Why Our Supply Chains Suck

Why are our supply chains suddenly breaking down? We take a deep dive into the history of logistics and class politics to find out.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Adcast. All right, Chris, you go, so welcome, Welcome to
it could happen here a podcast that I think, for
the first time is just me and Robert. This is
this is the very first time that this is happening.
You're you're all here at a moment of legendary significance
and historic importance. So try to try to face it

(00:28):
with the requisite all that's all I ask, yes, And
another thing that, man, this is a terrible transition. Something
else we're facing with requisite awe is weird shortages of
goods and price increases. M So it's fucking rad. I
was just at the Asian market today, Um, and they

(00:50):
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

(01:10):
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

(01:32):
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

(01:56):
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

(02:16):
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

(02:37):
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

(02:58):
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,

(03:20):
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,

(03:42):
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

(04:03):
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

(04:30):
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

(04:52):
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

(05:15):
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

(05:35):
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,

(05:57):
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

(06:18):
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

(06:40):
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

(07:01):
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,

(07:21):
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

(07:42):
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

(08:03):
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

(08:24):
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

(08:45):
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

(09:08):
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

(09:28):
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

(09:52):
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,

(10:13):
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

(10:34):
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

(10:56):
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

(11:21):
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

(11:41):
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

(12:03):
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

(12:23):
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,

(12:44):
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

(13:05):
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

(13:25):
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,

(13:50):
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

(14:13):
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

(14:33):
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

(14:55):
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

(15:16):
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

(15:38):
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

(15:59):
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

(16:19):
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

(16:40):
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,

(17:01):
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,

(17:21):
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,

(17:43):
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,

(18:07):
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

(18:31):
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

(18:52):
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

(19:14):
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

(19:35):
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

(19:57):
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

(20:19):
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

(20:39):
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,

(21:02):
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.

(21:26):
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

(21:46):
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

(22:08):
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

(22:29):
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

(22:51):
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

(23:12):
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

(23:33):
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

(23:54):
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,

(24:14):
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

(24:38):
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

(24:58):
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

(25:21):
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.

(25:41):
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,

(26:04):
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

(26:24):
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

(26:47):
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

(27:09):
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

(27:30):
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

(27:53):
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

(28:13):
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

(28:34):
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

(28:57):
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,

(29:19):
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

(29:39):
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

(30:02):
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

(30:22):
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

(30:44):
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

(31:06):
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

(31:27):
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

(31:50):
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,

(32:13):
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

(32:36):
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

(32:57):
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

(33:19):
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

(33:40):
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

(34:02):
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

(34:29):
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

(34:49):
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

(35:10):
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

(35:32):
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

(35:52):
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

(36:13):
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

(36:33):
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,

(36:54):
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

(37:15):
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

(37:37):
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,

(38:02):
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

(38:26):
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

(38:47):
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

(39:09):
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

(39:31):
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

(39:54):
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

(40:14):
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,

(40:34):
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

(40:58):
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

(41:19):
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

(41:40):
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

(42:02):
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

(42:27):
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

(42:50):
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,

(43:12):
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.

(43:33):
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.

(43:57):
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

(44:18):
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

(44:39):
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

(45:00):
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

(45:23):
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

(45:46):
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

(46:07):
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,

(46:30):
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

(46:52):
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,

(47:12):
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

(47:33):
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

(47:54):
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

(48:15):
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

(48:36):
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

(48:58):
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

(49:21):
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,

(49:42):
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,

(50:06):
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

(50:26):
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.

(50:47):
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.