Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Speaker A: So last week we started the show pretty simply. We had a conversation about what was going on, where we were at, what we're up to, and I think what we need to do is kind of keep that up.
So have we been. Well, we've been working on the stuff that we've got for the new episode. You know, we've got a new cadence for episodes every two weeks now. So with the bi weekly, we've got a little more room for writing.
And this week's writing kind of took a turn on us. It went in a direction that I certainly didn't expect, but fell in love with really fast.
[00:00:34] Speaker B: Yeah, I didn't expect it either, but as I read through it, I was like, there's some good.
[00:00:39] Speaker A: So for this episode, Bill is going to take the lead.
[00:00:43] Speaker C: I didn't think that was what I was doing. But hey, it's nice to stir the pot every now and again.
[00:00:49] Speaker A: As far as this goes, this script is great. You know, we start our shows with notes every week and we started with an outline this week and Bill went to town. So with that in mind, we're gonna let Bill lead this episode and kind of run from there.
[00:01:05] Speaker C: I ran with it because the topic class warfare means a lot to me.
I just celebrated my 70th birthday a week ago. So I've lived through a few years of class warfare and I've seen what happens in action.
The fact is that all of us inherit a place somewhere in the societal class structure.
For myself, I once upon a time, I worshiped at the altar of the American dream, a land where everything is possible.
Well, imagine my surprise 60 years later to find I'm still a member of the working class.
Maybe a rung or two above my humble beginnings.
But I am still very far removed from any real security.
And at age 70 with no prospect of ever being able to stop working.
[00:02:03] Speaker A: Yeah, and I can't say I'm far behind you, Bill. In my life, the examples were always the people on the television.
They were various families that I'm not going to name, of various races and various kinds that always had various quote unquote middle class jobs like doctor or lawyer and middle class homes with six bedrooms and middle class swimming pool.
[00:02:27] Speaker C: Get the idea?
[00:02:28] Speaker A: You get the idea.
I was raised to aspire to something that we don't start with. Most of us we're told we all do. We're told we're all start equal. But when I looked around my neighborhood, I realized really fast that I was the poor kid and that class warfare for Me started young because the other kids my age and we're talking, you know, 6, 8, 10, even 12.
How did you forget that?
[00:02:55] Speaker B: I think for me, I had almost a similar experience to you, Nils, where I grew up and was told that I was poor.
I knew it.
For me, growing up as early as kindergarten, I understood that I was poor. I understood that I had hand me downs and thrift store clothes. I was in a richer school district, so kindergarten, first grade. It was very obvious that I did not have Uggs and Abercrombie. And I knew it was weird that my apartment that I lived in with my mom only had one floor.
I knew right off the bat, I was told by my parent growing up that I was poor, but also told don't act poor, don't look poor, don't be white trash and live the fantasy that we were middle class while we knew we weren't.
[00:03:53] Speaker A: So many people force themselves to do that, and so many people wind up living above their means, trying to do it, and then really destroy themselves. It's truly sad, but we run with these social and cultural examples of what life is supposed to be like in America.
[00:04:09] Speaker C: The thing about class warfare is that it isn't always obvious.
Most of us have never declared ourselves as combatants, but the fight is very real, stretching all the way back to the times of the pharaohs and even beyond that to the earliest biblical civilizations.
Societies have been divided by class and literally built by the lowest among those classes.
Whether they're coerced by whips and chains, or more recently, by debtors, prisons and poverty and credit ratings, it is invariably the least wealthy and the least powerful who bear the physical burdens of society's construction and maintenance.
Just think about it.
The CEO of Amazon has the money and the resources to go anywhere, do anything he wants, anytime he wants, even go to space.
Most of us, on the other hand, are inextricably tied to a job that scarcely provides for our basic necessities.
Prepare yourself for a peek behind the illusions that the ruling classes have painted for you.
