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The Rick Smith Show 8-27-2026 · The Rick Smith Show

0:00
[SPEAKER_01]: It's time for the Rick Smith show.
0:05
[SPEAKER_04]: Now, here is the voice of a working class, Rick Smith.
0:12
[SPEAKER_03]: And welcome, brothers, sisters working class heroes.
0:17
[SPEAKER_03]: This is the Rick Smith show.
0:18
[SPEAKER_03]: Thanks so much for being here.
0:20
[SPEAKER_03]: Today on the big program, lots to get to, lots to talk about.
0:24
[SPEAKER_03]: Got a couple emails from folks wondering why I haven't weighed in on the Anthony Fauci thing or any of that circus.
0:32
[SPEAKER_03]: And look, my position's pretty simple.
0:34
[SPEAKER_03]: Conservatives really do have a magic trick.
0:37
[SPEAKER_03]: They've taken a public health crisis, they've sprinkled it with some billionaire talking points and somehow end up blaming the scientist instead of the disease, the incompetence and the political carnival of idiots who made everything worse because I lived through it too.
0:56
[SPEAKER_03]: Fauci and the CDC spent the entire pandemic trying to keep people alive and for their
1:07
[SPEAKER_03]: This is where we're at.
1:09
[SPEAKER_03]: Apparently in the alternative universe of right wing grievance theater, saving lives is now somehow suspicious.
1:17
[SPEAKER_03]: And now we're going to cherry pick a diary.
1:21
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, look, the right couldn't possibly admit the obvious.
1:25
[SPEAKER_03]: Science did not fail that reality did.
1:28
[SPEAKER_03]: And realities kind of rude like that.
1:31
[SPEAKER_03]: It doesn't, it doesn't care about your bumper sticker, or your Facebook rant, or your Senator yelling nonsense into a microphone like he lost a bet with a propane tag, not how it works.
1:43
[SPEAKER_03]: So instead of saying thank you to the people trying to stop mass death, they built an entire political religion around denial, complete with temper tantrums and blame finger poinings,
1:57
[SPEAKER_03]: Because once you admit that public health workers were right about anything, you have to confront the fact that the people screaming the loudest were often the least useful and the most wrong.
2:12
[SPEAKER_03]: And let's talk about the genius class of conservative leadership.
2:16
[SPEAKER_03]: Uh, if we can call it anything without insulting the concept of leadership, we get Tommy Tuberville literally the dumbest person to ever serve in the U.S. Senate and soon potentially going to be governor of Alabama acting like the nation's wisdom should be measured by how aggressively they can misunderstand the graph saying that, you know, if I was you killed nine million people when I'm governor, we're going to go get him to insane.
2:44
[SPEAKER_03]: But again, these are the same people who want you to believe experts are the problem while they can barely manage it coherent sentence without sounding like a lobbyist's broken toy.
2:57
[SPEAKER_03]: If stupidity weren't Olympic sport, Tuberville, I look, the rest of them, some of these folks would still be demanding a voter recount after losing to themselves.
3:09
[SPEAKER_03]: Meanwhile, the real owners of the circus are laughing all the way to the back, and we know who they are.
3:15
[SPEAKER_03]: They're the oil companies that the big corporations, the donors, the grifters, the political predators who love nothing more than a working class to busy infighting over masks or vaccines or fake outrage about anything.
3:31
[SPEAKER_03]: Instead of noticing that rents going through the roof, wages are falling flat, and also, you know, the economy keeps kneecapping anyone and everyone except, of course, the very rich who have figured out how to cash in on all this.
3:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Because understand, divide and conquer is the oldest trick in the book, and conservatives keep reading from the same dog-yared chapter like it's the holy scripture.
4:02
[SPEAKER_03]: In hindsight, it's always available from the safety of a cheap seat.
4:06
[SPEAKER_03]: Could Fauci have handled some things differently?
4:07
[SPEAKER_03]: Sure.
4:08
[SPEAKER_03]: Could every single person alive have done better in a once in a country in a century crisis with misinformation blasting from every direction?
4:18
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, absolutely.
4:20
[SPEAKER_03]: But it's called being human.
4:23
[SPEAKER_03]: But somehow, only the people trying to prevent catastrophe are expected to be flawless.
4:30
[SPEAKER_03]: While the ones making stuff up while they go, while the people just pulling stuff out of you know where, they get the posture as brave to truth tellers, fight in the man.
4:44
[SPEAKER_03]: And the funniest part here is, if you have a black soul in a sense of irony, the funniest part is the same people screaming that Fauci killed millions are the ones who helped spread the very nonsense
5:01
[SPEAKER_03]: And then they turn around and they act like victims when anyone points out the obvious.
5:08
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's not politics anymore.
5:10
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a traveling clown show with donor money, oxygen theft, and a merch table.
5:16
[SPEAKER_03]: So are we surprised by any of this?
5:17
[SPEAKER_03]: No, this is this is what they want.
5:19
[SPEAKER_03]: They want to devalue science.
5:21
[SPEAKER_03]: They want you not believing people have spent their entire lives ensuring that we don't die from everything trying to kill us.
