Episode Transcript
[00:00:16] Speaker A: Welcome back, defiant ones, to part two of class warfare, the fight you didn't know you inherited.
Last week, led by Bill, we started a discussion on class warfare in American society and basically what the stratification looks like nowadays. After the growth of the wealth gap, it took us to some interesting places and we ran pretty damn long.
That led to a decision to split the episode into two parts. So here we are with part two, probably about a week sooner than you guys expected, which is awesome because we've got another episode scheduled for next week, so stay tuned.
Without any further ado, here's part two of Class warfare, the fight you didn't know you inherited.
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Pull yourself up by your bootstraps originated in the 19th century as a phrase intended to signify an impossible task.
By the early 20th century, its meaning had evolved to describe the achievement of success through superhuman effort and determination.
And here we stand now in the 21st century.
And quite ironically, pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps has become every bit as impossible as the phrase was originally intended to imply.
After all, if one cannot afford boots to begin with, to what will you even attach your worthless bootstraps?
So whose fault is all of this anyway?
Well, if you've been following along up to this point, you've already figured out that the rich and the powerful certainly don't want you to think that they had anything to do with it.
To that end, they have established an elaborate matrix of potential scapegoats upon whom they can cast fault, each one precisely targeted to a specific audience likely to buy into the rhetoric of blame.
Not surprisingly, the only unifying characteristics among these scapegoats is that each of them belongs to some minority population, and not one of them is either rich or powerful.
Think about some of the ridiculous stereotypes.
Immigrants are taking your jobs.
Oh, really?
What jobs? You mean like dishwashing and fruit packing and landscaping? Like all the jobs none of us want to do because the work is too hard and the pay is too low for our privileged standards?
Bullshit.
Homosexuals are grooming your children.
Oh, is that right?
Is that what they're doing?
Then why is it that I virtually never read about a gay man abusing a child, but the media is constantly flooded with stories about rich and powerful white pedophiles?
Fucking nonsense.
Listen, I mean really listen to some of the dozens of their absurd assertions, then stop and think and try to reconcile them with actual facts.
If your brain begins to hurt after just five or ten minutes of this exercise, then you're on the right track.
[00:03:59] Speaker A: That's the truth because, wow, it gets painful, you know, the mental hoops that you have to go through to believe some of this stuff that we hear from the other side of the fence. Not even the conspiracy theories, just the basic beliefs, you know, I hear all of the time. Liberals are for open borders. What? What? What?
[00:04:19] Speaker B: Who the hell told you?
[00:04:21] Speaker A: When did that happen?
[00:04:22] Speaker C: Yeah, Fox News.
[00:04:24] Speaker B: I knew the answer.
[00:04:25] Speaker A: I hear all of the time that, you know, places like Portland and New York and LA are swamped with fire and under clouds of smoke between riots and the uprisings, the unrest and the crime and the looting.
And there are people who believe this.
[00:04:43] Speaker C: No matter how many people the rest.
[00:04:45] Speaker A: Of us who live in these places are like.
[00:04:47] Speaker C: And what's even more infuriating is that like we have things like TikTok and everybody can record on their phone immediately. And even when people in these so called riot tornadoes states are walking around posting videos. Here's a quiet street where we're supposed to be rioting and looting. We're at the point now where even the media will try to shut that down. TikTok will not show those videos, but will show more videos when there was a protest or something.
It's this again. Echo chamber of lies.
[00:05:23] Speaker A: Yeah, and it's getting weirder and weirder in terms of who filters what, because after Trump was elected to office, everybody changed their rules and their standards and their guidelines and their terms of service.
So I guess where we go from here is the big question, Bill. It's what do we do? What are the, what are the strategies that we can use as people to fight this fight that we were born into and didn't even ask for?
[00:05:48] Speaker B: We need to talk about financial literacy, we need to talk about skill building, we need to talk about self advocacy. And all of our options get narrower and narrower as the days go by.
Let's kick it off with financial literacy with a big picture story that may shine some light on how the rich and powerful subtly tailor their messaging to ensure the dollars keep flowing up the food chain and not down.