[00:05:29] Speaker A: You know, I'd love to talk about that illusion for a second, because it really is a game they play. It really is a game they play because when they go on the campaign trail, particularly Republicans, particularly when they're in red states, they talk about what they're doing for the middle class, they talk about the importance of the middle class, they talk about middle class wages, they talk about middle class tax cuts, and never once do they tell you that the threshold for middle class under Obama was somebody who made more than $400,000 a year, that number has moved up, not down. So chances are when they're talking about the middle class, they are not talking about you. The general public, like the rest of us, has to get that through their heads and stop voting against their own interest.
[00:06:20] Speaker B: At least for me, outside of numbers, because I. I know for some people, especially some people who think they're middle class, looking at the numbers doesn't always get through. When I think middle class, I think at least two cars, a house. If you're living paycheck to paycheck in any sense of that term, you are not middle class.
[00:06:44] Speaker A: You are not one of the people they're talking about.
[00:06:47] Speaker B: Yeah, if you have a car, even if you have a steady job, if one disaster, whether it's a health care bill, vet bill, car accident, if one thing could set you back, or if one missed paycheck could set you back to a point where you're maybe nervous about how you're getting food or going to continue to pay rent. Yeah, you're not middle class.
[00:07:08] Speaker A: If like 80% of this country at points and 70% most of the time you can't handle a $400 emergency, chances are you're not who they're.
[00:07:18] Speaker C: But it isn't just the politicians. I want to make this point quickly here. We'll talk more about it later.
But it's also the corporations, the businesses, and the media who convince you that. Who, who exactly. They convince you that if you buy this and you buy that, you'll be middle class, you'll be upper.
It's a, It's a bunch of.
[00:07:42] Speaker B: Yeah, other.
[00:07:43] Speaker A: The. Comes from billionaires telling us that temporarily inconvenienced billionaires.
[00:07:50] Speaker B: And it's another broken phrase because I believe money buys happiness is only half the phrase. The term money can't buy happiness is misused in 2025 because. Oh, I think because at this point, people don't want to be rich, they just want to survive. So telling people that money doesn't buy happiness is like, no, they need to eat.
[00:08:10] Speaker C: You know what?
I'll take it here. Buy happiness. But it can sure buy you a whole lot of peace of mind.
[00:08:19] Speaker A: Yeah. So how are we defining class warfare?
[00:08:21] Speaker C: Well, let's break it down here, and I'm just going to defer to George Carlin.
The upper class has all the money, does none of the work under the taxes. The middle class does all of the work and pays all of the taxes.
And the lower class, the poor, well, they're just there to Scare the shit out of the middle class and keep them chained to those goddamn jobs that create wealth for the upper class.
[00:08:43] Speaker B: That almost sounded just like him.
[00:08:46] Speaker A: But the man nailed, you know, you know, like so many things that he nailed.
[00:08:51] Speaker B: It's one of those things where it's always pissed me off that the lower class is always going to be the larger percent of the population, but they're beaten down by the other classes to make sure they can't fight back. This in even books today, like I think about the Divergent series had a whole like, you know, lower. Lower class of others who didn't fit into any sect, but they outnumbered everyone. Think about the Bell riots.
[00:09:15] Speaker A: It's the.
[00:09:17] Speaker B: I don't know about either. You think about the Bell Riots like.
[00:09:20] Speaker C: The untouchable in Indian culture when they had a rigid caste system. Yeah.
[00:09:25] Speaker A: And it goes all the way back. Like, if you really want to get into it, it's part of human civilization. It absolutely is part of human mindset. From the beginning. We've been exploited and exploiting one another for generations upon generations throughout the world. And doing it really well.
[00:09:43] Speaker C: Now they're convincing half of the lower class to do it to the other half of the lower class. And they've got us fighting amongst ourselves so violently that we can't even see where the real problem is.
[00:09:56] Speaker A: Exactly. And really what they're gonna do is leave themselves with the most controllable, compliant, willing, down.
Yep, lower class, they conform by eliminating any resistance using them.
[00:10:13] Speaker B: It's why trans people are considered resistance.
[00:10:16] Speaker C: Anyway, some historical context.
How has class struggle shaped economies and societies?
Well, we spoke about Egypt. Let's go back to the great pyramids, one of the wonders of the ancient world.
