Episode

4/14 Labor Action Sweeps The Nation & A Way To Ending US Wars w/ Alex Press & Daniel Bessner

April 14, 2022

Emma hosts Alex Press, writer at Jacobin, to discuss her recent pieces on the burgeoning labor movement countrywide and Eric Adams’s homelessness policies. Then Emma is joined by Daniel Bessner, co-host of the American Prestige podcast on SubStack, to discuss his recent brief for the Quincy Institute, “Ending Primacy to End U.S. Wars.” Emma and Alex begin with Eric Adams’ front-facing assault on the homeless, including the NYPD’s terror unit conducting an encampment sweep while a literal terrorist wandered the city, diving into his pointlessly expensive muscle-flexing of boosting the NYPD budget alongside cutting homeless services, before diving into his blame of protesters and parents for the deaths of Black teenagers by gunshot. Next, they swing over to Alex’s labor reporting, as she first contextualizes the recent discourse over unionization within the ever-falling rate of unions in the US, before looking into the positives we have seen in the wake of the Great Resignation of 2020. However, she then discusses the move from the individual action of this wave of resignation, to the collective action we’ve seen particularly amongst Starbucks and Amazon workers, as we begin to switch from temporary improvements for ourselves to bolstering the protections for workers and our colleagues as a whole, walking through the story of the unionization of the JFK-8 Amazon fulfillment center and the corporate neglect that lead to it. They wrap up the interview by touching on the labor movement amongst truckers in LA and Long Beach as Alex and Emma explore Biden’s improved NLRB and the genuine actions they’re taking to protect workers in the ever-evolving gig economy. Then, Daniel joins as he and Emma walk through the evolution of US armed primacy, first assessing its beginnings on the global stage in the wake of WW2, before walking through how it developed in the century before that, with the US simply containing their action as an expansionist power to the Western hemisphere. Next, they walk through the developments of the ‘30s and ‘40s that lead American elites to worry about their place on the global stage, and push us to become the hegemonic powers we see today. After discussing our armed primacy throughout the Cold War, they discuss our turn to the Middle East in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, how we used it to legitimize keeping our place as the world’s police, and how it set us on a collision course with Iraq, before wrapping up the interview with the concept of a turn to the Pacific, and what the future of armed primacy (and hopefully its decline) could look like. Emma also touches on PR pro-Eric Adam’s NYPD flaunting the arrest of Frank James, despite them having absolutely nothing to do with it.

And in the Fun Half: Emma is joined by Matt and Brandon as they watch Charlie Kirk discuss horizontal organizing… of houses, MTG goes to notorious feminist Matt Gaetz as he flies in to rescue her from BULLY Jimmy Kimmel, and Brandon gets into the feminization of videogames in the wake of GamerGates’ crackdown on jiggle physics. Evan from NJ discusses Ukrainians returning to their homes, and gets Matt to dive into the new Q Anon documentary, before they discuss TN State Senator Frank Niceley’s discussion of Hitler’s unproductive attitude, Rachel Campos Duffy’s going all-in on promoting wage cucking, and Dave from Jamaica engages in a fantastic conversation on the categorizations we use in sports, plus, your calls and IMs!

Check out Alex’s work at Jacobin here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/author/alex-press
Check out Dan’s Quincy Institute brief here: https://quincyinst.org/report/ending-primacy-to-end-u-s-wars/
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