5:29
[SPEAKER_03]: And oh, by the way, I got to think the people who died from COVID, you know, after we knew better who didn't get the vaccine,
5:38
[SPEAKER_03]: I think they'd make different choices.
5:40
[SPEAKER_03]: I got a thing.
5:42
[SPEAKER_03]: Want to hear your thoughts?
5:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Rick at theworksmithsshow.com, right back.
5:47
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm Rick Smith, and this is Labor History Into.
5:51
[SPEAKER_03]: On this day in Labor history, the year was 1993.
5:55
[SPEAKER_03]: That was the day that the family medical leave act went into effect.
5:59
[SPEAKER_03]: Union members worked hard to support this legislation, testifying before Congress and holding rallies.
6:05
[SPEAKER_03]: It was an uphill battle to pass the bill.
6:08
[SPEAKER_03]: Starting in 1984, family medical leave was brought before Congress.
6:20
[SPEAKER_03]: but was vetoed by President George H.W.
6:22
[SPEAKER_03]: Bush.
6:23
[SPEAKER_03]: He vetoed it again the following year.
6:25
[SPEAKER_03]: Then, in February of 1992, newly elected President Bill Clinton signed the FMLA into law.
6:33
[SPEAKER_03]: It guaranteed that most employers with 50 or more workers must give their employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for a serious health condition for themselves, their spouse, parent or child.
6:45
[SPEAKER_03]: In his speech, signing the act, President Bill Clinton declared, quote, This bill will strengthen our families, and I believe it will strengthen our businesses and our economy as well.
6:56
[SPEAKER_03]: He went on to say, I know that men and women are more productive when they are sure they won't lose their jobs because they're trying to be good parents, good children.
7:05
[SPEAKER_03]: Our businesses should not lose the services of these dedicated Americans.
7:10
[SPEAKER_03]: And over the long run, the lessons of the most productive companies in the world here at home and around the world are those who put their people first, are those who will triumph in the global economy.
7:22
[SPEAKER_03]: He said that family and medical leave is a matter of pure common sense, and a matter of common decency.
7:29
[SPEAKER_03]: It will provide Americans what they need most, peace of mind.
7:33
[SPEAKER_03]: Never again, will parents have to fear losing their jobs because of their
7:39
[SPEAKER_03]: Labor history in two brought to you by the Illinois Labor History Society and the Rick Smithsia for more information go to laborhistoryintu.com.
7:56
[SPEAKER_03]: So look, over the last several days, been having a lot of fun with the New York School District.
8:04
[SPEAKER_03]: You may remember talking about New York School District.
8:07
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it was Salamonka School District.
8:10
[SPEAKER_03]: I tried to pass off a $60,000 humanoid robot's tied to a sex style company as education innovation.
8:19
[SPEAKER_03]: Uh, and understand, you know, a lot of teachers, a lot of parents, state officials pushed back.
8:25
[SPEAKER_03]: Thanks to our friend, Michael Sanato and his piece, and the result was it, it was a ridiculous text-stunt exposed, uh, but it's, you know, the privacy risks, the PR nightmare that it was, and what, absolute insult to not just the people, the, the, the, the, the indigenous folks who are in that sell-a-market school district, but poor people across the board
8:49
[SPEAKER_03]: And I thought this would be a great opportunity to talk to my education expert and get some thoughts on, is this our future?
8:55
[SPEAKER_03]: Is this a one-off?
8:56
[SPEAKER_03]: Was this just a bad stunt gone really bad?
8:59
[SPEAKER_03]: That's why I've asked Mark Weber to come share some thoughts.
9:01
[SPEAKER_03]: He's a lecturer at Rutgers University and my go-to guy.
9:04
[SPEAKER_03]: You can follow him on social media at jerseysman.bluescop.social.
9:09
[SPEAKER_03]: I will get links out on social media how you can take a look at that mark.
9:12
[SPEAKER_03]: Thanks for taking time for us.
9:14
[SPEAKER_02]: I wrecked.
9:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for being here.
9:16
[SPEAKER_03]: So pleasure.
9:16
[SPEAKER_03]: So look, a lot of fun around the, hey, I wish they had a sex doll teacher when I was in school.
9:22
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, all the jokes basically write themselves because look, I went to Catholic school.
9:27
[SPEAKER_03]: I did, I did eight years in our lady of great pain in misery.
9:30
[SPEAKER_03]: And most of the, and then all the nuns were, you know, not sex doll quality.
9:35
[SPEAKER_03]: So a lot of us were joking, you know, maybe we would have learned, or maybe we wouldn't have, but what is this, what message is sent to you in this?
9:44
[SPEAKER_03]: in this moment.
9:45
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I don't think you were alone in that.
9:47
[SPEAKER_02]: I think teacher crushes are probably although I don't know any formal studies on these things.
9:54
[SPEAKER_02]: I think they're probably pretty common.
9:57
[SPEAKER_02]: This was,
10:00
[SPEAKER_02]: perfect parable for our time when it comes to education policy.
10:06
[SPEAKER_02]: It's all of the themes are right there, right?
