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It's autumn time to get cozy and nothing is cozier than one of Casper's award-winning mattresses. Of course, they've got their most popular mattress. The original hybrid, it's engineered for cool, comfortable sleep. You can get a more restful and more soothing night sleep if it's a little warm in your August with the wave hybrid mattress, which provides more support than foam alone. Or upgrade to the wave hybrid snow mattress with snow technology to give you a full night of cooler sleep if you need to try it to believe it, Casper offers free contactless delivery and a risk. Free Hundred night trial. Discover the Casper difference today at casper.com and use code here 100 for $100 off select mattresses that's code HERE 100. Thatcasper.com for $100 off. Hey there. I'm Scott rank, host of the podcast history unplugged. Now, it really is a dream come true to get paid to talk about history without all the stress while still being able to make a living. And I did it with Spreaker from iheart. Not only did they make it super easy to monetize my podcast, but ad revenue is 3 to four times higher with spreaker than with any other host I've worked with. So if you want to turn your passion into a podcast and give this a try, visitspreaker.com, that's SPREAKER. Dot com get paid to talk about the things you love. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Robert what I've passed this sport, Moira. That's a perfect way to open this episode, because it's it could happen here, the podcast about things falling apart and putting them back together sometimes. Not often enough, because I'm a hack and a fraud, but *************. This is Robert Evans, and my guest today is Moira Meltzer Cohen. Moira, you are my lawyer and you are my editor. You edited after the revolution a book in stores now. So you're you're you're many, many things to me. And today you're going to help me understand the Supreme Court. That's a that's a lofty bowl. Of course, let me be a little more specific about why we're chatting today on for the internet's sake. The Supreme Court last week issued a ruling, and there may have been another ruling by the time you hear this, but this specific ruling was about a case that had to do with what's called a Bivens action. If you have seen people talking about this Supreme Court ruling online, it is probably been with them sharing. An image of the United States that shows the 100 mile zone where Border Patrol is able to operate and being like now, because of this ruling, Border Patrol can come into your house with impunity and do whatever they want to you. There's been a lot of like, stuff said about this ruling, and as is often the case when people are get really up in arms about the the niche aspects of a court ruling, they're not entirely correct. About what the ruling does. The 100 mile zone is absolutely a real thing and the feds can do all sorts of ****** ** **** to you in your house. But that is yeah, let's talk about this. Yeah. Sure so. I think the 1st place to start is people are always asking me when can the feds kick in my door. My girlfriend always says when it's closed. But I say is whenever they want to, right? What might change from case to case is how they rationalize it in court later. And so this is this is really. A case that. Further reinforces. The fact that for many, many years, federal agents in particular, border control. Have been able have had a lot of power. To conduct searches. If they rationalize those searches with respect to immigration or in, in this case the even more hype term, national security. So this is not new. The federal statute outlining the powers and duties of border officers was passed, I think in 1952 and I believe always said that border agents can conduct searches within, quote, a reasonable distance of the border. I think case law has determined that that reasonable distance is 100 miles. They're not really looking at anything particularly new here. So. That one of the things about this 100 miles is people keep saying, oh, the 4th Amendment doesn't exist within 100 miles of the border. Does. This is not considered to be a violation of the 4th amendment because a search within a reasonable distance of the border is considered a reasonable search. Right. The 4th Amendment protects you from unreasonable searches, and this is statutorily considered a reasonable search, right. So I feel like a lot of the media around this particular case is kind of an exercise in extreme point missing. It's both an overreaction to some things that are outrageous, but are in no way new. Everyone's sharing these maps like you said. And again, it's one of those things where it's like, we're not saying there's not a lot of that, that this is not a problem, that there are problems with the hunt. There isn't that the 100 mile zone isn't a problem. The Border Patrol, there's not a lot of messed up stuff that they do. It's it's the idea that, like, this ruling came out and suddenly there's no more 4th Amendment right, like, which is how some people have interpreted it, because the Internet is a machine that devours context. That's right, social media is. I would say yeah, sure. So so this case is is called Egbert V Bull, which I just think it's a marvelous case name and these are all incredible. The original Bivens case is Bivens versus 6 unknown named agents, which I also like a lot, 6 unknown narcotics agents. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of sort of wonderful. Case names. My favorite, of course, is Alien V Predator. Yeah. You see what I did there? I did. I did. I just showed Garrison aliens last weekend. So I was. Oh, for the first time, yes. Marvelous. So I don't know. I think what's happening here is that even among people who kind of have a sense of history or an analysis, there's maybe this lingering belief that the legal system is supposed to protect us, or that maybe at some time it did protect us. And it just like persists like a vestigial tale of of, like hope. But I kind of love this case. I did read this case, and at least as Clarence Thomas describes him, the plaintiff in this case, who's bull, is basically the viewpoint character from a Steely Dan song. Like. He like appears to have sort of sprang fully formed from the head of Donald Fagan and he drove off with his vanity plate that says smuggler. Honestly, I'm sure you're going to tell me it was something problematic, but sounds like a cool dude to me. He spent years playing both sides of this game. He would get paid by people to smuggle them across the Canadian border, and he'd make them. He'd like extort money from them. He'd make them buy a room at his hotel even if they weren't going to stay at his hotel. And then he'd charge them money for every hour that he spent driving to pick them up and take them across to Canada. And then he would turn around and get paid by the feds to snitch on the people who had just paid him to smuggle them across the border. Cheese. Yeah. All right. Now, I don't think this guy's cool. Yeah. So he basically ends up getting in an altercation with a federal agent. It's back to being cool, OK? And then when he makes an administrative complaint to the agency, the agent 6 the IRS on him. This is, I mean, all right. It's not good behavior, right? Right. But now, after years of doing dirty work for the feds, bull is outraged because he never thought tigers would eat his face. So he sues the agent under Bivens, which is a case that sort of a little bit maybe sometimes. Gives individuals a very narrowly tenuous, circumscribed opportunity to sue federal agents for certain civil rights violations. And it's not a very strong right. And it has been getting ever more eviscerated since 1980. And really what Bivens does is it gives you. You know, in the very unlikely event that you win a Bivens claim, it gives you money damages. It doesn't give you their law, it doesn't give you better police practices. It doesn't make you safer. It's not nothing. But it's not like it's it's money, right? Usually what the law can give you, right? So unless you're harboring the delusion that there is a sort of direct connection between being allowed to try, usually unsuccessfully, to recover money from the federal government. And the self-control or good behavior of federal agents? Bivens is not actually a particularly useful mechanism for pursuing anything that resembles like a well developed vision of justice, right. It's not nothing I don't, I don't want to dismiss the utility of divens, but it's. You know it's not like. It's not a strong right. It's not a reliable right. You know, to sue. It's not very effective, one of my beloved colleagues. Described it, he said. Bibbins is such a bad doctrine that it's taking other doctrines down with it, right? It's just. It's Umm. It's just such a weak case at this point that it trying to, trying to use it and trying to invoke it can actually end up just being counterproductive as it is in this case. Right. Yeah. We have a a very unsympathetic plaintiff. And we have a really weak doctrine. So he sues under Bivens, it goes up and down the courts. It winds up in the Supreme Court, which issues a sort of a bunch of sort of fragmented opinions. But ultimately, all the justices mostly agree this is not a super controversial question, at least within the context of the Court itself. Yeah, so the first thing is they all say you don't. There's no right to sue for money damages under the theory of First Amendment retaliation, meaning Wallhead sued the agent. For basically for punishing him for making a complaint, he's saying I exercised my First Amendment right to make a complaint to the agency you work for. And then you punish me by sicking the IRS on me, right? Which I I see why that's questionable in the actual, like, legal argumentation. Yeah. So? You know. The justices say no, that that's not a right that exists, and then they have some differing thoughts on whether or not you can sue for excessive force. But ultimately the the big decision that is made here isn't about the border, it's not about the relative impunity of Border Patrol, which. Has long operated with relative impunity, just like the rest of the federal government. Remember that impunity when they were firing tear gas at us? Yeah, I you know. They they decide you can't sue them. Which, if you if you ever, could have sued them, I guess in a successful or effective way, and if suing them had ever had a meaningful impact on their behavior. I guess this opinion would be a real loss, but all this opinion really does, as far as I can tell, and I've spoken with my colleagues, and we all agreed that the sort of uproar over this particular case is a little baffling. Because all it really does is further remove what was already a really inaccessible and pretty weak remedy. And yeah, no, sorry, sorry. Well, you know, and then everyone lost their minds and started sharing the ACLU ACLU's map of the what 100 miles of border looks like and getting really mad on Twitter. Yeah. And again, the 100 mile Porter zone. I think it's fair to say that, like, that's a problem. I don't like that's that's a bad way for things to work. The Border Patrol, as we talked about in our two parter on the Border Patrol, has a lot of massive issues with it, but I, I feel like kind of what's happening here. Is. Some of this is like a little bit of collective PTSD because of the shock of the imminent kind of demise of Roe. And so I think maybe there's this kind of expectation that every ruling issued by the Supreme Court, because, **** it is going to be. This kind of like earth shattering, like end of a fundamental right. And in this case, it's really just like, no, this is more or less like, this is not a massive sea change. Yeah, we're the same. I like to say about this kind of thing. It's appalling, but it's not surprising. I I do want to note, just for your listeners, this case does not in any way touch our right to Sue State level, please. Because there is federal legislation called section 1983 that gives us permission to sue the police, and for some strange reason the federal government has not passed similar legislation allowing us to sue them. That's really surprising. I wonder why. So in any case, one of the things the court says in the bull opinion is that if the feds wanted to be constrained by the citizenry, Congress would have given us the right to constrain them so. So I think this particular case that people have been flipping out about is a great sort of example of the the way that. The sort of the. Zeitgeist moves so inexplicably to make much of things that are. Maybe not all that much. And well, also kind of failing to notice things that are really significant. And so I'd like to sort of highlight some of those things. I think there actually are real reasons to grieve and prepare and gather our courage. Based on what the Supreme Court has done this term and I, I'd love to talk to you about some of those things. So I do think there are real reasons, as I said, to grieve and prepare and some of those without getting too in the in the weeds. I guess I want to talk 1st about the shadow docket, which is shadow docket is a is a kind of a more recently coined term, but what it means is what it's referring to are the cases that are often heard. Well, they're not heard, they're decided by the Supreme Court on the basis of the record below, often without oral argument, and they're often issued as holding decisions without. Written opinion. So they're often not justified or rationalized or, you know, the reasoning. For the decisions that are made is often not made transparent to the public. OK. Yeah. Are cases that are sort of highly procedural or there? Not super complicated questions or their questions of law where there's like maybe a circuit split and they just need to resolve, you know what might otherwise be repugnant views of the law, right? And the shadow docket has recently included Jeff penalties issues. We decided something of such phrase import with decisions that are not explained by our opinion, where the justices do not make clear that reasoning. This is in my opinion. Hmm. Problematic. And it's, you know, the amount of power that can be exercised by the Supreme Court to me, I think requires a really intense degree of transparency. If you're, I think that like the amount of transparency that is, it's incumbent upon you to have a sort of inversely proportionate to the amount of power you exercise. Yeah, that makes sense. And so the Supreme Court has to, I mean literally life. How are you? Yeah. So for them to be making decisions on the shadow docket about death penalty cases and death penalty jurisdictions is just wild. It's troubling. It's frightening. You know, I I think I can't remember if I talked to you before about. How about the injuries? Yeah, maybe in the show about it, but I've certainly talked to you about it. We might need to do it. It's probably a good idea at some point to do a show about it, but yeah. One of the things. That makes grand juries so anomalous is that they they aren't public, right? And that, to me, like this, is anathema. Well, not to me. Yeah, in terms of the sort of received wisdom about the American legal system, to have secret proceedings is anathema to the underlying principles of due process, which, you know, which involves. Well, notice and a hearing. But really, there's a commitment to publicity right in the American legal system that is undermined and trampled upon by federal grand juries, and that there is a similar thing happening here with the shadow docket. We know at least what the cases are, we know what the opinions are, what the holdings end up being. But to have these kinds of cases and decided without oral argument? Have these places in decided without written opinions? It's troubling, yeah. So that's a move toward an exercise of power that I would characterize as authoritative and that I find very concerning. One of the things that we're seeing and I think it's sort of not unrelated to that is that they're they're they seem to be dispensing with the doctrine is very decisive, which is president, right the the idea that. Previously decided cases are binding. And you know, if you overturn one, you really have to be very clear that that's what you're doing and you have to explain why. And we see that with the least Rd rash. They were they, they have, you know, if indeed they. Issue it. Sure. Because yeah. And this is like an originalism thing, right? Like, you, you can throw out precedent if you're saying all that matters is this interpretation. You're saying it's based on the original intent of like. Some dead dudes. Is that more or less an accurate way to say it? Or? You can overturn President you know overturned precedent we would have that I think the just outcome or whatever. But I think there there's many reasons that you can overturn President, but they seem to be doing it sort of sub silentio right. They're not, they're not always. The leaked Rd rap did was pretty clear and transparent about it, but I think there are some other things that are going on. There was a 6th Amendment case where. They just. Just sort of didn't mention all of the countervailing precedent. You know they there's some stuff happening there is a case in Texas if there was a Fifth Amendment case where the court. The Supreme Court. Sent it back down to either the district or the Court of Appeals. I don't. I don't remember. Either the district or the circuit. And said, look this this guy who's on death row did absolutely receive ineffective assistance of counsel. Whether the is prejudice and the Texas court. You just ignored them. Yeah. And that's one of those ones that people freaked out about. That was like, yeah, I think folks should be very unsettled by this, right? And then the court was like. They didn't. The court, the Supreme Court, just didn't. They just let them get away with it, basically, and so there's this sort of weird. Umm. Push and pull happening not only between this court interpreting the last