Why Our Supply Chains Suck

goods and price increases. M So it's fucking rad. I was just at the Asian market today, Um, and they did not have the snack chips that I most prefer Now officially a calamity. Um, we've entered crisis of historic proportion. Yeah, I think I don't think we're going to live through this one. Nope, we're doing. We can't look at that

without the asient snack chips. Like it's the ones that are like they're like pieces of seaweed but that have been temp fried and temper a batter's completely out tragic, absolutely tragifying. I think there's a couple of things. I mean, you've got a script, so I'll probably just let you

do that in the not too distant future. But one of the things that's frustrating to me, although maybe it shouldn't be because I'm probably partly responsible for this, is that this is being um this is often kind of being talked about with by people online. It's like, oh, it's a sign that like society is crumbling, And what they mean by that is that like, oh, well, we just don't have stuff, like we're we're not able to like keep up with with demand, and like the ability

to produce these things is crumbling. And it's actually much more complex than that, and a lot less rooted in a lack of specific resources and more decisions made under capitalism about how the supply chain would work. And it's I don't know, I think it's important because it is you can say it still is like a situation where this is an example of the system falling apart, but it's not falling apart because we don't have the paper

to make toilet paper with. It's falling apart because decisions were made in order to increase the stock prices of companies by reducing the amount of products that they kept on hand, and that's led to an incredibly fragile system that that did nothing well but maximize profits. And I think, well, okay, I think there's there's there's a couple of things with

that that we should talk about. Yeah, because there's a lot of different explanations they're floating around for why it's happening, and I think some of them are good, but I think a lot of them are missing part of the story.

And I think it's important because Okay, so, like like my grandma like called me yesterday, like like called our family to like talk about the supply chain problem because someone had like she'd been like fed a conspiracy theory that like the shortages were because American dock workers like

didn't want to open containers from China. Uh yeah. It's like yeah, like I mean this is not that's not right, but it's not like if that had happened, it would be like, well, okay, that does scan like yeah, and I think yeah, and like I think this is this is a moment where yeah, you know, okay, think think

things are not working how they're supposed to you. And there's a lot of sort of competing stories about it, one which because which are bad, and I think most of the conventional accounts and Wherebert was talking about this, uh, you know, even the really good ones. They start with sort of the eighties Wall Street takeover corporate America and the transformation of sort of all corporate management into an

attempt to like raise short term stock prices. And you know, part of this is lead in production and this is true, and this is sort of true, but dismisses about half of the story. And and the part of the story that it misses that's really important, I think is the sort of it's it's the broader like frame in which all of this is happening in is essentially the worry of how the working class essentially loses the class war in the six season seventies. And weirdly, it's also a

story about for cos boomerang. Yeah, yeah, long, throw in, throw in, the music clip that we've all decided is going to be the one we put in whenever someone talks about FOKS boomerang, which is probably just going to be another time machine noise, So real quick employees. Credit to Cody Um okay, continue brief refresher on what that is.

So basically, the Free Coast boomerang is that Okay, if if you if if if a government does something like repressive like technology, passive technique or passive technology like in a colony, like in a war somewhere, eventually it will come back and be used against like the citizens of

that country. And yeah, a great example would be fingerprinting was invented for the British like policing um insurgents in Malaysia, and is now has them back to every you know, colonizing nation now use his finger printing, which is also deeply flawed as a technology. But anyway, yeah, yeah, and you know, and I think most people tend to think about this is our armed personnel carriers. But we will

eventually get to this. The boomerang technology here is actually shipping containers hell yeah, which have done like irreparable damage to the mankind. Alright, alright, I'm ready for this. I don't know much about this. Hit me, all right, I bear with you with this, because we're we're we're we're gonna talk about two threads. They're going to seem like they have nothing to do with supply chains, and then they're all going to tie together. It turns out is

literally all supply chains. So in the sixties and seventies, you have, you know, in very very broad general strokes, you have two kinds of class war. The first kind is what I'm sort of very broadly calling the war and the factories, and this is this is an enormous series that sort of strikes outright uprisings as stretch from

sort of Detroit to tur into Tokyo. And you know, the most famous of these is the student sort of worker uprising in May sixty eight in France and they you know, they're they're they're close enough taking the country that like French President Charles de gaul like flees in a helicopter to in secret, and like flees to Germany in secret, and you know, and that that that that's like a big event, but it's sort of it sort of fades. What doesn't fade is May sixty eight in Italy.

And you know that it doesn't fade there because Italy, Italy has been in the middle of a strike wave since two sixty four. It's the whole sixties that basically just strik waves there and you know, they have their own sixty and unlike in France where Peters out in Italy, you get the just incredibly named hot Hot Autumn of sixty nine, which is a hot autumn. Yeah, it's it's great. And so basically what happens is you get hundreds of thousands of workers go on strike, they start seizing control

their factories. Um, most of most of this is playing out in in the Fiat factories. Yeah, it's giant car factories in Italy's industrial triangle. And you know, I mean they're there for like, they're there for a long time.

