Steve Matthews introduces a significant presentation titled "Resisting Trumpism Can Revive the US Labor Movement," emphasizing the pressing need for labor unions to confront the existential threat posed by Trumpism. He features two key contributors, Stephen Lerner, a seasoned labor organizer known for the Justice for Janitors campaign, and Joseph McCarten, a history educator with a focus on labor history. Together, they discuss strategies for revitalizing the labor movement by fostering community alliances and collective actions that challenge the power of billionaires and corporations. Lerner and McCarten highlight the importance of direct action and civil disobedience in building a robust resistance against authoritarian influences, asserting that such movements have historically led to significant advancements in workers' rights. The episode not only explores the current labor landscape but also calls for a reevaluation of tactics to ensure a stronger, more unified front against the threats to democracy.

Takeaways:

• The podcast emphasizes the need for labor unions to engage in disruptive collective action to effectively challenge authoritarianism and corporate power.
• Stephen Lerner discusses the historical importance of union campaigns like 'Justice for Janitors' and their role in unionizing thousands across the U.S.
• Joseph McCarten highlights the necessity of reviving the labor movement through increased willingness to engage in strikes and direct actions.
• The speakers argue that the labor movement must expand its focus beyond traditional negotiations to include broader social issues affecting workers and communities.
• The podcast underscores the importance of building alliances between labor unions and community organizations to combat the threats posed by Trumpism.

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• SEIU
• Tesla
• Palantir
• National Nurses United
• Wells Fargo
• Blackstone

Hi, I'm Steve Matthews, the host of Riverside Rank and File.

We're sharing an important presentation called Resisting Trumpism Can Revive the US Labor Movement.

Two important contributors point a way forward for labor unions and workers in our country.

Stephen Lerner has spent over 50 years as a labor organizer and strategist.

He was the architect of SEIU's justice for Janitors campaign.

This campaign resulted in the unionization of thousands of janitors across the United States.

Joseph McCarten teaches history at Georgetown University and has served as president of the labor and Working Class History Association.

They point out the existential threat to democracy posed by Trumpism and and Trump.

Please watch this presentation and share your comments with us once this is done.

Thank you to Chris Garlock, the Labor Heritage Power Hour podcaster, for allowing us to rebroadcast this important presentation.

We are proudly part of the Labor Radio Podcast Network.

Thank you,.

Chris.

Hey, how you doing, man?

I'm hanging in there.

How about you?

I'm good.

I'm good.

We had two screenings of Baristas vs Billionaires over the weekend that went really well.

So that was good.

People were really excited to see it.

It's nice.

Cool.

Where'd you do them?

It was at the D. D.C. the regular D.C. film fest.

Not.

It's actually.

Sometimes the other film fests have labor films will co sponsor.

This was a case of that.

And it was down at the.

The Winnock Gallery place.

Oh, Regal.

Regal at Gallery Place.

I hadn't been there in a long time and we.

One of them was Saturday night and it was.

There was some concert going on also.

So it was like, man, there's a lot of people.

Jeremy, good morning.

Hey, good morning.

Morning.

Good to see you.

And Joe King is all here.

Good morning, Joe.

Morning, everybody.

All right, well, thank you all for joining especially.

So nice bright and early on a Monday morning.

So really, Joe and Steven, great, great article.

I read it avidly.

And then I was.

I was thinking, oh, I gotta get this on the show.

And I could think of nobody better than Brother Brecker to talk to you guys about it.

So thank you for jumping in to do that, Jeremy.

Happy to do it.

Okay, just a quick sound check and then we're off to the races.

We'll just go around.

Just your name and I don't like me.

Maybe you haven't had breakfast yet, but maybe what you're drinking.

Joe, we'll start with you.

Joe McCarten, Georgetown University, drinking a cup of stiff black coffee.

Steven.

Stephen Lerner.

I had oatmeal with fruit for breakfast.

And I'm drinking coffee.

I think you were at our house.

That's what Lisa has every morning power breakfast.

Jeremy, what about you?

Hi, I'm Jeremy Brecker in our cabin, West Cornwall, Connecticut, and I have had my morning gallon of coffee.

All right, so I'll just turn it over to you guys.

Again, thank you for doing it.

And I'll be here.

I'll go off camera, and we're recording.

