condition? I think the average person would say, yeah, yeah, but what about Texas? It’s mismanaged. What about Texas? I don’t hear the same. We don’t talk about Texas in the same way. Max mentioned at the start, 25 people are dead. That’s 25. Too many. I’m sure that death hole’s going to go up in Texas. 250 people is the government’s death to 700 is the unofficial death toll from the slow storms. A couple of years back when Ted Cruz fled to Cancun, right when the Texas power grid shut down, there were no consequences from that. No one talks about tying aid or conditions for Texas. There were no political people like Karen Bass’s career is over. Greg Abbott got reelected after that. Ted Cruz got reelected after that. Why? Because again, liberals in the left are not very good at creating villains in the same way that the right does
Francesca Fiorentini:
Because they often receive money from the exact same class that the right does. I mean, we have villains set out before us. Look, the fact is the matter is that 10 years ago we didn’t have names like Elon Musk or Mark Andreessen or Sam Altman or whomever else, other billionaires who were in the rooms with Donald Trump. We didn’t have those names. The income disparity was already concentrating, but we didn’t have the names.
Mehdi Hasan:
Now
Francesca Fiorentini:
We’ve got literal names. These emblems of late stage
Mehdi Hasan:
Capitalism, they’re literally going to be sitting on stage next week in the inauguration.
Francesca Fiorentini:
Yes. And we still can’t name them. And I just want to say Democrats are not off the cuff here. I just want to shout out that the Lever had an incredible report about how the California Insurance Commissioner, who oversees fire insurance in this state has received contributions from the insurance industry and is currently in 2023, passed a reform that would allow the buck to be passed to consumers versus the insurance agency because insurers are leaving California, we all know this. They’re leaving Florida, they’re leaving everywhere, and instead they’re
Mehdi Hasan:
Not leaving Florida. Florida is a perfect place in America. What are you talking about?
Francesca Fiorentini:
Well, actually, ironically, Florida has more checks and balances looking at the insurance industry there than in California. So all to say Ricardo Lara is his name. He’s going to be throughout LA if you see him and if he’s giving you a good information, great, alright, but also he has taken money from the insurance industry to specifically pass reforms that would make consumers premiums go up and let them off easy. They would have to do very, very little. They have to try to cover people for two years, 5% more coverage. But if it gets too expensive, they’re going to leave. Meanwhile, they’re literally hiring private firefighting forces that are protecting the buildings that they insure to say nothing of the Republicans like Rick Caruso, who also hired private firefighters to protect his property and wants to be mayor. So again, it always gets worse and we are going to see that come Monday how all of this is going to get worse.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And just to add one more thing there on just how absurd this entire situation is and how villainous it is, and then I want us to kind of pivot and talk about Gaza here in the next half hour. But my colleague Dave Zin was talking to us about this earlier this week. It’s like the Monday night football game that the Rams were playing was supposed to take place in Los Angeles. It got moved to Arizona. Everyone on the media, in the sports media was talking about, oh, what a great effort it was to move this game to the State Farm Stadium in Arizona when State Farm are the pieces of shit who just revoked a bunch of people’s home insurance a month ago before these fires. It is absolute madness. And one more point I wanted to make because me, you mentioned the need for expertise and verifiable information and authoritative information.
I want to also compliment that with information and firsthand accounts and stories and human faces of the working people who are being affected by this. And that is what we do here at The Real News. I remember when the Baltimore Bridge collapsed last year and all these same pieces of shit were on right wing media saying, oh, it was DEI that caused the mismanagement here. That collapsed the bridge. I was there talking to the immigrant workers who were coworkers of the men who died on that bridge. I was talking to longshore workers about how the shipping industry has made these container ships bigger, filled with more dangerous materials. Two to 3% of them are only abiding by US port regulations. The others are flags of convenience ships. Like we’re not talking about that. Instead, people are running around talking about bullshit like DEI. The same way that I was talking to folks in Asheville who were dealing with the effects of that hurricane the same way I talked to folks who were living near Eagle Pass in Texas who had a bunch of right wing idiots show up in their town and cause more disruption than the undocumented immigrants who were supposedly crossing the border.
But then all these right-wing nut jobs got there and there was no one there. I mean, I want folks East Palestinian, Ohio where the train derailed. I’ve been there multiple times. I’ve interviewed countless people from that community Immediately once that train derailed and those people’s lives were turned upside down and they are still sick, they are still suffering. I talk to them every week. It was a media circus over who’s more to blame for this Trump or Biden, who’s going to get there first? Trump or Biden. Everyone just cares about that. And then they stopped caring about the people who were right at the center of it. And that includes you and me and any one of us who are in line to suffer this kind of catastrophe in the future. And sadly, there are going to be more of them whether they’re caused by industrial accidents, climate change, what have you.
Mehdi Hasan:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, please.
Mehdi Hasan:
What you’re saying is we didn’t do enough coverage of James Woods’s house. Almost burning down what you’re saying, the real
Maximillian Alvarez:
Story. Yes. I’m saying my heart bleeds certainly for James Woods, but I will say on that note that I am deeply disappointed in so many people on the so-called progressive left who were talking about my home southern California as if these fires only burned James Woods’s house and that they were something to be celebrated when I’m seeing people who are being displaced who live in homes that they couldn’t afford to buy now, but maybe they’ve been there for a generation and the property values have gone up. So they’re not all these rich people that you’re pretending like are sympathetic characters
Mehdi Hasan:
Conversation perhaps for another day. But having worked at M-S-N-B-C and seen CNN how it goes, I say this as someone who moved to the US from another country, there’s also an east coast bias with our media, right? The West Coast is another country for people in New York and DC LA is not the same value, important status. I think I saw something a week ago in the midst of all the LA Fires houses destroyed 27,000 acres. I think apartment block was on fire in New York and it was live footage suddenly from this one building in New York on fire. And that’s always going to be the case. One building in New York will always get more coverage in the entire city outside of the east coast. And there is that longstanding problem, bipartisan problem. Forget right or left, there is east coast bias amongst our media. That’s the
Francesca Fiorentini:
Fact. Yeah, for sure. And also just really quickly, I mean, I was tuning into local news for the first time in a real ever because you’re watching local news and you’re like, oh, okay, obviously I’m using my husband’s family’s login to get to the log. That’s
Mehdi Hasan:
What good news was made for fire trucks, things on fire,
Francesca Fiorentini:
But right, but exactly. But again, a lot of people have, don’t have cable or don’t just don’t have their TV set up or whatever, only doing streaming. And so then for breaking news, and this is why the ownership of Twitter is incredibly important. They are going to Twitter. And if you’re not doing any fact checking on social media, then we are so
Mehdi Hasan:
Far, Twitter used to be a great place in a crisis. Now it’s the worst place in a
Francesca Fiorentini:
Crisis. Yes.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Speaking of terrible places, I want to turn our eyes to the other side of the world where we have been watching one of the greatest crimes of humanity unfold over the past year and a half on platforms like Twitter. I want to turn to Gaza and Israel, where as of right now, there is both hope and trepidation about whether or not this truce deal reached this week will actually be accepted and implemented by Israel. The Associated Press reported just this morning, a last minute crisis with Hamas holding up Israeli approval of a long awaited agreement to pause the fighting in the Gaza strip and release dozens of hostages. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday. Meanwhile, Israeli airstrikes killed dozens of people across the war ravage territory. The Israeli cabinet was expected to vote on the deal Thursday, but Netanyahu’s office said they won’t meet until Hamas backs down accusing it of reneging on parts of the agreement in an attempt to gain further concessions.
Without elaborating on that, a senior Hamas official said, the group is committed to the agreement announced by the mediators medi. I want to come back to you here and then Francesca, please hop in after we still don’t know if this ceasefire deal will take effect as planned this Sunday. The next 72 hours are going to be very critical and very intense. But if the deal does take effect, what will this mean and what will it not mean for Gaza, for Palestinians and for Israel and Israeli society? And that is the single most important question right now. So only once we’ve all addressed that, then let’s talk about what these developments tell us about the legacy of Biden’s administration and what the hell we can expect in geopolitics and the Trump 2.0 era.
Mehdi Hasan:
I mean, they’re interlinked in the sense that I’m thoroughly cynical about everything that happens in the Middle East, and I’m very cynical about the Israeli government because they’re a group of very cynical people and all American negotiators, whether the Democrats or Republicans don’t have the best interests of the people at Gaza at hand. Let’s be honest about that. Look, if this is real in any shape or form, even in a temporary form, that’s a good thing. Because even if you get an hour where a bomb stop falling, that is some kind of relief for one of the most depressed peoples on earth. The Palestinians of Gaza who spent the last 16th months being Genocided, right? Having their capacity to continue living existing, destroyed in front of our eyes, live streamed to us as the Irish lawyer for the South African government said exactly a year ago at the ICJ, this is the first genocide where people are live streaming their own genocide, begging for help from the rest of the world.
And a year later, here we are with no change. So if we’ve even got an hour of a pause, I’ll take it and Palestinian and Gaza will take it. Now, that doesn’t mean though we have to start celebrating and cheering and suggesting that there’s peace in the Middle East, peace in our time. That’s bullshit. And I’m very skeptical about this deal, not just because Netanyahu today said they’re not going to vote on it, not just because Ben Vere his far right terrorist, convicted terrorist. National Security Minister has threatened to resign if the deal goes through, and that means the Netanyahu government would fall and Netanyahu is all about self-preservation. But separate to that, just look at the deal itself. A, it’s the exact same deal that was on the table in May of last year that the Israelis rejected, but the Americans lied and said, Hamas rejected be.
It involves three phases, right? 42 days for the first phase, 42 days for the second phase. It’s really the second and third phases where the actual long-term impact of this kicks in, in terms of withdrawal of Israeli forces, in terms of any kind of humanitarian reconstruction. Those two phases, a lot of people are saying, we will never get to, right? Netanya is only interested in phase one if we even get to phase one where you do a limited release of prisoners and then he goes back to bombing net. Neil has made it very clear that he’s not going to stop the war. He doesn’t want to stop the war, and that’s why he’s never been interested in a ceasefire. He’s only interested in pauses. So some people spent the last 24 hours attacking me on social media because I was one of the people who said, Trump will be worse on Gaza than Biden.
So there’s a lot of gotcha moments going on right now said, well, look, Trump was better. He did it in 24 hours. What Biden couldn’t do in a year, I would say, let’s wait and see. Right? I’m old enough to know that Donald Trump is not what you think is not what you see. And people who have celebrated Donald Trump early tend to find egg on their faces. So I hope I’m wrong. I hope that in a year’s time or six months time, people will say, Mary, you were wrong. Donald Trump was much better for the people of Gaza than Joe Biden, but the man is not even president yet. Please stop the premature celebrations. Let’s see if this ceasefire happens on the Sunday. Let’s see if it holds. Let’s see if it actually delivers peace. Let’s see if we get any kind of reconstruction, because stopping the bombs is only one part of it.
Garzas cannot continue to exist in a place that is uninhabitable, which groups experts say will take, what, 80 years to rebuild 42 million tons of rubble. So I want to see what happens first. Already today, we’ve seen Donald Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor, waltz, Michael Waltz, I think his name is saying that we support Israel’s right to go back into Gaza whenever they like. We’ve seen Marco Rubio, who’s going to be the Secretary of State saying he’s going to lift all sanctions on the settlers that Joe Biden brought in the limited sanctions on the limited far right settlers. So this is far from done, the people who think it’s all done now of being very naive and have learned nothing from the first four years of Trump. But look, having said all that, I know you want to get into it a bit. Clearly Trump’s done more than Biden in the last week in terms of applying pressure. That’s undeniable. And it’s embarrassing for Joe Biden and the Democrats that that’s the case.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, I mean, think, oh, Francesca, please hop in.
