You're listening to the labor radio podcast, weekly produced. By the labor radio podcast network, labor radio network.org. I'm Chris Garlock. I think people have pointed to, like, the, the massive, you know, success of the right wing movement. To, uh, you know, dominate the judiciary.
But I do also think people have to acknowledge that one of the long term side effects of that is the complete de legitimization of the judiciary system amongst a wide swath of people Taking a look at the fallout from the big election to work stoppage rounds up statements from union leaders in response to the new era of organizing.
Even on the terms of what it means for American workers, the, the theme of joy is just not appropriate when people are facing homelessness, when people are facing housing insecurity, food insecurity, um, so on and so forth What will the Trump election mean for a Southern and rural working folks and their unions? The valley labor report talks to Joel Office of barn raiser.
There were like tens of millions, tens and tens and tens of millions of dollars in construction that was coming down the pike that under the current executive order would be union construction. Um, And he was like, it's all gone, you know, it's all gone. And now it's going to be worked by non union building trades folks On the dig. Keeanga Yamato Taylor on Trump's decisive victory. Harris's catastrophic loss. Multi-racial working class deal alignment and where the left might go from here.
The union movement needs to become an anti fascist movement. And the idea that anti fascism is partisan is irrelevant, and it's absurd Hot takes from bill Fletcher, Jr. And Dave Xyrem on the radical song book. One of our Texans, a transplanted Texan from South Africa named Elon Musk, played a particularly egregious role in loading the dice for this election. He not only did he donate.
millions and millions of dollars to the Trump administration, but he also ran a lottery, which is probably illegal, but it's after the election now Workers beat hosts. Jean Lance reacts to last week's results. That's all ahead. Plus Harold's shows you should know, and yeah, there's more politics on this week's edition. Of the labor radio podcast weekly. Here's a show. We start off this week show with work stoppage podcasts. Only talks about what can be done for the working class, as they say.
We're here to demolish corporate letters and chew bubble gum. And we don't even like bubble gum. I guess we don't, we don't have any, there's nothing really to be excited about. Well, I mean, no, there is something to be excited about, genuinely. The thing to be excited about is, uh, unions no longer have to spend any of their time supporting the Democrats. Now the election is over and we can stop doing that because clearly it, it, uh, didn't help. So, uh, so I am at least thankful for that.
Yeah, as evident, it didn't help at all, as evidenced by the thousands of pundits chasing their tails trying to figure out which one factor lost Kamala Harris the election. Yeah, and, and, and which factor, which we will not blame on anything the Democrats did. What way can we blame the electorate? Yes. It's, how is it America's fault? Yeah, it's the, and I think that, uh, maybe it was Ethan in the server who brought up this classic line, but it's like, uh, the, the Democrats can never fail.
They can only be failed. Right? Yeah. Well, yeah. And it, it, it, it's from like that, that, you know, that Bertolt Brecht poem where it's like, Oh, why does the democratic party not just dissolve the people and elect another? But yeah, I mean, look, I, I'm not trying to make light of it.
I understand that there's people who are, you know, genuinely and with good reason, uh, uh, upset about the prospects of the future, but, uh, you know, a big part of how we got to where we are now is that, uh, Support for the Democratic Party, um, when the Democratic Party has done jack shit for the working class, uh, for decades. welcome to. It's called Work Stoppage. I'm called John. I'm Dan.
And I'm Lena. So as we, uh, get into our headlines this week, you know, as we were mentioned in there in the cold open, obviously there's many folks who are worried this week about the potential impact of a new Trump administration and project 2025 on the trade union movement. Um, but we already have seen. The court system continue their work in that direction that they've been carrying out for the past several years anyway, regardless of who's in the White House.
As noted by Josh Idelson on Tuesday, November 5th, Election Day, the Ninth Circuit Federal Appeals Court overturned President Biden's executive order requiring all federal contractors to pay a 15 minimum wage, calling it, quote, arbitrary and capricious, end quote, and saying he lacked the power to do so. Arbitrary and capricious. Wow, I can think of nine people who are pretty arbitrary and capricious. Right off top, you know?