So if you want to redo anything, just, you know, give me a little stop and then just reset and we will, like they say, the building trades.

You know, where they say the painters fix everything in the end.

I will.

I will clean it up in the edit.

Okay.

And are you going to do an introduction to the speakers?

I am.

Good.

Okay.

Yep.

So you can just dive right into it.

Oh, got it.

All right.

Over to you, Jeremy.

So it's delightful to be here with you gentlemen, both of whom.

I have followed your work over many decades, and it's great to see your article.

Resisting Trumpism can revise the labor movement.

And that's what we're going to talk about today.

And I wonder, for starters, what kind of resistance do you have in mind, and what might it look like?

Do you want to jump in, Joe, or you want me to jump in?

You take the lead, Stephen.

Yeah, I think the kind of resistance we're talking about is what we saw in Minnesota, which is how we're both with union members and building community alignments, building the base and the power to really challenge what Trump is.

Isn't about.

And that's not just big demonstrations.

I think where we're heading more and more is how we're able to engage in economic disruptions and strikes and make the billionaires and corporations backing Trump to start to feel some pain for the result of what they're doing.

So, to us, it's not just big demos.

It's really developing the muscle and the power of civil disobedience and other ways to disrupt the.

Joseph, do you want to add.

Go ahead.

Yeah, I would add to that.

Yeah.

Just to underline what Stephen said at the end there.

And there's been, you know, protests against Trumpism for sure.

No kings, et cetera.

But I think.

And that's all great, but as Stephen says, what we feel is that there needs to be more collective action, more disruptive collective action in which people see each other participating in ways that, you know, block the normal function of things.

That kind of resistance has been most successful in resisting authoritarianism in other settings, and we think we need more of that here.

Are there examples of that here or abroad that you can point to and answer the question, well, why is that going to have any effect on Trump and Trumpism?

Stephen, Go ahead, Joe, go ahead.

Well, I would say, you know, Stephen mentioned Minneapolis, and I think there was a lot of such collective action there where neighbors came out when they realized that ICE was in their neighborhood to observe and to really get in the way to some extent, of ICE doing what it was doing to terrorize that community.

And it was people's efforts to do that that led to, unfortunately, a couple of killings there by the federal authorities.

But that kind of resistance brought people out together into the streets.

There were some arrests of religious leaders and others that happened in Minneapolis.

So I think the most present example that we've seen in the US Is what happened there.

But I'd also say that if you look back to take down Tesla, which started when Elon Musk got more and more prominent in Doge and this trillionaire race is rambling on and on and attacking folks, people went out and picketed his Tesla and drove the stock price way down, which is another example.

One way to think about it is traditionally unions have strikes when they're in negotiations with an employer, and you have to inflict economic damage to get them to change their position.

And it's clear and clear to us, and you can watch as the stock market gyrates and everything is that corporations are really, really nervous when they get focused on when activity goes there that inhibits their profits and all that.

It's everything from the battle to stop data centers for opening.

These are all cases where people aren't just protesting, but they're looking at the economics and how companies make money and how we make it clearer and clearer that supporting these policies of Trump and enriching the billionaires and supporting the Silicon Valley techno found fascists, that that ultimately is going to build a movement that's going to challenge the power of corporations and disrupt their ability to do things.

You know, when we had the justice for janitors campaign in D.C. we were enjoined from picketing buildings.

So we blocked the 14th Street Bridge and shut down the whole city.

We need to look at the kind of tactics that start to really disrupt what's going on.

And that's what's so exciting about what's coming up on this May Day, which is people are calling for economic disruption.

No shopping, no work, no school.

Not everybody can do all of that.

But there are always people can start to build the muscle of putting a boot in the gear of the system that's supporting Trumpism and the billionaires taking over more and more of the wealth and power in this country.

Now, you talk about reviving the labor movement.

In fact, the title of your piece is Resisting Trumpism Can Revive the US Labor Movement.

Why does the labor movement need reviving?

Well, I know we only have half an hour for this show, so I'll jump in first as an organizer and then Joe maybe can add the history to that.

Look, I think we all know that since the late 50s, the labor movement has declined in density and power for 50 years, and it's been slowly getting quicker and quicker.

We're down to, I think, 6% of the private sector unions are unable in many cases to strike effectively.