They're into like seventy and eventually they lose. But you know, Italy is just sort of rocked by conflict and sort of class war stuff, and all of this re culminates in yet another enormous uprising in nineteen seventies seven, this one driven like in large part by people who we're basically just like, funk this, I'm not working in the

factory anymore. It's awful, which which I think is something that like, you know, if you're looking at the mono political landscape, you have a bunch of people who are going like, funk this, I'm not going to go like die in these factories anymore. And those people all have in a lot of cases safer employing situations than many people today. Yeah. Yeah, it's like it's starting to get worse then, which is why people are are frustrated but

likes yeah, yeah, you know. And and this's sort of interesting because there there's a kind of like Vicky Uster while I've had on here. It calls it, it calls it like the Monkeys Paul thing, where it's like people in the seventies and Italy wanted like autonomy and like freedom from work, and so what what capitalism gave them was like, oh, we'll give you autonomy. We'll just make

you all contract workers. And now like yeah, you don't you don't have to like wake up every morning and like go to a job in the factory and leave a five or whatever. But now you just you know, you're you're a contract worker, so you just have no stability whatsoever, and that that's your autonomy. But you know this, this is this is really bad for the Italian ruling class.

Like they almost lose control of Italy three times in ten years, and after a seventy seven they're just like fuck this and they, i mean, they started to start

doing mass arrest. They imprison like tens of thousands of people, the torture a bunch of people, and you know, but it becomes clear that like pure repression is like not going to be enough to like just destroy the section of the working class movements that you know, God help you thinks that you should like run production for themselves, and so they start looking elsewhere for answers, and the place they find these answers, weirdly enough, is in the

second set of wars that are going on in this period, which are the sort of national liberation wars. And you know, these are the national liberation wars. Are these these are full scale, like these aren't sort of class warm metaphors. These are you know, this is this is giddy be Saw, this is Algeria. And you know, importantly, for for our purposes, the US fights two of them, which is Korean Vietnam.

Now Korean Vietnam are strategically really bad places for the US to fight wars, like they're on the other side of the world, which you know, it makes it more difficult to do war crimes because you know, if you're fire bombing of village, right, you have to be able to move fire bombs, jet fighters and like oil and

rations to the other side of the world. And this is hard about a lot easier when they can commit war crimes and like I don't know, Dulouth Yeah yeah, well like even even like you know, you got to commit a war crime in Mexico, It's like, okay, you just sign a bunch of people over the border. It would be so easy to commit war crimes in Mexico. Yeah, and and really really up our war crime quoti. Well, I we I would say, we do do a lot of war crimes in Mexico. It's just that like they're

done based on by proxies. That's true. But I mean we've killed like we've killed like a million people there in the last like twenty years. And the war on drugs, but yeah, you knows, so the US, you know, the U s okay. So it has this logistics problem. In logistics problem is that it can't do war crimes enough, and so it comes up with a couple of solutions to them. One of them is essentially they rebuild the whole Japanese economy in order to just use Japan's industrial

base to fight the war in Korea. And then after the war in Korea, and they rebuild the South Korean economy in order to you know, fight the war in Vietnam. And this works, but it doesn't solve the problem that you know, Okay, even even even if you're you know, you're you have an industrial based in Japan, right, you still need to be able to efficiently move things by sea to Korea, and you know, you still need to

still supplies you need to move from the US. And so the solution for this is containery shipping and continerary shipping.

This is the pivot point upon which the entire history of the twentieth century and everything that's happening in the twenty one century hinges on like this, this is the pivot and you know, like I'm not even this isn't even really an exaggeration, because it turns out that like the ability to have uniform boxes that you can stack on top of each other like legos and put on a ship is like like it's like comparable to the nuclear bomb in terms of how important it is, which

is really really used to the only way to get things from A to B was a big wooden ship filled with dubloons like pile bags and stuff. Yeah, yeah, I don't know how did we like global commerce work before shipping containers, what did we what did we literally like you just like sometimes sometimes you would just like physically people would just pick up the items and put them on the ship, or they would like sometimes they put them in boxes or like you would like strap

them to like the top of the ship. And so with the trains a lot they were just like strap

like machinery like onto a train car. And this was like not this is like really inefficient, it's really so yeah, And so the US in order to like do war crimes in Korea, and then you know, it's just like, oh, hey, what if we just make metal boxes and then they get they progressively get better and better at it because you know, they have to go do more war crimes in in Vietnam, and but by the time you're getting to the end, yeah, yeah, you know, look lots of

war crimes that do you need? You need good logistics networks to do all of these war crimes. I mean it makes sense that that's where we got shipping containers. But I didn't realize. I had just assumed it would have come out of the shipping industry as opposed to like we got to get more missiles over to these places. Yeah, well this is the interesting thing. We'll get to this