court. Opinion and deciding basically not to enforce them. But but there's a interesting power struggle where the Supreme Court seems to be strategically feeding power to certain. Certain lower courts in a way that. Unusual, yeah. You know, so you know they're not, they're not being. Transparent. They are not following precedent. They are not enforcing the hierarchy of the course. Which does sound like an odd thing I think that you need to complain about, but one of one of the things that we want to know is that. You know, one of the ways that you can anticipate what the law is or make reliable legal arguments is that the law has to be consistent with, you know, the law and the lower courts have to be consistent with what the Supreme Court has said. And if we can no longer rely on that, it's, you know, chaotic, potentially really bad for us, really bad for our clients, apparently, particularly clients who are facing the death penalty, which is. Particular concern. This court does seem pretty intent on knocking over the entire 5th amendment. And then I think yesterday or the day before they issued a really important immigration case on the class actions that were brought by or on behalf of people who were detained in immigration detention for like months and months and months without hearing, without volunteering. And essentially what the court held was that lower courts don't have any authority to. Lower court staff company authority to. Demand that the federal government do or not do certain things because they're they're plaintiffs of the Immigration and Naturalization Act does not give them that authority. And and so there there's a lot. I think the big trend here is there's a lot of protecting the federal government from any kind of accountability. Accountability that's being imposed by lower federal court. States rights. They have pretty cool way of showing it. I don't know what else to say about it because it is one of those things where. You know, when when we talk about or when I talk about, like, the frustration at people kind of sharing information about stuff the court is doing or about changes to how our rights are being interpreted by courts that are incorrect? It's not because, like, there's not a problem. It's because it's really important to be aware of like, the. It's really important to, like, see the the problem accurately and to see it like, it's this, it's this broad assault, like, like you said, the fact that. The fact that you have this kind of high level attack on the 5th Amendment is really frightening because that's one of like. Theoretically, our primary protections. Yeah, that's that's it. There's also, I think there's going to be a Miranda case soon, which is. Oh boy, I'm not looking forward to that. Anxious about that. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think that the general thing. So. You know. I I think the thing that I would like to highlight here is. Paying attention to what rights disagreeing court is trampling on is obviously pretty important. But. It's pretty likely to be kind of more of the same, particularly for quality targeted groups of people. Right, like the law is. In certain respects fictional. Right, like the Lie is an abstract concept. Exactly, yes. Impact. I it's not, you know, like, I don't want to get all postmodern here. It's not a lot of fictional things have have real impacts. Exactly like. If they have real impact obviously, but I think that. The impact of Supreme Court ruling. You know. It's very serious, it's very important. Umm. But it doesn't sort of immediately transform the world. I think it just sort of changes what kinds of solutions we look to right and like. I'm not particularly inclined to look to the court. To protect me or anyone and not particularly. I don't trust. The lot was sport enough to really want them to be the arbiters of things like. Free speech or yeah, absolutely not. The Council, but, you know, my hope is that we can. Take care of each other enough to to make the course they're relevant, which I realize is a delayed type thing, but. I guess. The thing you know, especially with Rose and I, I was, I was talking to Margaret, Mutual friend about this, the thing that is going to change if Roe is overturned. Is really going to be what solutions are available to us and how much courage will it take to pursue them, and what are the potential consequences? Right, yeah. What kind of resource is it do we need? I think. In the face of. These Supreme Court decisions, some of which are genuinely terrible and some of which are just reinforcing. Things that have long been. Yeah. You know, our grief and our outrage and our Twitter post. Are not practiced. They are not necessarily useful. And and even getting super in the leaves of, you know, what does this opinion actually say? I mean, I think that is interesting, but it's kind of good to know and it's good to at least have somebody around, you know? Umm. But. Instead of spending so much time focusing on. The. Real nitpicky language that's being used by the unelected God King of the United States. Maybe we should start thinking a little bit more about what are the material impacts that that might have and what are ways? What are tools that maybe aren't? Legal tools, or at least that aren't only legal tools. That might be useful in. Picturing. The things that we value. And I think that's both an important note and a good one to end on, Moira. I will run one thing by you real quick so. I have a plan and I I want to, I want your advice on the constitutionality of this. I would like to acquire Fort Bragg. So I'm thinking what I do is I go in a Third Amendment case right, and say that well I mean if look you can't what if we just extended the Quartering act right like in the you know could we could we push it even further so that nobody can host soldiers and then all those military bases are going to be, there's going to be a fire sale. You can't keep soldiers on them. Government's not going to keep running them. And then I get to own Fort Bragg. How, how are we doing? Is that, is that legal? Is the whole end goal that you own Fort Bragg? That is one of the end goals. I think you should probably talk to your contact at racing on OK, OK. Because yeah, you're right. They're probably gonna outbid me anyway. OK, but constitutionally I'm on solid grounds with the 3rd, right? That's bulletproof. You know, like like many of the questions you asked me. The legal questions you asked me, I think the answer is nobody knows. Nobody knows. OK, I'm going to, I'm going to do what the NRA did with the 2nd, but with the 3rd amendment. It's going to take a couple of decades, but I I feel, I feel good about this course of action. Thank you for putting up with me, Moira. You had some stuff you wanted to plug at the end of this episode here I do. I would like to pause the Reaper Legal Defense Fund of if, when, how? Because if we're going to talk about Roe at all, the little boy, yeah. Funny, which can be found at repro legaldefensefund.org they have a donate page. They're doing amazing work. I'm just incredibly impressed with them. They are also at risk for legal defense funds on. Instagram, and probably also on Twitter. But I don't really understand Twitter, so I'm not going to swear to it. That's for the best. We'll check that out. Wipro Legal fund. So please donate to the Reproductive Legal Fund Twitter.com repro legal fund. By the time this episode drops, we may have. The row thing so. I know everybody's gearing up, but you know, this is definitely a it's it's it's good to help out. We all need to be like. Poland, because we're not going to yank this back on course through just hoping that eventually the Supreme Court gets better. Well, we kind of wish really hard. It would be nice, it would be nice, but I think organizing is probably a more effective thing to do in the immediate term. So yeah, I thank you, Moira. And that's the episode. Football is back, and bet MGM is inviting new customers to join the huddle and enjoy the action like never before. Sign up today using bonus code champion and your first wager is risk free up to $1000. You'll also have instant access to a variety of parlay selection features, player props, and boosted odd specials. Just download the bet MGM app today or go to betmgm.com and enter. Bonus code champion and place your first wager risk free up to $1000 the bet MGM app is the perfect way to experience the excitement of wagering on live sports now in more markets than ever. Visitbetmgm.com for terms and conditions must be 21 years of age or older to wager Virginia only new customer offer. All promotions are subject to qualification and eligibility requirements. Rewards issued as non withdrawable free bets or site credit free bets expire 7 days from issuance. Please gamble responsibly gambling problem call 188853230. 500. So by now we imagine that you've seen the theories on tick tock. You maybe even heard the rumors, your friends and loved ones. But are any of the stories about government conspiracies and cover ups actually true? The answer is surprisingly or unsurprisingly, yes. For more than a decade, we here at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions, sometimes their answers that people would rather us not explore. Now we're sharing this research with you for the first time ever in a book format, you can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know now. It's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. Hey, it's Roy Wood, junior, host of The Daily Show podcast beyond the scenes, and we are back for season 2. Beyond the scenes is the podcast where we go even deeper into segments and topics we covered on the show, but they're topics that deserve a little more time, a little more finessing details, you know? So this season, we're bringing on more Daily Show writers, producers and correspondents. We're bringing on more experts to drop knowledge on all sorts of topics. You're going to get some knowledge that you can't get anywhere else. Breaking it down the season 2 we talking gentrification, we talk in gun laws, book banning, Black Trail Blazers in fashion, all the trash ways that people treat flight attendants as well. And shout out to the flight attendants how you keeping us safe and still got time to give me a biscoff cookie respect. Listen to beyond the scenes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It don't matter where you get it, baby. Just find us. Oh, it could happen here, which is the podcast that this is. I'm Robert Evans. With me, our other people. Hello, other people. Hi. Hey. Hello. Hmm. So this podcast, things falling apart, put them back together, yadda yadda yadda today our guest. Well, not our guest. Our host is the inimitable Andrew. Andrew. Hey. Hey, how's it going? What are we talking about today? What are we learning? I'm good. I'm good today, hoping to tackle another book, kind of. This one's not fictional like the past two, so I do hope to like explore some of those in the future, because I think some good conversations come out to those. This week we're going to be talking about Paulo Freire and the pedagogy of the oppressed. Yes. For those who don't know, Paulo Freire is a Brazilian educator and one leading advocates of well was a Brazilian educator and leading advocates of critical pedagogy. Pedagogy is basically like the study of education, philosophy of education. He was born in 1921 and. His experiences kind of led him to that path because during his childhood and adolescence he was falling behind in school because. He was poor. His poverty and his hunger affected his ability to learn and. So as he got older and he got opportunities and he was able to study and so on and. He basically realized it needs to do more to uplift the lives of the poor and improve the lives of the poor. Or to facilitate better educational outcomes. As he says in Warren Court, I didn't understand anything because of my hunger. I wasn't dumb. It wasn't a lack of interest. My social condition just didn't allow me to have an education. Experience showed me once again the relationship between social class and knowledge. So as he progressed in his studies and in his writing and stuff, he eventually contributed to a philosophy of education which blended classical approaches stemming from play 2 and modern Marxist and post Marxist and anticolonial thinkers. When I was reading the book it really. Sort of struck me. I've got a lot of. I got a lot of friends fun on vibes from his work. He died in 1997. RIP. But his greatest contribution, to me at least, and to most people, it's his book, the pedagogy of the oppressed. In the book, he sort of explores a detailed Marxist class analysis in the relationship between like the colonizer and the colonized, the oppressor and the oppressed. And he talks about the. Banking model of education that traditional pedagogy exposes because it treats the students as like this bank, this empty vessel to be filled with knowledge. Instead, he argues for a form of. Education of pedagogy that treats the Luna as a Co creator in knowledge as far as I'm aware, and I guess it kind of is illustrated in the book itself, but as far as I know there wasn't an anarchist or libertarian socialist or any variety, but he still ended up coming to some. Anarchic conclusions with regard to the education system and learning and stuff, I mean, and I guess have been writing about, you know, like youth liberation and the school system, and even experimenting with new models of schooling for a long time. The furrer movement, for example, experimented with implementing modern schools in in the US and in Spain. Emma Goldman was very much involved in that process, and. I don't think that the experiments were necessarily free of error, but I think they did a good job of trying something new, trying something with more liberatory in the sphere of education, because I mean, for the past several 100 years now, we've kind of been going with this sort of. Prussian model of education is very strict, very regimented, very divided model of education, the rules to sort of. Ferment, nationalism and division, class divisions and stuff within the populace. So I think that any experimentation in the more libertarian direction is. A positive. In preface. There sort of goes into why this book came about. He's talking about his experience as a teacher in Brazil, the time, the observations he made well in political exile and so. What he realized as a teacher when he was teaching his students is that they had a sort of a fear of freedom. It's not like a real fair freedom. It's more of a fear of the risks associated with freedom. Because of the experiences and stuff that they've had. What do you consider as the most vital, however, to the education system? It's sort of the establishing a conscientious out or critical consciousness within students. A consciousness that. Commits to social change and human liberation, according to Freud, the educational model. Can only really be successful if people are radicalized through it. If people are able to see the issues in their current society, think about them, Stew upon them, criticize them, compare them and and look at ways to solve them. And if they don't come out with that sort of critical consciousness, then it's. All for north, basically, the education system is kind of spinning on top of mud. I find it especially interesting that I ended up reading this when I did because as we've seen in the US, a lot of conversations and now attacking anything even approaching critical consciousness with this, you know, whole debate going on about critical race theory and this sort of. Even though critical series aren't being taught in primary or secondary education. This attack, this flip front attack on anything that resembles critical thinking and. Critical study of history and of the present. So in chapter one. Frere makes a case for why the pedagogy, the press is necessary. He says that humankind central problem is how we affirm our identity as human beings. Everyone is trying to reach that sort of affirmation and that sort of human identity, that sort of humanness. But oppression? And systems of oppression interrupt that process. They prevent people from expressing and establishing their full humanity. Whether you're talking about racism, keeping people from reaching their full potential, or sexism, preventing people or, you know, cetera, patriarchy with the whole limitations and. Such puts upon people's sexuality and gender expression and gender identification. All of these systems of oppression to put in place, to restrict and confine and bound us. Below, you know our full potential. And so. A lot of that and a lot of the you know, cultivation and. Forging of ones awareness of, you know, the systems around them and how to operate within them. Sixth place in the education system and so the education system. Is should be one of the critical junctures in which we. We each our fight for oppressed people. There's a sort of. Dehumanization that occurs. As a result of oppression. Whether it be? In the form of. Comparing people to. Animals as Reese is soft and doom whether it be in the form of. Decreasing people to. This sort of childlike status. Which itself is a is a form of oppression, because the fact that you know. Childlikeness and youth is considered to be something less than it's just another we they were people are oppressed and another we and where people are prevented from asserting there autonomy and their humanity. Oppressors. They tend to treat people as objects to be possessed. I see freedom as threatening. And. In turn, oppressed people and are becoming illuminated from each other through oppression and begin to see their oppressors as something to strive towards for. Our talks about how the oppressed, the whole vision and the whole understanding of what being human is, is being like oppressors. And so. A lot of people, and you see that even today, you know, when they strive for freedom. They strive to become entrepreneurs, you know. They strive to become business