The labor movement has really been gutted.

And what we've learned is the incremental steps that we've taken to try to organize in the past are insufficient.

What we know from history in this country and elsewhere is unions grow in leaps and bursts as part of bigger social movements.

And we think the way to revive.

And many in the labor movement have adopted the position, well, if we get too involved in fighting Trump, that's somehow going to hurt us.

We think it's the opposite.

We think the labor movement standing up, taking on the billionaires, is how we build the power that on the other end of Trumpism, to have the kind of massive growth in numbers of powers that we need.

Absolutely.

And I would add to that, Jeremy, that, well, you've written about strikes, and one of the things that needs to be revived in the labor movement is its ability and willingness to engage in strikes.

In the last 25 years, that average has dropped from 12 back then to about 1% per year.

And so what's really happened to the labor movement over time is that it's really let its muscles atrophy.

And unless we can sort of rebuild that muscle and the ability of workers, the willingness of workers and unions to engage in direct action in the form of strikes, and it doesn't have to be the traditional kind of strike, but collective actions that, again, bring pressure to bear, I think that's what what has been lacking in the labor movement in recent years.

And I don't see any kind of labor revival in this country that isn't accompanied and led by the revival of that capacity.

And I would just add to that is that sometimes people have this very narrow view of the strike, which is you go on strike and then you walk in circles in front of the door or the gate.

And when we think about strikes and big strikes, it's not just that people are withholding labor, that we're liberating thousands of workers from the daily grind of work so they can do all the kinds of activity you need to do to win a sprite, which is not just picketing your employer, but is building alignments and coalitions, which is doing nonviolent civil disobedience, which is creating a crisis for those companies.

So we think that when we think about strikes, we also need to think about how we cut off capital to companies by saying our pension fund should no longer invest in companies that want to destroy us.

We need to combine the strike with all the other tools we've learned about how to take on the rich and powerful.

And so we think there's an.

And I think what we'll see.

And, you know, one of the things we talked about in the article is that South Africa, Brazil, and South Korea had explosions of organizing strikes and growth when the dictatorships fell.

And one of the things that we.

And when you look at the history of the growth of the labor moving Post World War II in Europe, in the U.S. it was the idea that unions were the key defenders of equality and democracy.

And without a labor movement, those things couldn't happen.

So we think the opportunity here is for unions to lay out what we stand for, to reinvent the strike and how we take on corporations, and to help workers imagine the kind of country and world we could create if we don't cede everything to the billionaires and the folks in Silicon Valley who want to monitor everything we do.

All right, that was a long sentence.

Sorry, Jeremy.

There was a comma and a semicolon hidden in there somewhere.

I caught them.

Well, that seems to lead into your references to a shared common good analysis and common good alliances.

Can you explain what this means and what it has to do with bringing labor together with the other forces resisting Trumpism?

I'll start on this, Stephen, and please chime in.

And the Chicago teachers union was an important presence at our first meeting of this network.

About the whole community.

And they did work in advance of that strike, building community alliances and alignments.

And they made demands during the course of the strike that went beyond what.

What teacher unions have traditionally demanded.

They demanded that the schools be, you know, renovated entirely.

And their.

Their slogan was that, you know, Chicago's children deserve decent schools.

So bargaining for the common good was an idea of labor and community coming together and trying to use the bargaining process as an opportunity to bring them together to fight for things in common.

And.

And that's an idea that's developed over time.

One of the places where it took root very successfully was in the twin Cities in Minneapolis.

And, you know, Stephen referred earlier to strikes creating liberating workers briefly from their daily activities that allow them to step back and to learn about the larger struggle.

And what happened on a series of days of action that were organized in Minneapolis over recent years was that workers and community members came together in strike schools to learn how to work together.

And it was that work, I think, that laid the basis for the successful resistance that happened in Minneapolis.

So common good analysis refers to.

To bringing labor and community together.

And I'll let Stephen, you know, put a finer point on.

Yeah, I'll go backwards a second, which is one of the great tricks or cynical manipulations that the rich have paid in us, which is they've, over the years, narrowed legally what unions are supposed to bargain around.

You know, you can't only bargain around, you know, permissive subject, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And so they've limited to basically that unions should only bargain about wages and benefits.

And then they say, aha, look at the greedy unions.