They were built by tens of thousands of people chained and enslaved to facilitate their construction.
The Greek and the Roman empires. In the ensuing centuries, they recognized the efficacy of this blueprint and they replicated it in the establishment of their own dominions.
Not to be outdone, the Europeans took the framework and they ran with it. They softened it just enough to replace the chains with economic shackles and referred to their subjugated populace as serfs rather than slaves.
Somehow I doubt any of the serfs noticed the subtle difference.
And then came the age of discovery.
The new World. The African continent, where conveniently heretofore unknown populations of non white natives could be harvested and subjugated. And suddenly slavery was back in vogue.
Were they not, after all, heathens and primitives?
Now, fast forward a couple of centuries.
Noble notions of egalitarianism and human dignity begin roiling the waters of this entrenched free labor economy, sending the ruling classes into a tizzy.
Rather than struggle against the inexorably rising tide, they quickly figured out how to replace whips with subsistence wages, chains with lifetime jobs and aspirations with expectations.
[00:12:07] Speaker A: It really is modern day America. We are slowly devolving from a great nation into 50 tiny third world countries in which most people are stuck with subsistence level jobs.
You can't convince me that serfdom went away. You can't convince me that we're all equal. You can't convince me that this is not part of the plan because it's systemic. It's engendered in the design of the system from the top down. Capitalism is built on having free or nearly free labor.
They're going to make you one way or another.
[00:12:48] Speaker B: And I know at some point we're going to talk about healthcare in a.
[00:12:52] Speaker C: Little bit, but the great game of.
[00:12:54] Speaker A: Give me back the money and then I'll give you the money and then I'll give that guy some money. Give me back that money. All right, I'm going to give that to a doctor.
[00:12:59] Speaker C: Give me back that money is an oxymoron.
[00:13:01] Speaker A: Give it to him.
[00:13:02] Speaker B: We're talking about how this country is almost rapidly going back into just slavery and serfdom. And one thing about being stressed about money constantly and if you're gonna afford your next meal or afford a place to live, is it tears you down mentally. So now we have lower class who's constantly stressed, constantly burnout, constantly.
I mean, not even sometimes having the ability, like physically to fight back because we're all so exhausted.
[00:13:40] Speaker C: You know, four decades ago, I had a wage that more or less kept pace with inflation.
I had a corporate retirement plan that combined with Social Security would realistically enable me to stop working by the age of 65 and live reasonably comfortably.
I had a corporate health plan that didn't drain my bank account every time I went to the doctor or filled a goddamn prescription.
And that would follow me into retirement and along with Medicare, would see me through my, pardon the expression, golden years one by one. Over the past 40 years, I've had the depressing opportunity to wave goodbye to all of them. And today, my last best hope is that I don't become so goddamn sick or disabled that I drive my family into medical bankruptcy.
And yet somehow through all of this, the ruling class has seen their incomes rise exponentially. Their fortunes take them far beyond even their own wildest imaginations of just a couple decades ago, in the end, economic subservience turns out to be no less and perhaps even more degrading than physical subservience.
[00:15:03] Speaker A: Where is that more apparent than at Amazon?
Here we've got a guy.
[00:15:09] Speaker C: Yep.
[00:15:10] Speaker A: Who can just get a bug up his ass and go into space with Christina Aguilera.
[00:15:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:15:17] Speaker A: Look at his average warehouse worker who they're trying to replace with a robot right now. Look at his average warehouse worker. One, they're lucky if they get paid enough to actually get to work and slave through it. Two, bathroom breaks. What are those? Get a bottle. Three, the labor conditions in an Amazon warehouse are the kind of thing you fight against historically in America. But instead we're empowering union busters.
So it's kind of like other big corporations that do this to their employees, like ups.
Okay.
Do you know what those guys had to go through to get air conditioning in those God damn trucks?
[00:15:56] Speaker B: Yeah, I remember hearing about that.
[00:15:57] Speaker A: And what it taught me was people have no regard for the welfare of.
[00:16:03] Speaker C: The world as long as when they place their order, they can get it the same day or next day.