owners. They strive to become billionaires and CEO's and. All these sort of. Images of what's, you know, what being human looks like because people are striving to be free, and if the only way you can get a mesh of freedom is by becoming an oppressor yourself, then it makes sense. A lot of oppressive looking to try to do that, of course, as Frere himself says, and. You presses themselves a knots. Fully free either because by denying your press people their humanity. They rob themselves of humanity. The fight for liberation has, fair argues, must consist of two stages, reflection on the nature of oppression and the concrete action needed to change it. And that sort of reading that that that line, I'm paraphrasing, but it it reminds me of the process of prefigurative politics. Where not only are you. Bringing about the consciousness of people to recognize these systems of oppression and to understand how they operate. But the concrete action to change it is one that is intended to reflect the society that we wish to establish in the future. Fred does one that you know leaders and stuff must engage in dialogue with the press people rather than becoming like oppressors. But as the book goes on, I think he relies a bit too much on this concept of leaders as. Well, he he warns against them existing above the people, but he's still sort of. Upholds that distinction between the leaders and the people. As the book progresses, he begins to compare the concept of the banking model to the concept of the problem posing model of education, as he calls it. In the banking model called he, the teacher talks about reality as if it were emotionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds upon a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to fill the students with the contents of his narration, contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them. I could give them significance. We would say emptied of their concreteness, and become a hollow, alienated and alienating verbosity. Are you being? That sentence is quite verbose, but. On the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through the following attitudes and practices which mirror oppressive society as a whole. The teacher teaches and the students are taught. The teacher knows everything and the student knows nothing. Teacher thinks and the students are thoughts about. The teacher talks and the students listen meekly. The teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined. The teacher chooses and enforces his choice and the students comply. The teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher. The teacher chooses the program content and the students who were not consulted adapt to it. The teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which they set in opposition to the freedom of the students. The teacher is the subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects. I think Farrah needed to incorporate some more gender neutral language in that, so I had to kind of correct him there. But. That quotes that that quote in full. It really reminds me of my schooling experience. As some people may know, I was actually homeschooled for the majority of my learning experience. I actually didn't know that. Oh now you know. Yeah. So I was I was home schooled for like see the majority of my education experience and then after I went into college and stuff. But before then I did make it through the school system and. Even though it's really long time ago, my memories are still crystal clear of that process. You know, I remember seeing students being disciplined. I myself was kind of a a teachers pet, but that does not surprise me. Yeah. In the best possible way. I'm not sure to take it, but I'll take it in a good way because me too, Andrew. Not me. That also doesn't surprise me. Teachers are cops. Oh my God. Yeah, this is my prionic status. I wasn't, you know, I didn't. I wasn't jumping out the booth canal with the Black Flag, you know? Yeah. Unfortunately, a cab includes the person who tried to get me to read catcher in the rye. Catching the Rye was a good book. It was a good fight. It's perfectly fine book. I'm just being an *******. But but like Andrew, what are you alluding here? Is that like, Stoicism is something that is weaponized in the education system? Dosim. Stoicism being like, no emotion, delivering like, right, right, right. Because I was thinking the philosophy and I was like, yeah. No, but like yeah you were like a vessel for quote UN quote facts and knowledge to be like injected into you for you to like hold as as yeah it's we're seeing a resurgence in this type of thing. All the albeit probably a little bit less eloquently stated in some of like the anti schooling anarchist literature that's been coming out the past few years or at least has been gaining more traction in the past few years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Because this. And that's kind of, that's kind of The funny thing about it because. Most people in their schooling experience can recall it being in some ways negative, even if they look at it in a positive light. We can, at least if they don't go in that fully radical direction. Most people can look at some of the elements to their schooling, of their education. And so that wasn't right. You know, something messed up about that, even something as simple as having to like ask, you know, the teacher to go and and use the toilet. It's just, it's just those sorts of. Little ways of control, so like as I was saying. In in my school in the experience back when I was in primary school. I was very adorable. I'm sure you could guess, but. Are overseeing these students being disciplined they had. The bell had rung for you know the end of break and he was you know, file back into class but. I think there was a a school next door that was having some kind of event and they were playing like music. And so a bunch of students in my class, not me, but a bunch of students in my class were, you know, dancing at the side of the school, enjoying the music, having a good time or whatever. They heard the bell and they didn't go because they were, you know, they were having a good time. They were like 678. But then afterwards the teacher, after, you know, I sit down and stuff teacher goes and finds them and brings them in. And this is prior to. At least to my knowledge, prior to the corporal punishment being phased out of schools. So. I just remember seeing them having to, you know, like lay out their hand and receive punishment for daring to have joy after hours. You know, daring to enjoy themselves. What I was supposed to be class time and they're supposed to be in class. I'm sure people have similar experiences here, at least of yeah, that kind of punishment and control. I mean, this is not the same kind of punishment, but I think to your point of being controlled, like, even just like. Not even being aware of it, just like being forced to stand up and say the Pledge of Allegiance in the America, for example, it becomes this like, repetitive culty thing every morning that you're expected to do. And if you don't do it, personal experience. If you refuse to do that, you have to go to the principal's office and explain why it happens over and over again. And I think it's like. You're you're questioned and you're punished. Even for like thinking, not like differently or questioning, even thinking, just questioning reality. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and in Syria when I was, I went to school in Syria when I was really small and me and my sister ate really slow and we would get a hit with a ruler on our hands. It could because we didn't finish lunch fast enough. So yeah, mine isn't that intense. But the school I went to when I was a little kid in Oklahoma, number one, they paddled us. That was legal as a public school. But my first grade teacher was obsessed with the fact that, like, it was bad to be left-handed and. You know she couldn't she, she couldn't do the **** that they used to do, right. They used to like **** kids up for using their left hands. But she would every single day, like, chide me and tell me that I should use my right hand to write and stuff. That it wasn't like proper. That it was like bad that because if you, if you, if you're not aware, if you're not left-handed, when you're like do stuff with a pencil and you're left-handed, you get a bunch of, like pencil stuff on your on the side of your hand, right? It's just like a because of the way that unless you're using like those weird left-handed notebooks and **** which no one ever has. And she would like, she gave me so much **** for being dirty because like, I would get stuff on my hand. It was just like when I tell people that it's like really, this was like the 90s. It's yeah, there's there's a few of those folks left. I think she was extremely Catholic and I know none seems to go ******* **** on that stuff. I didn't know that Catholic people cared about the left-handed thing. I don't know Catholic, Catholic schools used to. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I wouldn't say that. Like it's I don't think there's anything in like the catechism. About not being left-handed, right, right. I mean, like in some very strict Muslim culture, a lot of it is like phased out. But for example, your left hand isn't meant to be used as the primary hand because it's like a dirty hand, like the one you wipe yourself with. For. Yeah, the one kill yourself with. Yeah, there's a lot, but like. Yeah, I know. You were left-handed though. Yikes. Ohh yes. Yeah, yeah. Yikes. Thank you. Thank you. You should be concerned. I have to make a number of things frustrating, like shearing sheep. Anyway, whatever. Well, everything is designed for right-handed people for sure. Like guitars, everything. Yeah, it is. You try. Speaking of sounds, but we are the master, right? OK. Sorry. Speaking of hands, Speaking of hands, just out of curiosity, did you all have the hand up? Hand out experience? Hand out what's hand out. Basically, it's just sort of a. Tool use such as sort of a sort of repetitive, kind of follow instructions kind of thing. So like if the class is getting too rowdy, it's like hands up, hands out, hands up, hands out. And the teacher does not stop saying it until everyone is quiet down. And it's just like like a robot, just reason and over in the house. I don't think I've experienced that, and I mean. I did. I wasn't assistant teacher at one point. And for for very, very young children, I'm talking like 4 to 5 year olds. And I understand the frustration of like you're just trying to get something done and everyone's in a while, you know, they just had snacks or whatever, and it's kind of wild, but. I think that says more about like the methods we use in than about the children themselves. You know, small boat like you have to, you shouldn't adjust more to like their cycles and and their needs and their stage rather than trying to force and shove them into this sort of like military robotic. Yeah, no, totally. It's. They're not allowed to actually develop naturally or like be themselves in a setting like that. Yeah, exactly. I think what happens that kind of throws me is that. And people have these experiences, you know, traumatic and not as dramatic in the education system. A lot of people. But some people, when they come out radicalized by it and other people end up. Being the. Like most stringent, most passionate of advocates of it, like even like this Catholic school teacher you're talking about, Robert. Like at some point she was also in the education system. And it really makes me wonder, like, what she went through to have to come up with that kind of mindset. Yeah. I mean, I think she'd grown up in Oklahoma, too. So it must have been a nice, like, everything in that state. Yeah. Yeah, like why does it have a Panhandle anyway? I mean the there is a reason for that, and it's not fun, but OK, I'm assuming it's slavery. Any ****** ** geographic thing going on in the South? The reason is generally slavery. Yeah, right. Right, right, right. And so. She spends a lot of time talking about this banking model and we could go on and on about it. I spent a lot of time just talking about the education system and all my problems with it, and at some point I would like to do an episode about different schools and part of how those sort of transpired. But what Fryer proposes as an alternative? Is the problem posing model. Which is basically through dialogue. The teacher and the students. Ceased to exist. The teacher of the students and the students of the teacher ceased to exist. So instead of there being these two separate categories, they are teachers, students and student teachers. There's no separation anymore between the one who teaches and the one who has taught. Rather, there's a dialogue between the two as they become part of this process where all of them couldn't grow. You know, you let go of this sort of. Authoritarian arrangement? And. Allow people to. Teach and be taught to. Learn and be learning to. Really draw out. What it is that we have to gain from each other? Rather than being sort of docile, listeners the students. And the teachers, the student Teachers, teachers, students. They become Co investigators in dialogue, they become. Critics, they become. Radicals who are able to. Open up. And demythologize the way that reality works, whether human beings exist in the world. Banking education tends to inhibit creativity and try to domesticate our consciousness. They're back to when I was talking about human domestication. The other day. But in contrast the problem posing model. Tries to. It really bases itself on creativity and stimulates. Rather than domestication. A sort of a full flourishing of what someone could be unbound and unshackled. So in summary, banking theory is immobilizing. It's it's it's fixating it. There's an acknowledge people as people. But rather as objects. Whereas the problem posing model it takes people's historicity, it takes peoples humanity as their starting point upon which they can. Draw and learn from each other. I think that's what frustrated me the most about the education system in the time that I was in it and even when I got back and I was in college, even though it was not as bad in some ways. Because, you know, in college they tend to emphasize dialogue a bit more in certain classes. But. I find the issue is that there's assumption in, you know, the earlier sections of schooling in secondary school, in primary school and even preschool that the children and the youths, you know, they're not there to have anything to add. They're just there to regurgitate to to, to study, and to repeat what they've studied for approval. Which is something I definitely did. Back in the day. If what's lacking is is dialogue, a dialogue that requires you know, hope and trust and critical thinking? Then. Liberation, you know, would also be lacking. There can't be dialogue without love for. The building for people and for. Knowledge and fur. Bringing that knowledge out to people. So, as France says, you know love is at the same time the foundation of dialogue and dialogue itself. On the other hand, dialogue cannot exist without humility. The naming of the world through which people constantly recreate that world cannot be an act of arrogance. I remember in countering a lot of arrogant teachers and lecturers and stuff in my time three education system. Are all being condescended to on multiple occasions, and that's the thing. Nobody likes being condescended to, but condescension is kind of the defaults. We in which we engage with young people. It just sort of there's this projected ignorance upon them, as if they have nothing of value to add or to share. And On the contrary, you know, we all have something to contribute if we all closed off and if we are closed off to the, you know, contributions of others. We can't engage in dialogue with them if we are fearful, if we are. Considering people to be like. Inferior in some ways, if we kind of embrace people as equals, and how can we engage in dialogue with them? I think there's a beauty in the way that he reflects on dialogue, and he goes on and on about it for quite a while. At one point he says that dialogue requires an intense faith in humankind's faith, in their power to make and remake, to create and recreate faith and their vocation to be more fully human, which is not the privilege of an elite, but the birthright of all. And so finally when he's talking about action and how this sort of changes brought about. He divides cultural action into two kinds, dialogical action and anti dialogical action. While the presses used antique logical action to protect their power and to separate people. Radicals can use dialectical action to bring people together and the struggle for freedom. I said different methods of anthological action. Through conquest, through divide and rule, through manipulation, through cultural invasion. Oppressors were able to. Put the oppressed in the predicament there in you know, the oppressed wouldn't be the oppressed if not for the oppressors oppressing them. That's kind of self-explanatory. But in contrast. Radicals from among the oppressed using biological action, using cooperation, unity, organization and cultural synthesis. Are you able to rise above and to push back against this oppression until? Allow education to flourish. Among all. And so I think that's the beauty of the text. You hope that it didn't abuse in people to. Really bring about these changes. And. I think it was a good read, 5 out of five. Excellent. And it's all very long, right? It's like under 200 pages from what I yeah, yeah, it's like 4 short chapters, relatively short. And know that back when you were talking about how. People are sectors of the right, specifically are so set on attacking like anything related to like critical theory or critical race theory. I the the book was was banned like like a decade and a like over a decade ago from the Arizona schools for teaching students that they are oppressed. Yeah, you. That's that's how you know that's to be expected. It's a good book. Yeah. Yeah. So that's anyway just a just a fun, fun fact there. We can't we can't have kids knowing that. They have shared interests as a group and that adults are mistreating them comprehensively. That's good. Yeah. God, you should reminded me of so many just moments that mean teachers, like, really got into it, or like the teachers that were condescending that I hated. I have to really go through the Rolodex and try to vent this out now after we finish recording. Yeah. Well. Listen if you're a child. Why are you listening to this rise up in rebellion? Destroy the adults. Their joints are terrible. Hit them in the knees, they won't recover. My joints are terrible. Uh-huh. Yeah, exactly. Some ******* 9 year old whacks you in the knee with like a shillelagh down you're you're out of the game. My knee would break, yeah. Embrace the ancient traditions, make shillelaghs and go for the ******* joints. Children of the world, you have nothing to lose what your bedtimes. Well, that's that's the episode Andrew. Football is back and better. MGM is inviting new customers to join the huddle and enjoy the action like never before. Sign up today using bonus code champion and your first wager is risk free up to $1000. You'll also have instant access to a variety of parlay selection features, player props, and boosted odd specials. Just download the bet MGM app today or go to bedmgm.com and enter. Let's go champion and place your first wager risk free up to $1000. The bet MGM app is the perfect way to experience the excitement of wagering on live sports now in more markets than ever. Visitbetmgm.com for terms and conditions must be 21 years of age or older to wager Virginia only new customer offer. All promotions are subject to qualification and eligibility requirements. Rewards issued as non withdrawable free bets or site credit free bets expire 7 days from issuance. Please gamble responsibly. Gambling problem call 188853230. 