in a bit. But basically, like a lot of the logistics revolution stuff either comes out of the military or is developed by X fascists and and and a lot of the reason for this is Okay, I mean this is you know, this is the seventies. They're still are in d happening like the still actual research and developments, but the military is doing just an enormous amount of

the researcher development for all of global capitalism. And you know, and and the other thing that what's happening here and you know this this is the sort of cozy boomerang thing is that you know, so the container are shipping logistic stuf that had been used to just like obliterate the global South suddenly starts spreading into capital like you know, just into like broader shipping because people look at this

and they're like, oh, this is efficient. And then the contracting companies the US is using this turns into the solution to both sort of the war and the factories are talking about in in in Europe and the US and in like Japan itself, and then also to the solution of the national liberation movements and sort of like communism in East Asia because you know, Okay, so you have this question, right the US, like we kind of fight to a draw in Korea, like we kill a

norm's number of people, but the North Korea, yeah, and like yeah, but we don't really win, right, like we we we can't actually defeat the Chinese army or yeah, and and you know, and we lose Vietnam. And so the question is, okay, so like how how are we going to stop communism? And the answer, it turns out, is to just integrate integrate the communist countries into the capitalist supply chain. And I mean there's a lot of

examples of this, like Market Thatcher for example. It is like very good buddies with Nikolai chesscu Ah, that's nice. They could be friends despite their the fact that they well I guess they weren't really that different as people, No, not really, Like basically the difference is that ky lost and thus got like murdered on state television on a state funeral treatment. That's my official stance. They should have

for stuff we will talk about in a bit. But yes, but you know, the the archetypal example of this is actually China, and you know there's a lot of various sort of skilled diplomatic work by Kissinger and also the US like throughout the seventies just like they're just like sending entire factories to China, like like the like they'll they'll they'll take an entire factory, break it down, put

it in boxes, and then just like ship at the China. Great, it's the time and yes, so yeah, they're they're they're just like sending to knowlogy of China. And the end result of this is that you know, China goes from like fighting American troops with like like doing bannit charges like through yeah, yeah, against the Yeah. I was just like yeah to to you know, being an American ally in like invading Vietnam as a way to like stick

it to the Soviets basically. And so you know, so the US esensely just integrates China to the global supply chain, and they eventually do the same thing to Vietnam, which again is another country that they couldn't defeat militarily. But what they you know what they actually beat them with,

it's the shipping container. And before the shipping container this would have been impossible, right, like basically it was too inefficient and too expensive, like the cost of shipping was too high to have all of this production, you know, like some half your parts made in China, some of them made India's on them made in like Japan's, one of the made in Korean, and then shipped them all around the world, which is how the modern system works.

But with with container I shipping, suddenly shipping is really cheap, and it becomes much cheaper to pay shipping costs it is to pay labor costs. And this is the solution

to to the sort of war and the factories. You know, if workers start making too much noise about pay or like again a god forbids start talking about like taking control of factories and running the democratically like some kind of anarchist monsters, corporation can just move the factories overseas, and this becomes an incredibly effective way to just destroy the labor movement because anytime, you know, organized labor starts making demands, you can be like, well, okay, sorry, we're

just gonna pack up and we're gonna you know, we're gonna go to China. We're gonna go to somewhere else.

And this coincides with, you know, the thing, the thing that gets talked about a lot in the conventional accounts, which is the Wall Street sort of corporate takeover, well, the Wall Street takeover of corporate America, which is something I think that sounds really weird to us now, but you know, the whole the whole story here is really interesting and extremely long, and if if you want to like have a very detailed accounts of how this all

played out, the book Liquidated by Karen Hoe is just incredible, like ethnography and history of Wall Street. She like she's a Karen has an anthropologist, and she like went and worked on Wall Street and like did ethnography there for a bit and it's very interesting stuff, but it's kind

of outside of our scope. So the very very very short version is that the Wall Street bankers basically figure out a way to just like buy out corporations, to raise a bunch of money and just entirely buy out corporations. And then once they have the corporation, right, what what what what the you know, this is corporate rating. So they're there, they they loot all the assets, they sell it off and they try to sell off their stock

at a higher price. The parcels of this is sort of complicated, but the net result of this is that Wall Street completely takes over the corporate world in the way they hadn't before. Like the Wall streets, the Wall Street like finance people are now you know, there're the there are the people making off the decisions, and you know, and and they're their only goal is to raise the stock price, like that's that's the only thing they care about.