All they care about themselves is they only bargain about wages and benefits.

And the whole idea behind bargaining for common good is workers have full lives.

They have lives at work.

They have lives in their neighborhood, they have lives in their cities.

And bargaining for common good is really about democratizing each part of people's lives.

So at work, how people have more say in what goes on.

But going back to Minneapolis and St. Paul during the foreclosure strike crisis, the St. Paul teachers negotiated that the school district would not do business with Any bank that foreclosed during the school year.

It was based on a tradition for farmers in Minnesota that you couldn't get foreclosed on during the peak of crops, which went back to the populist movement.

And so what the teacher said is, what is worse for student outcomes than losing your home?

That was the kind of thing they bargained for around the janitors union in Minneapolis that cleans the office buildings.

Bargained and struck along with student climate strikers over the issues of greenhouse gas emissions and how they needed a step up training program so that workers would be at 70% of greenhouse gas emissions come from office buildings in Minneapolis.

The idea was that workers would get trained to better deal with greenhouse emissions from the building so they get paid more.

But also, you actually literally had student climate strikers at the bargaining table.

The whole idea behind Bargaining for Common Good is what's our vision of our workplaces and our communities?

And how do we leverage collective bargaining as one part of how we expand that?

And so that plays out in schools.

For meatpacking would be unions negotiating that the meatpacking unions inspect food to make up for what the government isn't doing in banking and finance bargaining for common good.

In the CWA bank campaign, it was Wells Fargo workers who blew the whistle on the Wells Fargo cheating scandal.

It's the idea that workers and community, when we have a common analysis of who the bad guys are, can work together in a way to dramatically change people's lives and turn bargaining not into a narrow can I get a little bit more money?

But into a transformational experience.

The idea of regulation from below is kind of what Stephen's talking about.

Yeah, we looked at, I mean, in banking, it's incredible that one of the challenges and we talk about reviving the labor movement is for unions to have a more expansive role of their role,.

Not just at work, but in society.

And to start moving that.

So that does mean that workers should be the whistleblowers when companies cheat.

It's helping people come into their full humanness.

And so it's not the idea that you're at work and then you have no power when you leave.

It's fascinating.

For example, in Connecticut, the Connecticut for all table, which is part of Bargaining for Common Good, has helped support and build out the tenant union organizing that now has negotiated a first collective agreement with landlords.

It's the idea of that through collective action of workers and communities.

That's how you win change.

Not just workers, not just unions narrowly on their own.

And how do you see that kind of self organization and action around common issues relating to the.

What you describe as resisting Trumpism.

Well, I'll give one example.

It's if you take Palantir, which most people know, but Palantir is this wackadoodle, scary, crazy surveillance company that is doing, creating the tools both in the US and around the world to monitor and monitor everybody.

One of the things that's starting to happen that is like the.

And it also means that AI would take over scheduling almost every part of our lives.

So the nat.

So there's a campaign purge Palantir, which is saying we should get cities and states and companies not to hire Palantir to do that kind of monitoring.

So in healthcare, National Nurses United is already working on bargaining with employers and saying we shouldn't have AI and Palantir control our scheduling and our patient care.

In the UK there's a whole call for the National Health Service not to use Palantir.

So when we look at the key.

Corporations, especially the Silicon Valley techno fascists,.

That are backing Trump and profiting from Trump, it's an analysis both of where they get the money.

We're starting a campaign that might shock you, Jeremy.

There's a website on Stop Funding Billionaires, which is a $6 trillion of public employee pension money.

That's the money that's deferred compensation for workers that is currently being invested in the very companies that want to support Trump and destroy unions.

And so by taking that on and by building labor community campaigns to say no more of our money should fund these guys like Palantir or the SpaceX IPO, we both start to help people understand we have much more power than we think.

The capital that is supporting some of the worst things is all deferred compensation of workers, meaning the money they didn't get paid because they agreed to have it go into a pension plan.

It's the same thing on college campuses.

The Duke University endowment is invested in Palantir, which is one of the most dangerous companies in America, by building labor student community alliances to say college endowments should not be invested in companies that monitor and leave to do deportation.

These are all ways we imagine both building the power to resist Trumpism, but in some ways, as and more importantly, to set the stage for what comes next.

Because at some point Trumpism will fall because it's not really an ideology.