10:10
[SPEAKER_02]: We've got, we're going to spend 60, I think it was around $60,000 for an AI powered robot.
10:17
[SPEAKER_02]: that is going to teach in a tech class.
10:20
[SPEAKER_02]: I think they said it was going to be for a tech class for high school students and it turns out that the manufacturers are the same manufacturers as a sex spot.
10:32
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, I don't know what you call it on a robot, is it the
10:44
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, we're not going there.
10:47
[SPEAKER_02]: The technology itself was powered by Steve Waznick.
10:54
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you're if that name sounds familiar, he is along with Steve Jobs, one of the founders of Apple.
11:01
[SPEAKER_02]: And for years, he has been involved in Ed Tech, right?
11:05
[SPEAKER_02]: And which has been this
11:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Generates a lot of revenue generates a lot of interest, but they have been looking for this kind of magic item that is somehow going to transform teaching not just by making a better but and here's the catch making a cheaper and that is the thing that seems to drive so much of this.
11:35
[SPEAKER_02]: that how can we save a couple of bucks?
11:39
[SPEAKER_02]: How can we not actually have to worry about hiring a actual human being and paying them in actual living wage?
11:48
[SPEAKER_02]: How can we get around that?
11:50
[SPEAKER_02]: It always seems to be this other sort of scheme.
11:54
[SPEAKER_02]: So if it's not a robot, there was a charter school a few years ago, actually,
12:02
[SPEAKER_02]: had a bit of following in California is called rocket ship and the idea was that the kids were going to learn on laptops are going to learn on their own but but this has been going on for a while and it inevitably inevitably never works out but who is this
12:21
[SPEAKER_02]: in the experiment.
12:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Who gets this?
12:24
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that's a super important part of the story.
12:27
[SPEAKER_02]: And thank you for highlighting that in this case.
12:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Upstate New York, this school is in the Seneca Nation.
12:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Native kids.
12:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Native kids are the ones who are going to be the experiment for the teaching box.
12:43
[SPEAKER_02]: This is not happening in the white schools, it's not happening in the affluent schools.
12:47
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I'm state New York, if you know the area, you know, it's hit hard times.
12:53
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a big problem with raising enough funding for schools in many of the districts.
13:00
[SPEAKER_02]: And again, who rather than saying we need to do something about adequately funding our schools and adequately paying our teachers, we're going to try this wacky stuff, which is doomed to fail.
13:12
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
13:12
[SPEAKER_03]: No, but that's not new, Mark.
13:14
[SPEAKER_03]: And you know this better than anyone.
13:15
[SPEAKER_03]: We've we've used poor kids in this country as guinea pigs for all of these newfangled ideas when we know educationally what works.
13:24
[SPEAKER_03]: having small class sizes, having more experiential learning, having kids who come to school ready to learn, being fed, being clothed, having decent home environment, we know we know how to do this, but that takes some money, that takes some doing and well we've got billionaires we've got a fat enough because their kids, their kids get all of the advantages and no sex doll teachers.
13:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and you know, part of that list, Rick and everything you said on the list is absolutely right what what is required for adequate education, but what's also required is having well paid experienced well trained teachers that is the key.
14:07
[SPEAKER_02]: And if we don't have that, then all of the other stuff isn't going to matter.
14:12
[SPEAKER_02]: And so where are we at right now?
14:16
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a great piece that came out a couple of weeks ago from Matt Barnum.
14:21
[SPEAKER_02]: Matt is, I think, one of the best education journalists out there.
14:25
[SPEAKER_02]: He writes for chalkbee.
14:27
[SPEAKER_02]: And he was looking at teacher turnover.
14:30
[SPEAKER_02]: And what has happened since the pandemic is we have had this enormous wave of teacher turnover.
14:38
[SPEAKER_02]: It has increased, I believe, by his calculations somewhere around 10% more than we had before the pandemic.
14:46
[SPEAKER_02]: And that is indicative of a profession in crisis.
14:51
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, the learning policy institute, which is a great source on these sorts of things, puts the estimate of the teacher shortage right now is about 400,000 and that we've got about three million public school teachers, 400, that's a lot when you look at the total.
15:11
[SPEAKER_02]: And they're saying that these are jobs that either haven't been filled yet or have been filled
15:21
[SPEAKER_03]: Why is that why I want to stop here because you're you're I think and it helped me if I'm wrong You're you're going on the assumption that they you know the people who run these systems What your kids to be critical thinking citizens as opposed to button pushers and obedient workers and people who just follow along
15:41
[SPEAKER_03]: that you actually want kids to get an education that isn't just rooted in regurgitating what they've been told that they actually want you actually want thinkers and leaders and I think that's where the fundamental flaws.
15:54
[SPEAKER_03]: They don't want that for our kids.
15:56
[SPEAKER_03]: They want that for poor working class kids.
15:59
[SPEAKER_02]: There you go.
16:00
[SPEAKER_02]: There you go.
16:01
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that last part is the key and that ties into this whole thing about who gets the robot sex dolls as teachers and who gets real teachers who are experienced and well trained.
16:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Great book by Eve Ewing just came out this last year called original sins highly recommend this book.
16:22
[SPEAKER_02]: she got very carefully documents, how for black kids and for native kids in this country, schools have become these engines of social reproduction, right?
16:33
[SPEAKER_02]: You think about the messages that are sent to kids who attend a school where
16:40
[SPEAKER_02]: it is considered serious to have a robot be one of your teachers, right?
16:47
[SPEAKER_02]: What messages that sending to kids is that sending to kids that you want them to grow up to be critical thinkers that you want them to grow up to be leaders that you want them to grow up to excel in
17:02
[SPEAKER_02]: highly intellectually challenging jobs or are you sending the message that that's for somebody else and for you instead you get the robot teacher or you get the laptop learning or you get the school voucher or you get the charter school that has the no excuses kind of philosophy.
17:20
[SPEAKER_02]: that's what you get if you're a certain kind of kid.
17:24
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you're another kind of kid, you get something else.
17:27
[SPEAKER_02]: And that sends a very powerful message.
17:31
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a very powerful message.
17:33
[SPEAKER_02]: And we really should be calling it out.
17:35
[SPEAKER_03]: No, absolutely.
17:35
[SPEAKER_03]: And what does it also say to the teachers in those school districts, the people who are working in those schools that are struggling, and I look at the Philadelphia school district, I can't find anyone to say a nice thing about the teachers there, but I know a lot of the teachers, and they're hardworking, they're well trained, they've got a lot of problems, and it keeps getting worse because the funding keeps going down, and the problems keep going up.
17:59
[SPEAKER_03]: and now we're looking for gimmicks and all of the division that's going on with charter schools and vouchers and programs that are meant to destroy public education and really to deep professionalize the entire industry for those folks at that level.
18:16
[SPEAKER_03]: Still, I got to thank
18:18
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, at the Abington Friends School in Philadelphia or, you know, the, the ones that will Baba's kids or Trump's kids go to, they're still treated like professional teachers and professionals to be respected and and learned from, but everyone else, and I look at what Trump's Department of Education did by basically deep professionalizing education, teaching, nursing, and a number of other careers with the student loan stuff.
18:43
[SPEAKER_03]: It sends an incredible message,
18:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, for a while now in certain education policy circles the idea has taken root and Michael Bloomberg I think was the one who said famously that he could cut the teaching staff in half and double up on the number of students if he just had quote unquote good teachers of course.
19:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Good teachers, uh, it's a real question is to how you determine who who is and who is not a, uh, good teacher and a lot of it has to do with who you are teaching.
19:27
[SPEAKER_03]: Right, but look, I look at myself and I let me just jump in here because, you know, this whole good bad teacher thing I've never had a bad teacher.
19:35
[SPEAKER_03]: I've had some that were less inspiring, but those that were less inspiring to me, I had friends who just thought they were the cats me out.
19:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Every teacher that I've ever had, even when I was in a poverty school district, they still presented what they were supposed to.
19:49
[SPEAKER_03]: They're still doing their job.
19:51
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, the difference I think is how we perceive them, you know, especially because everybody I talked about is bad teachers, but my kids teachers are okay, and they can't point to something that's been done.
20:03
[SPEAKER_03]: It's been a message that we've been forced fed for so long that we just kind of accept it.
20:08
[SPEAKER_03]: At least that's, yeah.
20:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, well, I mean, I think there's a lot of truth to that.
20:14
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it's also tied into the fact that this is a profession where three quarters of the practitioners are women.
20:23
[SPEAKER_02]: And we've always had a problem in this country with a siding, I shouldn't say a problem.
20:30
[SPEAKER_02]: We've always been very good in this country.
20:32
[SPEAKER_02]: It is a siding blame to,
20:36
[SPEAKER_02]: professions that are dominated either by women or by people of color or whatever minority you may think of.
20:45
[SPEAKER_02]: And that becomes actually an excuse then not to address things like pay gaps.
20:51
[SPEAKER_02]: You know we have a real problem with a teacher pay gap in this country.
20:56
[SPEAKER_02]: The folks at economic policy institute now put it at like around 30% you pay
21:05
[SPEAKER_02]: for getting a college degree and going into teaching as opposed to going into some other profession on average.
21:14
[SPEAKER_02]: But that sends a message in it of itself as to how we view the professionalization of teaching.
21:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Is this something that is really going to be a career
21:27
[SPEAKER_02]: that you can have long term that allows you autonomy that rewards you for taking leadership and being a professional leader within the field.
21:38
[SPEAKER_02]: Or are we just going to make it into this recitation that actually could be done by a robot that has been built by the same people who
21:50
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I mean then this is where the joke it comes back to because all of us had that hot for teacher moment when we were in school.
21:56
[SPEAKER_03]: All of us have that one But the difference was that teacher in front of the classroom was still challenging us.
22:02
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know how an AI robot is going to challenge us My fear is like all of AI and my great fear of AI is it's the end of thinking
22:10
[SPEAKER_03]: It's just the we're going to just be regurgitating what is told to us and we never we never question and that kind of obedient society kind of scares me and I understand why the guy who helped find a found apple would want us going in that direction because we might not ask why why he's not paying higher taxes.
22:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, well, I mean, the obedience again gets back to the racism, you know, again, certain kids are expected to quote unquote be a certain kids are allowed to walk the halls and talk and sit with whoever they want to sit in lunch and not sit silently.
22:49
[SPEAKER_02]: And certain kids have to behave in a different way.
22:53
[SPEAKER_02]: So that is, you know, it's all kind of tied in, and to my mind, the other thing that I think is very closely aligned to what you're saying about the idea of obedience and behavior is about surveillance.
23:08
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's the thing, I think, in AI, that's also very scary.
23:13
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, these robots, we're joking about it now because it's, it's so silly and transparently silly.
23:23
[SPEAKER_02]: But is it so silly to think that if this ever caught on, those robots wouldn't be data-gathering as well?
23:31
[SPEAKER_02]: And what are the implications of that?
23:33
[SPEAKER_02]: What does that mean that we begin this data-gathering process in our schools?
23:39
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, let me stop you there and ask your question on that.
23:41
[SPEAKER_03]: because I argue that we've already been doing that.
23:44
[SPEAKER_03]: All of this hyper-testing, these high-stakes testing, all of the surveillance and classrooms, with cameras literally everywhere.
23:52
[SPEAKER_03]: There's literally not a moment of my kid's childhood that hasn't been videotaped somewhere, and they're keenly aware of it.
23:58
[SPEAKER_03]: Whereas you and I, we went out, we did all kinds of stuff, and nobody knew what we did.
24:03
[SPEAKER_03]: We fought and did all kinds of stuff.
24:05
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, they don't have that kind of freedom.
24:08
[SPEAKER_03]: They're used to being watched, surveilled.
24:10
[SPEAKER_03]: So for me, this next step into the AI sex pod, you know, teacher, isn't a huge leap.
24:17
[SPEAKER_03]: It just seems like the natural evolution, or do you think I'm wrong?
24:21
[SPEAKER_02]: No, I think, unfortunately, I think that your paranoia is not misplaced, and it's something that I definitely share, but again, and I know I keep harping on this, but I think it's important to understand.
24:39
[SPEAKER_02]: who gets surveilled and in what way do they get surveilled.
24:43
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that we have to include that as part of our understanding of this overall.
24:48
[SPEAKER_02]: There are certain groups of students who are going to be looked at and you're going to have this carceral kind of education where they are monitored and then certain students who are given more freedom.
25:01
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, let me, let me push back on that a little bit, you know, if you, if you took that argument into the public square right now, given what we're doing with immigration, do you think, you know, a large segment of the population to be like, yeah, that's not a bad idea.
25:15
[SPEAKER_03]: Let's get them sexual about teacher.
25:17
[SPEAKER_03]: So we can keep an eye on it.
25:19
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, yeah, certainly they're going to be people who are fans of it.
25:23
[SPEAKER_02]: That's true.
25:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Although I will say this and this is something I talk about a lot when I talk about the education policies sphere.
25:33
[SPEAKER_02]: In general, the public has questions about education and they have doubts about public education, but when it comes to their own schools and their own teachers,
25:45
[SPEAKER_02]: Generally, it's very different.
25:46
[SPEAKER_02]: The polling seems to show this consistently over and over again.
25:52
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a real question about overall public education in this country.
25:56
[SPEAKER_02]: But I love my kids, children.
25:59
[SPEAKER_02]: I love my kids school.
26:01
[SPEAKER_02]: And I do think that if there's a bright side to this crazy story, it's that the people in Salamanca stood up and said, okay, no, we're not putting up with this.
26:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Whoever came up with this idea, sorry, thank you very much.
26:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Time to move on.
26:18
[SPEAKER_02]: We want our public school.
26:20
[SPEAKER_02]: We want our public school teachers.
26:22
[SPEAKER_02]: We want to have a school where we as a community have a say in how our kids are being educated.
26:29
[SPEAKER_02]: And that might rip, that might be the thing that saves us.
26:32
[SPEAKER_03]: No, look, I want my $60,000 back and I want you to hire a teacher to put in the classroom to replace the robot.
26:38
[SPEAKER_03]: I want to see robots on the unemployment line, but Mark, as always great stuff, I appreciate the thoughts last question, what should we be doing, what's the marching order out of all of this?
26:50
[SPEAKER_02]: I think, again, I seem to come back to this as a theme.
26:54
[SPEAKER_02]: I think the last time I was on you and I talked about this, it starts at the grassroots, get involved in your school district, even if you don't have kids who go to the school.
27:04
[SPEAKER_02]: It's your school, it's your community school.
27:08
[SPEAKER_02]: And if there are things going on like this, that you've got some real doubts about some real questions about,
27:13
[SPEAKER_02]: You have every right to go to your school board meeting and say, hey, but let's think the twice before we start putting robots and collecting data and doing all this other wacky sort of stuff, you know, it's your school.
27:28
[SPEAKER_03]: While we still care before they privatize it and institute it without or even having any say.