Francesca Fiorentini:
No, no, no, go ahead.
Maximillian Alvarez:
No, I was just going to say, I think everyone is rushing to do the thing we were just talking about in la, right? It is like rushing to have a take on what’s happening while it’s still unfolding, and we don’t know what’s going to happen. And so I think everyone, especially on the MAGA Trump side, is trying to kind of sell this as a Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan hostage kind of moment before we even know if the deal’s going to be accepted.
Mehdi Hasan:
Well, it simply, you mentioned the hostage Treasury because of course in 1968 you had Nixon, Vietnam, and Kissinger. We discover later that Kissinger was treacherous and was passing messages to the Vietnamese saying, we’ll do a better deal. Don’t stop the war now. And many more Americans and Vietnamese, of course, and Cambodians and lotions died because of that. We know that in 1980 now, and there’s a great new book from Craig Unger on this that Jimmy Carter was very close to getting the hostages out of Iran, but Ronald Reagan said to Iranians, don’t do it. I’ll give you a better deal and I’ll get you weapons. And this may be the third time that happened. We know that Netanyahu and Trump met at Mar-a-Lago last year. We don’t know what was discussed, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump said, make sure you hold off till I’m office.
So I get the credit. We know Trump doesn’t give a shit about Palestinian life. It’s all about his ego and showing that he is a deal maker. He’s a successful president. He wanted this done by January the 20th. By the way, it’s not going to be done by January the 20th. Can I just point that out? Everyone? I love the way we grade Donald Trump on a curve, even the left grades Donald Trump on a curve. He literally said he wanted all the hostages released by January. There won’t be hostages won’t be released by January the 20th. The deal only begins on the 19th. So this is the man who also said he would end the Ukraine War in 24 hours. Right? Good luck with that. Apparently it’s going to be over on Monday night. So this is the kind of bullshit that unfortunately left us to have allowed Trump to be graded on a curve about. And like I said, I hope to be proved wrong, but to say that I’m wrong right now, or that those of us who warned against Trump on the issue of Gaza are wrong because there’s this ceasefire deal that hasn’t been even implemented or voted on by the Israelis yet. Calm the F down.
Francesca Fiorentini:
Yeah, no, I 100% agree, but I will say I was surprised when I heard it came through. I was like, oh, completely shocked. And it’s amazing that Netanyahu hasn’t even agreed to it, that it hasn’t even gone forward. But the narrative of Trump got a ceasefire is already out there. Right. And again, messaging, right, what we talked about earlier, they masters. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, it’s the kind of the Bill bar. There was no collusion headline. Everyone was like, oh, okay. There was no collusion and that made it. That’s the headline. And so Trump got this, but again, I was reacting to it sort of in real time on my show, and I was like, damn, it really does. And here’s the thing we need to be very careful about, not as Nora Kott lawyer, a Palestinian lawyer, awesome academic said, don’t give Trump any flowers on this. It is really a revelation of Joe Biden and the inability to actually get a ceasefire after the professing of working round the clock. I mean, I think maybe the differences between the Nixon and the Carter examples medi is that I don’t know if Joe Biden really was working on a ceasefire around the clock. I mean, I don’t think he was actually invested.
Mehdi Hasan:
He certainly didn’t apply pressure. I mean, this is the deal, to be fair to Biden, this is the deal that they put on the table that the American,
Francesca Fiorentini:
Yes,
Mehdi Hasan:
He never applied the pressure. I wrote my first column for The Guardian last February, and it was a column about how Ronald Reagan called man be in 1982 when the Israelis were Besieging Beirut. He saw a child on TV with no arms. He rang be and said, this is a Holocaust. And be said, how dare you use the word Holocaust, but no one called Reagan and Antisi in those days. You could say that. He said, this is a Holocaust. You need to stop this now in 20 minutes. The Israelis stopped bombing Beirut. I said, at the time, in February of 2024, Biden can make a phone call and end this genocide. The very serious people, the very savvy, smart people. Oh, no, it’s not that simple. You can’t do that. Actually, you can, right? Steve Witkoff went to Israel and said to Netanyahu, it’s got to be done in time.
I don’t care if you’re on a holiday, but look, how much of it was pressure, how much of it was mutually beneficial behavior by Netanya and Trump? We don’t know yet. The thing about Trump is half the things come out in memoirs and books. We have reporters sitting on stories that they write about in bestselling books like a year later. You’re like, why didn’t you tell us that at the time? How many New York Times and Washington Boast and Politico reporters have done that? So I would like to hear what happened at Mar-a-Lago last year. I would like to hear what was actually said between Witkoff and Netanya. How much of it was pressure and Netanyahu’s arm being twisted? How much of it was Netanyahu and Woff and Trump saying, this is good. We’ll make it look like you pressured me into this because it’s mutually beneficial for it to happen this way.
Francesca Fiorentini:
Sure. And obviously, who knows the back deals that were promised around the West Bank and annexation and the Miria Adelson money and all that,
Mehdi Hasan:
The Israeli press called a gift bank. Francesca, they’ve said that Trump gave
Maximillian Alvarez:
Lifting sanctions on Pegasus, which could come in very handy for an authoritarian regime. Yeah, I mean, I think, again, a lot of these details are going to come out in the wash, but I think one distinction that came up in the great interview that Jeremy Scahill did on Drop Site news yesterday with Palestinians reacting to the news was a sort of distinction that when it comes to Biden, he’s very merits ideological in this regard. Like he’s expressed himself as a full fledged Zionist who wants his legacy or wanted his legacy to kind of be pegged to standing with Israel. Whereas Trump’s is more transactional, and this guy’s got a whole lot of things he wants to do right here. He’s seen how much Gaza has tanked. Biden’s administration hampered that administration. He doesn’t want have to deal with that. I do think that’s a useful distinction while, but I wanted to ask what you guys said.
Mehdi Hasan:
Can I just jump in very briefly, just push back a little bit. I hear that that Trump is transactional. The implication of that is that there is some consistent strategy to what Trump says or does. I refuse to accept that Trump is only consistently inconsistent. So okay, he’s transactional in the sense that he’s a businessman. He likes to make money for him and his kids. He likes to do deals and wrote books about it and sees himself as a dealmaker. I get that. But in actual reality, the man is a narcissist. He’s a dumbass, he’s an ignoramus. He’s a vain, thin-skinned little man. And the idea that people can’t manipulate him, he is absurd. He’s the most easily manipulated politician of our lifetime. So when people say, oh, well, he’s transactional, he’s not an ideological Zion. Even if I accept all that, which I’m not sure I do, he’s surrounded by people who are, you’re telling me that Marco Rubio, and as I say, Michael Waltz, and what about Mike, Mike Huckabee Huckabee now who says there’s no such thing as Palestinians.
There’s no such thing as a West Bank. I just want to know what’s Mike Huckabee thinking for the last 48 hours? He’s okay with this. Clearly stuff has been going on behind the scenes that we don’t know about. There is long-term ramifications that we don’t know about, and I think we have to really be skeptical of this idea that somehow Donald Trump’s going to just do deals with the Saudis and the Turks and the Qataris, and that’s why he’s different to Biden. Who’s this lifelong Zionist? No, I mean, first of all, he’s not even fricking president yet. We’ve got four years of shit coming down the line. Talk to me at the end of four years, if at the end of four years, Palestinians are free, if at the end of four years Iran hasn’t been bombed, if at the end of four years there isn’t another genocide in Yemen, then fine. I’ll be the first to come on here and say, I was a hundred percent wrong about Trump. But come on, if we learn nothing from the first Trump term,
Francesca Fiorentini:
I mean, I think transactional can be taken in two different ways. Transactional, it sounds like diplomacy, but I think when people say it right, when people say it, it’s more like anything for flattery. And to me, I think he is able to read the room, I think, and there’s a line from one of his rallies over the last year that really stuck with me where he said, he goes, well, and Biden, he’s terrible on Israel. He hates Israel, hates the Jews. He was basically trying to, he does the brow beating of Jewish voters. So he was saying he hates Jews, but I guess he hates Palestinians a little bit more. And there was a smile, and I was like that because even he knew what he was saying was bullshit, and that actually Biden is helping genocide the Palestinian people. And there was that smirk as he understood that all of the Democratic voters that now you got Paul proves that so many people voted on Gaza.
Mehdi Hasan:
I mean, in that sense, he’s an evil genius. The man is both an Ior Aus and an evil genius. I mean, he went to Dearborn, Michigan, which Biden didn’t dare to go to Kamala Harris didn’t dare to go to, he went to Dearborn, Michigan and said, I am a peacemaker. I will bring peace to the Middle East. Liz Cheney will get Muslims killed. Don’t listen to Liz and Kamala. I’m the peacemaker, right? And people lapped it up, which is nonsense. Go back and look at Trump’s first term again. I know Americans have the memory of a goldfish. The guy increased bombing in Iraq, bombed Syria, increased drone strikes in Pakistan, and Somalia helped MBS genocide. Yemen, except I can go through the whole record. The idea that Donald Trump was some kind of anti-war anti interventionist candidate is a complete myth. But again, as you pointed out with the Bill Barr report, he’s transactional. He didn’t collude with Russia. He’s a master of getting these one line narratives about himself out there, which somehow people stick to. He’s Teflon Don,
Francesca Fiorentini:
And it’s more than him. I mean, I think medi that it is this desire for a demagogue to just take the reins. And I think everyone has that. I mean, I’d load to think that I would have that in, but there is even liberals or liberal media, there’s like, Hey, maybe he’s such an idiot. He’s smart there,
Mehdi Hasan:
Strong man. I mean, I spoke to No Gaana Paul yesterday in our live town hall as aeo, the Israeli journalists, and she said, look, even Israeli leftist politicians are buying into this idea that he was a strong man who came in and just beat up Netanyahu and made him do it. And she didn’t buy that narrative either. But even leftists, see that. And by the way, one thing I would say about the American left is what I’ve seen over the last few days and during the election campaign, is in the desperate desire to kick Joe Biden, which I totally get and understand, I’ve got a piece coming out in about 10 minutes on Joe Biden’s awful legacy on Gaza. The problem is where I split with some of my fellow leftists in America is this idea that in order to do Biden down, you have to promote Trump.
This idea that Trump is, I can be very critical of everything Biden did without drinking Kool-Aid about Donald Trump. And that is what Im seeing now in the last few days. The reason why we’re seeing the narrative of Trump, the peacemaker, Trump did this cease. It’s not just the right pushing. There’s a lot of people on the left trying to attack Biden by saying, look, Trump did what you couldn’t do. And I get all that, but that only helps the Trump narrative. Like I said, we don’t know the backstory to the ceasefire deal yet. I don’t know if it’s real. I don’t know if Trump went and twisted Benjamin net Neo’s arm and made him do something he didn’t want to do. We don’t know what was offered in return. We don’t know what the long-term consequences are for Gaza and the West Bank, but they’re again, graded on a curve. It’s not just the right and liberal media that grade Trump on a curve. I think progressives do it too, because we are understandably so frustrated with the Democrats
Francesca Fiorentini:
That
Mehdi Hasan:
We give Republicans a pass on things we wouldn’t give Democrats a pass on.
Francesca Fiorentini:
Yeah, I agree with that. I think we’re trying
Mehdi Hasan:
To cajole anti the entire establishment.
Francesca Fiorentini:
I think there’s a desperation to cajole the liberal, whatever the Democratic leadership to be like, see what a little bit of backbone
Speaker 4:
Might
Francesca Fiorentini:
Get, which is fair that I think. But you’re right. There’s a slippery slope there, and absolutely it can play into the same. Trump did a thing narrative that we know is bullshit.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Right? And I want to make one point and then throw one more question before we got to let Medi go. I know you only got a couple more minutes, man, but I would point people to a very instructive interview that I did with Sarah Nelson, the president of the Flight Attendants Union, who famously became a household named six years ago in the midst of the longest government shutdown, led by Trump in the GOP ostensibly to secure billions of dollars for his stupid southern border wall. And the government was shut down for 35 days, 400,000 federal workers went to work during that entire time without pay. And it was this high stakes game of political brinkmanship as every government shut down inevitably is. But Sarah, I had Sarah on and asked her what we could learn from that moment, from that struggle going into the next four years.