It's just, it's, it's so funny to me that, like, I, this is one of those things where I think people have pointed to, like, the, the massive, you know, success of the right wing movement. To, uh, you know, dominate the judiciary.
But I do also think people have to acknowledge that one of the long term side effects of that is the complete de legitimization of the judiciary system amongst a wide swath of people, because you have earlier this year, the Supreme court make a ruling that basically said the president is a king and now like the same, uh, ideological current is saying, well, but if it's not Donald Trump, the president, then actually they, that he can't do anything. So like.
No one can look at these things and be like, Oh yeah, no, they're just calling balls and strikes. Like, so, uh, I mean, while this is bad, like on the face of it, it's, you know, it's, it's unsurprising. It's in fitting, uh, with the, uh, recent spate of anti worker rulings coming out all over the judiciary. Um, but also shows once again, how like, uh, unfortunately, uh, we can't really pin our hopes on labor law and, uh, some and really have to pin our hopes on labor power. Right. Absolutely.
Absolutely. Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin Magazine. My name is Daniel Denver, and I'm broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island. The de alignment of working class voters away from the Democratic Party toward either full scale alienation or to the MAGA far right has become a multiracial phenomenon. This should be devastating news for the stewards of the Democratic Party. But instead, many in their leadership are doing everything possible to avoid learning anything from this defeat.
Here at The Dig, however, we're going to try to learn everything we can from this election so that we on the left can figure out what we need to do to move forward, build power, defeat the far right, and win. That conversation starts today. With Keeanga Yamata Taylor. Keeango Yamada Taylor, welcome back to The Dig. Thank you. Great to be here. Sort of. Yeah. Caveat. Asterix. What's, what's your diagnosis? What's driving this class de alignment?
And why does the Democratic Party seem totally incapable of confronting it? so I don't know exactly who voted in 2020 and didn't vote in 2024. There's still a lot of parsing through the exit data to, to get the full picture. Now saying that it is important to talk about the defections where they happened among Latino men, um, and black men in, in particular.
One of the things that has been missing from the discussion about the Democratic Party's campaign over the last few months is the way that the party was systematically missing the extent to which people are in crisis, um, in the U S and this is, you know, the heart of Joe Biden's insistence. That he remained in the race was that he had turned the economy around. And by all conventional measures, you know, the American economy was doing well.
Unemployment, historically low, poverty, low for African Americans, poverty, the rate at which people are living in poverty is at historic lows. Biden was correct that the rate of inflation, uh, had, you know, precipitously declined. I think it's at around 2. 1 now. Problem, falling rates of inflation. Or not falling prices. It just means the rate at which prices are rising has slowed down.
And so we are still stuck with the, whether it's price gouging, whether it's inflate, whatever it is, the, the resting place of these prices are really out of whack with what people's incomes are. Especially when you take into consideration that the nest eggs that people had. Amassed through the covid payments, whether it was enhanced unemployment, whether it was the stimulus checks, whatever it was being at home, not having to pay for gas rent moratorium, people were able to store away money.
That money's gone. That money's gone. Savings over the summer began to dip as low as they had in the recession of 2008. And so the Democratic Party seemed to have no consciousness of this. And so how does this economic picture play out in real life?
Well, 2023 to 2024. A historic rise in homelessness that is on schedule to rise even higher this year, uh, at the end of this year, 2024 food insecurity, high, all of these kinds of barometers by which people measure the quality of their life pointed downward for working class people. Rent rent today is 20 percent higher than it was in 2020. There was a, um, a study on, uh, consumer debt. That showed in the first quarter of this year, 2024, consumer debt had exceeded 17 trillion.
So, to the extent that people are holding their lives together, it's through credit cards, which of course we know is completely unsustainable. And so, You can go through the statistics, you can go through all of these kinds of measurements that we can piece together what a working class person's life is like, and you contrast this to the platform and the promises, policies, whatever, that the Democratic Party has had on offer since their convention moving forward.