500. So by now we imagine that you've seen the theories on tick tock. You maybe even heard the rumors, your friends and loved ones. But are any of the stories about government conspiracies and cover ups actually true? The answer is surprisingly or unsurprisingly, yes. For more than a decade, we here at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions, sometimes their answers that people would rather us not explore. Now we're sharing this research with you for the first time ever in a book format, you can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know now. It's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. Hey, it's Roy Wood, junior, host of The Daily Show podcast beyond the scenes, and we are back for season 2. Beyond the scenes is the podcast where we go even deeper into segments and topics we covered on the show, but they're topics that deserve a little more time, a little more finessing details, you know? So this season, we're bringing on more Daily Show writers, producers and correspondents. We're bringing on more experts to drop knowledge on all sorts of topics. You gonna get some knowledge that you can't get anywhere else. We're breaking it down this season 2. We talking gentrification, we talking gun laws, book bannings, Black Trail Blazers in fashion, all the trash ways that people treat flight attendants as well. And shout out to the flight attendants how you keeping us safe and still got time to give me your biscoff cookie respect. Listen to beyond the scenes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It don't matter where you get it, baby. Just find us. So we record this episode? Sure. Let's start. I'm sure. I'm sure we could use some of that as the opening. Hi, welcome to it could happen here, the podcast that is about medical ethics in the 1860s. Not today, but fair. Yeah. No, to today. Today it's it's me, Christopher Wong, and we're doing an episode about inflation. And Speaking of medical ethics while Speaking of kinks, actually. The moment I said that, I was like, I have opened myself up for, Oh yeah, yeah, that was some of the film broadside. That was some of the first weird Interport Internet point I came apart. It was specifically the cast of duck tales being, like, inflated. OK, let's get to the topic of the episode. This episode is now about duck tales, inflation, pet fetish, ***********. That is enough. Pre rebel. Christopher, what do you have for us today? Yeah, so we're talking about inflation. We're talking about economic inflation. Yeah, that 1/2 be fair. This is. I mean, somebody was making money off of that inflation. I'll tell you that much. God. I mean, the one one thing duck tales actually does crossover because of Scrooge Mcduck and his giant and his giant vulture money, and that actually, it does inflation. That's right. I can tell you right now, that's not the only thing about him that was inflated. Oh boy. Talking about *** ****. OK, let's let's keep it, keep it on track. OK, so alright, alright. If people are inflation, it's not good. It's pretty high. It's probably should have looked up the inflation rate, isn't it? Like before I did this, yeah. Everything keeps going .6. Yeah. Yeah. But every time someone says it's this or it's that people are like, well, no. But they also changed these, these and these indicators five years ago and these other ones 10 years ago. So really, it would be this. And I have no way there's judging who's circulate about that. This is the thing. I didn't put this in the episode. But there's a thing that if if you study economics, you will realize pretty quickly is that all of the, like, basically all of the inconsistencies that we have are ******* ********. And they're like our basic, like they're they're they're really, really fake. Like, yeah, like we like, we don't like. One of the big ones that you know is like one of the underlying things that makes all economics fake is that no one knows how to, like, actually calculate the value of of just like a factory, like, like if you have like a bundle of goods, right. And they're not the same thing. So I don't know. You have two factories that make different things. Actually figuring out what the value of that is is like ******* impossible. And the like, the, the, the, the, the way that it's done in, like if you look at like, like, there are these. The UN produces statistical animals, right? And the values that are in the like the UN statistical analysis are literally them guessing because because this is like the value depending on like the actual value of the thing changes right depending on where it is, unlike a supply and demand curve, blah blah blah blah. And so they literally just tell the the the people who are doing the econometrics, just like pick a pick a random like price that they that they think is equilibrium. So it's it's completely ********. It's ********. Like literally all the way down. It's nonsense. All of the indexes are wrong. Yeah, unfortunately. The, the the field of economics doesn't really care about this that much. So we're going to have to sort of take them seriously. And the thing I specifically want to talk about today was. There was a really interesting paper that was produced by two economists at the DC Federal Reserve, David Ratner and Jay SIM, about why inflation happens, which is called who killed the Phillips curve and murder mystery. And we're talking about this for two reasons. One. One, because it's funny, because I what is going to happen over the course of this paper is that the Federal Reserve has comrade Federal Reserve has discovered Marxism. And they're going to attempt to solve. It's a mystery of inflation by by applying, by applying marks. And the second thing, the second reason want to talk about this is that it reveals something that's very, very important about the current political situation, which is that. Both economists, and like the rest of the ruling class in general, do not understand what inflation is or what. Well, they sort of understand, kind of understand what it is. They don't know what causes it. Umm. And before we go on here, I should like explain what inflation is, because most people I don't know the way I got talk about. I talked about this with Garrison like a few days ago about like. Like, the way people get taught about inflation is that inflation is when, like, your money is worth less. Yeah. When when the government prints more money. So you each individual dollar is worth less because it's more of them circulating. Yeah. Yeah. And and this is like. This is this is propaganda. That is not what inflation is. Inflation is literally just when prices go up. And if you think about it like, OK, that that's kind of the same thing sort of because if prices go up like you're, you're, you know your your dollars are worth less money, right? But mostly, inflation isn't about the amount of money becoming less. Mostly it's about something happens and that makes things cost more. And you know and and likely, yeah like the IT it is possible for you to get inflation because government too much money. But like well and mostly are like symbiotic, right. Government. Yeah. More money because prices are going up so that people need more money in circulation to buy things and you saw this happen a lot with the COVID pandemic. So that's it's the both these things kind of feed off each other and contribute to the sort of but but I think something that's important to understand about this is that if you look into the actual econ stuff like the supply of money. Like, how much money there is in the world has very, very little to do with inflation. It only really has effects inflation when you're dealing with, like, I don't know, like 1930s like 1920s Germany or like China after World War Two were just there's literally just like, you know, the government prints so much money that like, like my, my, I have my family. As much stories about, like literally carrying out baskets full of money in China, it's like buy a train ticket because yeah, but like that's not everybody knows about vimar. Germany, too is like the wheelbarrows full of cash and stuff. Yeah, but this stuff that's actually, it's. Really rare, and it's like the reason everyone knows, but when it happens, it's only happened. It's happened like four or five times. And mostly that's not, that's not what why inflation happens. And if you look at inflation right now, for example, there's the prices of, like, a whole bunch of stuff from, like, food to like, microprocessors are going up because, a, it's harder to produce things because of COVID, B, our supply chains are collapsing, and C, because Russia invaded Ukraine and, like, absolutely annihilated an enormous portion of the global food supply. And this that stuff causes prices to go up, right? Because now it's harder to make a thing, and because it's harder to make the thing, that thing cost more. And. This, this has, you know, this has literally nothing to do with, with the money supply, right? Like doesn't have anything to do with how much money is in circulation. And there's another reason that that that we'll get into kind of at the end that inflation happens that is also has nothing to do with money, which is that corporations just do price markups because they know people will pay for it. And that's that's happening too. But having an explanation of, like, why inflation is happening is really, really politically important, even even if the explanation that you have is completely wrong. It. It allows you to do really powerful things politically on like one of the ways that neoliberalism sort of took power is that in in in the in the 70s and 80s. Especially in sort of sort of the, the, the, the, the 70s in particular, both, both in academia and in sort of politics writ large. There's this problem where you have a bunch of these old Keynesian economists who are like pensions are like. They're big on, like, using government spending to keep the economy running. And, like, you get a lot of welfare programs. But yeah, it was like, OK, you can avoid crises by having the government do spending. But the problem is that, like, they couldn't explain why inflation was happening in the 70s. And this was because the Kenyans were. The Keynesians are working on something called the Phillips Curve, and we have to do a little bit of econ ********. But it's not that complicated. I promise I survived it, so it'll be fine. So the Phillips Curve says that, like, the closer you get to full employment. And like the lower the unemployment rate gets, the higher inflation rates and this sort of really starts to kick in around from like 5% unemployment to like 4% to 3% unemployment, the inflation rate like spikes. And. You know the the reason this is supposed to happen is because the lower the lower the unemployment rate is. Wages start to rise because as there's lots of people unemployed, you have to pay them more money to get them to work. And yeah, so this is and and the theory behind this, right, is that like wages increasing is what is what causes inflation to happen because it makes everything cost more. Now, there's a simple and obvious this is like. This is a very simple and obvious solution to the problem of why like inflation happens. And like all simple and obvious solutions, it is also wrong that the Phillips curve does not explain inflation. I'm going to refer everyone in the chat to. I this tweet that I made and I. I want you to look at exhibit A which is the Phillips curve and then I want you to look at Exhibit B, which is I actually plotted unemployment versus inflation in the US from like 1946 until 2:00, 1021. And I I want to get a description of what the second graph looks like because it's supposed to look like a curve, right? So the the first the first graph we have, we have an XI, an XY graph of the Phillips curve starting at 8% closer to the Y axis and then swooping down and then flattening out at 8% on the X axis for the unemployment rate versus the inflation rate and then for. The next graph we have what's not a curve. Like what? What is instead inflation and unemployment graphed, except it's zigzagging everywhere, like dark sides, Omega beams. It is not, in fact, doing a curf. My, my, my, my favorite thing about this is that like. Multiple multiple like and this happens with both unemployment and inflation. There are multiple unemployment rates that are associated with different inflation rates and multiple inflation rates that are that generate two different rates of unemployment. It's it's incredible. It is. It is, it is, it is a, it is an is an absolute sort of monument to how much this stuff doesn't work. And there is a really good reply to your graph tweet that says economists are the modern day court astrologers. It's basically true. Like, which is a funny thing to look at. I mean, court astrologers though were probably right more often. That's true. Simply guessing, is it a good idea to invade this country or not? 5050 odds it works out for you, right? If you're if you're trying to predict, like, I don't know, the S&P 500, there's a lot more variables. Yeah, and and this is this is one of the things that like, OK, if if you can be the person who like, walks into a lecture and goes, the emperor has no clothes. You can like attain immediate ultimate power because again, this stuff is like, so it's so. It's so trivially and easily like falsifiable that like. I, you know, like built in, Friedman is able to do this. And you know, OK, so I should be able to follow the Phillips curve that like I showed you, that's like a curve is like a very simple one. There's all of these really convoluted, like modifications to it. Umm, there's, you know, if you look like the new The New Keynesian Phillips curve or whatever they they've done, they've got a bunch of math to it to try to like make it kind of work. The problem is that it doesn't work. There's there's a there's another Phillips curve that's been that was like modified by the Neil, by the neoclassical economists. And the neoclassical economists were like, this thing doesn't work. OK, here are some modifications you have to put in, but that curve also doesn't work. And you know, and this is a real problem, right. Because, OK. So if, if, if, if this inflation explanation of why inflation happens doesn't work, like what is actually happening? Milton Friedman who sort of like takes the the economic scene by storm by like predicting a lot of the inflation in the 70s and like sort of having an answer to it is his his argument is that inflation is they they print too much money and those inflation. And this is kind of a gross oversimplification of of what his actual point is, but. It's it's it's it's more true than any of like Friedman's oversimplifications. So I'm just, I'm just going to leave it at that. And this is what the Federal Reserve and like Paul Volcker use to try to try to fight inflation 1979. He Volcker does is he just tries to massively reduce the money supply. The problem is that this didn't work like in inflation, like inflation is still like above 10%. I think spikes to like like 15% or something like in into like 1984. So. And and just based on how much larger Huey, Dewey and Louie got, sometimes two or three 100%. Do you know who else wants oh boy, I. That's right, Garrison. All of our sponsors are into duck tales. Inflation fetish ***********. This is it could happen here, a podcast sponsored by the concept of ************ to the cast of Duck Tales getting inflated by bicycle pumps. Ohh, we're back well. I've done my part. Yeah. So, OK, so, so we're left off, right? There's, there's a bunch of inflation happening. Some of it is happening to DuckTales characters. Most of it is happening to the economy. Paul Volcker has tried to stop the inflation by, like, making there be less money, and this has done nothing other than, like, dramatically increase the unemployment rate. Now the problem with again Friedman sort of explanation of of of inflation is that inflation persistence of the 80s, and it only stops after insert