That they don't they don't even care about making money. Right if if you lose money and your stock price still rises, like you don't care. And those guys start looking at a lot of the things that had existed in corporations before that things like pensions, uh, particularly things like researcher development. They look at it and go, Okay, why are we spending money on R and D Like this This doesn't this doesn't raise our stock price, This doesn't have any immediate shorter and value. So they cut

it right, They start cutting pensions. They starts just destroying the unions, and you know, and and because because this is happening at the same time as corporations really like

get the ability to outsource for the first time. You know, they lean into it and they start essentially we're just just slashing the aout of people who work for the company, right, and so you know and so and instead of having direct employees, they start working with contractors, and they start moving to the contractors overseas, and you know, and and this is this is where we get to sort of this whole outsourcing wave because you know, something I don't

think I talked about enough withoutsourcing is why actually are the labor costs lower in the countries that these people are are moving their factories to. H And part of it is, you know, people talk about development like they're moving to undeveloped countries, and you know, part of part of part of development is just you know, how much technological capacity their manufacturing system has, right, and that you know.

But but the other part of it is that if you move your production to say Columbia, right or like you know, you're investing in sort of like cocoa bean farming in Columbia and people try to do you need organizing,

you can hire des squads to murder them. Yeah and yeah, yeah, It's like you can basically just sort of like you can you can outsource the violence, and you can you can you know, the corporate term for it is reducing labor costs, but really what you're doing is just like murdering people with des squads and terrorizing them, and you know that that does lower labor costs, right, But you know, and I think there's there's another example of this, Like this is a lot of what like the killing at

Tienamen was really about. It was you know, not so much in Tianna score itself. If falked about this elsewhere, but like the workers that they kill outside of the square, like a lot of the reason they're doing very little about Tinaman Square other than like protesters China government bad.

The guy stands up the tank and then yeah, yeah, yeah, I've talked about this elsewhere more than like the very short version is, so there's a bunch of students in the square, right, and the students in the square itself like basically they kind of went democracy and mostly they want like market reforms to go faster. But then outside of the square, you know, Fijings, like whole working class

shows up and there's these enormous demonstrations. They basically start like like barricading, like blocks and blocks and blocks and like this radius outside of the street and you get

the sort of like mini commune thing ing. And those guys are like, you know, like they're they're they're advocating for democracy and the factory like they're you know, they're they're talking about things like like I mean, they're they're like that, you know, they they they they they have their like marks out and they're talking about how like they're they're they're calculating their rate of surplus value that's

being extracted from them by the capitalists. And those are the people, like almost everyone who dies at chantament Is is from those guys, Like those are the people that they just get massacred. And you know, and and the reason that happens is that the CCP is looking at this and it's like, okay, this, this is this is like this this is sort of this is the return of organized labor, and we need to destroy it before it like gets anywhere. And so they do, and organized

labor and China just implode. I mean, it was already pretty weak because you have a lot of stake control unions, but I mean now it's just nothing, and you know, and and and there I mean there there have been attempts to labor organizing in China sort of recently, and like yeah, the to be just rest everyone, right, and so you know this this this is how this is, this is the price of cheap labor, right, it's just

incredible state repression. But this is also you know, and this is this is a sort of like macro scale thing of why the supply chains suck because everyone talks about like the efficiency of the supply chaine, but the

supply chains aren't efficient. They make no sense, right if if if if what you're trying to do is move something quickly from points A to point B. They make no sense because you know, the supply chaines are spread all over the world, like in individual parts of being made in six countries, right, you have like people will like for tax dodge purposes, like they'll have one part of a component's built in one country, and then they'll move it from another country and to have another part

of it, and then they'll ship all of it to Mexico and they'll ship it across the border and they'll have the whole thing be assembled in the USC they can say it was made in the US. Like there's there's all of these things that are just just nonsense right there. They're not they're not efficient at all. It's it's completely ridiculous. It's it's this just you know, it's just completely absurd web. And and the reason why it is designed like this is as as a giant sort

of kind of asurgency thing. Like the reason the reason supply chains are are just bad is because there, you know, they they they're not designed to move things that they're designed as an instrument to just like solve the problem of of of of class power right there there there. They're designed destroy unions. They're designed to make sure that nobody ever sort of like gets any ideas about widges, to make sure nobody gets any ideas about like taking anything.

And so you know, but this this this can work for a while. The problem is again, like they're not efficient. It's it's just it just it is not efficient to like move have everything made in like six countries and then you have to semble them somewhere else. Yeah, and so you know, it's efficient in the sense that it efficiently maximizes the value of stock prices for like stock

by backs and stuff. And generally what is meant by like efficiency in that sense is like what makes the seventy people who actually own this company the most money. That's the efficient thing, but it's it's horribly inefficient in every practical sense of the word. And that this is kind of an interesting change because I mean, you know this, this isn't to say that like the supply chains that worked before this were like better, because they also sucked

in a lot of their own ways. But all of the like efficiency stuff that we're about to talk about just just in time production, etcetera, etcetera, Like you know what isn't produced just in time? Sorry, but it isn't add right time. Yeah, they're they're they're they're not produced just in time anymore because the supply chains falling apart. That's that's what that is. Our promise about our sponsors is that, uh, they're they're not at all in time.