And It's like they're living in a different universe. I mean, take yourself back to the DNC, to the Democratic National Convention, where the theme was joy. And not only was joy perverse in the midst of a genocide in Gaza. Even on the terms of what it means for American workers, the, the theme of joy is just not appropriate when people are facing homelessness, when people are facing housing insecurity, food insecurity, um, so on and so forth. Well, Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor, thanks very much.
Thanks for having me. That's right folks, from the mountains of Kentucky to the bayous of Louisiana, broadcasting online and on the radio from the heart of the Tennessee Valley, the Spice Radio Studios in Huntsville, Alabama, this is The Valley Labor Report. The Valley Labor Report. My name is Jacob Morrison here with my co host and fellow agitator Adam Keller. Today we talk to Joel Blyfus, editor of Barnraiser, about the election and its consequences. Joel, welcome to the valley labor report.
Thank you for taking the time. Glad to be here. Really glad to have you. And so I guess the first question on the election is Why do you think that it went the way that it did? I think the economy is the number one reason you look at all the exit polls and, uh, people, uh, who voted for Trump, uh, they cited the economy and immigration as their two top issues. I think the democratic party is also somewhat to blame for running the kind of campaign it did.
And I would add that the, Um, maybe the sort of the political class in this country is, uh, doesn't know how to campaign in, uh, rural areas or to reach working people. And I think that sort of a combination of a democratic campaign with a bad message. Uh, and then a bad campaign, uh, sort of together, uh, were sort of enough to guarantee that Trump, uh, Trump victory. Hmm. Right. Right. I think that's kind of Go ahead. The exit polls are pretty clear on all this.
And you, I think you look at the union movement in Wisconsin, uh, 50%, more than 50 percent of union members voted for Trump. Is that really the case? It's like 51%. Yeah, according to the exit polls and union members made up 20 percent of the electorate in Wisconsin. Wow. So I think it's also a sort of a message for organized labor and especially sort of a Washington centric labor approach.
And so I think that both the Democratic Party and, uh, sort of labor leadership have to take a long, hard look at this campaign and where the money they went. let's talk about industrial policy then, you know, you mentioned that industrial policy, um, has, has been like one of the reasons that rural communities have shifted from the democratic party because of like NAFTA and things like this. Um, and the.
You know, all of our structural critiques of the American economy, not withstanding, there has been some movement from the democratic party and from the Biden administration on industrial policy. Uh, and we are actually seeing a manufacturing boon at this point. Uh, it's coming down the pike. There are more manufacturing jobs than there were under the Trump administration. Uh, there's more manufacturing construction going on. And a lot of that is happening in.
Um, to a certain extent, rural, uh, and, and many red states. Um, and so why do you think that that the creation of these jobs and a lot of them, you know, many of them being union jobs, I mean, I got a call from a union, from a building trade union leader. We, we are in Huntsville near a federal enclave, Redstone Arsenal, um, where, you know, uh, There's lots of construction happening.
Um, and I got a call from a building trade leader in the area saying we had, I mean, there were so there were like tens of millions, tens and tens and tens of millions of dollars in construction that was coming down the pike that under the current executive order would be union construction. Um, And he was like, it's all gone, you know, it's all gone. And now it's going to be worked by non union building trades folks who are going to be getting paid, uh, lower wages.
They probably won't have healthcare. They probably won't have a pension. Um, and probably a lot of them will be from out of town. Right. And so, um, why do you think that, do you just think that the industrial policy to the extent that it has improved has just not improved enough? Is that kind of what your assessment of that would be?
Well, no, I think that that was one of the untold stories in the campaign is how much, how much better things have been in many parts of the country because of the huge infrastructure, uh, investments that have been made, uh, by the Biden administration. And it's unfortunate that the campaign didn't run on those who didn't have forefront those in a way that it could have. And, and I think that.
Again, this gets back to, what part of the story where what story are we telling the American people about life in the United States? And, um, I think there was a it was a tactical mistake to. But all the talk in the. Campaign toward the end on abortion and on democracy. One should have run on an economic argument. And compared, you know, talked about Trump's economic policies and what Biden and the Democrats have done for the economy in the past four years. All right.