foreshadowing noise. Here Reagan crushes the unions. And we will come back to this is to solve inflation. We should stop all unions. That is your official position. No, wow, OK, But this, this is this is part of the position of the Federal of of the the Marxist Federal Reserve. So we will get there a second. So alright alright so so the thing I've been describing that that Freeman is pushing about the money, this is called monetarism. And monetarism is like the fakest theory of inflation. Like it's it's a, it's a theory of inflation. So fake that like even other, like even other like neoclassical economists don't accept it. Like none of the other different neoliberal schools of economics, like every single one of them. Look at this and was like this is nonsense. Like what? What are you doing? But, you know, so, OK, so, so it's like, it's like the tick tock astrology compared to the neoliberal court astrology. Yeah, it's it's it's all. It's like it's it's it's somehow an even faker explanation of this. But you know this, this brings us back to like where we started, which is that like, OK, so if the monetarist stuff doesn't work and the Phillips curve also doesn't work, what is causing inflation? And the answer from inside of the like, the actual field of economics is that nobody knows. Here's Daniel K Trello, who was the former Federal Reserve, who was a former Federal Reserve Bank governor and was a member of the Federal Reserve Board. I so he's a he's a very, very high-ranking like guy inside the sphere of people who try to apply econ ****. And here's here's a quote that he gave about it in 2017. Quote The the substantive point is that we do not at present have a theory of inflation dynamics that works sufficiently well to be of use for the business of real time monetary policymaking. So what are you saying there is like, if you translate that out of econ speaking, you don't even really have to translate that of econs much what are you saying? Is that he? No one has any idea. By inflation works and done on the models work well enough to let you like try to deal with inflation if you're, you know, the people who control the money supply, like the Fed. Now. Economists like we've seen in the past, if you've been following this in the past like 10 years, ish. Especially in the last five, economists are getting like increasingly desperate to explain what the **** is happening. And they're getting increasingly, increasingly desperate right now because, you know, hey, inflation's back. And that that brings us to the paper I mentioned at the top of the episode, which who killed the Phillips Curve in murder mystery, which opens talking about two sort of massive recent failures of the like, New Keynesian we fixed we we we added variables to the Phillips curve. Tell it, like, sort of kind of works. Ish. Maybe. But, you know, the only thing they're talking about two of, it's sort of like incredibly massive failures. The first is in 2008, where there's, you know, there's a recession. Oh, really? What happened economically in 2008, 1008, those recession. But what's interesting about this, right, is that, OK, so if you think about this, there's an inflation is this recession, unemployment skyrockets. This should cause deflation. Well, you know, because you know what else happened in 2008? The official duck tales video game came out. So I think this could we are through. Looking glass people, you know, I mean, this is, this is, this is not any more ******** than any of the other stuff they're doing. So like, but you know, OK, but there's, there's there's this thing that happens, we're like, OK, like the inflation, the inflation rate should have been decreasing and it just stays the same. And economists are like what? And this is this is called the missing deflationary period. There's there's a second thing where dream the sort of like quote UN quote economic recovery in the last like. 10 years ish I until basically until before the pandemic, employment rates dropped really, really low and this should have started. This should have triggered inflation, but it doesn't. And. You know, OK. And so the, the, the, the people who run the Phillip Phillips group, like the economists are looking at this and they're like, OK, what do we do? And the Fed economist solution is again, and I **** you not Marxism. And more specifically, the solution is Neo Marxism. And Mark says, yeah, yeah, this is, this is, this is something else I'm sort of excited about, which is that I finally get to tell the world what a Neo Marxist is because this is technically a thing. It's just that none of the people who talk about Neo Marxist have any idea what it is post modern Neo Marxism. Yes, actually. Really? Well, I mean I guess you could have OK what? Once we explain it, I will. I will talk about how you could theoretically have a postmodern NEO marches, but I don't think I ever met. Whoa, how welcome. Would might have contradictory terms. OK. So, so I'm excited to hear this. Yeah, yeah. All right. So what is happening here is that there's an old joke in March of circles that like the most advanced bushway economist is 50 years behind the most vulgar Marxist. And this is this coming true. The Federal Reserve economists are developing, they're trying to make a new Phillips curve and the New Phillips curve is what they call a collegian Phillips curve because it's based for guys. New curve just dropped. I literally is except this, this is, this is, this is the NEO Marxist curve and it's based on the works. It's kind of loosely based on him, but it's just. Based on the work of a Polish Marxist economist named Michael Kalecki, and Kalecki is a he's a very, very weird Marxist. Like by Marxist standards is extremely weird. And to explain why this is, we have to we have to speak, we're gonna have to speed run Marxism 101. So I'm going to attempt to explain Marxism in one page. All right, let's OK Marxism 101, right? You have a worker? She has to go find a job and sell her labor to, like, get food to eat because otherwise you can't support herself. So she goes to work at a factory that makes, like, hospital stretchers now under capitalism. And this is, this is, this is, this is what we think I'm explaining. This is, this is like the, this is the Orthodox Marxist interpretation. So the people who are about to scream at me for a million years about how this is wrong, I'm explaining the Orthodox position. Damn it. This isn't my position on hearing and Marxism. Yeah. No. Yeah. Chris, quick question. What, what, what, what? What was Marx? O Marx was an experiment psychological experiment run by the by Harvard University that was concluded in. 1897. But he wrote, he wrote a bunch of books and one of those books is capital and and in capital. So, OK, so you, you have you have your worker, right. And she, she, she works to make hospital stretchers. And the thing that makes the hospital stretcher have value is the amount of time that it takes a worker to make it so on an under under this, this sort of understanding of of what Marxism is value was just labor time, right. The the value of an object is how many hours of work it takes to make a thing. Now this labor time or you know like how long it takes to make the thing the the value of it isn't measured by like how long it takes to make like an individual cot, right. It's measured by like how long on average it takes society to make. So you know, for example, like say this is in Finland, right. It's based on how long on average it takes to make a hospital stretcher in Finland, not like. You know how long it takes to make him like. Bolivia or something. And this this is the technical term for the for like this thing is is socially necessary labour time. So our worker like works for through her day and after six hours she's produced enough value to support herself. She can buy food, she can pay her rent, she can like, I don't know, maybe you buy a car or something, but she still also work two more hours of the day and during that time the labor that she's doing just goes to the boss and this is called this is called surplus value, like the amount of time that you're working when you're working for the boss and not to like. Support yourself. This is called surplus value. It is the objective root of exploitation and Marxism I. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's it's a value that goes directly to your boss that. And the the the the the the reason that like your boss can just steal this from you because they have the factor in you don't. And so if you want to produce something for them to survive, you have to go to him. And this is called the ownership of the means of production. Now the the the price in theory of of this hospital stretcher right is based on value on its value or how many hours it takes to produce it and. How how precisely you get from dollars as a unit of measurement, from like $2.00 from time, is a subject of an absolutely interminable debate called the transformation problem. If you want to go read more about it, I have wasted probably four years of my life reading about it. I don't recommend it, but. The answer is you can sort of, kind of get it to work if you **** with the numbers a lot. But if you do, what's unclear, if they mean anything, you can also bypass it entirely by arguing that it only works in the level of the entire world economy, blah blah blah. I don't care. If you do care about this. Don't yell at me. Go read Chapter 6 of Bickler and Neeson's capitalist power. Paul Mattick theory is critique, Fred Moseley's money and totality and kilman and mcclures a temporal single system interpretation of barks's theory of value of Mark's value theory. And then, OK, Google. Duck tales. Go big Jenny wineland. Then send all of that, all of your notes on both the the the the texts and the duck tales. Send all that to I write OK on Twitter and they will get back to you. Please. You you will probably come out of like you will come out of the duck yellow stuff like more sane than you were doing the work system stuff. So yeah, but I, I've, I've, I've now covered my bases. This is this is, this is Orthodox Marxism, which is the stuff we've been talking about is based on another. There's another assumption here that's important. Kind of technically, which is that like? So Orthodox Marxists assumed that, like, so you have a bunch of sectors of the economy, right? There are people who, like, make different stuff and the assumption do who who make hospital guarantees people who do more important work, like make podcasts. Yeah. Yeah. And and everything in between. And the assumption is that, OK, so you have a person who makes, like, podcasts, right? And the other people who make hospital structures figured out that making podcasts is more profitable than making hospital stretchers. So they start moving all their capital into making podcasts. But then because there's too many podcasts, the rate of profit goes down and eventually. Like eventually the the rate of profit across all sectors is supposed to equalize. Yes, yeah. So and and this means that like the combination of this and competition is that price is supposed to tend towards value or like the how much something cost in money is supposed to tend towards the labor time socially necessary to produce the commodity in a given place. This this is like the basic thesis of like what you call Orthodox Marxist. Like Orthodox Marxist political economy would probably or Marxian political economy, whatever the **** you want to call it now. In in starting in about the 1920s. There was a new Marxism, and this is called Neo Marxism. Neo Marxism is basic, like Jesus. I heard about that from Doctor Jordan B Peterson. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Now, now, now we're gonna get the inside scoop on Neo Marxism. So neo Marxism. Their basic thesis is like, what if profit rates don't equalize across, like between different parts of the economy that make things? And you know, and because they don't do that, what what if? What if you don't get competition? Because instead of people being able to just freely move capital between like sectors, what if you have monopolies? And if you have monopolies in instead of sort of price, being like a price is just value blah blah blah, everyone can keep moving their money around. Price is now a price. Price is now derived from the power of a corporation. Because if you know if if if you if you are a powerful enough corporation to like, have a monopoly and stop anyone else from producing the thing that you do now, you can now you can charge what called markups. And this is where Michael Kalecki like enters from stage left Kalecki. It's like he probably should have been the father, father of like, modern macroeconomics in the sense that, like, he invents a bunch of the **** that like canes before Keynes did. But the problem is that she's writing a lot of this in Polish. And so the the sort of like anglophone, like economists are not reading it because he's in Poland and he's a Marxist and he's writing in Polish circles. But he invented a bunch of the stuff that like canes and fence slightly earlier. And he starts like looking at like monopoly and oligarchy theory and he starts trying to apply it to Marxism and it's, you know, his conclusion is that. Apples are powerful enough that they can charge these markups, which is just like additional price increase over, like what the value determined price is supposed to be because they could prevent anyone else from selling the thing and then you know one. What? Once you have a monopoly in the market, you can force people to just like, ******* suck it up and pay it because they can't get it from anywhere else. And this is actually, this is like pretty similar in some ways to like the bourgeois economic, like theory of how this stuff works, which is like, Oh yeah, in bourgeois economics, like monopolies can increase the price if we were supposed to be in a perfectly competitive market because they have power, blah, blah, blah. But there's something very different in college's work that is not in the normal bushwell stuff, which is that. What? What he argues is that trade unions. OK, so you have a trade union, right? It it it they represented the workers who work at a company and these that these trade unions are fighting over, over the product of the markup? And this keeps the size of markups with these, sort of like these price increases that monopolies are doing down because the larger the markup. Like these companies apply, the more incentive there are there is for unions to sort of like fight for pay increases, right? Because, OK, well, the the the, the more expensive the goods are, the more money they're like very clearly is on hand and so the larger the demands you get from organized labor. And this is the insight that who killed the Phillips curve, the people I was talking about jumps on that unions fight over markups and thus that the strength of unions is part of what helps determine inflation. And they point out that, you know, unions want lower prices. And for for good. And the reason they want lower prices for goods is that the higher the price is of something, right, the less people buy of it, and the the less people like buy of the thing, the less has to be produced. And that means that there's less people being employed. And so if you're a Union, you want like the most number of people being employed as you can. And so that means that means that you want you want prices to be low because. Yeah, that because because lower prices means more of the more of the good being produced, more the good being produced means more jobs. And this is where we get to sort of the fundamental assumption behind the. The regular Phillips curve. And this is also true for this sort of like new, like pseudo Marxist 1, right? Their assumption is that inflation is driven by rising wages. And you know, even though the unions are trying to sort of like reduce the markup and like and and reduce markups, reduce prices to increase the number of workers, firms are trying to increase prices so they can make back the money they're paying out in wages. Now, when unemployment is like high, this doesn't matter. Because wages still don't rise very fast, because there's no there's this normous pool of people who are incredibly desert for jobs. You can pay them sort of like nothing, and they'll come work for you because you alternative is, you know, starving or getting evicted. But when when unemployment is low, the bargaining power of workers increases and that's that. That's that's where the class war starts. Yeah, I mean this you you see this in 1941 with the screen cartoonists strike that Scrooge Mcduck brutally cracked down on and eventually had to cede seed ground to the Guild. But Scrooge? Scrooge Mcduck was was brutal during during this time period post the 30s rise of unions. That's right, Garrison. And that's a big part of why, Huey? Louie and Louie had to track him down in his money room and stick a bicycle pump into his mouth while he was sleeping and begin to inflate him largely while touching themselves. Critical support. I boy. So as as as as with I don't, I can't, I don't know how to transition that. I got nothing. I can't do it. Nobody does. I mean, really, the main thing is that the concentration of wealth in the hands of a small number of individuals will inevitably lead to inflation, which is true and and this is one of the things that. That that that the economists are sort of talking about here, which is that like. OK. So once once you get an actual sort, once you get like a real class work going on right where you're getting a class work to the extent that like the bargaining power of workers and the bargaining power of of like capitalist firms are essential are like very close to being equal. You get inflation. Now, what's interesting about this is that when you have strong unions, like when you have strong unions, you get high rates of inflation during periods of sort of inflation shocks, right, because the unions are sort of like popping up wages and this theory, but, and this is the interesting part, right? You get way lower rates of unemployment and see, so it's OK, but it's just step back for a second. So what's happening here is right if you have, if you have strong unions and there's something else in the supply chain that increases costs, say, to, to, to to, to pick a completely random example that never happened, say for example, you're in the 1970s and the price of oil has quadrupled in one year. And that increases the price of everything. Yes, now when you have strong but relatable, this never happened. I don't Google the oil shocks. Actually, literally don't Google the oil shocks, because almost everything written online about the oil shocks is a lie. Yeah, I think I've talked about that before on the other browser, but yeah, it's all a lie. But but basically, like one of the what, you know, what happens here is if you have strong unions, you get a bunch of inflation, but people don't get fired. And when when corporations are strong and you don't have unions, you know, you get these shocks and the inflation rate is much lower, but everyone gets fired. The unemployment rate goes up to like 10%. It's, you know, it's an absolute disaster. So. That's that's one thing to note about, about the way the sort of the Phillips curve the, the sort of marxy and Phillips curve like analyze the situation, right. But there's another consequence here, which comes back to like, what? Inflation is under Phillips curve, right? Inflation in a Phillips curve is literally just wage increases, right? So when Union power is weak, inflation stops. But like, what does this actually mean? What it means is that wages aren't growing. Sure aren't. Yeah. And and and this brings us back to like the sort of weirdness we saw in the in the early part of the episode, right after 2008 where there should have been deflation because the unemployment rate was really high. And also like junior recovery period where inflation rates unemployment rates are super low, but there should have been inflation, but there wasn't. And the answer is why. Why wasn't there inflation? It's well OK because no one had a union and so everyone's wages just stayed the same the whole time. I have another explanation for this. When I previously previously said the duck Tales game came out in 2008, I was actually incorrect. 