Who knows when they'll get your products to you. There's no way to tell, it's impossible to know. We're back, Yeah, we're back to talk about how, you know, having having developed an entire network of extremely inefficient supply chains that just absolutely suck and don't make any sense. Uh, people

tried to make them efficient. And this this is where we go back to Japan because Japan, you know, I guess this is this is this is the other Forks boomerang, which is that you know, okay, so we we we industrialized Japan in order to like fighter colonial wars, right, But then you know this turns into this huge like Pikachu face moment when Japan suddenly starts like industrializing more efficiently than the US does. It's very funny. And then and writes a bunch of books that are the premise

of all of them. Is Japan scary? Yeah, it's very funny. Yeah, you know, like this is interesting. Is this is an interesting thing here, which is that like all of the panic around China, there was exactly the same panic like around Japan in the in like the seventies, and it's exactly say like right down to like a bunch of socialists going like, hey, look this this is a model for anti capitalism. Like people people said that about the Japanese model, and it's like it's it's all, it's all

the same thing. It's just it's just happening again. But you know, what what what what what Japan did and specifically what Toyota does is create this thing called the Toyota production system, which eventually becomes known as just in time production. And this if you've read anything about sort of the modern supply chain problems, you've almost certainly heard of just in time production or or lean production. And just in time and lean production are technically difference, but

the differences don't matter for us. So yeah, and and this this stuff is derived from what Toyota was sort of doing in the post war era. And basically the goal of it is, You're you're never supposed to have any inventory that's just sitting there, so that the whole distant supposed to be constantly the whole system is supposed

to be constantly in motion. So you have parts come in, they get put into their immediately get put into production line, and the finished products immediately shipped out to the stores. And you know, the theory is that the stores are only going to carry exactly enough products to meet demands. And it's supposed to be quote unquote flexible, which means that it can react to shifts and consumer taste and demand by like increasing or decreasing production, and it can't

do this. This is what we've been seeing for the entirety of COVID, which is that you know that this is this is why every time there's a run of toilet paper, everyone runs out of toilet paper, because it turns out that these systems can't even a ten percent increase just completely obliterates this entire system and it just collapses and can't produce enough toilet paper. Yeah, and again

just because it's expensive to store things, it's pricing. This is a big part of like why actually the John Dear strike, which has the potential to disrupt the status quote movement more than any strike in recent history, um is so potent because John Deere actors are kind of a necessary part of the agriculture industry, not just their ability to sell new tractors, but their ability to repair

the extant tractors. Like if harvest season comes around and there's not spare parts to repair tractors that break, like food doesn't get harvested, it's a significant issue John Deere.

We'll talk more about this in another date. But like, not only did the most that they could do to squeeze their employees to suck out pensions, to cut you know, the expenditures on wages, but they they set up their factories in such a way that there was no extra space, so they could not scale up any of these factories to increase demand when they needed to. So that now that John Deere's going on strike, if they lose a

month of productivity, they can't ever catch up. It's impossible because they can't actually expand the productive capacity of their factories. And because the strike is hitting, they didn't have any extra spare parts lying around, so if ship gets broken, they can't manufacture the parts necessary to keep tractors functioning in a lot of American farms because they didn't store any thing, because that was not the most efficient thing for the economic bottom line of the CEO who gets

a hundred and sixty million dollars a year. And anyway, this is this is the funny part about this whole thing, which is that you know, okay, so this whole supply chain system was based around just like destroying destroying the organized working class, right, But it's like they were so successful at it that they've like turned around and fucked themselves with it because like you know this, this is this is the thing about about the John Deer strike, Right,

It used to be you know, back back back if you look at like like how how the unions were broken in the eighties, or like if you look at like the giant like auto strikes you'd have in the seventies, right, And companies still do this to this day, but like there worst at it. The thing they would do is so okay. So you you you know, if you're a company, you know roughly when a strike is gonna happen, right.

And the reason you know when a strike is gonna happen is because in the US, like the way labor law works is that like you can you can basically only strike like when a contract is up. I mean

you can do wildcats, but it's illegal. But you know, okay, so they knew that the audio unions, for example, we're about to go we're going to go on strike when when the contract like was was coming up, and you know, they'd have spies, and you can get a sense of like, you know, okay, so are are how likely are they to do the strike? And you know so so that that that lets you do things like build up an

enormous sort of inventorio spare parts. It lets you build up an inventory of supplies, and it lets you build up you know it basically, it lets you build up the capacity you need to outlast a strike. But the problem with just in times, they can't do that anymore because yeah, they they've they've you know, they've they've completely fucked themselves by by then the John Deer situation, because they hadn't strike, the workers hadn't had gone on strike