27:34
[SPEAKER_03]: But Mark Weber, appreciate the time.
27:36
[SPEAKER_03]: As always, great stuff, Markweber.com, the website, you can check out the work that he does as always.
27:42
[SPEAKER_03]: I appreciate it, Martin.
27:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Thanks so much.
27:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Thanks, Rick.
27:44
[SPEAKER_03]: Thanks, Rick.
27:45
[SPEAKER_03]: Want to hear your thoughts?
27:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Email me, Rick at therixmythshow.com.
27:48
[SPEAKER_03]: You okay?
27:49
[SPEAKER_03]: Would you want your kids taught by a sex style teacher?
27:53
[SPEAKER_03]: Rick at therixmythshow.com, right back to CROP.
28:00
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm Rick Smith, and this is Labor History in 2.
28:03
[SPEAKER_03]: On this day in Labor History, the year was 1917.
28:07
[SPEAKER_03]: That was the day I WWE Leader Frank Little was buried in Butte Montana.
28:12
[SPEAKER_03]: Little had been lynched on August 1st by police agents thought to be working for the despised Anaconda Copper Company.
28:19
[SPEAKER_03]: He had arrived in town to help organize 14,000 striking copper miners.
28:24
[SPEAKER_03]: devastated by the deaths of 168 miners in the June fire at Granite Mountain and Spectacular mines, mine workers formed the metal mine workers union and walked off the job.
28:35
[SPEAKER_03]: Frank Little had previously worked as a hard rock miner and organizer for the Western Federation of Miners.
28:40
[SPEAKER_03]: He also took part in the free speech campaigns on the West Coast.
28:44
[SPEAKER_03]: Little was involved in early drives to industrially organize oil workers and lumberjacks.
28:49
[SPEAKER_03]: He voiced his opposition to the First World War and sought to stop workers from enlisting.
28:54
[SPEAKER_03]: When Little arrived in Bute in July, he worked to build strike support, picket lines, and spread the strike to other trades across the city.
29:03
[SPEAKER_03]: Early on August 1st, six masked men broke into the boarding house where he was staying.
29:08
[SPEAKER_03]: He was beaten and taken from his room.
29:10
[SPEAKER_03]: His assailants tied him to the bumper of their car, and dragged him through the granite streets of Bute to the Milwaukee Bridge where he was hanged.
29:18
[SPEAKER_03]: An ominous note was pinned to his bullet-ridden body with the words that red others take notice first and last warning.
29:25
[SPEAKER_03]: It included the numbers 3, 7, and 77, as well as the initials of other Union organizers in the area.
29:32
[SPEAKER_03]: As many as 10,000 marched in his funeral procession, days after his lynching, Marshall Law was declared.
29:39
[SPEAKER_03]: Labor radicals were rounded up and charged with espionage.
29:43
[SPEAKER_03]: The miners strike and Union were crushed.
29:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Labor history in two brought to you by the Illinois Labor History Society and the Rick Smith Show.
29:50
[SPEAKER_03]: For more information, go to LaborHistoryInto.com, like us on Facebook and follow us on the Twitter's at LaborHistoryInto.
30:09
[SPEAKER_00]: I doubt it since introspection doesn't seem to be in the DNA of hebristic AI demagogues like Bezos, Musk and Zuckerberg.
30:18
[SPEAKER_00]: nor are they programming such qualities into their super-intelligent bots?
30:23
[SPEAKER_00]: So let me help them see themselves.
30:26
[SPEAKER_00]: First, today's eruptions of public hatred toward them are not, as they want us to believe, just petty jealousy by people who want to be like them.
30:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Really?
30:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Be like Musk?
30:37
[SPEAKER_00]: His ugliness is not just skin-deep.
30:40
[SPEAKER_00]: It emanates from his inner core.
30:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Such aloof AI profiteers have sparked a nationwide purry fire of anger by plundering local water supplies, farmland, electric power, and tax subsidies.
30:53
[SPEAKER_00]: They're callously treating our communities as nothing more than a series of financial transactions for them to consummate.
31:00
[SPEAKER_00]: But people's rebellion is not merely about monetary prices and property.
31:05
[SPEAKER_00]: fundamentally, it's fueled by corporate elites total disregard for the basic human value of fairness, even preschool children comprehend the moral implication of, that's not fair.
31:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The corporate goal rush to an AI future is not about the mystical possibilities of technology, but old-fashioned greed.
31:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Money elites are grabbing more profits and control, and there's nothing fair about either.
31:32
[SPEAKER_00]: This is Jim Heiter saying, the spreading rebellion against AI arrogance is raising a politically explosive moral question.
31:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Who the hell elected you, selfish screw ups, to dictate our future?
31:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Musk and companies say they don't even believe in democracy, so why would we the people let them remake society in their totalitarian image?
31:53
[SPEAKER_00]: To join your local rebellion, go to jimheiter.com slash data centers.
32:03
[SPEAKER_04]: Welcome back to the Rick Smith Show.
32:05
[SPEAKER_04]: Now, here is Rick Smith.