2008 was when Nintendo Power listed the DuckTales game as the 13th best Nintendo Entertainment System Game there was. It was voted that in 2008. Now it's important that 13 is very unlucky number. So by voting the duck tales games, the the 13th best game from the NES in 2008 in they could have basically caused a psychic rift in the fabric of the universe, creating the financial crash. That's fascinating, gearson, because I was 13 in 2001 when I came across that Angel Fire website with home drawn duck tales inflation, ***********. So this caused 911, I think in a lot of ways. Yeah, yeah, that's connected. You know who else may have been a contributing factor to 911? The products and services that support this podcast, I think that's right. That's right. We do not accept a sponsor unless it gets the explicit sign off of the King of Saudi Arabia, who, if you'll remember, did 9/11. Alright, yeah I I'm I'm not gonna I'm I I I am not getting paid enough to properly transition this so I'm not going to. So it turns out that yeah so the reason there hasn't been inflation is that there's no unions because we don't have unions are wages all suck. And this means that you know wages, wages are stagnant low and it means that they're not the unions aren't a driver of inflation and also low wages aren't driver inflation because they. You know, like unions aren't around to increase wages. Now, meanwhile, the other thing that this suggests is that monetary policy and they OK. I think they're. They're an exact analysis was like, I think like 84% of like inflation shocks can be explained by looking at like union density. And but this also means to me, well, like monetary policy, like how much money there is, like in the economy has like basically no role in inflation whatsoever. And and this, this is, you know, OK. So like, like, this is all been sort of 1 perspective from some economist at the Federal Reserve and we can ask the question, like why does this matter, right. Like, why, why, why, why does like sort of 1 like group of people on the Fed, like their response to this matters? And partly it matters because again, extremely funny to watch the Federal Reserve turning to Neo Marxist to like, try to explain why inflation happens. But it also matters because theories of inflation dictate inflation policy. Jerome Powell, who's the chairman of Federal Reserve has had a press conference on May. 4th and it's too long to play the whole thing, but he he he has the speech and he lays out a few things that are interesting. So he, he talks about a bunch of stuff that's causing inflation, rising production bottlenecks, increasing crude oil prices, increasing commodity prices from like Russia's invasion of Ukraine lays lockdowns in China. They're keeping factory, like, close and like, yeah, OK, those are all like reasonable things that cause inflation. But then when you get to like what the Fed is actually going to do, he starts talking about how the job market is too good for workers right now and unemployment is too low, and that's what's driving wages up. So his plan is he's going to tinker around with monetary policy to reduce wages and decrease the demand for jobs. And this brings us back to like two things. The first part is just the class where part of inflation, right prices are rising right now because someone inside like prices are rising right now and someone inside if you want them to not to like cease to continue rising somewhat. Some part of like the company is going to have to take a hit to like their percentage of like the the sort of the markup, right like their percentage of like the the price increase of the corporations due above like cost and. OK, so someone has to do this, and the Federal Reserve, like, absolutely wants to make sure that the person paying for that is you, the worker. And the second part is something you might have picked up on if you were paying close attention. And this has been something that's been true of of both, like the Fed chairman and the Fed economists do this too, which is they they do this, but they talk about inflation, they do this kind of two step right. They talk about a shock or something that causes prices to increase. Like, you know, a bunch of Ukrainian wheat, like suddenly being on harvestable because the Russian army is squatting on it. Or like Chinese factories shutting down reduces the amount of weed at price electronics. Or sorry, reduces the amount of wheat or the amount of electronics being produced. That drives up prices, right? They talk about like there's an inflationary shock. And then they start talking and instead of talking about that anymore, they start talking about unemployment levels and the job market and monetary policy being what drives inflation. And, and I think this is, this is a very like important piece of ideology because if you look at what's going on here, right, if you know, if you go back to the 70s, it's not like inflation in the 70s is not the Union's fault like. The, you know the the, the the inflation in the 70s was like in in large part the original price increases because the price of oil country could tripled in one year. But, you know, but the the Fed instead focuses on wage increases is what drives inflation, even if they're sort of like using like Marxists to do it. And what they're doing here is shifting the focus from the actual shock that is like the thing, the immediate thing that is increasing prices. And they're shifting the focus from the shock to the people who are reacting to it. And from there, the question stops being about, like, dealing with the shock itself and starts being about who's going to pay for these price increases. And in the 1980s, like Reagan's Reagan solution to this as well, OK, she's just going to make organized labor pay for it. And so she's just annihilates. She annihilates the unions, he uses the state to do it, just crushes the unions completely. And price increases. You know, prices stop increasing, right? And they stop increasing because the production costs. Of all of these, goods like decrease because workers are no longer getting paid and they lose all their benefits. But this is the thing. They never dealt with the actual source of the problem, right? Oil prices are still really high to this day, and we never transitioned off of oil. And to look at sort of that problem, I want to briefly look at another theory of inflation, which is 1 presented by Steve Mann, who I think actually had on the show before. He's one of the people that strange matters and he wrote he wrote this article called Notes Towards a theory of inflation, which is based on the work of a heterodox economist named Frederick Lee who is. He's a cool guy and all of this stuff is like completely out there from ecommerce from DICOM perspective, but it it makes more sense than most regular Recon stuff, so. The sort of like founding observation of like that, like project lead basing his stuff on is that. Like, OK, prices are not set by like an abstract market, right? The price of something in a grocery store is set by a guy like that. There, there there is a specific guy or they're like several specific guys whose job it is to set the prices for the firm. This, this, this theory of, like, it's not even a theory. Like the fact that this is how prices are formed by just a guy who sits there with a notebook or like a computer is this is what the price is going to be. This is called administered prices. And Lee, like, very conventionally argues that, like, this is how firm this is, how both large and small firms actually set their prices. Right? A guy calculates his expenses, he adds a markup, and he sets the price. Now Steve Mann argues that these prices don't generally tend to increase naturally because. The price setters don't generally want to just increase the price randomly because if you increase the price randomly, you will **** *** your customers. And the customers, you know, OK, they'll tolerate like some small increases. But if you raise the price enough, they lose your goodwill towards your brand and they'll be like, they'll go off and try to find another brand. And this is disastrous because even if you reduce the prices back down again, like the goodwills lost and that sort of like, you know, the sort of like happy association that like you have in your brain between, like, I don't know, like Nestle chocolate or something or like. Whatever brand of thing you're buying, like you get ****** *** with them because the price is now like way higher. So you know you don't go back to the same like grocery store because they've increased their prices. Now obviously this is like, there's like this subject to constraints, right? Like if if you need insulin and the monopoly that controls insulin production just jacks the price, you're screwed, right? There's no sort of like there's no other place you can get insulin unless you're going to try to make it. So your your solutions are you either try to ration it and you die or you pay for the price increases. And this this is bad, and it does happen, but most goods aren't like this and so price increases when they happen tend to be small and fairly infrequent. Unless. Unless the person and the reason this doesn't this wouldn't happen is if the person setting the price has no choice. And the main reason that if you're a person setting a price that you would have no choice but to increase like the price that that that you're setting. The main reason you would do this because something happened to your supply chain. I don't know if you'll see that there was a tiktok going around from a farmer in Iowa who was talking about like why, why food prices are going to keep increasing. The woman, honestly, I bless her heart, honestly thinks that food prices are not going to go up. She thinks that this is the highest they're going to go. I tried to explain to her that that was not the case, that they are absolutely going to go up even more. And I told her there are things that like we have to buy. There's something we had to buy that two years ago cost us $24.00. Last year was about 46. This year it is costing us $96, OK, local farmer, 50 head of cattle. It's costing him $8000 a month to feed them. Please understand food prices are going to go up. Yeah. And so, so you can see here what's happening. Is it like at some point down the supply chain, prices are increasing either because of like climate change, because of the word Ukraine, because of COVID, because of like any thousand sort of other factors. And eventually the like the farmers who are setting the prices right, they have to increase their prices because. They don't they don't have a choice, right. Because each, each person further back in the supply line as a charity, right. Like they have to be able to pay a bunch of **** bills. Yeah. And and this, this sort of, you know, this is the Steve calls it like that. He calls it the the supply chain theory of inflation, right. And you know in in this model like this is what's causing inflation, right. Each person successively down the line has to has to increase their markup because they have to cover their they have to cover the the new the newly increased production costs. And this is important because. Unlike most models of inflation, inflation isn't being caused by, like, some kind of like giant macroeconomic thing. Like it's not being caused by, like unemployment, like monetary policy, but it's being caused by very, very specific microeconomic forces there. You know, there are literally specific people who, as a reaction to a specific thing happening that makes production harder, are increasing their prices. And this is a very different sort of, you know, this is a very, very different theory of inflation than like any of the like 17 mainstream ones, all of which are bad in various ways. And. Yeah, and there there's, there's one other thing I I want to mention though that kind of isn't talked about in this model that is absolutely happening right now and that's. And something that is really one of the drivers of inflation, which is that corporations are raising prices because they think they can get away with it and they're just pocketing the costs. And this isn't like a sort of speculative thing. Companies, when you ask them about it, are very, very open about it. Here's from Business Insider article. What we are very good at is pricing, Colgate Palmolive Oil CEO Noah Wallace said. Whether it's foreign exchange inflation or raw and packing material inflation, we have found ways overtime to recover that in our margin line. We've been, we've been very comfortable with our ability to pass on the increases that we've seen at this point, said Crocker CFO Gary Miller Chip in October. And we would expect that to continue to be the case. And here's some here's the Wall Street Journal where more people talk about doing this. We have not seen any material reaction from consumers. Procter and Gamble Finance Chief Andre Schulten said last week, referring to a string of price increases that went into effect in September. So that makes us feel good about our relative position. Now those two articles, like just those two articles alone talk about prices raising, like, talk about companies that are just raising prices because they know consumers will pay for it, because I think there's inflation happening. And those companies just from those two articles alone include Procter and Gamble, Nestle, Verizon, Unilever, Colgate Palmolive Oil, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Gillette, Chipotle, AT&T, Verizon, Kimberly-Clark Corp, Clorox, Reynolds, Krogers and Albertson. And like that that's that's just like the corporations in the article that are like specifically. Named as talking about having done this right and they can get away with this because normally, normally right price increases people off they go go free for grants. But if if prices across the board are already increasing you can, you can just like do basically like a price gouge increase and you can do it. You can increase your markup and it doesn't. It doesn't affect your goodwill because people just assume that inflation is already happening and that inflation happens sort of naturally is either because the wage like, wages are too high, there's too much money in circulation. So there's just like inflation happening is like abstract thing. Instead of what is actually happening, which there are very specific, like there are individual people with names and addresses who specifically increased the price in order to screw you. And that that that's that's what's actually at stake here in having explanation for why inflation happens. It tells you who to blame for it. Like right now, Larry Summers, who is the former Treasury Secretary who is responsible for. I. Arguably responsible for 2000, directly responsible for 2008. I wanted people who completely annihilated the entire Russian economy in the 90s. He is has apparently been on the phone with Joe Biden and he is going around saying that in order to solve inflation we have to cut wages and raise the unemployment rate to 5% like for five years, like on average 5% for five years. And so this means either you have 5% of of 5%, five years of 5% inflation, 2 years of inflation at 7.5%, or like one year of 10% unemployment. And again, unemployment right now, is it like 3%? So she's talking about millions, potentially 10s of millions of people losing their jobs in, in order to, in order to solve inflation because summers, again, summers is going back on this with the sort of Phillips model **** right, where inflation is caused by, you know, it doesn't even matter like what's actually causing the inflation, which is a bunch of accommodation