And I think she really rightly pointed out something that I want to introduce to the conversation that we’re having right now, which is we are going to get trapped in this kind of same bipartisan bullshit cycle if those are the only two terms that we have to define our political values, our struggle are the things that we’re actually fighting for. Whereas Sarah rightly pointed out that even though Trump is coming and we are going to have to be on the defensive, we’re going to have to come to the aid of our immigrant neighbors, our trans and GBTQ folks, neighbors. Everybody who is under attack needs to be protected. But if we are just responding to the Trumpian news cycle, we are not fighting for the working class with principal consistency and with strategy. And Sarah, I would again point people to that interview. I’m not going to go into it all now, but really listen to what she’s saying and take to heart what that’s going to mean going into these next four years, and how we have to define our terms as a class, a global working class, and what we need and who’s getting in the way of it, Democrat, republican, whatever, and keep fighting consistently for what we need.
And in that vein, looking ahead at the next four years, with the last few minutes we’ve got Medi, I wanted to ask you both if we could look ahead to next week’s inauguration, sticking with this theme of geopolitics and international relations in the Trump 2.0 era. And as I said before, friend, you’ve been talking about this quite a lot, and I really appreciate it and medi you as well. So let’s talk about first the Trump effect has impacted countries around the world from Argentina to El Salvador, Italy, India, Brazil, over the past eight years since Trump was first elected. And let’s help our viewers understand this global right word shift that is really happening here. What does it mean for instance, that Trump has invited far right leaders to attend his inauguration, like President Na Bke from El Salvador,
Speaker 4:
Argentinian,
Maximillian Alvarez:
President Javier Malay, Victor Orban, prime Minister of Hungary and Italian Prime Minister Georgia Maloney, and that some like Malay are actually going to be there on Monday. Medi, please hop in.
Mehdi Hasan:
So I’m glad you mentioned this. I mean, I’ve been tearing my hair out for almost a decade now, trying to point out that this isn’t just about Donald Trump in the United States. This is a global phenomenon. You can’t understand it in isolation, but you do need to understand that Donald Trump, because by virtue of the US being the US, is the symbol of it, is the leader of it, is the inspiration for it is the guiding star for it sets the benchmark for it. So whether you’re Narendra Modi in India, or Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, or Erdogan in Turkey, or Orban in Hungary, or Putin in Russia, or Lapan in France, or Farage in the uk, go down the list, Malay in Argentina, Bolsonaro in Brazil, they look to the United States for inspiration. They see what Trump gets away with. They try and do the same, and it’s remarkable. I used to do a show for Al Jazeera English called Upfront, a weekly show where I interviewed politicians around the world. One thing I noticed in 20 17, 20 18 20 19 was the politicians I was interviewing from Africa and Asia all started sounding like Trump. They were all saying the same. They were literally echoing. Why not? Why wouldn’t they look at America? They go worked in the us, why can’t we do here?
Francesca Fiorentini:
Didn’t do Ter say fake news. Wasn’t that his,
Mehdi Hasan:
All of those lines, fake news and all of that stuff about enemy of the people and all just downright lying about what’s in front of your eyes. All of that. I started noticing in interviews I was doing with politicians around the world. That is the Trump effect globally. And that’s why it was so important to try and stop Trump from coming back to office, not just for the United States, but because of the symbol and the message it sends around the world because of the power of this networking. When people talk about domestic extremism, it’s not domestic, it’s transnational, right? White supremacy, supremacy of all forms, racism, fascism is transnational. It is very global. We are seeing liberal democracy on the decline in the retreat and migrants and Muslims especially demonized across the Western world. So it is really important to pay attention to all these connections and see who Donald Trump is sponsoring and propping up and understanding that this is a common struggle wherever you are in the world.
And to go back to your point about Sarah Nelson, I would tie that into here to make a final point, which is we have to stick with our principles, right? That is what’s key. What worries me now is in an age of social media, we’re very cultish. We are very partisan. And that’s not just the right, the right, they’re way out there, but the left liberals, progressive centris, are not immune to the online disease of cultism and partisanship, right? This idea of politics as a football game, I support my team, not your team, and I’ll turn a blind eye to my team’s successes as long as I’m attacking your team. That’s a problem, right? Politics is not about personalities, it’s about issues, it’s about principles. I think that is the only way we get through this era. I went on Blue sky yesterday and I saw a long list of prominent liberals saying, thank you, Mr.
President, for getting this ceasefire deal. What? That’s as bad as the MAGA people saying, Donald Trump is peace of our times, right? We got to get away from this idea of holding up politicians or political parties and saying, I support them. No, no, no, no. You support principles and if they’re in line with your principles than you get behind them. And I think that is what we’ve forgotten. And social media is making much, much worse by kind of treating everything as a kind of putting you in your echo chamber, putting you in your tribal bubble. And if we’re going to survive the Trump era, if we’re going to survive fascism, we have to stick to principles, not people and politicians.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And Fran, real
Francesca Fiorentini:
Quick, before you hop in
Maximillian Alvarez:
Credit for wanted,
Francesca Fiorentini:
Is that what I’m hearing? I think that’s what I’m hearing. Many.
Mehdi Hasan:
Exactly. He is the Mandela of our,
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I just wanted to hop in because Medi, I know you’ve got to go, but I wanted to really, really encourage everyone watching. If you are not already, please go support eo. Thank you Medi. Can you please let folks know what you guys are doing, what you got coming up, and where folks can find you.
Mehdi Hasan:
So we have got a lot going on right now. xeo.com, ZETE o.com is our place come do support or subscribers. We’ve got some amazing documentaries coming out on Gaza and Palestine very soon. We’re rolling out some amazing new contributors next week, many of whom viewers of your shows will know. We’ve already got some great contributors like Naomi Klein and Baam EF and Owen Jones already in our stable, but we’re adding to that for the Trump era. And we have a wonderful podcast that just won an award. We are not kidding. So we are doing a lot. We appreciate your support and we appreciate the plug.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Appreciate the work that you do, brother. It’s an honor to be in the struggle with you and I’ll see you on the other side, man. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me on.
Francesca Fiorentini:
Bye man. Bye-bye.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright, Francesca Fiorentini, I’m dying to hear your thoughts on the Trump effect over the last eight years and how this is all coming to a head in his inauguration next week with potentially a lot of foreign diplomats and even heads of state showing up from the global populist, right?
Francesca Fiorentini:
Yeah, I mean it’s chilling and it also, I think to Sarah Nelson’s point, and I’m really glad you brought that up. I think we need to have fighters on every single flank, I don’t know, war terminology, but on every single battlefield. So there have to be people who are pushing against the barrage of misinformation that’s going to be coming from Donald Trump. There have to be people fact checking. There have to be people pushing back on these narratives. There have to be people who are watching what he does and what his administration is doing. That’s going to be critical. But for so much of our sanity, we need to be building. We have got to build. And that can even be with your neighbors. It can be with your community members and your schools and your churches and your synagogues and whatever it is. We have to create spaces of real, again, mutual aid and solidarity.
It’s the only way we are going to sort of mentally survive, but also physically, quite literally as we’re talking about LA fires and people surviving thanks to the goodwill of their neighbors and their communities, we need to make sure that locally, that locally we’re electing the right kinds of folks, that we are holding people to account that we’re pressuring Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom, but from the left that we have again, these amazing new progressive leftist city council members that can be the next generation that so many Democrats have fought so hard, whether it’s the squad nationally or on a local level to make sure that progressive stay out of politics. So I super agree with Sarah that I hate the reactive doom loop that we can get into. One thing, and I don’t want to knock it, but one thing that people on the left do often is look at right wing news outlets and right wing influencers and sort of make fun of them.
And I do think it’s important, but sometimes I think about the world upside down. Imagine if right now there were right wingers who watched everything we said, and then they made clips and videos based on the outlandish things. We said, we need a green new deal. And I’m like, that’s power. I’m tired of giving right wing mouthpieces more power by highlighting their bullshit. I’m like, what are we building? What are the scary things we’re singing? What are the real socialist plans that we are creating and enacting? You know what I’m absolutely for defund the police. Fuck yeah, let’s talk about it. Let’s enact it. The right says we did. No, we didn’t. So these are the kinds of things that I’m interested in building and on my show habitation room, having activist organizers, thinkers who can build that now to Trump’s global fascism. I got to say it’s not just, I don’t want to give Trump too much credit because you look at someone like naive B and you’re like, this dude is his own little creation like El Salvador who has basically consolidated power, political power in his country.
He was able to break through the two party system of, I mean it was mostly a two party system by just demagoguing them, saying, turning on them and using his own independence. I think as a weapon and as sort of a badge of honor, which a lot of people are responding to and has now enacted sort of this scorched earth incarcerate first policy on the communities of El Salvador. And depending on who you ask, many El Salvador are very on board for it and very okay with it because they think it’s cleaned up the streets. Nevermind what happens 10 years later, nevermind when people have been incarcerated for decades. There’s no job opportunities when they come back. Nothing’s improved in the economy in El Salvador, right? But it is fascinating because this little crypto king demagogue is, I mean the Trump Jr came to his inauguration. So did Matt Gaetz came to the naive inauguration. What the hell? So the US is actually looking at countries like El Salvador, like Israel, the countries where we’ve propped up their militaries, we’ve assisted with their genocides and saying, what can we learn? We want to build walls here. We want to lock people up indiscriminately here in the us. I think there is a scary authoritarian symbiosis happening between these figures.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I want to talk about this a little bit more in the last half hour that we’ve got, and I’m going to circle back to it in a sec. But I wanted to let you all know watching live that we’ve got Francesca sister Fran on for the next half hour. Brother Meti had to hop off, but we are here to answer your questions or respond to your comments. So I’m going to be throwing some of those up on the screen in a second. So please, if you’ve got questions for Fran or for me, please throw them up there and we’ll tackle them as many of them as we can get to in the next half hour. But a note on the naive B thing, Francesca, because we’ve got a real problem on our hands here. And again, I appreciate the hell out of you for actually being like one of those prominent voices who is talking about this regularly and getting people, your audience to think about the world beyond our own individual scope. Think about the world outside of the US borders, and in fact, it would tell you a lot about what’s happening here as well.
But we’ve also reported on what’s happening in El Salvador. We had a really powerful video report published by the great Latin American based journalist, Mike Fox from El Salvador s
Francesca Fiorentini:
Such a good podcast. Everyone should listen to it. Tell me the name of it again, remind people.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So the one that we put out last year was called Under the Shadow, which was an incredible podcast series that I would highly encourage everyone who’s listening or watching this go binge that whole series. And also listen to Mike’s previous series, which we produced with him in partnership with Nala, the North American Congress on Latin America called Brazil on fire, specifically go find the episode near the end of Brazil on fire where Mike investigates the rise of the evangelical right in Brazil and talks about how this right wing evangelical pro Bolsonaro group is pretty much saying what the evangelical nut jobs here are saying about Trump. So if you want to look at that Trump effect, if you want to hear it in audio form, it’s there in Mike’s podcast, Brazil on fire and a lot more is there in his podcast that we ran last year under the shadow.