32:10
[SPEAKER_03]: So, as you know, privatizing the post office has been a long running conservative wet dream assault on public service.
32:19
[SPEAKER_03]: And you go back to 2018 when Trump really really began his tool full tilt, buggy assault on the postal service.
32:27
[SPEAKER_03]: I understand not new been doing it for a while, but kind of the pressure points really built in 2018, major funding cuts, debt traps, service slowdowns, and well, now fast forward to today attacks on voting by mail.
32:46
[SPEAKER_03]: look they didn't want and certainly do not want an efficiently well-run postal service that's not in their interest what they want is they want to be able to steal a national asset break it up in the little tiny pieces and sell it off to their criminal friends and their billionaire crony buddies because well there's there's profit to be made
33:05
[SPEAKER_03]: And look, like a lot of things that we're living through today, this is the conservative corporate plan.
33:10
[SPEAKER_03]: Go back to 1970 when they reorganized the post office and kind of made it quasi-private.
33:15
[SPEAKER_03]: It was setting the table for where we are now.
33:18
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's why I've asked Andy Norman to come share some thoughts with us.
33:21
[SPEAKER_03]: And he's the Associate Director of Campaigns at Americans for Financial Reform.
33:25
[SPEAKER_03]: We can find their website at ourfinancialsecurity.org.
33:29
[SPEAKER_03]: That's where she leads the Save Our Post Office Coalition.
33:33
[SPEAKER_03]: Hopefully we're going to save our post office, Annie, thanks for taking time for us.
33:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for having me, Rick.
33:39
[SPEAKER_03]: So I go back to 1970.
33:41
[SPEAKER_03]: They begin the reorganization scheme.
33:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Cause hey, we got to bring good business principles in and this is really in my view of the beginning of laying the groundwork for stealing this national treasure.
33:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Many in our coalition would agree with you and I would say that that's a pretty accurate representation of when things started to go off the rails.
34:04
[SPEAKER_01]: I, like you said, I leave the save the post office coalition and I've been in that role for about a little over four years now.
34:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, and the coalition came together shortly after the, um, first attempt of Trump, um, to meddle and try to privatize the post office you are speaking up in 2018, um, but our coalition came around in 2020, um, when Trump installed Lewis
34:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Yep, yeah, I love to hate.
34:42
[SPEAKER_01]: I've got a lot of flag, deservedly.
34:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, Trump told basically, you know, Trump meddled and told his buddy, statement secretary, secretary, statementation to pressure the postal board into hiring the joy, which he's not supposed to do as an independent agency.
35:02
[SPEAKER_01]: So worth noting that the postal board has the sole,
35:07
[SPEAKER_01]: higher fire power over the postmaster general.
35:11
[SPEAKER_01]: But the joy was just Trump's first takeover attempt after the 2018 privatization attempt.
35:18
[SPEAKER_01]: But um...
35:20
[SPEAKER_01]: He did work out in there and started messing with the male delivery and sorting machines tearing them out right before the summer before the 2020 midterm election when, you know, all of the country was about to vote by mail and record numbers because of pandemic that was going on and so we drew on our, well, I guess I should start.
35:44
[SPEAKER_01]: and say that the same the post office coalition is sort of nested within the organization I work for the non-profit Americans for financial reform at the DC-based.
35:55
[SPEAKER_01]: I work out of Detroit, but Americans for financial reform is the organization that got started as a coalition whenever they were working to pass a Dodd-Frank after the financial collapse.
36:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, as a part of that financial reform work, public banking as an option, an alternative option to these private banks and how they screw us over, was something that AFR had been long working on and one of the options there is post-of-banking, but we have to have
36:30
[SPEAKER_01]: functioning healthy public postal service in order to have nice things like postal making.
36:35
[SPEAKER_03]: Right now the important part is a public bag, a public post office, and this has been the wet dream of the conservative movement for a very long time.
36:43
[SPEAKER_03]: There should be nothing in the hands of we the people.
36:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Everything should be privatized, profitized, and sold back to us as we're getting something better, and I've been asking this question for 21 years doing this program.
36:55
[SPEAKER_03]: What is it that we've privatized in the past that actually lived up to all the promises that they made of it being cheaper and faster and better quality and and we would we would we would we would just benefit wildly if we gave over our water supply our sewers are parking our turnpikes go through all of the stuff that we privatized that somehow in the past we used to be able to figure out for ourselves show me something that's actually worked out the way they sold it to us and I'll be able to be on board with
37:23
[SPEAKER_03]: of privatizing the post office.
37:25
[SPEAKER_03]: I know you can't.
37:26
[SPEAKER_03]: So I just know you're going to screw it up even worse.
37:29
[SPEAKER_03]: It's going to cost me a 10, a ton more.
37:31
[SPEAKER_03]: So it seems like a bad idea.
37:33
[SPEAKER_03]: I think most Americans, Annie.
37:34
[SPEAKER_03]: I think most Americans kind of feel that way right now, or do you get a different sense?
37:39
[SPEAKER_01]: 100% most people do feel that way now and because people feel that way now and they feel so strongly about protecting the public postal service that's why I have a job but that's why the coalition is here because like I said back in 2020 when all this was started sort of moving
37:59
[SPEAKER_01]: We put out a call.