It's a hodgepodge of lunatics who want to enrich the super rich.

So that we also are trying to.

The way I imagine it, it's a little bit Like a pool game, you want to set up the next shot.

And we're trying to set up the next shot, which is at the other side of this, how we don't fall into what the article calls, I think, magic thinking, which is, oh, the Democrats are in charge again.

Everything will be fine.

The worst thing that could happen is for the Dems to win and then for everybody to sort of fall into the same trap of, well, let's not push the limit here.

We don't want to alienate people.

If the system stays the same, unions won't grow and it will feed a further right wing populism.

We need to both have a vision, a plan and a strategy about how we're really talking about transforming the country and redistributing wealth and power and fighting Trumpism is how we build the muscle to do that in the long run.

Right.

And.

How do you see if it's not simply by putting more Democrats in power, which I gathered from what you say is not the strategy that you see here.

What do you see as a strategy for, other than that, for what should be happening as we're able to reduce and eventually eliminate the power of Trump and Trumpism?

Well, I think it's not that we don't believe that we have to defeat, you know, the political allies of Trump.

However, our view is that, you know, doing that is just not enough.

You know, the idea for bargaining for the common good began before there was Donald Trump on the national seat.

You know, the idea emerged because, you know, we could see where things were heading and the folks who've been involved in this movement could see, you know, how labor's weakness was creating a vacuum for the emergence of this kind of demagogic leadership.

And unless we found ways to attack the, those in power in the way they wielded power, especially the corporate interests of this country, that, you know, we would in one form or another degenerate further into the, the kind of crisis of democracy that we're now in the midst of.

So bargaining for the common good began as an idea of how to reinvigorate democracy by bringing people together in fights around common, commonly shared issues against commonly identified targets.

The corporations that were driving so much of what was going wrong in the country.

Giant capital formations like Blackstone, the private equity group, which is doing so many different things in the country to worsen, you know, the housing crisis, for example, getting involved in health care and messing that up and in every part of workers lives.

And Stephen says that workers are whole beings, these corporate interests were doing things to make life more difficult.

So it was building a muscle to try to take that on.

And unless we build that kind of muscle further, defeating Trump's political enemies or Trump's political allies, I should say, is not going to be enough.

Those same forces will limit whatever Democrats can do if they are in office.

We have to attack the power where it resides.

And that's the key, I think, to building this kind of resistance.

Yeah, I guess one thing, and I know we're running out of time, Jeremy, and you want to actually ask us questions instead of have us ramble on here, but I think in some ways, Minnesota, we did a whole long case study at Georgetown, Kalmatovitz, of what's going on in Minnesota over the last 10 years.

And one of the things to look to is they built out bargaining for common good and this alignment.

And then when the Democrats did take power, only by one vote, they had an unrelenting agenda, which is called the Minnesota Miracle, which they passed very quickly, meaning it wasn't like, oh, we elected the Dems, and now let's just wait to see what we do.

The whole thing was built around the time to act.

So we're not, as Joe said, we're not dismissing electoral politics.

We're saying they're necessary but insufficient.

And we have to imagine, and this is what actually I'm trying to remember the exact numbers, but happened in Brazil and South Africa when the dictatorship or apartheid fell, there was an explosion of strikes.

So we think these two things are interrelated.

How we fight Trumpism builds the muscle, builds the experience, builds a sense of power.

And then we need to build on that and not be content to say, oh, we're not under attack by fascists.

We need to then turn our eye to how do we really break up the big corpor, tax the rich and do things that make substantial and real change in society.

Now, bringing this down to the present time, you mentioned the Mayday actions, which are now only about 10 days away.

Could you talk a little bit about that and how that fits into the analysis you've been laying out?

Yeah, I mean, what's really been fun about Mayday Strong, which of course is a website, Mayday Strong is that it's been doing what some people might call the mass work.

Tens of thousands of people on calls, lots of actions.

And it started on May Day of last year, which is really a call for workers over billionaires, which is a much stronger call in terms of what we're doing than stop Trump.

And what Mayday Strong has done is start to knit together local unions and community groups to build.

Build local alignments with strike schools and all of that, to start getting people in motion and getting people to see what it's like to do civil disobedience, what it's like to shut down an airport.

It's giving people that experience.