But also to circle back to naive Bke and El Salvador, we published a standalone documentary report that Mike did there about b’s dragnet arrest, first sweeps. We talked to family members of those who have been disappeared in these sweeps who are completely innocent, but maybe they got tattoos, maybe they’ve been accused of being affiliated by a gang or maybe they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But this is the real problem that I wanted to get your thoughts on. Fran, and you already touched on this, right? There is a parallel here to Trump and the US that we can learn from because Trump, as we know, didn’t come from nowhere. I mean, you have to have a long brewing crisis of legitimacy in the existing system, economy culture to create enough of a desire in people for something as extreme as Trump or bouquet or what have you. And in El Salvador, we can’t pretend that that wasn’t the case. We can’t pretend that working people, poor people were not just devastated for years by drug cartels, by gang violence. This impacted them every single day. And now the functional difference for your average working person in El Salvador, as we’ve heard from them, is I can walk on the streets. My kids can go to school. I don’t feel as afraid anymore. And naive, B, the proto fascist neofascist guy who has accomplished this is the most popular politician in the world right now, but like you said, he’s still serving the needs of capital while addressing some of the needs of the people through draconian measures. And then people, he’s incredibly popular because of that.
What do we do with that? I guess another way of asking that question is what do we do if someone like Trump remains incredibly popular over the next four years? How do we intervene in that? What is the left’s place here?
Francesca Fiorentini:
I mean, I obviously am no expert on El Salvador, but I do just mean to what I hinted at before, there’s only so long you can lock people up and we all know what happens. And it has happened in the United States, that is where gangs are formed. So the odious MS 13 formed, wasn’t it in Los Angeles formed in a prison. So when you lock people up, you are contributing and you treat them like criminals even if they are not criminals to say nothing of how we should be treating criminals. Let’s put that aside. You will create people who are violent, who are gang members who don’t when they come out of prison and you have not helped them reintegrate into society or have offered any kind of job opportunities to say nothing of prohibited them from being employed simply by the fact that they were incarcerated.
What do you think is going to happen? So for me, the bhel model’s really interesting because the US is not El Salvador. Okay? We are not being terrorized by cartels no matter what your Facebook aunt says that is not happening. But what’s interesting about the right in the US is that they’re able to convince us that yes, we are being terrorized by migrants and cartels and it’s happening in Springfield where they’re eating cats and dogs and they’re killing innocent young white victims. And we’re going to pass the Lake and Riley act. And we are convinced that somehow we are El Salvador. And I think any Salvadorian would come here. In fact, they do want to come here precisely because it is safe. So what are you talking about? It is just very funny that the US suffers from this imagined doom and this imagined crime when crime is down.
And so again, back to la, these moments when you’re like, oh, all I got to do is go out, talk to my neighbors, meet people, see the solidarity, see the comradery, and I am suddenly not afraid anymore. I’m not sitting at home just watching local news and getting freaked out. So I think it is our job, while the US is still a relatively safe place because we could get to the levels of El Salvador. That’s what happens when your elites do not invest in their people for decades and decades and decades. But our job is to break through, to humanize specifically, I think the people who’ve been left out of the system, which are unhoused people, the people who are victims of late stage capitalists, greed, and systems not working for them. It’s to hold accountable. Our democratic officials specifically who are still neoliberal actors and who still take corporate donations, it’s to primary them.
It’s to unseat them. It’s to say their way is leading us down the primrose path. Back to fascism. Don’t pull a Biden Newsom, don’t pull a fucking Biden bass. Don’t pull a Biden, don’t deliver us into the hands of Rick Caruso. Don’t deliver us in the hands of a Republican governor so you can seek higher office. So these are all the sites that we need to fight on because it’s not just the global demagoguery. It’s happening in every single place where you have very feckless politicians who might be smart. Newsom’s a smart guy, he knows what he’s talking about, but he also knows that he’s never going to pass Medicare for all for California, that he’s going to skirt environmental regulations so that rich people can rebuild their homes in places they probably shouldn’t build. So we’ve got time on some of these areas.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and the crazy thing that we’ve got here to make your point that yes, the United States is not El Salvador working, people are not being terrorized by drug cartels ravaging the streets. But the thing is working, people are being killed and terrorized by cartels. They’re just the ones in boardrooms. They’re the ones in dc. They’re the ones who are stocking up the Trump administration right now. They’re the people that everyone was righteously pissed off at after the United Healthcare CEO was assassinated, right? I mean, the cartels are here, they’re running the show, and we are all feeling it in one way or another. They are poisoning our water and buying off politicians to do nothing about it. They are corporate capturing the regulatory agencies that are supposed to protect us, which is why we now all have PFAS and other forever chemicals like microplastics all in our bodies, which is, but to your point, at the same time, the right wing fear machine is constantly trying to convince working people that the dangers are here at eye level. The dangers are around the corner. They’re living in your neighborhood, they’re in your children’s schools, they are your fellow workers who are responsible for your misery, not the people. They’re DI.
They’re
Francesca Fiorentini:
DI. Yeah. And I think that is, and that is so, and this is what I, God, if there’s, you know how we each have the one thing we’ve said a million times over, if there’s one thing that I want people to know of, if my political pecking order, the first thing I want to say is that identity politics are radical. They were developed, identity politics was spearheaded by black feminists who wanted intersectionality, who said, we can tackle capitalism, we can tackle racism, and we can tackle sexism. We can do it all together. That’s identity politics. The problem is Democrats have used hollow empty identity politics only in the form of representation as a stand-in for the real radical identity politics of having not just again, the Cornell Westly black faces in high places, but actually passing legislation that positively affects black communities and poor communities and women.
I mean, the one place that we are like El Salvador in the United States in the year 2025, I visited there and I did a whole piece about how they’re locking women up for having miscarriages because abortion is criminalized because the rights of the fetus are enshrined in the constitution, max. I’m telling you, we are headed there in this country. They will enshrine the rights of the fetus, the rights of the unborn into the US Constitution. And guess what? Then all people with uterus become second class citizens, period. And it is fucking terrifying. And we could be sentenced to 30 years to life. I spoke to women who were in prison longer than their rapists who got them pregnant in the first place. That’s what they were accused of is miscarrying slash abortion. But all to say, I forgot where I was saying before that. You know what I mean?
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. You’re spiting fire. And I kind of wanted to build on the emotion here because I’m feeling what you’re feeling. I know our audience is feeling it, and we’re all feeling a lot of shit right now. And I kind of want to dig into that real quick. And again, I’m looking at questions in live chat and comments. We’re going to be throwing them up. But on that last point, I want to ask if we could maybe just break the fourth wall here. And I have a question for you, Fran, which is right now, what do you think your most unproductive fear is and what your most productive anger or where your most productive anger is coming from? I mean, I guess for us to be a little sort of internally mindful of where our emotions are coming from and where they’re driving us. I am not telling people out there don’t feel anything, but don’t be overwhelmed by those feelings, but also know how you can harness those feelings and when those feelings are harnessing you for other ends. So yeah, I guess just sort of an open question right now, what’s the most immobilizing, unproductive fear that you’re feeling now? And what’s something that’s galvanizing you?
Francesca Fiorentini:
Most unproductive fear is America’s cooked. We need to go by, how do I get out of here? How should I take my child and leave somewhere where the air is cleaner and there aren’t guns in people’s hands? And somewhere that respects her bodily autonomy and her rights. That’s where my maybe unproductive fear is at. And my productive fear is when I squarely plant myself in my place, and I say, you live in a neighborhood, a community, a city. You have an elected official. You can talk to them, you can go, you get involved. There are groups that have been working in the cities that we all live in and the towns we all live in for generations. Plant yourself in this moment in history and get to work.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I think that’s beautifully put. I don’t want to add anything onto that I think was amazing. Well, let’s bring in some comments here from the live chat. A lot of these aren’t even questions, just folks really expressing a lot of things in the live chat that I want to make sure we name here. But we’ve got one comment here from Kevin Tuey. I do know the severity. 8% of Americans, 78% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Again, if you need a bigger example of why the kind of red state, blue state MAGA Democrat thing is just horse shit, neither of them have a 78% hold on the population that’s working people, blue, red, independent, who are getting screwed over by this economic system. I think that’s very rightly pointed out. And let’s see,
Francesca Fiorentini:
We’ve got, and I think that’s the resurgence in labor organizing too, is like we have enemies. We’ve got a villains list. Your boss is part of it, your landlord is part of it. That is how you’ve got Elon Musk in your life. They are your boss, they are your landlord,
Maximillian Alvarez:
And they run things like bosses. In fact, if you want to learn about and you want a good sense of what we’re in store for in the next four years, and in fact what we’ve been moving towards over the last 40 years, like look at labor struggles, look at how bosses respond to workers when they get uppity and try to exercise their rights. Like they get squashed, they get fired, they have their rights violated, they get intimidated. They’re subjected to unsafe working conditions regularly, yada, yada yada. This is the kind of boss governance that Trump and his cabinet Musk. I mean, that is how they think. They don’t think about us as human beings. We are at best human shaped widgets that can do things for them, but our lives do not matter to them.
Francesca Fiorentini:
No.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And on that, let’s throw a few more comments here. So yeah, I mean I think this is timeless, but well put by Black Rain, you can tell the greatness of a nation by how they treat the less fortunate.
Speaker 4:
And
Maximillian Alvarez:
On that note, it’s important to underline as Fran and Medi and I have been in this live stream, that we need to not just think about the United States as the center of the universe here. And in fact, there’s going to be a real interesting dynamic going on between the NAFTA countries, Canada, the US and Mexico. And right now you’ve got Mexico’s new president, Gloria Scheinbaum saying explicitly on the so Klo in Mexico City that we have to prioritize the poor for the good of all. That’s kind of to the point of the comment that we just read. And Fran, I’m curious how you’re looking at the soul of that statement and also how Mexico and shine bomb’s government are going to be a player in the next four years. I
Francesca Fiorentini:
Mean, again, I wish I could only do Latin American politics. I like it way better than American politics. So I am no expert, but I have been really heartened by shine bounds rise to power her posturing, her being able to sort of stand up to Trump, but also say we’re willing to work with you. And then of course, in the LA fires, most recently sending 75 firefighters and other national forestry and disaster relief workers and officials to Los Angeles and saying, we believe in solidarity. We are a nation of generosity and solidarity. Max Trump, the Mexicans are rapists and criminals is about to assume office on Monday. And the president of Mexico wants to be in solidarity with us. I mean, it is crushingly.
I don’t even know. I don’t have words for that kind of treatment when we have treated them so opposite. And so I think that there’s a model there. I don’t think it’s an accident. She’s a woman. But again, hey, look at me playing the identity politics card. But I think it shows you that her administration and AMLO enjoyed a certain amount of support already from the people what they had done and delivered for the Mexican people clearly bore out. And so that she can get away with saying, when we help the poor, we help everyone imagine if what would happen in this country, all the Jesus lovers would be like, Ew, gross poor. I don’t believe in poverty. No, no, no, no, no. I’m in the prosperity gospel. God delivers to those who are rich more riches. And I think we had the beginnings and the fits and starts of that in Bernie Sanders. But I dunno about you Max, but I’m still in the post-election haze where I haven’t fully decided to support the Democratic party. I’m still like Uhuh. They have to do a lot to earn my vote and trust and we have to do a lot to change them. So if you don’t let us change you and transform you then and get out of the way, then we’re going to have a problem.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, I mean, I’ll be honest, that’s where I am. I mean you and so many others that we’ve spoken to on this channel. I mean, I think I’m not naive and I grew up a deep red Republican in Southern California in Orange County. I spent the first half of my life a Latino orange county, very outspoken Republican,
Speaker 4:
And
Maximillian Alvarez:
Now I’m a lefty socialist nut job years later. That was a long ideological journey that really began or really turned in the financial crash and great recession in the 2008, 9, 10, 11, that range. Those were the years that really changed my life, changed my family’s life. Those were the years where the system that I thought I could work hard in and be rewarded for showed how nakedly the deck was stacked in favor of the fuckers who got bailed out for causing a crisis that led to millions of families like mine losing everything, including the home that I grew up in.