of price gouging and like supply chain disruptions. Right. She's going OK who his theory isn't about what is causing inflation. His theory is about who's going to pay for it and his solution is **** you, you are going to pay for it. They are going to pay for both the price increases, which the prices won't ******* come back down. That's the other part of this, right? Once you get inflation, once the prices rise, they're sticky. They don't ******* fall. And what he's saying is. Yeah, **** you. You are going to pay for it. You're going to continue to pay these prices. You're also going to pay for it by reducing your wages. You're going to pay for it by getting fired. And you know this is this is sort of the choice that we have, right? It's either we let the ruling class tell exactly the same stories about why inflation happens. They've been telling 50 years that they know are wrong, that they that they know are so wrong. They are desperate enough to turn to ******* Marxism to try to find explanations for it. Or we find that we find a new, like, explanation of why ******* inflation happens, and we go back. We take the stuff that they've stolen from us, and then we expropriate the ********. They don't do it again. And that is that that that that is what I have to say about inflation. Yeah, I mean again, what what we need to do is if we organize as a people. And as a people become. The vacuum tube that we need to shove down the esophagus of summers and other members of the ruling class in order to inflate their organs so that their ******* widens and we can collectively. **** them until they deflate. Is that more or less accurate, Chris, would you say? Economically. Sure. I mean, you know, this is like, OK, I would say like, this is the thing, this is the thing about having an explanation for why inflation happens, right? It doesn't matter if it's true or not. You can, as as long as long as you have a compelling enough explanation for inflation to cause people to do something. You can. You can. I mean this. This is one of the things, for example, like this is one of the things that caused tianamen to happen is that there were skyrocketing inflation and the, like, workers had an explanation of inflation. It wasn't, right. Like, yeah, I mean, their explanation for inflation has to do with like, the the like, China was taking in a bunch of loans and the CCP was spending all their money on sports cars. And it's like, it's kind of marginal whether it was like, true or not. But it doesn't matter, right? And inflate inflation could be caused by the fact that we haven't ******* inflated. McDonough yeah, we have enough right on that point. And this is this is, this is 100% true. You can look this up online. So the original duck tales game from 1989 was remastered in 2013 and it was real. It was released on August 13th, 2013, the remaster of the Duck Tales Game 1313. Both unlucky numbers. I think that could have just as much to do with our current economic problem around inflation as basically anything else Chris has said here, because August 13th, 2013. DuckTales getting released, Scrooge Mcduck main character it that is too much to be a coincidence. Yeah, we are through the looking glass I can see the Nords like there's there's there's no getting away from this one. Look, you all all all you have to do is you just got to go. You got to show up to the room with a ******* Bunny is and you got to take it from them. You guys show up, you gotta show up to the the ******* factories and inflate your bosses and you will. Inflation will come down. Yeah. Work everybody. Football is back, and better GM is inviting new customers to join the huddle and enjoy the action like never before. Sign up today using bonus code champion and your first wager is risk free up to $1000. You'll also have instant access to a variety of parlay selection features, player props, and boosted odd specials. Just download the bet MGM app today or go to bedmgm.com and enter. Bonus code champion and place your first wager risk free up to $1000 the bet MGM app is the perfect way to experience the excitement of wagering on live sports now in more markets than ever. Visitbetmgm.com for terms and conditions must be 21 years of age or older to wager Virginia only new customer offer. All promotions are subject to qualification and eligibility requirements. Rewards issued as non withdrawable free bets or site credit free bets expire 7 days from issuance. Please gamble responsibly gambling problem call 188853230. 500. So by now we imagine that you've seen the theories on tick tock. You maybe even heard the rumors from your friends and loved ones. But are any of the stories about government conspiracies and cover ups actually true? The answer is surprisingly or unsurprisingly, yes. For more than a decade, we here at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions, sometimes their answers that people would rather us not explore. Now we're sharing this research with you for the first time ever in a book format, you can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know now. It's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. Hey, it's Roy Wood, junior, host of The Daily Show podcast beyond the scenes, and we are back for season 2. Beyond the scenes is the podcast where we go even deeper into segments and topics we covered on the show, but they're topics that deserve a little more time, a little more finessing details, you know? So this season, we're bringing on more Daily Show writers, producers and correspondents. We're bringing on more experts to drop knowledge on all sorts of topics. You gonna get some knowledge that you can't get anywhere else. We're breaking it down this season 2. We talking gentrification, we talking gun laws, book bannings, Black Trail Blazers, and fashion all the trash ways that people treat flight attendants as well. And shout out to the flight attendants how you keeping us safe and still got time to give me your biscoff cookie respect. Listen to beyond the scenes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It don't matter where you get it, baby. Just find us. Welcome to it could happen here, the podcast about stuff falling apart and perhaps how we could begin to put them back together. Today I'm your host, Garrison Davis. We've had a lot of doom and gloom the past few weeks here on the pod, so this episode will be more focused on the putting stuff back together side of the spectrum, we'll be talking with Elizabeth Blackburn of the first collective. A group of volunteers, organizers, and activists in Columbus, OH focused on direct grassroots action and mutual aid. But we'll be specifically talking about a volunteer run homeless encampment that's currently serving around 20 to 30 people in the Near East side of Columbus. Here's some of the history from Elizabeth the project started as a warming station at the end of January. And has morphed into a autonomous encampment that's largely self governed and managed by a loose network of mutual aid organizations that came together during the 2020 uprisings. And this is. This is as flat an organization as we can make it, and we're, you know, we're trying to make it flatter. And I just think it's important that the people recognize, you know, going out with resources is great, but going out and finding out what resources people need is better. There are so many groups in our city that are supposed to be doing this work that are not. And. They're being paid to do this work and it's ineffective. And all I want is for. For more people to try and. Do it their own way. To try and do what their community wants, you know? To the best of their abilities. We've seen lots of projects grow out of the mutual aid networks that were established in 2020. It's been interesting to see how people in the wake of the George Floyd Uprising have built off things that started two years ago, what's changed in their practice, and how it's evolved since then. This past winter in this area of Columbus, OH, there was community needs not being met, people having to be out in the cold and not having a place to stay. This problem was recognized by people, but unfortunately far too many people. Let's look at problems and just be like, Oh yes, here's the thing that sucks. Well, that's too bad. But today we'll be talking about how a collective of people didn't simply acknowledge a problem, but actually went past that point in decided that even with limited resources, they have the capacity to actually figure out how to solve this themselves and provide a solution for the community. I think the first time I really tried something like that was in December. A friend of mine had reached out about a camp on the South side of Columbus that was being swept by the city. And they they had needs. They needed new tents so they could set up elsewhere. They needed food and water like they always did. And they needed people to be there to keep, you know, to prevent violence from occurring as much as possible. So hearing about that, I started a. I set up on my street and in a bougie part of Columbus. A little sign and collected goods. Whatever. People dropped off. I collected money. I raised about $2000 and. I think we ended up buying around 22 tents, got other people there as well and tried to make sure everybody had what they needed so they could get set up elsewhere. But that was my first like, my first experience with that, doing it hands on and. Seeing that that works, that encouraged me to do more. So that how is it grown and changed since then? There's still a need for people to stay. It still gets pretty cold at night. So how throughout throughout winter, how did the project kind of morph and change? How did you go about finding like places to actually, like, set up the physical spot? Right. Like that's that's the whole. That's a whole other problem. It's all like the. It's all like the logistical side of things. Yeah, exactly. Well, we happen to have a space late last fall. I was invited to. In a collective first collective that was operating out of a church that largely. Falling into disrepair but still operating as a church, and because we had that space, a couple members of the collective encountered some folks in the neighborhood who needed a place to sleep. They were sleeping in a bus stop on their snowy night, and we just decided to start giving them a place to stay because we had a place. It wasn't a super popular decision, but we had community backing. Conflicts from some people in the neighborhood who are more NIMBY minded did obviously come up along with the complaints from the church that the first collective was operating out of. For the community's part, when we were at the church, we were in a part of the neighborhood that had largely been gentrified. And so there was some. Some resistance, some concern about the the changing face of the community and about the safety of kids and so on and so forth. But we didn't have any real safety concerns, not not in our not inside beyond a couple encounters that we had to deescalate and a few people that we had to remove for and based on their behavior. But from inside the church, from the the church organization. The conflict started pretty early on. They didn't really like how we operated, and we got a reputation as a a warming space with no rules, and so they they felt like. Because couples could sleep next to each other. Because people could go outside for a cigarette at night. Because they weren't locked in the building that we were running a space that was out of control. Well, until until we were kicked out of the church on March 29th, I think it was the physical infrastructure was there. It was just a matter of getting cuts and blankets and making sure that people had food. Most of that was either through just. One off donations to my cash app or I bought it with my own funds. Once we were forced to move outside it got a lot more complicated because at that point we didn't have any tents. We had to go out that night and purchase the day that we were removed to go out and purchase I believe 10 tents to start and then had a couple dropped off. We now have around 20 to 25 tents. A lot of those were purchased by by me or by donations that we received. Or have been dropped off by by friends or people in the neighborhood. That has been, you know, the the physical infrastructure is mostly tents and canopies and most of them are being held up by. Pieces of old tents or large tree limbs or whatever we can to survive the wind, because it's been nothing but wind storms for the past. Well since we got here our first campsite was set up on a lot that was connected to the farm of Four Seasons, City Farm. Several of the members of the collective are former paid employees of the farm or multi year volunteers. It's a it's a large organization on this part in this part of the town, Old Town east with about 15 I believe years of of history and goodwill. So we set up next to their lot, but because they're on land bank land, we we didn't want to interfere with their lease with the city. So rather than risk the farm getting fined or having having their lease broken, we we look next door to a lot on the other side of the chain link fence. Two lots actually. One is owned by the city, that's the one where most of our tents are, and then one is owned by a private owner who's a rather wealthy person in the neighborhood. We've done our best to stay on the city lot and that has been good for us, but we're also maintaining both lots and doing our best to keep the trash to a minimum. To make sure that we're not tearing up the the ground as much as we can, though, it's hard with all this rain. And and just do our best to be good neighbors and and I think that has helped us a lot. In recent years, lower class Columbus area residents lost 20,000 units of housing due to unaffordable, spiking rent prices and annual point in time tally this year organized by the Community Shelter Board, found the number of homeless people in official Columbus and Franklin County emergency shelters increased by more than 200 people since 2021. And online data from the Shelter Board, a nonprofit organization that receives funding from the City of Columbus and other organizations. Indicates that as of March 2022, there was a 7% drop in the rate of people exiting their program and moving into stable housing as compared to last year, going from 33% to 26%. A lot of times more formalized shelters are not ideal for people to stay in. There's many issues with the formalized shelters regarding the specific rules of when you can get inside, how long you can be inside, whether you're locked inside the building, what stuff you can bring with you. At best, they are challenging to navigate. At worst, they're simply hostile to people looking for shelter. I asked Elizabeth what her take on the homeless shelter situation is like in Columbus and the ways their encampment is different from the more official shelters. We have limited beds, and then the beds that are available are mostly under the governance of the Shelter Board. And the shelter board wasn't too fond of us either because we weren't following all their rules and. There are a lot of concerns about the way the shelters run, the people that stay with us, the people that come through. They feel safer here. There's considerably less drug use. There's basically no distribution. We try to keep a handle on that because it, you know, would bring problems to the camp should it happen there. We are a safe use space. We do have harm reduction materials and they know that. And we we do our best to, you know, just make sure that people have the care and the safety that they need. And that is kind of a dirty word, while all of those are kind of. 30 words and the shelter, organizing community, I guess care and and, you know, making people comfortable. It's just not really the goal. Next, I asked about what types of connections the encampment and 1st Collective have been making with various organizations for infrastructural support or daily needs, as well as inquiring about the relations the camp has with the city government. Here is Elizabeth's response. We reached out to the different, you know, harm reduction groups, the different hopelessness groups that the emergency action groups. Different serve groups and we just asked them to bring what they could or to send people if they could just. You know, whatever they could spare and and it's worked and people show up with whatever they have to offer from all over the city and and just from around the corner, which has been wonderful. The the grassroots community support has just blown my mind. I thought they were going to hate us and here we are like making friends with everybody. Our first goal is to make sure that we've met people's needs as best we can. You know that that involves right now. Keeping propane on site so that they can cook some of the food that's brought. We get a lot of prepared meals, but we also get a lot of ingredients and there are quite a few people here that cook and have done pretty miraculous things with a couple of propane grills. We try and have meals prepared every day, but it doesn't, it doesn't always work out and sometimes we fill the gaps with. Little Caesars or or something else, whatever, whatever can be scrunched up at the last minute. Some of our biggest allies so far have been the local food not bombs. They they've been wonderful, as well as some different church groups that that run nonprofits like Community Kitchen. We get our meals provided six days a week by a church that's basically erect down the street and around the corner, but as far as the city goes. For the first couple days there were a lot of roll bys, a lot of. City officials taking pictures, no one really talking to us. But you know, there was clearly concern. It wasn't until a man who works for the city and outreach under the safety and security department, Sean Stephenson, came out and talked to us that we really started to see the possibilities of working with the city. And and so much