And what's been really fascinating about Mayday Strong is now how many groups like the did know Kings Day, like Indivisible, have now endorsed Mayday and endorsed economic disruption.

So I think what Mayday Strong is.

Doing is, is it raising an issue and bring in the center very much.

In our direction, that it really is about billionaires and giant corporations, and Trump in some way is just their enabler.

So while we talk about taking on Trumpism, that's really the vehicle to go after the billionaire.

So Mayday Strong is part of building.

A national movement that is ultimately, you know, it ultimately started.

What Mayday Strong is saying, one, we can't wait till 28 because Trump's moving so quickly.

But also it's the kind of activity that we do now that sets the.

Stage to do much more militant and aggressive stuff later.

And how do you see an ordinary worker or ordinary union member if they said, well, it all sounds right to me, and I want to be part of this, not just Mayday and Mayday Strong, but about the broader transformation of US labor through resisting Trump and Trumpism.

But how can I relate to this?

I'm just one person, just a person who gets up and does my job or works, you know, maybe participates in my PTA or my church or my synagogue or my mosque.

How can I relate to this?

What is, what does this mean for me?

What should I be thinking about doing?

How can I try to begin making a contribution to this?

I mean, I could take a first shot and then turn it to Joe.

You know, in a way, what's going on is there's.

There's no Kings and all that, which.

Is an entry point for a lot of people.

Mayday Strong then has just getting very.

Concrete, big mass calls that are open to anybody.

So a lot of people, rank and file workers, both union, non union, get.

On those calls and they start to hear this idea.

Then there are, around the country, we've been doing strike and solidarity schools where people can then go and learn more and meet other people.

One of the really good things about.

Mayday Strong is that because it's hyperlocal in the sense that everything's about the local activity.

There's a range of things you could.

Go pick at a Tesla, you could.

Hand out a leaflet, you could go to a meeting, you could go to your union meeting and encourage folks that we're creating all sorts of on routes.

And I think, Jeremy, on the thing that you're really getting to, it's like somebody can start as easy as coming to a demonstration, then they can get trained on civil disobedience, that we can keep moving people up.

And what we're seeing is lots of.

Rank and file union members and people who are not yet union members know things are wrong.

And if we do things locally and offer them opportunities, folks want to get engaged and then they're radicalized by that experience.

And I think Minnesota really shows we can talk all about ice and how.

Terrible those tactics are.

But 320,000 people stayed away from work.

I think that's the official number in Minnesota, because they experienced personally regular workers what it was like to have mass government agents attack people.

And that radicalized people in a way that we never could have through political education.

That radicalized people because of that experience and then led them to be able to do what they did in Minnesota.

So I think that's the kind of thing that we're starting to look at and seeing people responding to.

And Stephen's the organizer and he laid that out beautifully.

I'm a historian, so I'll just step back and like try to put this in perspective in the long swing of our history.

And I know you've written a lot about history yourself, Jeremy, so I would say that what Stephen described is the emergence of a movement that's trying to figure out how to respond to financialized, globalized capitalism of the 21st century that's causing a crisis of democracy, not just here, but anywhere that democracy exists.

And this kind of movement needs to have low barriers to entry for anyone.

We can't rely on coming into the movement through an NLRB election.

There need to be ways that workers can come together to defend themselves without that.

And we can't rely either on a top down campaign being orchestrated by, say, the labor federation.

We have to have ways in which workers can engage where they are in this kind of struggle because of the nature of the kind of system we're now in.

So in the 19th century, the craft union emerged as an appropriate response to the kind of conditions workers found.

Then in the early 20th century, industrial unions emerged to deal with that kind of situation.

Workers found themselves in and then public sector unions in the later part of the 20th century, as government group in the 21st century.

I think we need the kind of model that is kind of experimentally taking shape through this kind of struggle right now, and one that brings workers and community people together and a defense of the common good of democracy of their own voices.

And I feel like the average worker can find a way to do this, as Stephen said, in their local community.

And as they do this, I think people should see themselves taking part in the kind of reinvention and revival of the union movement as we go forward, and also the defense of democracy, the expansion of democracy because it had atrophied, which has opened the door to Trump.

Chris, you should let us know how we're doing on time.

I think maybe one more question.