since eighties six. They've been putting funds into their strike survival fund for years, but the company had nothing like

has um. It's rather and this is you know, this, this is the other part of of of why everything like good that's happening right now is happening is that they they they you know, they everything has circled back around and suddenly all of these companies are, you know, we are incredibly vulnerable to strikes again because yeah, as you're talking about the just in time production thing, it only works if if everything actually comes in on time, right Like if if if any if any individual part

is late, the whole system starts to fall apart and then and then you can't repair it. And you know, and there's there's a lot of ways that that this this this can be very bad. Um, you know, We've talked about the John do you. We talked about the labor stuff. The other big thing that's happening is COVID, which has happened and continues to happen and has killed off just enormous parts of the working class. I mean,

it's like four million dead worldwide or something. And again that that's also probably an undercount because that's just direct, guest, that's not like, yeah, it's probably like twice that it's I mean, we're looking at a minimum of se us into the US, and again that's probably a million undercounted

at least. It's it's a horror show, right, And and the people they killed with that, you know, like especially in the initial phases, like it was just it was just that they took a chain chainsaw to the working class. And those are a bunch of people who you know that they're they're not replaceable, they're they're very highly skilled, and they do a bunch of jobs that absolutely suck.

And now you know, and one of one of the places that this this has caused a bunch of problems is in the ports, because the other thing that this entire supply game relies on is being able to very quickly and cheaply moved parts from you know, China to the US, from China to Mexico from like Bangladesh too.

Like symbolia, you have, you have, you have. You have to be able to continuously like keep moving stuff around in in you know, you have to continuously keep moving ships around and you also have to be able to load noneload them. And we you know, we we we saw like there there was the that when that ship got stuck in the Suez. There is that whole yeah that you know that that that was sex asses where where when people couldn't get sex asses because the world's

supply of sex asses for months was on that one ship. Um, it was a real crisis for the sex ass community. Those are plastic asses that you have sex with if you're curious. Yeah, it is. The world appears as an immense collection of commodities, some of which are sex asses. Yeah, most of which, in terms of the ones that matter sex asses. Yes, sex ass industrial complex is really the

lynchpin of global capital. But please continue. Yeah, well, you know, but the sex ass indictial complex falls apart, and you know, and it's not just the ship being stuck in the suis like made everything way worse, right, But it was very funny, Yeah, it was. It was a cually funny, but it was extremely funny. The part the thing that's like not very funny is that, like, okay, so in order to getting this to work right, you have to have a bunch of longshoremen. You have to unload all

of this ship m hm. And you know, one of one of the problems that is that is happening in the sort of global supply chain right now is that

the ships can't be unloaded fast enough. And part of this is like this job sucks and people just a lot of people don't want to do it, and a lot of people died and in the and it's causing this huge problem, and and there's and then there's there's another you know, if you want to take like the macro perspective about this, it's that this whole system is relying on logistics workers and so it also needs you know,

you need truck drivers. And we're coming back and you know in the US is that there's yeah, you know, there's there's a sort of a truck drivers now because again, their job sucks and they've been like just absolutely screwing these people over for decades and decades and decades now and turning into the subcontractors just not paying them, and you know, and and this and when you know, when the when the ports shut down, like not even shut up,

like when when the ports are behind unloading stuff, and when the trucks like that are supposed to be moving this stuff, there aren't off of them, and like the cost of that increases, it throws off the whole system. And that's that's another big part of like why this whole thing is is sort of imploding. And and it's

interesting because I remember this. There was like a decade where like every other article we'll be talking about how they were going to like automate like truck driving, and it was like the truck drivers are all going to go out of business because they're going to automated. It just never happened at all. And say the same thing with with there. You know, there's I mean, there's been some port automization, but like not on the scale that

you know, actually does anything. And part part of the reason for that is, you know, I was talking about people not investing in research developments. Yeah, so the biggest people who aren't doing that are the shipping companies. And that's a good time because the shipping basically like container shipping, has been taken over by what's essentially just like a monopoly of two companies. And those two companies make just

an indescribable amount of money. They have like a thousand percent profits, and they just pay it all out of dividends. And so they're not you know, they're not investing in any port infrastructure, they're not investing automation. They're just pocketing the money. And that means that you know, we have all that and they're they're spending in in the case of John Deere, which I keep going back to a bunch of money lobbying to make it illegal for farmers

to repair uh their tractors. Yeah, yeah, they're there, you know, they they they figured they figured out that like the the easiest way to make money is just get the state to shake people down for you. It's like funck like investing in making anything that we have better. Let's just you know, like let's just turn the state into a debt collector. And and it's interesting because so this this is the part of the supply chain crisis that like Biden has been focusing on. But Biden's plan, Biden's