Over the past century, the US economy has evolved from production based to consumption based.
This is due to many local and global factors and it is not necessarily a bad thing.
Rather than focus on the reasons, let's look at how political and corporate messaging has evolved in tandem throughout much of the 1900s. The motto was build, build, build.
It kept workers in factories, construction humming and profits flowing.
And even bankers were able to seize upon the opportunity, introducing the 30 year mortgage so they could make huge sums of money on all those newly constructed homes, as those factories and manufacturing jobs slowly began moving overseas once again in the name of profit, the messaging morphed into buy.
With the influx of relatively cheap goods, consumers had to be persuaded to drain their pockets and push those pennies up that food chain.
And those clever bankers, they were right on board again with the advent of consumer credit.
Buy now, pay later.
Until everything from housing to transportation to education, and in the worst case scenarios, even food was providing the credit issuers unbounded profits.
This is, if not the first, then certainly one of the most important lessons of financial literacy.
Credit is the economic equivalent of the double edged sword.
It can be an invaluable tool or a fully loaded pistol in a single player game of Russian roulette.
Learn the rules of the game before you agree to play and don't, for God's sake, don't ever assume the rules are in your favor.
[00:08:39] Speaker A: This lit something up in my head. I had a moment a couple weeks ago where I saw something online that completely blew my mind. I was looking at Instacart, I was making a grocery order and one of the payment options for Instacart was buy now, pay in four.
[00:08:59] Speaker B: There you go.
[00:09:00] Speaker A: We have actually hit the stage where grocery stores are offering lightweight credit at checkout because that's how easy it is to afford food and that's how hard.
[00:09:11] Speaker B: It is to afford food in America.
[00:09:13] Speaker A: I was absolutely blown away.
And I got to thinking about all the people that are probably using this and actually paying interest on their food and wow, just it's. That moment of capitalism has gone way too fucking far, guys.
[00:09:29] Speaker C: So I think the biggest thing that came to my head with this whole thing, and I know we've probably discussed the gaps and lacks in the American education system, but talking about, you know, financial literacy, wouldn't it be great if the American education system taught kids financial literacy?
Wouldn't it be great if we had classes that teach you how to balance a checkbook or have an understanding of what credit is?
But like, just like you said, Bill, they don't want us to have an understanding. They don't want us to realize that it's the double edged sword. They probably are hoping that all of us end up on the Russian roulette side of the gun. Why are we teaching all these kids about Pythagorean theorem when it would be really nice if like, you know, they understood what a credit card was when they got out of high school?
[00:10:28] Speaker A: Because.
[00:10:29] Speaker B: Because. And I'm going to roll it right back to George Carlin, the people in power don't want you to know their secrets because once you know their secrets, the money stops flowing up the food chain and you might have a bit of power over them.
Oh, my God.
[00:10:48] Speaker A: It's radical, you know, when we get together, it gets even more radical.
And that's the thing we keep talking about, the power of us, really. So let's dig into that.
[00:11:00] Speaker B: What are the options for community organizing, local movements, mutual aid networks. See, here's the thing.
We cannot just take for granted the things that are happening and trust that somehow it's all going to work itself out in the end.
Because the one thing that hardly any government throughout history has ever done is give back the power that it took.
If we give them these things, our rights, they will be out of our hands for good. And it will not stop.
That's some scary.
Doing nothing is not a viable option.
It's a choice. Yeah, but that really not an option.
Stand up and make your voice heard. You're not alone.
You just have to find the people who share your feelings and unite with them. And together we are legion.
[00:12:04] Speaker C: And I think another thing too. When we're talking about community building, like, local movements, mutual aid, don't forget that, like, teaching can be part of that. Some people still do book clubs at their house, right? If you have a couple people who understand credit, why don't you take a couple nights a week and talk to your friends and be like, how many of y' all really understand what your credit card's doing? How many of you understand the interest and just sit and, I don't know, have wine, have a beer, whatever. Sit and figure it out together.
[00:12:37] Speaker A: Where I see it is the elderly folks. And people don't expect this. They don't see it coming.