[00:16:11] Speaker A: Right. And for fuck's sake, that's just so shallow. When you know, in reality it takes unions to fight for these things and it takes collective bargaining to keep these things. And we're watching that just bucking erode along with everything else that was built in the last 50 years in this country, 100 years.
[00:16:26] Speaker C: And I like, sorry.
[00:16:28] Speaker B: I'm pissed too though, honestly, because this is for, for both of you, you have such a different perspective because you, at least I guess both got to watch the fall. And I feel like I've just grown up in the aftermath and I've got to watch. I get to like watch the rapid decay.
[00:16:49] Speaker A: 911 was the line. If you were born and aware and living life pre 9 11.
When 911 hit is when you saw the switch flip.
[00:16:59] Speaker B: Like I grew up my whole life knowing and just accepting that I'd never be able to afford a home.
I also, I remember growing up an aspiration for me, something I thought that would actually bring me up to the middle class would be going to college and getting a degree. And then I got into college and I watched the people around me who were in my age group or slightly older have degrees and still be hanging on by a thread and they'll have.
[00:17:27] Speaker A: The same or higher level of unemployment.
[00:17:29] Speaker B: Did I, you know, unfortunately. Well, this country makes it so it's almost impossible to afford schooling. But I ran out of money to afford schooling. And I'll be honest I kind of also ran out of the motivation because I went, why am I slaving my ass away to get a piece of paper that won't even guarantee me a job?
[00:17:44] Speaker C: And we're going to talk about schooling in a little while because that's right up there with housing and health care.
So what do you think is our position in the class structure inherited?
Let's talk about that.
The myth of meritocracy tells us that we all should advance and prosper upon the basis of our own individual abilities and merit.
While it certainly sounds like a perfectly reasonable and egalitarian principle, the devil, as with so many things, lies in the details.
Imagine a 5 mile foot race.
You and I and the vast majority of all of us take our positions at the 0 mile mark to await the starting pistol.
Amongst us, we have all levels of runners. Some slower, some faster.
Most of us are average.
But we do have a very few exceptional runners here amongst us.
And these few are reasonably expected to eclipse all of us in performance.
Their merit will carry them across the finish line far ahead of anyone else and they will undoubtedly win the race.
But wait, what if there's another starting line at the four mile mark where a select few await the same starting pistol?
These are the invisible structures that dominate our class structure.
[00:19:39] Speaker A: When I think about that second starting line at the four mile mark, I think about what exists. Right. And what they're trying to say exists.
For the last nine months out of this year. We've heard that that second starting line is dei.
We've heard that that second starting line is equal opportunity.
[00:19:58] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:19:59] Speaker A: When in reality that second starting line is wealth and location.
They want us to blame it on dei. They want us to blame it on equity.
But in reality, it's about wealth and location.
And when you look at it that way, all of a sudden wage stagnation and the wealth gap become a huge part of the discussion that they don't want us to have.
[00:20:25] Speaker C: Right?
Right. It's a decoy.
There are invisible structures.
Unbeknownst to us, these few folks at that second four mile marker starting line have successfully leveraged advantages and doubt upon them by little more than their chance birth into a particularly wealthy or powerful family where opportunities for education and advancement and connections are simply built in. They're part of the fabric of their existence. Much like us.
They have the slow and the fast among them, but they're overwhelmingly average.
Nevertheless, given a four mile head start, they're going to win the race every time, regardless of their merit.
Fuck. Even the slowest among them could one day grow up to be President of the United States.
The mechanics of Class Warfare Modern class warfare can't even begin to be spoken about until we look at the realities of wage stagnation and the wealth gap between the richest and the poorest.
For example, When I was six years old in 1961, my family bought our first house on Long Island.
Three bedrooms with a full basement on a quarter acre for the whopping sum of $11,000.
The monthly mortgage payment on the 10,000 they financed, listen up closely. Was $49 a month.
@ the time, minimum wage in New York state was $1 per hour, or roughly 172amonth, meaning roughly 28% of their income was dedicated to housing.
[00:22:27] Speaker A: If only that translated to modern day numbers.