Speaker 4:
I
Maximillian Alvarez:
Was working in warehouses in factories 12 years ago, not knowing what the hell I was going to be doing with my life. But that period I think was really important in sort of breaking a lot of that ideological crust that I had. Maybe it was the sort of optimism of youth. Maybe it was also still the last drags of the post Cold War era where it felt for many of us, the US was going to have a big enough pie for all of us to get a piece
Francesca Fiorentini:
And make a good life for us. Sure, you just work hard enough you can get that piece. And now, I mean it’s amazing people now I think there isn’t even that if you work hard, I think everyone left right? Doesn’t matter where you stand. You understand that working hard is not going to deliver. Now it’s about how do I get the cheat code for this life so I can at least not even be rich, but just be comfortable. You need a cheat code to even own a house, right? I need a cheat code. And often that cheat code is a shortcut by bashing minorities and immigrants and women and whomever else who I think has a little bit of something that I want. And so just when I really empathize with people who believe in crypto, and again, I’m not here to knock it. I know a lot of people have it, but it’s like I understand the impetus to like, well, look, if I just play this lottery a little bit, maybe I can get out of the dregs of where the majority of people in this country are at. And in that sense, the right wing narrative of you too can be a billionaire tomorrow. I mean, they’re really just pedaling one massive Ponzi scheme, except there are bodies that have to be, that are being claimed in the process
Maximillian Alvarez:
That hit like an ice pick to the chest. And I know we only have a couple more minutes
Here, but I want to circle back to something you said when we were talking about the productive and unproductive fears we’re dealing with now. And I think this also hooks into some of the comments and questions I’m seeing here in the live chat. So I want to put up two here in succession. One, I think a really pointed question from the brindle boxer, it’s beyond depressing. How do we get out of the doom loop considering what we’re facing in four days? And the brindle boxer just want to let you know we are with you. We’re all feeling that. And I want us to end on that question while also kind of highlighting this other comment from Black Reign, again about the need to intervene on the local level and do what we can to hold politicians accountable, not just react to Trump, but all those people throughout the political hierarchy with names and faces and positions and emails and phone numbers. There’s actually a lot that you can do when you see the spread of power instead of just believing that it all resides in one person over here in Washington dc.
Speaker 4:
And
Maximillian Alvarez:
So I kind of wanted to end on that note, Francesca, and give you the final word here. We don’t have to give everyone a playbook of everything they can do. As we say here at The Real News all the time, no one can do everything, but everyone can do something more often than not that something is going to be in your area in the circles, you have influence in your community, in your apartment building, in your workplace, in your district. So I wanted to just ask for your final thoughts on that, Fran. Not just how people can get more involved locally, but what doing something in your real physical world, offline, why that is so crucial to fighting the larger forces that we are going up against right now.
Francesca Fiorentini:
I mean, every time there’s a demonstration, every time there’s a protest, every time you go out and you make your sign and you listen to a speech and your legs are hurting and you can’t hear the speech and whatever, I really feel that every time I do that, every time I’m with community, I feel much better. I feel mentally prepared and physically and mentally not alone. So I do think protest has a place in the world. We know it has power. Concedes nothing without a demand, never has, never will. But it’s also for our own nourishment. I feel nourished when I am in community, whether it’s chanting, whatever, a slogan or a song, but I also feel nourished. I feel like I have a couple moments of maybe happiest moments in Francesca’s last 10 years and some of the other than my child being born, obviously two moments stick out.
One fundraiser for the I Napa 43 disappeared students, teacher students in Mexico who disappeared in 2015, I believe. And I was at a fundraiser back then in San Francisco, and it was obviously, this is a terrible thing that happened. It should be incredibly depressing. But there was the food, the music, the number of people that came out, the activists and organizers and community leaders that hadn’t seen each other in so long. But this awful event brought us together and we were dancing and we were raising money and we were just in it. And it was truly one of the nicest nights I’ve experienced. Another day in this last year comes to mind when a pro-Palestinian market took place, sprung up in la. I don’t know the organizer’s name and I apologize, but there was everyone selling kafis and pins and cute hats to doing henna tattoos to selling their delicious food from all over the world, amazing, affordable plates. And then you had the poetry and the music and you’re just like, this is it. I feel so fucking seen. I feel so fucking support. We’re not here all chanting, Rob, we’re not getting mad. We’re not having a meeting. We’re eating good food. We’re listening to beautiful music. We are making art. And I know this sounds corny, but I’m telling you, it was like it was intergenerational. I brought my daughter like, don’t, don’t. Don’t sleep on building community and having fun. Allow yourself to be joyous even as we resist.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I think it was beautiful, powerful words by the great Francesca Fiorentini. If y’all are watching and you are not subscribed to Francesca’s show the Situation room, you really need to go correct that asap.
Speaker 4:
Francesca,
Maximillian Alvarez:
I cannot thank you enough for the spending this hour and a half with us. I can’t thank the great Hassan enough for joining us for that first hour. Again, if you’re not subscribing to EO and following the great work Me’s doing and all the folks at eo, including now contributors like Francesca herself, who has a great piece out on the LA fires and the people helping in the midst of tragedy, go watch that video, subscribe to eo, follow Francesca Fran, what are you going to be up to? Where can folks find you? Just final plug here before we
Francesca Fiorentini:
Close out. Yeah, yeah. Look, Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays live, 1:00 PM Pacific, 4:00 PM Eastern youtube.com/franny. Theo fran, I fio o. My name is too long to write it all out. And you can listen as a podcast habitation room. We try to have comedians and then activists and experts and thinkers and all that, and we try to be fun and be a little reverent. Go see live comedy guys. I’ll be at the Ice House in Pasadena next Wednesday, 7:30 PM Tickets are still available. It’s going to be a great show. I’m calling it New World Disorder, a Night of political comedy. So come out to that if you’re in the Pasadena or LA area,
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. So everyone out back home, go check that out. Follow Francesca’s work. Fran, I can’t wait to have you back on the channel. Sis, really appreciate you taking the time now.
Francesca Fiorentini:
Thank you, max, as always, for the pointed questions and just your passion, we love it. We see it.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Thank you, sis right back at you means the world to me and to all of you watching, I don’t know what’s going to happen next week, next year, or in the next four to eight to 50 years. In fact, none of us do because that story has yet to be written. I want to kind of close on this thought here because we cannot give over the power of writing history before it’s even been written, right? You can’t ask what the next four years will bring with the assumption that we are just going to be waiting and responding to whatever is passed down from on. High. History is always written in that dialectical space between top and bottom, from the grassroots, from the upper echelons, the struggle over power. We are part of that struggle. What happens next depends on what we all do now, how we respond to it, the demands that we put on power, not just the ways that we respond to the whims of power, right?
I mean, so think about that. Think about the power that you have that your community has, the power you can build with your community, with your coworkers in your workplaces and beyond. You are not powerless here. We are not powerless here, but we will be way less powerful if we already concede the point that what happens in the next few years is just out of our hands. It’s not. And that is what we here at The Real News are committed to people, power and people in general. We are about you and your communities. We are about people around this country and around the world. And we believe all human life is sacred and worth fighting for, and that we all deserve a world better than this. And that we are the ones who are going to make that world happen. And we at The Real News are going to be there covering your struggle as you make it happen. We’re going to be there on the ground. We want to talk to you about what you’re going through and how others can help. So please support our work, subscribe to this channel, reach out to us and let us know about your stories so that we can help lift them up and help them reach more people. And above all else, please take care of yourselves and take care of each other, solidarity forever.
Police in Jonesboro, Arkansas, are facing scrutiny following the release of body camera footage capturing a ticket issued to a local pizza delivery driver—who says that officers have pulled him over more than seven times in under a year. The driver, Christian Mobley, says police have destroyed his livelihood after he lost his job due to receiving so many tickets. Police Accountability Report investigates the case as an example of how police departments around the country employ dirty tactics to maximize city revenues through ticketing.
Production: Stephen Janis, Taya Graham Written by: Stephen Janis Post-Production: Adam Coley
Transcript
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 the Police Accountability Report. As I always make clear, this show has a single purpose holding the politically powerful institution of policing accountable to do so. We don’t just focus on the bad behavior of individual cops. Instead we examine the system that makes bad policing possible and today we will achieve that goal by showing not one, not two, but multiple questionable stops by police of a pizza delivery man trying to simply make a living. It’s an ongoing pattern of writing tickets, pulling him over, and yes, even an arrest that we will investigate to reveal just how problematic the actions of these officers are. But first, before we get started, I want you watching to know that if you have video evidence of police misconduct, please email it to us privately at PAR@therealnews.com or reach out to me on Facebook or Twitter @TayasBaltimore and we might be able to investigate for you.
And please like share and comment on our videos. It helps us get the word out and it can even help our guests. And of course I read your comments and appreciate them. You see those little hearts I give out down there and I’ve even started doing a r comment of the week to show you how much I appreciate your thoughts and what a terrific community we have. And we do have a Patreon accountability reports. So if you feel inspired to donate, please do. We don’t run ads or take corporate dollars. So anything you can spare is truly appreciated. Alright, we’ve gotten that out of the way. Now there is no doubt that times are tough for the working class in this country. Grueling jobs, underpaid work and insufficient benefits are not only commonplace but a veritable addendum to the American dream that for some has turned into a nightmare and that is why today we are telling the story of one man who personifies both the challenges and obstacles of making an honest living under extreme duress.
The man in question, Christian Mobley has been working as a pizza delivery person in Jonesboro, Arkansas for years. There he has been diligently delivering food, working late into the night to make ends meet. But soon he found along with the occupational hazards and inherent dangers of delivering food, another unexpected challenge he had to overcome to make ends meet the Jonesborough Arkansas Police Department. That’s because in spring of 2023, police began pulling him over for minor traffic violations, car stops that often became confrontational and ever more contentious as police turned traffic enforcement into something entirely divorced from public safety encounters with police that changed his life. Now Christian’s story begins, like I said, in June of 2023, Christian was driving to work to start his delivery shift when a Jonesboro officer Michael Starns pulled him over. Take a look.
Speaker 2:
What’s going on man? All right. My name is Officer Jonesboro Police Department. The reason I stopped is you got a brake light out, you’re passenger side brake light. Is there a reason you’re not wearing your seatbelt today, sir? Now I’m trying to get Walmart. You going Walmart, you’re going the wrong way. You got a driver’s license on you.
Taya Graham:
Now as you notice, the officer is already questioning Christian about circumstances that have nothing to do with his allegedly broken taillight. I’m not sure why he has to explain where he is going or even why. But the officer asks, let’s say provocative questions that heightened the tension of this stop. Just listen.
Speaker 2:
Okay, Mr. Moby, is there a reason you’re nervous? What’s wrong man?
Christian Mobley:
I mean you’re telling me from all the way who wouldn’t be nervous? You’re telling me all the way from back there. Well,
Speaker 2:
You have a brick light out man.
Christian Mobley:
You tell somebody that long, I mean you going to pull me over. You
Speaker 2:
Could have pulled me up. Well I thought you were going to turn to a residence back there. I wasn’t going to bother you because you were going to be at home, but I saw you driving. So I mean you need to know your brake lights out, don’t you, for your safety, right? Alright, I mean, right. And you’re not wearing your seatbelt. That’s not safe either, man. I’ll be right back with you, okay?
Taya Graham:
Now I won’t judge for you, but I think Christian looks annoyed rather than nervous and truly, if the officer was concerned about Christian safety, why were they focusing on his state of mind? But apparently Mr. Moby’s answer did not satisfy the Jonesboro Police Department because again, they escalated the encounter. Just look
Speaker 2:
Ly shaken.