But you go to a senior, you talk to people in the. The senior community, and you're like, what are you doing Tuesday night? And you think the answer is going to be sitting home, watching TV, being sad about the last 70 years?
You're like, no, I'm going to Auntie Gemma's investment club. And then Thursday I have book club. And I'm like, wow, why don't we do this stuff?
[00:13:01] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:13:02] Speaker A: You know, as younger people, why don't we think of these things before it's.
[00:13:05] Speaker B: A necessity because we're too goddamn busy in the world we live in.
[00:13:09] Speaker C: Which is true.
[00:13:11] Speaker A: Bingo.
[00:13:11] Speaker C: I still think it's important that we try to make time to come together and teach each other and uplift each other. That's what the people in power don't want. At this point, we're all working so hard to just try to survive. Let's try to survive together.
[00:13:28] Speaker B: Amen.
[00:13:29] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:13:31] Speaker B: What about voting and advocacy and coalition building, political engagement?
And this is the really, really difficult part because how do you engage meaningfully in a two party system where both parties, by and large, are funded by and guided by the elites that you hope to challenge?
This is where the rubber meets the road.
This is where you actually have to get to work.
Do the granular research and dissect each candidate's positions on each topic until you are certain that you know which one most closely aligns with your own.
And it is going to be painful because the ones who really want to further your interests are only a handful, a small handful in a generation.
And most of them are beaten back by by the realities of the existing power structure.
So find the ones whose ideals most closely match yours, give them your vote, and then don't let them forget that they got it.
Write to them, email them. Get all up in their social media like your life depends upon it. Because in a potentially not too distant dystopian future, it actually might.
Then we have to talk about lines of solidarity across race and gender and geography. That black guy down the block is not your enemy.
You think you're struggling.
He is struggling harder than you could ever possibly imagine against centuries of ingrained prejudice and brutal repression.
That woman next door, that single mom on food stamps, she is not your enemy.
That Salvadoran fam renting the house across the street, they are not your enemy.
There's eight of them, simply grateful for their shelter and looking to you as the inspiration for what they can become.
Oh, and that gay couple around the corner.
Their smiles and waves to your children as they walk by are nothing more than the outward expression of their own inward hopes of someday adopting a child of their own.
Your neighbors are not your enemies.
Reach out to them.
Learn something about them.
Try, just try to understand them and then maybe invite them to join you.
Stand by your side in the universal struggle against oppression and dominance. Just fucking think about it.
[00:16:36] Speaker C: And also keep in mind, not only are all of these people not your enemy, but a real easy way to keep the lower class down is to start infighting. Make us fight each other.
[00:16:50] Speaker A: Yeah, keep them fighting each other.
[00:16:52] Speaker C: Fight them.
[00:16:53] Speaker A: Keep them fighting each other.
If you fight on the ground, you can't fight upward.
[00:16:58] Speaker B: Remember, it's a strategy that has worked for centuries and it continues to work because we fall for it so easily.
[00:17:09] Speaker C: We should all be looking up and not at our neighbors.
[00:17:16] Speaker B: There's plenty to fight in that direction.
[00:17:18] Speaker C: So we talked about making community groups and helping each other grow that way. But there are also some people currently in politics who actually started from the ground up, started like you and me, and are really fighting for everyone's best interest. Bernie Sanders is the first one that comes to mind. I also think aoc, we have some other people like Elizabeth Warren and I'm gonna fuck up that man's name. So somebody else say it.
[00:17:49] Speaker B: Mom.
[00:17:49] Speaker A: Danny Momdani. You got mom dies.
You have to bring him to the table. Because the amount of real estate he takes up the President's head is almost as much as Gavin News.
[00:18:02] Speaker B: Easily as much as Gavin Newsom. And the thing is, these are not anywhere near the only people we could name. They are the select few, the very, very few who have made it through the battle.
These are the ones that have not let the existing system beat them down.
These are the ones who have, I.
[00:18:33] Speaker A: Think, perhaps the best example that pops the mind for me and somehow didn't make the list. This Barack.
[00:18:38] Speaker B: Oh my, how did I miss him?