plans great. Biden's plan is literally make the longshoremen work harder. So his plan is here, there are we better, baby, Yeah, we're gonna we're gonna make We're gonna keep the ports open twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, and like make people work weekends now. And then he also got FedEx Walmart and Ups to do twenty four hour or seven day a week shipping. So yeah, the solution is literally just like feed more workers into a grinder and make them work longer, which is which is

great and and you know will not in any way backfire. No, it's fine. I don't even think we should be talking about it. No, it's great, it's gonna, it's it's yeah, it's you know, but I get like this is the thing, Like this won't work and it can't. And the reason it won't work is that, like part of the reason there's a shortage is that, you know, it's it's not it's not just about the like the fact that people aren't paying enough. It's about the fact that these jobs

are just awful. Like you have people, you have people working like twelve hour shifts that start at like six am, then they have to wake another twelve hours shift in hours later, and that these peop having to do with this over and over and over again, and it's well, and they don't like the way that these shifts are

usually put on them. Is that, like you'll find out when you come in that instead of working six am to four pm or whatever, they're actually gonna need you to stay until eight and then they're gonna need you to come in. By the way, you're gonna need to come in like two hours early tomorrow. So you'll realize that, like in between your two shifts, you have a total of eight hours to get home and sleep. And if

you say no, uh uh. While the idea is that if you say no, like you won't have the job it's required now, the reality is that most of these companies are also pretty desperate to have these workers. And a lot of these manufacturing and packing firms, it takes time to train people up and then they quit a couple of weeks in because the work is miserable and the schedule is fucking miserable. Um, and it's yeah, it's all, it's it's it's it's simultaneously like deeply inhuman but also

is leading to a situation. There's a reason why there's so many strikes on right now is that there is opportunity because in sort of the chasing of short term profits, a lot of these fucking oligarchs have exposed themselves in

a in a pretty vulnerable position. Yeah, and I think you know this, this is coming back to a sort of the other way that when when there was a crisis in in the seventies, the other way they solve this was just authoritarianism, right it was you know, is this is the pinos a solution, right like, oh, like workers are using control compromids, Okay, well just shoot them, right and yeah and yeah, and this is you know, they're they're they're finally running into a point where you know,

this is this is the solution they've been trying to do now with with with this crisis, is you know, the the they're relying on the fact that just the

workplace is just indescribably authoritarian. I mean, it's it's like it's it's it's a dictatorship on a scale that is like like even to like the most despotic absolute monarch is just like onion saginable, like your boss gets to control like when you ship, like they get a control when you eat, they get a control exactly what you're doing, like at all times, they get control when you do it, they get a control like when the next time you're

going to do it is. They don't even have to tell you when it's going to be untel like you show up and you know, for the this is this is this has been the gamble for for you know, capitalism bit tire existence, which is that like you just have to take this and eat ship or they get to take away your ability to eat, get medical care and have a place to leave to live. But that's not true anymore. Like you can just say no, you can tell them to funk off. You can, you know

you can. You can, you can organize a union. You can just fucking just leave your job, like just leave it, fucking walk out. And this is why we focus. I mean, this is number one why within the context of unions, strike funds are so important, but also why mutual aid is so important. Is it it potentially when organized well enough, provides people with the option to like, well, how are you going to feed yourself? Well there's people in my community who want to make sure that I'm fed because

they believe in what I'm striking for. Um, that's the promise of all of that. That's the practical behind the kind of high minded you know, anarchists of just you know whatever, theorizing is the ability that like, well, this actually is a weapon too. Yeah, and I think you know what else is a weapon? Christ I hope you're not being sponsored some of them. I hope we are. Chris. Look, I've I've said before for weapons. I'll read any ad for a weapons manufacturer as long as they send me

some weapons. So come on, guys, get on it. You could uh, you could be you could be in the middle of this conversation. Rayphaon, you know, send me a couple of missile guidance chips Lockheed Martin. You know, you want to give me an F thirty five, We'll we'll plug you. You know. That's what's that's that's the deal. That's how it works. Baby. All right, we're back. Hopefully, hopefully you have now heard the advertisement for knife missile to knife missile harder now with like five knives, a

thing that I am not making. It actually exists Yeah, people keep being surprised that the r nin X is a real thing. And yeah, but there's another one. There's there's there's one with more knives. They put more knives. Yeah, what do you You're not gonna look again, You can't. It's like with apple products, right, planned obsolescence is a critical You have to You can't just rest on your laurels. You're gonna run out of money. So you gotta make

another knife missile with a couple of more knives. Yeah, just keep keep adding knives. Nothing can ever go wrong. Do not ask any questions about why you're developing knife missiles. Please send me one and like a drone or three. I swear to God I'll use it for legal purposes. Yeah. So, I guess the last thing that I that that's really interesting about this moment that doesn't usually happen is that you know, okay, so if you, if you, if you,