Taya Graham:
Now before I play the next section of the video, I want you to notice how police often needlessly escalate a routine car stop. That is because since the initial contact, at least two other officers appear, including the one I’m showing you now on the screen, they approach Christian’s car from the back. So how would any rational person not be afraid? How could you not be fearful of a rapid and frankly questionable ratcheting up of police presence? Just take a look at what happens next.
Speaker 2:
Hey Ms. Mul, go ahead. Step back for me. Okay, so I’ll explain all that to you in a second. Just go back here. So this is a high drug traffic area. So what I’m going to do is I’m just going to run around your vehicle and if it doesn’t hit, we’ll be out of here. Is there anything in your vehicle illegal? I’m just going Walmart. I’m a pickup driver. Walmart, I get it man. I get it man. That’s all I’m trying to prove, man. Trying to prove your exact man. Okay? Is anything on you illegal? Nothing. Mind we search you real, okay? Yes, or
Speaker 4:
I
Speaker 2:
Just want to spray though there’s nothing illegal in here at all.
Taya Graham:
So the overarching crime under investigation here is an allegedly broken taillight, although the cop never uses his body camera to record the evidence from that point, police construct a narrative that Mr. Mobley, because he’s driving in a so-called high drug crime area, should be subject to a drug sniffing dog to test his car.
Speaker 2:
She’s been letting it go. So dispatch let her go. Yeah, essentially. Hey dude, I appreciate your on your break. Fives going to give you a verbal warning, a citation.
Taya Graham:
So after the entire ordeal of being personally searched, then his car subject to a drug sniffing dog, Christian is given a citation. That’s right. All the assorted officers, including a drug canine unit deployed to battle a broken taillight. But for all the duress Krishna experienced with his stop, he was soon pulled over again in March of 2024. Let’s listen as an officer justified stopping him,
Speaker 5:
Adam nor zebra, 86 M NZ 86 M on Nettleton by the country club. Send me another unit over here. I’m not sure what he’s doing.
Taya Graham:
He’s over by the country club. I’m not sure what he’s doing. I mean that’s interesting. So driving by a country club is suddenly a crime. First he was driving in a high drug and crime area and that was justification to search his car and now he’s driving next to a country club. Apparently Jonesboro is just a bunch of no-go zones for delivery drivers. And like the previous stop, apparently one officer was not enough to corral Mr. Mobley. Shortly after he was pulled over, another cop showed up on the scene. Take a look.
Christian Mobley:
How was y’all harassing me? I just told you cops are always following me. That’s harassment. That’s not harassment. It is. There’s officers who drive every day, every you on it too. You want to harass me too.
Speaker 2:
I just came here because he asked for backup. Man,
Christian Mobley:
He’s clear. I’m always clear. I ain’t never committed no crimes. I’m always clear you ain’t never going to catch me with nothing but drugs or nothing. Listen
Speaker 4:
Dude, bring it down.
Taya Graham:
Just bring it down. Now the car stop then takes a troubling turn as the officer says something that seems very pointed and honestly a bit disturbing.
Speaker 2:
Where have I talked to you before? Your name sounds familiar.
Christian Mobley:
Yeah, I got these cops always following me harassing. So if I don’t come home, you know where I’m at. They’re arresting me for no reason. We’re not arresting you for anything man.
Taya Graham:
But yet again, this car stop ends without charges. Not even a ticket. As the officer never fully articulates what Christian was apparently doing wrong other than driving adjacent to a country club. But this is not the last encounter in the series of stops that have pervaded Mr. Moby’s life. That’s because just months later he’s pulled over yet again this time just outside his workplace. See for yourself.
Christian Mobley:
Yeah. What’s up? What’s going on? Yeah, what’s going on? I’m working officer jp, I’m working right now. I know
Speaker 6:
Officer JP D. You reading that stuff because you didn’t use the turn signal?
Christian Mobley:
Yeah, I did use the turn signal. Yeah, I did you use it hundred. I used the turn signal. Yeah, I did. Your feet prior your into the parking. What? What’s your name?
Speaker 6:
Can you have a driver’s license insurance? What?
Christian Mobley:
What’s your name? Name and badge number?
Speaker 6:
Driver’s license, registration, insurance
Christian Mobley:
Name and badge number. Name and badge number driver license registration.
Taya Graham:
Okay, so I’m just going to have to be blunt for a moment. I understand enforcing the law is not easy and is often complicated. I understand officers have to do their jobs to make sure we obey certain rules of the road. But to pull a man working to make a living for not signaling quickly enough within 100 feet, I mean is that really worth anyone’s time? Let alone a police officers? I mean, how many times have we been told traffic stops are one of the most dangerous facets of policing? How many law enforcement officials have repeatedly claimed that they take a mortal risk simply by pulling over a driver to procure their license and registration? My point here is why if indeed this is so risky, why bother to pull over a man for a traffic infraction that is so minor and of such little consequence? Why take the risk if the alleged misdeed is so inconsequential? Well, Steven has been working on that question and we’ll discuss it later. But despite the questionable nature of the allegation, the jonesborough officer presses on and actually escalates the encounter. Just watch, Hey, I need driver to get
Speaker 6:
My driver’s license out of there. Driver’s license registration.
Christian Mobley:
I need to go in there and get my driver’s license out of there. Oh,
Speaker 6:
You not going inside.
Christian Mobley:
It’s inside.
Speaker 6:
Well you not going inside. I’ll take your name and date of birth. Matter of fact, step out for me.
Christian Mobley:
We have to lock our stuff up in the car up in the job then. All right, cool.
Speaker 6:
You still away? Do you have any weapons on you?
Christian Mobley:
No, I don’t have no, no weapons, nothing on me. Alright, cool. I’m working right now. As you can see Papa Johns, I’m working. What’s your name, date of birth?
Speaker 4:
Christian Mobley.
Speaker 6:
I did use the turn signal. I did. You didn’t. If you stop talking over me and let me explain.
Christian Mobley:
Okay.
Speaker 6:
You didn’t use the turn signal a hundred feet prior before making this right? Turn to this.
Christian Mobley:
I used the turn signal fully and you know
Speaker 6:
I did not a hundred feet prior. That’s what I’m saying.
Christian Mobley:
A hundred feet prior.
Speaker 6:
You trying to turn you giving the wrong information.
Christian Mobley:
Okay man. Okay. This is clearly harassment. Do you have any registration in? Yeah, I got everything you need in the car. Where is it? Can I get in the car? Of course, go ahead. Okay, registration insurance please. Okay, hold on, hold
Taya Graham:
On, hold on. Now as the stop continues, I want you to notice something as I run the video Again, these car stops are not being conducted by a single officer. No. This apparently serious offense of not signaling more than 100 feet before the turn has actually warranted. Not one, not two, but seemingly three cops at least. That’s three law enforcement officers for one pizza delivery man, who apparently made an ill time use of his turn signal. Take a look at how this increased police presence makes this stop even more tense.
Christian Mobley:
This is clearly me. I’m only going to ask you this one time, okay? Stay right there. Don’t move. You understand what I’m telling you? Yeah, I understand what you’re telling me fully. Officer, am I being same? Yes moment. Yes. I’m being the same at the moment. Yes. Where is it at? In the glove box. It’s in the glove box. My insurance and everything’s in the glove box. Officer, are you getting consent to go in there and get it? You said I’m be in the same, right? Yes sir. So if I’m, we
Speaker 2:
Have to have consent for you to go inside there, get your
Christian Mobley:
So if I deny, if I deny,
Speaker 2:
If you
Christian Mobley:
Deny it, we’ll recite you for not having proof of, okay, go on there and get it. Go on there and get it. Come get my keys out the car and get my driver’s license out the bunk
Speaker 5:
Because you’re supposed to have it while you’re driving. So we just won’t even worry about that. I’m going to be driving without a license.
Christian Mobley:
Yeah, yeah. Come get my keys at the car. No, stay over there. Come get my keys out the car so you can get my drivers out the box.
Speaker 6:
Put you in a until we tell you to don’t throw with nothing. Okay? Thank you.
Christian Mobley:
Okay, let’s get this right. You’re not in patrol, you don’t need to tell him what to do. You don’t get I got you officer. I got you. What’s your name and badge number? D Thomas. 1, 5, 3, 3. Thank you. Thank you officer. Yeah, they harassing me. They harassing me. Get your hands out your pocket. Ain’t no weapons on me out of your pockets. My bad. I’m used to putting my hand in my pocket, man.
Taya Graham:
Okay, just wait a moment. I think I actually undercounted the number of cops at the scene this time. It looks like there are at least four officers who’ve joined this investigation. And guess what? More cops probably means more problems. And that’s exactly what happened as police decided to put Christian in handcuffs. Just look ice.
Christian Mobley:
Huh? Ice. What’s your bad number? What’s your bad number? Four, eight. Thank you. Who is that right there?
Speaker 2:
He’s not a part of this traffic stop
Christian Mobley:
Business, sir. Okay. Hey, hey, hey. They won’t let me get my license out the box. They won’t let, he’s my manager. He, yeah, they harassing me. What did I just say? They harassing me. Hey, put him back in there. Put him back in the truck going on. I’m being arrested. Being detained.
Taya Graham:
That’s right. They detained him. Although this looks like an arrest to me. And again, this entire ordeal did not lead to any actual charges. Just more mental anguish for Mr. Mobley. But it wasn’t over. Not hardly just 48 hours later, just two days after the stop we just watched Christian was pulled over again by the same officer
Speaker 6:
Jones, bur police department. I know the reason I stomped you is because you falling too close. No I wasn’t. Yes you were. No. You flashed me with your high beams. No I wasn’t. When I pulled over into this parking lot, you was so close. You almost rear-ended me. No. Okay. What was the purpose of you? You harassing me again. Odie. Can I have your driver’s license? Registration, insurance.
Christian Mobley:
What’s the traffic ion? Odie.
Speaker 6:
Driver’s license, registration, insurance. You
Christian Mobley:
Harassing me again? OIE,
Speaker 6:
Mr. Moley. Okay, driver’s license, registration, insurance. Do you know that’s bs
Taya Graham:
O. But this time the crime was apparently following too closely, but this time as well, the officer seems to have decided that he would employ the full extent of his police powers. Take a look.
Speaker 6:
Set up out. Step out. Step out. Here’s your drive license here. No step out. It’s too late. Here it is. Here it is. What you doing man? Step out. What are you doing? Turn around. What are you doing? Oie? Hands behind your back. What are you doing? Hands behind your back. What am I being arrested for? Odie. What am I being arrested for? Obstruction for what? 1 42. Dispatch. Oh damn, this is bullshit. 15 one time. You know this is bullshit, right? Turn around. I asked you three times to give me your information. I gave it to you. It’s in your hand. I’m only required to ask you once you gave it to me once I came over here and told you to step out the vehicle,
Christian Mobley:
You know what you’re doing. It’s bs man.
Speaker 6:
Let’s go
Taya Graham:
Obstruction. Well that’s interesting. Bear in mind obstruction is premised upon obstructing an investigation into a separate crime. And since the officer did not articulate what the underlying crime is, we have no idea how he is justifying the charge. A lack of full disclosure that is not addressed during a post-arrest discussion. Let’s watch
Speaker 6:
Mr. Mobley. Yeah, what’s a good phone number for you?
Christian Mobley:
What am I being arrested for?
Speaker 6:
Obstruction. I’m being arrested for obstruction. Yes sir. What’s a good phone number? How did I obstruct Odie? Are you going to tell me your phone number? Mr. Mobley? What’s the number for your citation? How did I Instruc? Odie. What’s your current address? You know my address Odie? It’s on the driver’s license. Okay, you mind telling it to me?
Christian Mobley:
It’s on the driver’s license.
Speaker 6:
Alright, well like I said, you going to jail tonight for obstruction? I asked you three times to provide me with your identification.