[00:18:40] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:18:42] Speaker A: Because we've got a guy who started as a community organizer and ended up as the President of the United States.
Yeah, that's the story. That's the thing that we want to see. That's the thing that we want to hear.
[00:18:55] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:18:56] Speaker B: Literally. Literally against all odds.
[00:19:00] Speaker A: And I think, as opposed to somebody.
[00:19:02] Speaker C: Who'S another reason, other than him being the first black president, why it was so impressive that he became president like outside of his race was because he's an example of ground up as a single term senator.
[00:19:17] Speaker B: He was able to parlay his charisma, his knowledge and his less than stellar political advantage into exactly what he needed to be the person we needed in a time when we desperately needed him.
[00:19:40] Speaker C: Thanks, Obama.
[00:19:42] Speaker A: You know, I think the saddest thing really when I think of Obama in retrospect is just how well he represented the interests of the American people to the best of his ability anyway, and just how lost that idea has become on current presidents.
[00:20:01] Speaker B: And. And he was also, to some extent a tool of the elite in the fact that he could not have gotten where he was if he didn't play their game and work with them.
Yeah.
Espoused the same ideals and the same aspirations and the same goals that I look toward and to the best of his ability, worked within the system to get to a place where he could actually try to do something.
[00:20:34] Speaker C: And I think for me, when Obama was president, I was still in high school, I was still learning politics through the American education system. So I wasn't really learning a lot. You know, I was trying to learn. But when I think about Obama, like I think the most significant thing for me is always the legalization of gay marriage, which you know now is being threatened again.
[00:21:00] Speaker A: But it was more the Supreme Court.
[00:21:02] Speaker C: Well, like I was in high school.
[00:21:04] Speaker A: And now we've got a Supreme Court with a slightly different structure that's signaling that they may revisit that press.
[00:21:09] Speaker C: But that was a president who did care about the American population.
[00:21:17] Speaker B: What inspiration, if any, do we have?
Well, if we've learned anything over the past centuries and millennia, it's that A, nothing is easy, but also that B, nothing is impossible.
The French Revolution, the American Revolution, the workers revolts, the civil rights movement, the anti war movement, none of them, not one, resulted in a perfect solution.
But each one of them moved us at least incrementally toward a better path than the one we had been following.
And just a couple of weeks ago, early September, the people of Nepal, a tiny South Asian nation, they were finally done with rampant corruption and nepotism and lavish displays of ill gotten wealth.
Not to refer to anybody in our current political climate.
[00:22:21] Speaker A: We have the best gold.
We have the best gold in our White House.
[00:22:25] Speaker B: The people of Nepal unseated a long entrenched government.
They upended its established structures and even disbanded entire political parties in only five days.
Led primarily by the young people of Gen Z, they literally demolished and rebuilt their nation, holding this is the best part, holding free and open elections on discord to select their new prime minister, a woman, one of their Supreme Court justices.
And they accomplished all of this in less than one week.
[00:23:11] Speaker C: So yeah, here's the thing.
[00:23:14] Speaker B: It's impossible.
[00:23:15] Speaker C: Look at all of these movements, these revolutions, these revolts. The first thing we have to remember is the way they even got started is by people coming together. Like we talked about before, don't fight your neighbor, join them in the fight upward. But also I do have to say Gen Z is ruthless in the best way possible.
Like, you know, I would agree for all the things we make fun of them for with their fucking skibidi toilets and their labo boos when they want.
[00:23:49] Speaker B: Something.
[00:23:51] Speaker C: Damn do they know how to get it? Figure out that like, you know, talk about an Internet generation. They take the Internet, use it to get get the change that they want and you know, we really could all take like a lesson from Gen Z in the way they unapologetically demand equal Rights.
And.
[00:24:17] Speaker B: Gen Z is today's answer to the kids like me from the 60s who took sit inside and nonviolent protests and accomplish things that we really shouldn't have been able to accomplish.
I would have hoped that those accomplishments would have carried on further in history. But there's always some backsplash.
[00:24:45] Speaker A: I guess sometimes it's one step forward and two steps back.