Well, let me just say ask if there's anything that either of you would like to add, some big, important point that we've not hit on so far.

Give me a second to ponder, since I know so many points to make.

It doesn't have to be cosmic, but something that is really important for the listeners to this show to have in mind.

I think what I'd build into this is that there's two things going.

There's many things going on, but two of the things going on is the massive concentration among billionaires and how almost every policy leads to them getting more and more money and more and more power.

But I think what we've given a little bit of short shift to in our discussion here is what some of us call the techno fascists of Silicon Valley, because they explicitly are saying, this is Peter Thiel.

These are the giant companies that democracy should be replaced with the CEO oligarchy aristocracy.

They are officially publicly writing and saying that democracy no longer works.

So we have two things going on.

We have a money grab, but we also have a power grab combined with AI that's going to lead to massive job cuts.

So I think what people have to think about here is, and Joe is alluding to it, is we're about to go through another stage of capitalism in the US which is going to be worse and worse for workers.

And that's both horrible, but it's also an opportunity to really talk about the kind of change we make.

And so I guess what I really want to stress, which is where we end the article, which is we need to start thinking now about who the bad guys are, not just the billionaires, but the techno fascists in Silicon Valley, how we start taking them on now, organizing as workers Organizing as consumers, organizing as people that have potentially control our capital and really prepare ourselves for a very, very different kind of battle on the other side.

That, to use a bit, maybe has cosmic importance because it's not just the question of whether the workers will have unions.

It's a question of the will of a society that's based on equality and opportunity for everybody or based on a teeny group of people like Elon Musk dominating all parts of our life.

So the crazy thing is it's so stark, it's so bad that as people hear about it, I think that we can build the kind of movement we need to win the kind of change that we haven't had for 50 years.

And that the labor movement can play a key role if it adopts that view that this is a time to do everything we can.

The biggest risk, as I wrote in an earlier article, the biggest risk for labor is to be cautious.

The biggest risk for labor is to hope that somehow this will fix itself.

The risk for labor is that we don't do anything versus the risk.

And the safest thing for labor to do is to go all in on mass organizing now, on challenging the bad guys and building the base we need to reorganize a country on the other side of this.

I think that says it all.

I love working with Stephen because he can put it in such a fine point as you just did, but I think that says it.

Okay, well, Chris, are we all set?

Tell us what else you'd like from us before we go.

I'm good, guys.

What I loved about the article and what I loved about the conversation today and Jeremy, thanks for bringing your piece to it is it's such a clear eyed view of what's going on and I've heard these things expressed by other folks, but usually at the end you just feel like, let me just go find a hold.

But you guys, in both your article and in the conversation, you wind up feeling, yes, this is something that we can do.

And you wind up feeling energized and inspired.

And that's why I wanted to get this conversation down on tape.

So I really appreciate you guys spending some time with us on a, on a Monday morning.

And I will let you know, I think we're going to try and get part of it into the radio show this week and then it'll probably the longer conversation will be in labor history today.

But I will keep you posted and I hope to see you at some of our labor film fest.

It's a really good film fest.

It raises a lot of the issues that you guys are talking about.

Excellent.

Cool.

All right, guys.

Thanks, Chris.

Thank you.

And, Jeremy, I know we've been on a million emails together, but I have no idea if we've ever had a conversation like this.

Actually met in what I think of as an underground location at Occupy Wall street with the rank and file organize labor organizing committee of Rank and file Wall Street.

I wandered in because I saw it being on a list somewhere around Zuccotti park.

And I wandered in, and there were a group of Occupy Wall street activists, plus you.

And that's the one time we've actually met.

Well, it's great to see you, and let's stay in close touch.

I should just tell you guys when I met Jeremy, who I'd been reading his stuff for years and of course, knew about him.

Jeremy I met.

When was it?

Like three or four years ago.

We were at one of Jane Fonda's Fire Fridays.

So I'm with Sally Field, kind of helping her.

We get arrested, and me and Sally get into the paddy wagon.

There's a bunch of us in a paddy wagon.

We're sort of introducing ourselves, and this thing, this little guy in the back says he's Jeremy Brucken.

I'm thinking, what could be that.

Jeremy Brecker.

Very good to see you all.

Thanks again.

Really appreciate it.

Yeah.

Take care, guys.

Bye.