Christian Mobley:
I gave it to you
Speaker 6:
After the fact. I came over there And
Christian Mobley:
How was I obstructed though? Oie? How was I obstructed?
Taya Graham:
And so Christian is taken to jail without sufficient justification and truly without understanding what crime he’d committed. And as you’ll learn later, this had devastating consequences for him and his livelihood. But there is more to the story, so much more that we’re actually not showing all the video now. Instead there will be a part two of our investigation into the Jonesborough Police Department. And please feel free to reach out with your own stories of your interactions with the Jonesborough Police Department and we will be soon joined by Christian to tell us how this continuing series of police encounters has impacted his life and what he wants to happen as a result. But first we will be joined by my reporting partner, Steven Janis, who’s been reaching out to the police and examining the documents. Stephen, thank you so much for joining me
Stephen Janis:
Taya, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Taya Graham:
Now first I know you sent a lengthy email to the Jonesboro Arkansas Police Department. What did you ask and how did they respond?
Stephen Janis:
Well, I was very specific. I was very concerned about the kind of probable cause for putting Mr. Moley through all these car stops and some of the searches. So I asked him very specifically, how do you designate a high crime area in the city? Is that like an official designation? What is the process you use? Secondly, I asked about country club is driving within the vicinity of a country club actually a crime. And how do you establish this? Basically I was looking for a criteria for how they decide when to pull someone over and what that means. Now you sent an email to it to the Jonesborough Police Department? We actually sat and talked to them on the phone. We actually spoke to a traffic sergeant there who said he would get back to us. I have not heard, but we’re going to keep following up and I just want to let people know we did our due diligence to get these people to respond. We let them know what the questions we had. We asked specific questions and we did not get a response. But they are certainly been put on notice about this.
Taya Graham:
So you have reviewed all the video in depth. Do you think the officers had probable cause to stop Christian?
Stephen Janis:
Well tell you. Certainly not because I have a lot of experience with being pulled over myself and living in a city that part of their crime enforcement was to pull random people over all the time. And these stops saying high crime area, that’s so subjective. Driving near a country club even more odd and I can’t even call it subjective, just kind of crazy. And then the stops occurred later when he was driving a hundred feet. I mean, how on earth is any person supposed to know? How is a cop supposed to know that? How do you know when someone’s not put a tour signal on a hundred feet before they turn? It’s just impossible. So to me these stops are highly questionable. I don’t think the law backs it up and I think the questions need to be asked.
Taya Graham:
Steven, can you give me some background on the Jonesboro Police? How large is the department and what their crime rates look like?
Stephen Janis:
Te there are a lot of different ways to look at crime statistics and we’ve seen some reports that say Jonesboro has somewhat of a high crime rate, although it’s not that much different from the rest of major cities in Arkansas. Some people have given them a B plus for certain types of crimes and a C for violent crimes. So there’s all over the board. Obviously they have some problem with crime, but I will say as a word of caution that pulling people over randomly does not reduce crime. They did that a lot in Baltimore and it didn’t work. And if that’s the department strategy and I really wish they would talk to us about this then I think they’re going in the wrong direction.
Taya Graham:
And now to give us a sense of how his ongoing encounters with police have affected his life and his livelihood and how his perception of law enforcement has changed. I’m joined by Christian Mobley. Christian, thank you so much for joining us.
Christian Mobley:
No problem.
Taya Graham:
Now first please walk me through what we’re seeing in this video. You’re working in food delivery, driving back from a stop, I assume. What happens when the officer pulls behind you? What did they say and why are they pulling you over
Christian Mobley:
That? I didn’t use the turn signal at a hundred feet before making the turn, but I used the turn signal.
Taya Graham:
So the officer initially says you’re not using your turn signal and then admits, well, you used the turn signal, you just didn’t use it within 100 feet of the turn. What were your thoughts when he said this and do you agree with his assessment?
Christian Mobley:
What you don’t see, what you don’t see is there’s another cop on the left side of me. He’s right on the left side of me and Odie is behind me. So it’s like they kind of got me boxed in. But yeah, it’s just harassment. They’d have, the police department is actually across the street from Papa John’s, so they sit over there all the time stalking me, trying to make their presence felt. It’s like they’re just trying to agitate me all the time and it’s just what they do
Taya Graham:
Now. This seems to be a simple traffic enforcement issue and really if you were guilty at all, there should have just been a warning. Why did it escalate? I mean, it seemed like there were four officers on the scene just for a turn signal infraction.
Christian Mobley:
Simply put, they don’t like me. They don’t like the fact that I stand up to them and they can’t bully me or intimidate me and I speak out against them. So they just got a problem with that. But like I said, I’m not really necessarily doing this for me. I know I’m not the only one in this town dealing with this kind of stuff. So this is more so for the other people that’s dealing with this and somebody needs to do something about it. I feel like I’m the one to do something about it.
Taya Graham:
Now you were trying to communicate with your manager or wanted for your coworkers, you tried to explain to the officers where your information was. Why do you think they were so adamant about stopping you from communicating with your manager?
Christian Mobley:
They knew that if he could get my driver’s license, they wouldn’t have, they probably wouldn’t be able to get me with that charge of failure to present driver’s license. But when I come into work, my driver’s license is always in my wallet and I lock my wallet up in my locker, so I forgot it that day. So that’s why my driver’s license wasn’t on me at the time.
Taya Graham:
So what surprised me was that they placed you in cuffs effectively for trying to speak. How did they treat you? I mean, did they put you in the back of the car? You can’t really see because the video goes dark for a little period of time.
Christian Mobley:
Well, they didn’t put me in the back of the car, they just cuffed me. They just took my phone, placed it on the hood of his patrol vehicle and that’s why the scream went dark. But I was in front of the vehicle handcuffed.
Taya Graham:
So this wasn’t the first time. Jonesboro police officers have followed you looking for traffic infractions. Can you tell me how many other times you’ve been pulled over this year and for what?
Christian Mobley:
I mean if I could off the top of my head, I could say at least five times. It’s like they would pull me over to try to find out where I live, try to get my, they would just issue me warnings, but they would pull me over. It’s like they just trying to find out who I am and where I live at so they can monitor me or something.
Taya Graham:
So I know you mentioned that after one of your traffic stops with Officer Sergeant James D. Stout on March 3rd this year, you said he followed you into a Walmart afterwards. Do you believe this is harassment?
Christian Mobley:
It is something they do. It’s like this little thing they do. It was after the encounter I was doing Walmart Spark and while I’m doing Walmart Spark, he drives by me and kind of nods at me. It’s something they do, they’ll drive by you and they’ll nod at you we’re watching you. It is just something they all do. It’s like a little gang thing that they do. And yeah, he drove past me. He nodded at me. He’s trying to intimidate, he’s trying to send me a message and they all do it.
Taya Graham:
They said they aren’t following you but pull you over because they thought you were break checking them. Can you please explain?
Christian Mobley:
No, I was just coming from Natural Grocers and they have this thing where they’ll always get behind me and start telling me and he was just doing the same thing and what you don’t see is him looking in his mirror. I can see him looking in his mirror, making a face trying to intimidate me. It’s what you don’t see in the video video. So I’m just slowing down to see what he’s on and then he turns his lights on and said, I’m trying to break check him. It’s what? It’s
Taya Graham:
So Officer Michael Starnes of the Jonesboro Police Department pulled you over June 27th this year allegedly for having a break light out. But then he started saying you look nervous. I mean, considering how often you’ve been pulled over this year, I would be nervous too. Do you think he was hoping to search your car and he was talking about smelling deodorizing spray in your car and talking about running a canine around your vehicle and that you’re in a very high crime area. I’m familiar with that sort of police procedure as a Baltimore city resident, do you think he was fishing for bigger crime than a traffic infraction?
Christian Mobley:
It wasn’t a high crime area, not at all. But yeah, I think he was just targeting me. But the very next day after that incident, I’m in Dollar General on East Johnson. He walks in my back is to him, he walks in the Dollar store and like I said, as I turned around, I seen him standing there. He gives me this nod. He’s trying to send me a message like We’re going to be watching you. Yeah, it’s what they do. It’s like they target people. It’s like a game to them.
Taya Graham:
So you were driving your mother’s car during that stop, which is nice looking car. And the also said you were in a high crime area. Do you think that you were being profiled, I mean there were at least four officers on the scene and a canine, so it seems like they were expecting you to be the catch they were fishing for. I mean, is Jonesboro a place where there’s lots of criminal activity?
Christian Mobley:
Not at all. I mean, nah. Mean even if you say you live in the hood in Jonesboro, it ain’t dangerous. Give me a break. Nah, it’s not a high crime at all.
Taya Graham:
So Christian, how much has this cost you personally? I would imagine it is stressful just getting into your car for work, considering how often you’ve been followed and ticketed and how much it costs in tickets and timing going to court. I mean, what has this cost you either financially or even emotionally or psychologically?
Christian Mobley:
I would just say I’m built for it. No, I’m not. And like I said, they’re not going to intimidate me. I’m not the one they’re going to intimidate. I’m going to stand up, I’m going to stand up against them. But I mean in the beginning it was kind of stressful. It was new to me, but it started to anger me and that’s when I decided, you know what? I’m going to stand up against this. I’m going to bring light to this situation because I can’t be the only one in Jonesborough, Arkansas dealing with this from these officers. One time it got the best of me where I made a mistake and thought someone was following me and I ended up getting arrested by Deputy Jordan drum. But that was in the beginning when it was new to me, but now I built a tolerance for it and I know how to deal with it and I know how to manipulate it and catch them in the process of trying to do it to me.
Taya Graham:
Christian, I hate to ask this, but do you have any sort of criminal history that could explain why these officers have chosen to keep such a close eye on you?
Christian Mobley:
No, the only thing that if you want to consider it is when Deputy Jordan drum from the Craighead County Sheriff’s Office, he arrested me. The only thing they charged me with was obstruction. That’s the only, I guess major thing you can say that’s on my record. Everything else is just traffic tickets.
Taya Graham:
By any chance, do you know why Officer Peyton Perkins was fired? I mean he was one of the officers that was involved in your interactions?
Christian Mobley:
I don’t know. I went in there, I went in there one day to get A-F-O-I-A video and yeah, Trevor, I was talking to Trevor, officer Trevor and I said, I was talking to him about Perkins and he said he got fired and I asked him why he wouldn’t disclose to me why he got fired. So I’m not really sure, but I’m happy he’s fired.
Taya Graham:
If you could speak to the Jonesboro Police Department right now, what would you say if you knew they were listening to you right this moment? What would you want to tell them?
Christian Mobley:
Personally? I just want to tell them they cowards, they’re cowards for you to do for them to try to put that type of, this is the type of stuff that can make people commit suicide. So for them, them to find some sort of satisfaction out of doing this type, this type of stuff, they’re cowards. That’s what I would tell them. They’re cowards and that’s all you’ll ever be.
Taya Graham:
Okay. I have a lot to say about what happened to Mr. Christian Mobley. Part of what I’m thinking about is directly related to the constant and I think obviously unnecessary police interactions we just witnessed, it seems based upon the video evidence that these traffic stops were the result of concerns other than just enforcing the law. One can only imagine the stress that Christian must have experienced when a drug sniffing dog was deployed to search his car or one can guess how he felt when a police officer told him he was pulled over because he was driving near a country club. All of these interactions with law enforcement hardly build a connection with the community. In fact, all of this police intervention for Noncrime only increases the distrust of institutions and not just policing. That has become endemic in this country. And I don’t think policing like what we just witnessed is simply the result of Officer overreach, but that’s not the only aspect of Christians’ ordeal that concerns me.