[00:24:50] Speaker C: Another thing about Gen Z is that they seem to have an understanding like Gen Z does, go out of their way to educate themselves outside of the American education system with the way that they use the Internet. But Gen Z also is aware that a lot of, you know, your generation who were part of the anti war movement or stuff like that, Gen Z realizes that a good handful of them ended up as the Republican conservative adults.
And I think Gen Z is very hyper aware that they want the change and they want it to last.
[00:25:29] Speaker A: Yes. And I think they're very wary of honestly older generations approaches to the thing, not so much the people, although I think they're wary of the people too. But I think they're wary of the approaches taken by people prior to them and they're striking new ground, finding new ways to do it.
And that brings us to a place where we have to talk about the future, you know, because we've got the path we're on, we've got varying paths we could be on and we've got, you know, these kids leading the way that are bright and brilliant and kind of our future and you know, where's it all going?
[00:26:04] Speaker B: Stand behind them?
Or do we come up with the knee jerk reaction to fight them, to hold them at arm's length? It's easier than ever to imagine the dystopian future where all of this is leading us. We've all watched the miniseries or read the books or seen the movies and it's pretty damn frightening.
But it is not inevitable.
There are other possibilities and we have come tantalizingly close to them in the not so distant past.
Consider the fact that just 50 years ago, after only three decades of taxing the rich to the tune of 80 or 90%, a policy which was supported by Democrats and Republicans and even businessmen of the time.
After just three decades of taking that money and reinvesting it into, into infrastructure, manufacturing, farming and people, we had created by the early 1970s not only the strongest economy the world had ever seen, but the smallest wealth gap between classes that history had ever seen and the least polarized political system that our nation had ever seen.
Things were so good, in fact that serious economists, at least two of them, were predicting that with the advent of computers and technology on the horizon, we might soon be ready to implement a zero hour work week.
My, how times have changed.
But the good news is that is precisely what time is.
Time is change.
The question is, will we be agents of that change or silent victims?
[00:28:07] Speaker C: So Bill, you talking about there being a point in time where we had the smallest wealth gap and everything like that? Imagine it almost sounded like the intro speech to Wacko's Wish about how prosperous the town was when the King and Queen still reigned, and then how everything went to poverty when the new king came in.
[00:28:33] Speaker B: And you think there's no mature messaging in cartoons?
Get the fuck out of here.
[00:28:39] Speaker A: We all have our hands in this. We all have a role in this. We're all a part of this from birth, whether we like it or not. There's really no way to accept it.
[00:28:47] Speaker B: Even if we didn't.
More than anything else, I am afraid that too many of us have become far too comfortable in our heated and air conditioned homes, where endless entertainment arrives effortlessly, where our wishes are delivered overnight to our doorstep, where even our goddamn meals can show up boxed and bagged and ready to eat.
Some of us don't even have to leave to go to work.
In today's world, we are not just stuck in our comfort zones, some of us are actually imprisoned in them.
And if I'm not even willing to get up and go out and pick up a goddamn pizza, what are the chances I'm going to get up to go out and fight? I don't want to fight.
But the alternative is that I stay in here, snug and comfy and watch obliviously as the walls close in on me and my comfort zone grows smaller and smaller and my options become less and less and my choices become fewer and fewer until one day I'm no longer even allowed to leave.
My comfort zone has become my coffee.
Your hosts and producers are Nils, Bobby Socks, and myself, Bill.
[00:30:26] Speaker C: Behind the scenes, the audio magic is woven by Niels and Jack, with crucial feedback and assistance from our associate producers Tyler and Turbo.
[00:30:35] Speaker A: Our writers room is composed of everyone we just mentioned, with help from our friends Skeeter and Jimmy.
[00:30:40] Speaker B: We absolutely could not do any of this without our incredible contributing members who not only support us, but help steer the ship on episode topics and formatting.
[00:30:52] Speaker A: Finally, I'd like to thank our freaky little goblins, Jack and Tyler, for sharing every unique and weird meme they see back on up to us and sometimes creating their own sa.