[00:22:30] Speaker C: Today, the average comparable home costs 700 $725,000 and New York State minimum wage is 16 or $2,838 a month.
For the sake of comparison, assume that you were somehow miraculously able to come up with a 10% down payment.
That would leave you with a mortgage of $652,500 flipping dollars and a roughly monthly payment of 4,200.
That is 148%, or one and a half times your monthly income. And you are now effectively priced out of the housing market by a margin so wide that you can never realistically hope to recover.
In a little over six decades, your wages have increased roughly seven times, but your monthly housing costs have increased by a staggering 85 times.
This is the reality of wage stagnation.
And pretty clearly giving up the occasional cup of Starbucks or your Saturday morning avocado toast ain't the answer here, kids.
[00:23:55] Speaker A: It's a really fascinating thought because when we talk about inflation, most people think about, oh, the price of goods, the price of services, the price of stuff they buy off the shelf.
They don't think about the housing market.
And when they're worrying about their income stacking up to inflation and keeping pace with it, they're worried about the grocery bill. Yeah, it's only at certain points in your life that you look at the housing market and dive in. And when you do, well, what you're hit with nowadays is so prohibitive that we are creating a whole generation of people that will be renting for their entire lives.
That's so far from the American dream that we're sold when they talk about making the country great again that it boggles the mind. But here we are watching them make it easier for private equity firms to buy up Housing, watching them make it easier for real estate companies to collude and set mortgage rates, rent rates and various other pricing options prohibitively high.
We've got markets where now all of a sudden to get into a new rental, it's no longer a security deposit in your first month, it's first month, last month security deposit and fees.
Oh, and by the way, there's an application fee for the privilege of finding all that out.
[00:25:18] Speaker C: And God save you if you're going through a broker because there's another month's rent on your tab.
[00:25:24] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:25:24] Speaker C: Just to walk through the door.
[00:25:27] Speaker A: So the housing market in America has become a major battleground for class warfare and one of those places where I think we can all see the impact of the wealth gap and the growth of the wealth gap.
[00:25:41] Speaker C: Absolutely. It sickens me to know that the only point in my life where I had a choice of being or not being a homeowner was when my mother passed away and left me her house.
[00:25:55] Speaker A: And that's the case for so many people nowadays. It's horrifying.
[00:26:00] Speaker C: And if you think housing is the only nightmare, don't at all costs, don't get sick.
Back in the day my employer offered wide ranging health coverage at a nominal cost to employees with maybe a few minimal co pays.
Then trickle down economics started taking hold in the 80s and not only did corporations decide they could pad the bottom line by charging us individually, but as medical costs kept rising at a pace exceeded only by housing costs, insurance providers decided not only that they were better qualified than our doctors to make medical decisions for us, but that we should pay more in copays for their decisions whether they were good or bad.
And our rates. For these increasingly bare bones policies, the sky was the limit.
Their first responsibility was with their shareholders and personal medical bankruptcies took over the landscape. And then big pharma jumped on the gravy train.
As bad as serious or chronic illness was in my grandparents day, and I remember it personally, I'm pretty sure I would much rather take my chances in 1955 than in 2025.
If you're hoping to climb out of this quagmire with education, my best advice would be to temper your expectations.
You see, in 1970 the average in state tuition and fees at a four year public university was roughly $400 a year. Today that same number is approximately 28,000.
That is a staggering 7,000% increase in what was once intended to be an affordable educational opportunity for the disadvantaged.
[00:28:08] Speaker A: And it all comes down to power. It all comes down to power. And influence and capitalism. Because in the end, money is what shapes these class structures. In the end, it's their fiduciary responsibility to someone to maximize their profitability in educating us as people. Yeah. And because of that, we're stuck with a world where whole generations, not one, not two, three more or are stuck with a lifetime of debt just to have the opportunity to get up in the morning and go to work.
It's staggering what we've done to the educational systems of this country.
[00:28:49] Speaker C: My sister is only three years younger than me.
She just in the last two years paid off her educational debt and that's only because she got some loan forgiveness over the course of several of the previous administrations.