if you, you read your very basic marks, right. One of the things Marks talks about is that there's this thing called the reserve Army of Labor, which is it's just like, you know, there's a bunch of people who are just always unemployed and they get along by doing sort of like odd jobs, like you know, like my, my, my quintessential person for this is like if you ever go on a subway, there's you know, it's it's the

guy selling candy bars in the subway. Yeah right, it's people who quasi legal you know, sometimes they just kind of like doing whatever, you know, rants we call them. In the West Coast, you have a lot of those, like yeah, people who tream marijuana for a couple of months and then just kind of like crashing you know, camp sites the rest of the year or whatever. Like yeah,

there's a bunch of those folks for sure. Yeah. And you know, and like the number of these people who have been just like kicked out of like the formal labor system has been increasing for a long time. But what's interesting about this moment is that you know, every every strike you see has a second strike behind it, and that strike is the informal general strike, which is

just again people just quitting their jobs and leaving. And you have this weird moment where where normally the sort of reserve army of labor is this thing that like capitalism can always sort of rely on as a way to sort of solve its problems. Because it's like, oh, well, all right, if if you're not going to do this job, we can bring another person. But you know this, this is a weird moment where like the reserve Army of

labor is like fighting on our side. M h. And the fact that all of these people are just like you know that they're seeing the just incredible authoritarianism of these workplaces that just horrific abuse. The fact that you know they're they're being in a lot of cases, just asked to show up and die, and they're saying, oh, is a really sort of is a really incredibly powerful thing.

And when when when you add that to the fact that you know, all these companies have completely screwed themselves with how they designed the supply chains, it's it's all, it's all come back around and suddenly all all the supply chain stuff that they carefully laid out over decades and decades decades is a way to just like break the union movement and make sure nobody ever asked more wages.

You know, it's it's it's it's it's been revealed to be incredibly fragile and you know, weak to our attack, and that leads us, I think, to this other tension in Biden's plan to sort of like revive the economy, which is that so the US technically speaking has this like very large central planning capability, but it only has it to like build weapons. So you know, like the army has this incredible ability like that. There there's a lot of bullets, you know it despite the huge stress

on the bullets supply chain, it really has scale. You know, the prices have increased, but we're we're still still still getting bullets. America is great at making bullets. Yeah, it's

less great at keeping tractors working, but be a problem. Yeah, then you're like even if even remember at the beginning of the pandemic, it was like the US just couldn't produce masks, like we said, we we never we never like did that, right like that, like the government never at any point was like we're just gonna make mass and given the people, they just never did it. And so you know, our mass supplies, all those supplic chains suck.

And the only way that like the States can intervene and get the supply chains to work is by doing one of two things. It's by either doing a thing Biden was doing, which is just go to a bunch of companies and tell them to make all of their workers work harder, which is the thing that like, you know,

totally won't backfire or explode in his face. And then the second thing is for Biden basically to like do all this saber rattling about how we have to have like medical supply chains in the US because national defense or something. And that's the second thing he's trying to do. But you know that just that just makes the problem worse, right, because what once you once you lose the ability to outsource, you,

you lose the hammer even beating the unions with. And so you know, all all of the sort of all of the tendencies that are you know, making things like bad and scary right now are also weirdly making this. You know, the fact that prices are rising, right, the fact that there's all these shortages. It's it's it's making this like the best moment two, you know, it's it's it's making this the best moment that and that anyone's had in ages to actually try to make something better.

And and and the important thing is we're starting to see it happen. And yeah, and we're we're we're we're gonna talk more about St. October and sort of the strike wave and the coming you know, weeks and months. But yeah, we're gonna we're gonna be hitting this pretty hard, even just next week. Um, we have a lot of stuff in the pipeline. Kind of wish we've gotten to it earlier, but there's a lot of stuff to talk about in the world y happening that that's within our milieu.

It turns out when you're when you're specific focus is things falling apart. Uh, you're always behind uncovering all the things that are falling on the park. But I think it is a good time to to to drive this to a close, to drag this episode out behind the farm the barn, and and and shoot it and bury it in a shallow grave and and break its bones with the hammers that the police can't identify it. Chris Um, thank you for putting this together. I got anything anything

else to say? Uh, quit your job, you or you and or unionize your workplace and or take it over and run it yourselves, because Lord knows the people who are telling you what to do, just literally do not or if you die. Yeah, I mean with with that Sorry, no, no, no, no, I was just gonna Uh, I don't know what I was gonna do, Chris, I don't know what I was gonna do. Do do Go go do something. You know

you're you're listening to things, Go do something. Yeah, and and yeah, and if you want to listen to us, do more things. We are allegedly allegedly we we we are at cool zone Media on on the Twitter and and the you can't prove that in court, it's true. Good luck, good luck to them and try to for if that we did this. Yeah, that's right, motherfucker's all right. Uh. It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts and cool zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It could Happen here, updated monthly at cool zone Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.