Joel Blyfus, editor at Barnraiser. You can check it out. Is it barnraiser. com or org? It's barnraisingmedia. com. The following is a conversation between Bill Fletcher Jr. and Edge of Sports host Dave Zirin, recorded in the aftermath of the November 6th, 2024 election. This is Michael Funke for the Radical Songbook. And here are Bill and Dave. Bill, the election, what happened? So a number of things happened, Dave. Um, and, and I think that.
That we have to recognize that Trump, very much like John Gotti, the former and late leader of one of the five families of the mafia, um, was a charismatic figure who was a bad boy, and that this was attractive to many people who were angry. Um, so that's one of the factors. A second thing is, uh, Harris was running against inflation.
And one of the things that's important to note is that no standing president, or in this case vice president, who has been running when there was inflation, won a second term. Um, and it's very hard. Now, I think, and I was surprised by this, that Biden and Harris did not make more of what was going on four years ago. You know, when, when, when Trump said, are you better off now than you were four years ago, and he thought he, he painted the answer as an obvious yes.
I don't think the answer was an obvious yes at all. Because four years ago, what was going on? Thousands of people were getting sick and dying from COVID. And the economy collapsed, which is largely why Bump did not get reelected. Duh. Right? Well, why weren't they making that point? I was mystified by that, Dave. I think that there were others that have despaired. Um, and, and so you have, you have these different factors. I definitely suspect.
And they'll have to be researched that many younger folks were dismayed by the approach of the Biden administration on the Gaza war. And I think incorrectly decided to either vote third party or sit this one out and even when you would say to them, Knock, knock. What about project 2025? Both on the left as well as within the ranks of Trump's voters. A lot of people don't believe that it's going to be implemented, man. Let's, let's take, let's take it to labor.
That's you're, you're so experienced in this field. What do you expect from labor? If anything, organized labor. In the months, in the months ahead. I expect three things. One is, um, Excuse me, some people will go radio silent, uh, and you will hear nothing from them. So that's one thing. Um, a second thing will be, uh, the cover your ass element.
And these will be the people that will quickly, much like what happened after January 6th with Congress, where various congressional people ran to Trump to try to, uh, play nice, nice. You'll have some leaders that will try to cut their own deal with Trump or the administration to make sure that their sector and their union does not get touched. And then the third will be those who will resist. And, um, and I think that many of those would be the usual suspects.
That is, there are unions that have fought hard around immigration, immigrants, tax on immigrants, like Unite Here, um, Service Employees International Union, uh, the Painters, um, and a few others that have been out there Uh, you know, fighting for organizing, supporting migrants. So I think you'll have a split. I think it's going to be very hard for the National AFL CIO to build the right kind of consensus.
But here's the punchline, Dave. The union movement needs to become an anti fascist movement. And the idea that anti fascism is partisan is irrelevant, and it's absurd. There is a particular threat to constitutional democracy, and in that situation, There are only two sides.
There are no three sides in this one, and, and the, the union movement needs to take up the banner of anti fascism, and that will mean that there will be some unions and some union leaders that are going to try to take a pass. But that's what we have to do. Thank you so much, Bill Fletcher. Thank you for everybody out there for listening. Tough times, but we're tough people. Yo, for everybody out there listening, I'm Dave Zirin. Please stay frosty. We are out of here. Peace!
I'm Gene Lance of Dallas. I'm going to make the report for the Labor Radio Network on the situation in Texas. Labor Radio Network is gathering information from every state because we have 200 podcasters now on the Labor Radio Network and we're covering everything. Here in Texas, the Republicans ran the table. They beat us on just about everything. Okay? Uh, even Some things that we did not expect.
For example, the Hispanic vote in the valley, the Rio Grande Valley went Republican to our surprise. And that's the first time that ever happened in history. One of our Texans, a transplanted Texan from South Africa named Elon Musk, played a particularly egregious role in loading the dice for this election. He not only did he donate. millions and millions of dollars to the Trump administration, buying himself a, uh, a fat place in the Trump administration to come.
Uh, but he also ran a lottery, which is probably illegal, but it's after the election now, uh, he ran a lottery, a million dollar lottery to sign up people for the Trump administration and for the Trump campaign. So. Elon Musk of Texas played one of the worst roles of all of the billionaire class who beat us in this election.