as the lettuce he he brought a city attorney, Steve Dunbar, and a gentleman from the mayor's office, Jason Jenkins, by to talk to our folks and. They listened. They they listened to the people at the camp who explained to them why they were here. Explain to them why the resources that are available didn't work for them. You know, it was a, it was a tearful conversation and since then. It's largely left us alone. We wish that they would provide some of the resources that they talked about, like a couple Porta Potties and a dumpster. But you know, we we do our best with our composting toilet and the the good grace of some very kind neighbors. Police raids and sweeps are always an existential fear for those living in DIY encampments. Here's what Elizabeth had to say about sweeps and police interactions. What we've been told is that they are they've been told to leave us alone. We've heard this from the cops themselves. We've heard this from people who have talked to them. But the precinct that is in this area has been told not to mess with us unless there is a violent conflict. The thing to do cop stuff at there are a lot of sweeps that have been threatened around the city of different camps, and they've received notice or. Notice of notice. So they don't know exactly when, but it's supposed to happen sometime. But as far as we're concerned, we we haven't really had that problem. Cops have come through. There are a couple of times when they've been called by by people disgruntled residents or by neighbors, but for the most part they talked to us and then they leave. We we do our best as volunteers to get between. The police and other other groups that come out, even even the outreach groups that we know are are here to help just because those interactions can can quickly get volatile if, you know, if people aren't sure about other people's intentions. So I would say that. One of the best interactions I've had with the cops is they they did come through here once and talked to a few folks, and a Sergeant from the the Police Department said roughly that they couldn't make us leave because this was city land and they didn't have anywhere else to send us. So, OK, I'll take it, I'll take it. I've got, I've got it, I've got the audio, so I'll take it. Elizabeth does hope that one day the relations between the church that first collective was previously operating out of could be mended, and once again work to utilize the space to serve the wider community. She also discussed the possibility of moving into vacant buildings and hoping to restore them, while also having a place to provide more stable housing. So where the church is concerned I I haven't given up hope we we aren't in the building now. I don't have a key but. I go to church every Sunday. I'm not, I'm not a Christian. I don't believe in God, but I do like the messages that I get there. And I I want to continue to use this really wonderful building as a part of the Community. You know, it's. There there are a lot of goals that that we as a camp have and some of them include the church and we would love to get back into that space and. Six, there are two bathrooms in the basement that are just sitting there, build some showers, laundry facilities, a free store kitchen. There's there's so much that we could do if we could utilize that building in addition to the the infrastructure that we have here. But when it comes to to building something more. We're currently working on a proposal for the city for some of the relief funds that have been received but not dispersed with the goals of. Ideally, building little cabins on platforms on the lot that we're on now, just to start to get people out of tents, to start meeting some of the code requirements to improve the sanitary and living conditions. And then from there we'll ask them to give us a building to restore. There's a lot of really skilled people out here and they want to work and they want to work on all of these old buildings that have been allowed to fall apart all over the city. There are so many rooms available, there's so many units that they could work on that they could live in. And that's what they want to do. So that's what we're going to try and help them do. The camp functions under a sort of direct democracy with residents and 1st collective volunteers, some of whom are also residents, hold regular community meetings where camp occupants vote to make decisions about camp guidelines. There's been a couple instances of violence, a couple particularly scary moments that we had to try and deescalate, and there's sometimes that. We didn't handle things as best we could, but we we try and we try to talk through the way that the way that it goes down with the residents among the volunteers. We try to be transparent about, you know, why? Why we make some of the decisions that we do. And for the most part, we leave it to the community. There have been some really great community meetings that go so long. But they talk about everything. They talk about, you know, shared concerns about safety, concerns about how they want to live together and and what would make them feel safer. And established guidelines. And occasionally vote to remove people, though we've managed to resolve some of those conflicts before they went that far. I initially talked with Elizabeth in May 2022, but I was able to catch up with her a few weeks ago to hear about what's been going on the past month. I just wanted to kind of fill you in on what we've been up to over the past month or so. It's it's been busy. We've been to a lot of area Commission meetings. For the different areas of the city to try and. Make some allies and talk to people about what we think is a solution to a problem they don't know how to solve. It did get some unwanted attention. A local station 10 TV came through with a bit of an agenda. Right now, the city of Columbus has a problem, and it has to do with homelessness. A camp set up on city property along E Mountain St in the middle of the Near East Side neighborhood is raising questions tonight about whether the 20 people who live there should be allowed to stay. Are forced to go to TV's Kevin Landers has been working the story all day. Today. He went to the camp and spoke to those who lived there, and got answers from city leaders about addressing concerns from neighbors who say that Camp's got to go. This on housing community is located on East Mound St the people who live here, the city says, are technically trespassing. The city says they're going to let them stay here until they can find housing, but not everybody wants them here. They wanted to talk specifically about our sanitation situation and nothing else. He told them we've been waiting on the city since April 15th for the dumpster the the port of Johns that they've offered, but they were still looking into it, so we took it into our own hands and all that attention we needed to do something, so we contacted a portajohn company who is currently donating to Porta Johns and servicing it once a week. Great, we had a compost toilet before and this is so much better. And we went out of pocket to pay for trash service. So we're getting our own trash service, trash ServiceNow once a week. It's not quite enough, but it's certainly helps. You see code enforcement go by all the time they've been driving by. I've seen them at least five or six times today and people are waiting for something that they can latch on to, but so far so good. With Columbus facing 100 degree heat waves, what started as a warming station in winter now serves as a cooling station this summer for its few dozen residents. As gears shift and new seasonal materials are required, the camp has been exploring alternative methods of funding to sustain the level of resources and services they've been able to provide the past few months. We did launch a GO fund me, and we've had pretty good luck. So far, we've raised $7500. This is just for operating funds. There's a lot that we would like to do here. There's a lot we'd like to do with the land, but for now we just need. We're just fundraising to keep going. The camp still serves around 25 people, so resources end up getting distributed across a large collection of individuals. All the donations received have been used to provide necessities to survive, including but not limited to shelters like tents, food, water, medical supplies, bedding, clothes, bus passes, medical services and prescriptions, harm reduction supplies, funds for individuals, immediate needs, and assistance to pay with residents phone bills. Sometimes funds are also used to compensate. Residents for extra labor put towards maintaining the camp, like cleaning up the campsite, cutting up firewood and providing extra services like haircuts. The response has been really good. I think people understand what we're trying to do and are being really receptive to it. I can't say the same about the city, though. We we met with Councilwoman Shayla favor from the city on Monday and presented a proposal. We asked for $181,500 over the next six months to continue operation to pay a small salary to the three volunteers that are here all the time. For healthcare. For small stipends to give to each resident of camp every every week. Additional operating funds just. We came to them with this ask and they. Didn't really seem to get it. So we're going to keep trying. They felt like they can't really support a tent city in their minds, like they couldn't give money to support. People who were residing in tents because tents are inadequate shelter. But I mean, I I can test that not having a tent is also an adequate shelter. The city of Columbus relies almost completely on the Community Shelter Board to manage its problem with homelessness. Community Shelter Board has a revenue of around $44 million a year. They pay their director half $1,000,000 just under, and a few other executives receive ample compensation. But their success rate for the entire county is labeled at 15%. If you go through their data, they have managed to get 15% of the people who come through their shelter into some sort of housing. For the ZIP code that we're serving, it's 7%, which equates to 8 people over the past year. So what they're doing is not working. At all, and they know it, but they don't know what else to do. Whenever we talk to the city, someone tells us to talk to this one particular person. Her name is Emerald Hernandez para. She is the assistant director of special projects for the Department of Development. If you have a problem with a homeless camp. In the city, she is the person that the city wants you to talk to no matter what. If if you're homeless, that's who, that's who they want you to talk to. She's under the Department of Development. Her her main focus is economic development. She's just special projects, which means she helps clear the way. By getting camps out of the way for development projects. That's that's her role and and she is the city's liaison. No matter who we talk to, she's the one that we keep coming back to. So. I I think it's pretty cynical and upsetting that this is an under the purview of the Department of Health. You know, at any any other department would be a little bit better than the Department of Development. Just shows how much we care. We're we're planning to go back to the city. Regardless of what they say about this initial proposal. Because. There's a lot that we'd like to build here, and and we think they'd be amenable if they understood what drafting a second round proposal, taking inspiration from Dignity Village in Portland. It's a an autonomous village of Unhoused people that's existed since 2000, and I think there's a lot of good that we can learn from them for modeling this in a way that the city might better understand. We believe that what we're doing here is transitional housing. And the people who are here want to be involved in building that transitional housing for themselves and then for the people that come after. So that's that's what we're hoping to get the city to sign off on. When we met with the new Met with the Councilwoman, one of the things that she said was. They at the city, they don't have a model for serving the population that we're serving. They don't. They don't know how to handle people who don't want to move inside, who don't want to move into the shelter system for whatever reason. And so all they can really do is move them around. We're trying to tell them that we do have a model and and we think, we think that we can help the city as long as they stay pretty hands off and give us money for it, so. Fingers crossed. I'm not going to hold my breath, but fingers crossed. The city of Columbus has been much more openly hostile to some other encampments, providing cooling and shelter in parts of the city. We're not only on House encampment in Columbus there. There are a lot more, and there's one that is that place called here Park on the South side. We have a lot of friends there. Our organization works with their organization. They were served a 14 day eviction notice. On the 1st and they have until June 14th to move out. So we're doing whatever we can to support them, but. Very much feels like we're being treated like the the good camp and they're the bad camp right now, so we're trying our best to make sure that the city knows that. We're with them, you know, I I'm. Whatever they think about us, we we support those people no matter what, and we'll do whatever we can to help. We're trying to give them advice about the things that have worked for us to keep the city away and hopefully. If they do have to move on the 14th, they'll be able to set up somewhere where the city will give them a break. Here is some audio of a press conference given at the HERE Park camp just last week. The city is not out here giving out water. The city is not out here making sure that people don't get heat exhaustion or heat stroke right. They're nowhere to be found. So we are here to remind them they have $135 million in American rescue plan funds. Where is this money going? Why do we not have housing? This weather is just a little taste for many of us, of the conditions that our unhoused neighbors out here can look forward to enduring for the entire summer. The city of Columbus was planning on evicting our people today, June 14th. They delayed that eviction. It is a human right, so we are here to assert our human rights to housing. They're hoping that we're going to get hot and tired and wear out. Are we gonna let up? No. The Here park camp eviction was pushed back to June 21st due to a massive heat wave, and by June 21st the temperature was still in the upper 90s. But the city followed through on their threat and swept the camp. At least 20 Columbus police cruisers, city attorneys, people from the Department of Development and other city employees were on site for the eviction. Bulldozers and massive machinery crushed people's tents and personal belongings. Some folks forcibly displaced have lived in the HERE park for nearly a decade. For wrapping up this episode, I had just one more question for Elizabeth, for people who would be interested in trying to create similar projects or help with similar similar projects in their area. What would be some advice to give to people who who are want to try something similar? What's the kind of stuff that you've learned the past few months that you were kind of surprised by and and you know if if you could do anything different what's what's like what's the kind of stuff that you would that you would approach to make the process like smoother or slightly more improved? Well, I would have looked for more funders first. The one of the most painful parts for me has like just personally has been holding the purse, being the person that everyone knows to ask for, for cash if they need it for something. It is a it is a real strain on on compassion. Sometimes you know, on compassion fatigue is real and it can be really hard day in, day out having to field requests from people who you know need these resources. But. You can't always give everything it's. It's hard to say no. Learning to say no has. Has helped but. Diversifying our funding sources is also helping a lot. I I've. Learned that I can't do it all and that I need to take breaks and that being here 24/7. Is is what I want to do, but that doesn't mean I need to. Always, always do it some. Sometimes you've got to step away. Umm. I. I wish that I had spent a little more time with my family. Rather than, you know, throwing myself completely into this. But two months ago my fiance, my ex fiance, asked me to leave, so I've been living at the camp too. So I I it's it's been a pretty stark jump to go from having a big house and some retirement funds to living in a tent and having none. But I mean, I wouldn't. I wouldn't change it and I'm going to keep doing it. It's because I can, because I could and that's that's really what I want people to see is that if they can do something, they should. It's the best job I've ever had. You know, nothing is more rewarding than going to work and hanging out with your friends all day. Like helping them get jobs and find apartments and. Meet friends like. There's so many wonderful people here, and like me and the other volunteers, we we love all of them and we want nothing more than to see them succeed. So. Yeah, I I just, I just advise people to do what they can, to ask people what they need and try and provide it. Anyone who wants to know more about the first collective and what they're doing, you can go to firsthyphencollective.org. You can find links on Elizabeth's Twitter account at innate optimist. And even if you disagree with some of the organizational or structural choices, I hope you at least learned something or got something productive out of this example of people putting in. Effort to fill in the gaps in their local community that does it for us today. See you on the other side. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of cool zone media. 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