Something else bothers me about what we just watched that more than likely will get less attention than the stops themselves. An idea about law enforcement in this country that deserves to be discussed so that we understand what we’ve truly seen and to make it more comprehensible, I’m going to explain it as a story, a tale about people like Christian who work hard struggle, keep trying only to discover that the biggest obstacle to carving out a good life for himself is the government that’s supposed to serve him. The story starts almost 50 years ago before Christian was even born. That’s when the working people of this country had benefited from one of the most robust expansions of the middle class in history, high union membership and less income inequality meant that the American dream was alive and well and more importantly actually possible. But over the past 50 years everything changed.
Union membership fell, income inequality rose the road to the middle class was filled with potholes of neglect. As the wealth of the top 1% expanded to engulf the bottom 80, it seemed like the hope for a comfortable middle class life turned into an unattainable dream, a mirage of a long forgotten social contract that seemed to move further and further away the harder we reached for it. Now the reason I bring this up is because the excessive policing we just witnessed is part and parcel of the lack of opportunity for the middle class. It’s something I’ve been thinking about because I’ve witnessed so many cases like this where police seem inexplicably drawn into conflicts with people whose biggest crime is being economically vulnerable. Now, it made me think about something I heard about one of the reasons America seemed so invested in the middle class 50 years ago, I don’t remember who it was, but their argument went like this.
The country’s political leadership concerned over the Cold War with Russia felt they had to prove that democracy could deliver for the people. The idea was that the best life prospects for the greatest number of people would lead to proof that a democratic society was an effective society. It would be proof that the whole system actually worked. So what happened? That’s a good question. Apparently after the end of the Cold War, our country’s elites decided to abandon the egalitarianism of making the greatest number of lives better without the so-called red scare. It seems like we all veered in the opposite direction, extracting the biggest gains for the smallest number of people. And I think along with that decision was the idea that in order to prevent such an imbalance system from collapsing the elites turn to an institution that could in some sense keep the declining middle class and working class in check by sowing chaos in their midst.
And that’s why we see so many questionable car stops and ordeal like Christians. That’s why police roll out drug sniffing dogs because you simply drive in an area they deemed well basically poor and off limits or while you’re stopped a second time for driving next to a country club, no need to worry if you’ve committed a crime. No need to think about if you’re a threat to public safety. The whole idea is containment to make you feel less capable of demanding your rights or of expecting a fair shake or of being treated fairly. The unnecessary scrutiny and inexplicable traffic stops is all a part of the same process to make you feel strange from the rights that are bestowed upon you by the Constitution. And to make this point even more salient, I want to share some news with you, a development to reinforce my argument that over-policing is a consequence of rampant inequality.
Just as we were finishing recording our show, Christian sent me an email and I want to read part of it to you. I just found out I lost my job because of this arrest. Christian wrote me not only that his car was impounded and he spent three days in jail and now he’s unemployed. So I ask you, what exactly did law enforcement accomplish here? What exactly was the goal, the purpose, the public interest that was served by causing a hardworking man to lose his job? I mean, I am at a loss to explain the underlying societal justification for a process that culminates in this type of economic loss that bolsters such unnecessary hardship, that conscripts humiliation to justify the deleterious effects of a society that are intrinsically unfair. Honestly, when I watch videos like these, I feel like all the mainstream media pundits who say discussing economic inequality is class warfare are right except the abuse runs downhill to those who can least afford it.
To people like Christian who were struggling but working hard and now must struggle even more just to overcome the government that he literally funds through his taxes, but only if the police department will allow him to work. One of the things that is most discouraging about Christians ordeal is like many cities we cover, Jonesboro spends more on policing than any other facet of city government. As Stephen pointed out, the city dedicates less the firefighting, sanitation, parks, recreation and fixing city streets than to law enforcement. Basically 37% of all the money their city collects goes to cops, cars, arrests, and jails. But how does city leaders justify this expenditure? What do they say to residents who might ask why they need to find countless numbers of officers to conduct countless numbers of questionable stops? How do they explain the dedication of communal resources to a process that seems so unnecessary?
And Jonesboro is not the exception throughout this country. We invest more in handcuffs than we do in housing, more on cages than in keeping our cities clean, more on traffic stops than healthy recreation. And that’s what’s really intriguing. The recent trend in crime calls into question the entire justification for this hard to fathom spending. As you may already know, there has been a historic drop in violent crime in many of the largest cities across the country in our city. Baltimore homicides reached a record low dropping by nearly 40% over the last year. But what’s also intriguing about this good news is that it occurred when the police department also had a record number of vacancies. And Baltimore is not alone. Departments across the country have raised concerns about a dearth of new police officers shortages that they simply can’t fill vacancies that have remained vacant.
So then how can we explain the historic drop in violence? If more police and increased spending on police will somehow deliver more public safety, then why do crime drop when fewer officers were on the streets? What exactly am I missing here when fewer cops translates into less crime? I think what we’ve considered and truly examined is that perhaps all the spending on policing has less to do with crime than police. Partisans would want us to believe that pumping tax dollars into shiny new SUVs for cops isn’t really about keeping us safe, but perhaps about keeping us in check, maybe just maybe cops have another purpose, an often unacknowledged role in the economic inequality that has engulfed people like Christian maybe along with traffic stops and minor crimes, they are the guardians of the border between extravagant wealth and soul crushing poverty. Maybe they are here not just to enforce the law but impose boundaries on the chaos that communal poverty creates.
I mean, just consider that roughly only 20% of property crimes and 40% of homicides are solved. I’m not saying it’s easy to catch a thief, but certainly that doesn’t seem to be the focus of police who have the time to constantly pull over the same man over and over and over again. And that’s why we take the time to report on cases like Christians. That’s why we produce a detailed show to scrutinize the actions of police that deserve the attention. And that’s why we tell the stories of people who end up on the wrong side of police overreach. That’s why we produce the show so that someone other than the cops holding handcuffs can tell their side of the story. I want to thank our guest, Christian Mobley for bravely coming forward, supplying us the video evidence and of course sharing his story. And we really hope that things are going to take a positive turn for you soon. Thank you so much for your time, Christian, and of course I have to thank Intrepid reporter Steven Janis for his writing, research and editing on this piece. Thank you Steven
Stephen Janis:
Taya, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Taya Graham:
And of course I want to thank mods of the show, Noli D and Lacy R for their support. Thank you and a very special thanks to accountability report, Patreons. We appreciate you and I look forward to thanking each and every single one of you personally in our next live stream, especially Patreon associate producers, Lucita Garcia, David K, and John, er, and super friends, Eddie Clegg, Kenneth K Shane, B, pineapple girl, Chris R and matter of W Rights. But also I want to thank a very special supporter of the show, Scott Rushing. Scott was kind enough to share his family story with us. Unfortunately, this case is a tragic use of excessive force that result in the death of his unarmed son. Tyler rushing 34-year-old Tyler rushing was tasered attacked by police canine shot and killed on July 23rd, 2017 in Chico, California. But Scott has never given up on the hope that his family will receive justice for his son’s death and neither have we.
Scott, we appreciate you supporting our work and we hope you’ll join us soon to update us on your progress on reforming the excessive force policies and training practices of private security guards. Thank you for your support, Scott. And I want you watching to know that if you have video evidence of police misconduct or brutality, please share it with us and we might be able to investigate for you. Please reach out to us. You can email us tips privately@therealnews.com, ensure your evidence of police misconduct. You can also message us at Police Accountability report on Facebook or Instagram or at Eyes on Police on Twitter. Or of course you can message me directly at tia’s baltimore on Twitter or Facebook. And please like and comment, I do read your comments and appreciate them. And we do have a Patreon link pinned in the comments below for accountability reports. If you feel inspired to donate, please do. We don’t run ads, never take corporate dollars, so anything you can spare is truly appreciated. My name is Taya Graham and I’m your host of the Police Accountability Report. Please be safe out there.
Pro-junta militia leaders in Myanmar and operators of online scam centers have agreed to stop human trafficking after the rescue of a Chinese actor this month raised international alarm about their operations and looks set to damage Thailand’s tourist industry.
The ethnic Karen militia force based on Myanmar’s border with Thailand is suspected of enabling extensive internet fraud, human trafficking, forced labor and other crimes, and is being enriched by a business network that extends across Asia, a rights group said in a report last year.
But the case of Chinese TV actor Wang Xing, rescued this month from the notorious KK Park scam facility in eastern Myanmar’s Myawaddy, has brought the issue to public attention across Asia like never before.
The result has been pressure from both the Thai government and the Myanmar military, leading to a meeting on Wednesday between the militias and their business partners in which they agreed to stop human trafficking, said a businessman close to the ethnic Karen militia.
“The current issue of the Chinese actor has brought pressure from Thailand and the junta council in Naypyidaw. That’s why the meeting was held to enforce rules,” the businessman, who declined to be identified as talking to the media, told Radio Free Asia.
Leaders of Myawaddy-based Border Guard Force, or BGF, and the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army, or DKBA, which control the border zone under the auspices of the Myanmar military, agreed on a set of five rules with the business leaders, many of them ethnic Chinese, the businessman said.
The list includes no use of force, threats or torture, no child labor, no income from human trafficking and no scam operations, according to a copy of the rules that the businessman cited. Anyone found breaking the rules will lose their business and be expelled from the area.
RFA tried to contact senior members of the ethnic Karen forces, Maj. Naing Maung Zaw of the BGF and Lt. Gen Saw Shwe Wa of the DKBA, but neither of them answered their telephones.
Leaders of Border Guard Force and Democratic Karen Buddhist Army meet online gambling business owners in Myanmar’s Myawaddy town on Jan. 15, 2025.(AEC News)
The Karen militia force in power in the eastern region emerged from a split in the 1990s in Myanmar’s oldest ethnic minority guerrilla force, the largely Christian-led Karen National Union, when Buddhist fighters broke away, formed the DKBA and sided with the military.
The military let the DKBA rule in areas under its control in Kayin state, set up a Border Guard Force to help the army, and to profit from cross-border trade, and later from online gambling and scam operations.
The scam centers in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos have ensnared thousands of human trafficking victims from all over Asia, and as far away as Africa.
Many victims say they were lured by false job offers, then forced to scam people by convincing them over the phone or online to put money into bogus investments.
University of Texas researchers estimated in a report in March last year that scammers had tricked investors out of more than US$75 billion since January 2020.
People forced to work at the scam centers are often tortured if they refuse to comply, victims and rights groups say.
The rules announced by the militias and scam operators come after a string of high-profile kidnappings, including that of Chinese actor Wang.
Hong Kong authorities have sent a task force to Thailand in a bid to rescue an estimated 12 victims in Myanmar and have imposed a yellow travel advisory for Thailand and Myanmar, warning of “signs of threat,” but without mentioning the scam parks.
The Bangkok Post reported on Wednesday that Thai hotels and airlines have been getting a flood of cancellations from Chinese tour groups for the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday.
Authorities in the region have accused Chinese gangsters of organizing the centers but Chinese nationals in Thailand said Chinese state-owned companies were behind operations in Myanmar, and behind them is the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department.
“Wherever you have these scam parks, you will find Chinese companies plying the biggest trade,” a realtor who only gave the surname Pan for fear of reprisals recently told RFA Mandarin. “The Myawaddy park was built by Chinese state-owned companies.”
Pan said the parks were the criminal face of the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s United Front outreach and influence operations.
“All of the big bosses are back in China,” he said.
The Justice for Myanmar human rights group has accused governments and businesses across the region of enabling the cyber scam operations by failing to take action against the profitable flows they generate.
Edited by RFA Staff.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Burmese.
In recent years the labor movement has witnessed a resurgence in organizing, and 2024 was no different. Tens of thousands of workers fought for pay raises, increased job protections and union representation. Workers across the United States also linked their domestic struggles with Israel’s assault on Palestine, demanding an arms embargo and an end to the genocide in Gaza. While the labor movement…
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
Transcript
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.
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