Beyond discourage. It's disheartening.
[00:29:13] Speaker A: Like when did education just become a racket is really what it's become, you know, and you look at schools that handle specializations. What we used to have back in our day were trade schools. There were these low and mid cost options that were trade schools for a given profession. Those are all but gone nowadays and once replaced them as specialized courses at colleges, universities that cost a hell of a lot more. So again that that entry level barrier to getting into stuff is huge nowadays.
And it all comes down to what the politicians have done for the sake of the business people.
So here we are, the public once again, holding the bag.
[00:29:55] Speaker C: Exactly. Got it.
[00:29:58] Speaker A: Or the bill in this case.
[00:30:01] Speaker C: Listen, none of this happened in a vacuum.
We had a brief renaissance during the 40s, 50s, 60s where class structure started to equalize, but political power shifted back to the conservative right and they wasted no time in reestablishing old agendas.
As early as the late 60s, the Nixon administration, under the tutelage of a Mr. Lee Atwater and with the enthusiastic support of ultra conservative senators, began quietly chipping away at the previous three decades of economic equalization, social support structures and civil rights. This whole thing with education began during the Nixon administration.
That mind boggling increase in the cost of public education.
Its beginnings were meticulously engineered by the Nixon White House and their congressional allies for the sole purpose of forcing college students into the workforce.
Why?
Because students who were dependent upon jobs to fund their education would have a lot less time to spend in the streets protesting civil rights abuses and wars in places like Vietnam for instance.
This is the backdrop that ushered in the huge increases in corporate and special interest lobbying and the influx of dollars that continues to grow and mold our society and its class structure. And to this day, this is where the chain of events that led to the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision in 2010 shot down its roots.
Technology and automation have a lot to do with everything that we're feeling today.
While all of these political, societal things were happening literally right under our noses, we faithfully tuned into the evening news every night to receive our daily dose of fair, unbiased reporting brought to us by some of the very same mega corporations, the American Broadcasting Corporation, the Columbia Broadcasting Corporation, the National Broadcasting Corporation, that were lobbying their overseers for rules and regulations that would enable them to make more money that they could direct to politicians and bureaucrats who would enact new rules and regulations that would allow them to make even more money that they could funnel to. Now do you get the picture?
[00:33:05] Speaker A: The picture gets bigger over time because in the beginning, you had basically the big three. You had the big three media networks on television and they ran the show. And then later on, we added in cable and we added a couple other bigger players.
Media conglomerates handled home entertainment. They handled what we watched, what we listened to, what we got on our televisions, what we got on our radios. But then the Internet rolled around and everything changed.
There was this big sea of information that you could get into really cheaply.
But in the first couple generations, we tried to keep it walled behind those corporations.
And now fast forward all these years later, I see them trying to eliminate things like any semblance of net neutrality in order to enable that again.
So we had this era where we had democratized information.
[00:34:01] Speaker C: Yep.
[00:34:02] Speaker A: And now we're looking at an era where we may have privatized, corporate sponsored, individually flavored information handed to us pretty much 24, 7. If we don't keep an eye on the evolution of the situation.
[00:34:19] Speaker C: Flavored. I like that term.
[00:34:24] Speaker A: For me, in technology and automation, I see two things. I see barriers and opportunities. Barriers for people who want to get into technology. You know, you have to have the right computer, you have to have the right hardware, you have to have the right software, you have to have the right education.
But I also see this flip side to it where we have automation. And automation's primary role in a capitalist society is to replace human beings.
And now here we are in 2025 developing AIs, and we're on the cusp of developing AIs that can think and.
[00:35:02] Speaker C: Reason like people and produce art and beautiful things that once only people were capable of producing.
[00:35:10] Speaker A: What are we going to do when they become part of the workforce? What are we going to do when they're a big part of the economy? What does that do to the value of us in the eyes of these.
[00:35:21] Speaker C: Corporations over centuries, we have been consistently devalued, and I don't see that changing anytime soon unless we stand up, rise up, and take some action on our own bloody behalf.
[00:35:45] Speaker A: SA.