I have, I'm talking to people every chance I get, and I've already posted a 25 minute screed on my Facebook page saying, uh, so stop looking within for the problems and stop blaming Kamala or Joe Biden and just admit that the billionaire class beat us. They beat the pants off of us. Of course, the dice were loaded, but nevertheless, they beat us in this election. And now what we're left with is the door closing on the electoral arena.
And the arena that's left for us is probably a more important arena anyway, and that's the arena of concerted action. So I already bought a hundred buttons that say, don't mourn, organize. We are, we are retirees here in Texas. I'm the president of the Texas Alliance for Retired Americans, and we're proud that we took the vote by mail vote away from the Republicans.
We also have taken note that the national Exit polls that were published in the Washington Post said that for the first time since Al Gore, the seniors, the over 65 vote, has gone Democrat. So we deserve some credit for that, the Alliance for Retired Americans nationally and the Texas Alliance for Retired Americans here in the Lone Star State. I'm telling everybody We got to use our concerted action. That means boycotts. It means marches. It means picket lines.
It means possibly a national strike. If we could just get some of the labor leaders to call one, uh, we can still win. We can still defend ourselves. And certainly the retirees are going to be a big part of that. Jean lands, host of the workers, beat radio show and podcasts in Texas. Now. Here's Harold with shows. You should know.
Harold Phillips here again, folks, and, uh, you know, Chris and Patrick have a hard enough time picking just four or five shows to take clips from for the weekly, but in a week like this, where so many labor radio shows and podcasts have been talking about the election, and the aftermath, and where we go from here, their job was even harder. So, with that in mind, Here are a few more election related shows you should know for the week of November 10th.
Rick and Brian look at the Democratic Party's colossal loss in 2024 and look back to 1800's labor history to answer the question, what happens next, on We Rise Fighting. On Radio Labor Canada, Unifor President Lana Payne discusses the results of the U. S. election and what they may mean for workers in Canada. And resistance against fascism in the U S political strategist and community leader, Alvina Vasquez talks with Robert about the 2024 election results on labor exchange on rivals.
What do we want podcast? Max and Sarah go deep and dark with Planet Critical's Rachel Donald, and ask if we should give up hope, embrace nostalgia, or just do something. Okay, technically, that's not just about the election, but, you know, the title is Despair, so I think it fits. And the Green and Red podcast brings back Bob's interview with Noam Chomsky from 2022 on the rightward shift of the Democrats as a postmortem for the 2024 election.
And that's just a few of the shows that have been discussing the election and what happens next. Want to find them and other shows that are talking about this? Trust me, if there's one thing you can say about people in the labor movement, they have opinions. Head to laborradionetwork. org and search through the Shows section.
And while you're at it, if you want to find out the latest on what's going on and how we're all reacting, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and No, I'm not gonna call it X. I'm still calling it Twitter. At LaborRadioNet. And follow the hashtag, LaborRadioPod. No matter what happens from here, we're always gonna be here, right Chris? That's right, Harold. You can count on us. And by the way, folks, we would love to hear from you to drop us a note [email protected].
That's a wrap for this week's edition of the labor radio podcast, weekly, our sampling of some of the amazing programs there at over the last week. Um, more than 200 labor radio and podcast shows. They're all part of the labor radio podcast network shows that focus on a working people's issues and concerns. We've got links to all the network shows, labor radio network. Uh, or you can also find them. Use the hashtag labor radio pod on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
And do let us know what you think of the show. Drop us a note [email protected]. You can be part of the network. You don't even need a microphone. Labor radio podcast network t-shirts are now available. They are union made. You'll find them in all sizes and two [email protected]. This podcast. Is recorded under a sag after collective bargaining agreement. The labor radio podcast weekly was edited this week by Patrick Dickson. I produced the show.
And our social media guru always and forever is Mr. Harold Phillips. For the labor radio podcast weekly. This has been Chris garlic. Stay active and stay tuned to your local labor radio podcast show. We will see you. Next week.