38:00
[SPEAKER_01]: We had a longstanding relationship with the American Postal Workers Union and move on and people we just sort of started talking and we're like, this is really like somebody needs to do something about this.
38:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Like as we're the somebody's and so we put out a joint mass organizing call in August and we got almost like 500 RSVPs and less than 48 hours.
38:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, people definitely see through the smoke and mirrors and corporate greed of privatization and they know that it doesn't work.
38:30
[SPEAKER_03]: So that, so this is where this is where I want to make sure that people understand that this whole made up.
38:36
[SPEAKER_03]: assault this whole made up crisis around mail and voting is not about really about of voting is as much as it really is Americans don't want their postal service privatized but it seems like a nice attack point to go well you know the the post office is screwing up the mail and ballots maybe we should go a different way it not only attacking something that was ours but also the bedrock of this entire experiment of self-governance which is access to that ballot box.
39:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely, they definitely, the playbook is old and predictable where they make it sound like there is, there's a false flag of election security, right, and that's why.
39:22
[SPEAKER_01]: they have to, the Trump administration creates all of these, like, and perpetuates these false narratives of the stolen election.
39:30
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, going back to 2020, where, you know, I started at this conversation, like, he's still winding about that.
39:36
[SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, he's not just winding.
39:38
[SPEAKER_03]: He is totally fixated on it as if it's the only thing that matters.
39:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Because, hey, we're in a war with Iran still complaining about the 2020 election, which he cannot change no matter how badly
39:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, people are struggling to put gas in their cars and food on the table, and he's giving speeches about how the, you know, he's winding about the election and saying the top priority is the save act to limit.
40:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Moting rights in this country, and that's one of our priorities and the save the post office coalition, in addition to monitoring like and calling out and, you know, just sort of mobilizing,
40:21
[SPEAKER_01]: People as much as we can around any sign of stealth privatization, which we can talk a little bit more about that later, but, you know, this is a huge election year and not to be alarmist and I'm sure this isn't news to anyone of your listeners, but we are in the probably little fight of our lives to protect the right to vote, especially by mail, we've seen executive orders and lawsuits.
40:50
[SPEAKER_01]: and county election boards being rated by the FBI.
40:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Supreme court cases, like all kinds of things I'm sure people as for like hit with information, like people have been hearing things, but I would say like we are not like a sort of like democracy focused organization or coalition, but we have partners within our coalition that are democracy focused.
41:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And so our sort of on-ramp in that is to like,
41:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Race day alarm and say, you know, these are the things that are happening.
41:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Like there is a threat to vote by mail And it has things to do with the post office and these are sort of the ways and the things that like we can look at and monitor and like yell it are Senators and Congress people about and so right now Any day the Senate could schedule a confirmation vote for two of Trump's nominees to the post award and remember earlier I said that the post award is
41:51
[SPEAKER_01]: has the soul hire firepower of the postmaster general, they are like the tipi top of the post office.
41:58
[SPEAKER_01]: So much so that like they even approve the budget of their own regulator.
42:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, the post regulator.
42:05
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, there's there's no conflict there is there.
42:08
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, you do what we want or maybe the the purse gets squeezed a little bit tighter and this is where I was going to go because the questions like people want because look we've been talking about privatizing the post office pretty much my entire life there's always been that undercurrent of hey you know if the profiteers could get their hands on it it would be it would run much better and I I've got pictures of me you know marching on picket lines you know save our post office you know from 15 16 years ago this isn't new so
42:37
[SPEAKER_03]: how uh because my concern is I reach out to a couple friends and they're like yeah they bring this up every once in a while it's not going anywhere.
42:44
[SPEAKER_03]: How much of this it can be how much of this is a real opportunity because I don't want people to get fatigued of going yeah we've we've seen this movie it's not going anywhere.
42:54
[SPEAKER_03]: How real is this moment and this assault?
42:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Very real, right?
42:59
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think I might have a little bit of perhaps
43:06
[SPEAKER_01]: a position of watching these things kind of ebb and flow over the last four years, so not as long as it's been happening, but what I see over and over again is that let's start in 2018.
43:22
[SPEAKER_01]: The first time Trump and Secretary Steven Manuchin tried this privatization,
43:27
[SPEAKER_01]: scheme.
43:28
[SPEAKER_01]: They put out a report and they said, you know, the postal service needs to be fixed and then privatized.
43:35
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was the headlines.
43:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Those were the headlines.
43:38
[SPEAKER_01]: And there was a mass outcry because this coalition didn't exist yet, but we're not the first to organize around against pushing back against postal privatization.
43:49
[SPEAKER_01]: So people sounded the alarm bells and
43:54
[SPEAKER_01]: folks contacted their congressmen and congresswomen, and they politically were forged.
44:02
[SPEAKER_01]: The Trump administration was forced to walk it back because it was so politically unpopular not just with Democrats, but Republicans, and defendants, everyone loves the post office.
44:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And polarized political climate, it's still the most
44:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Beloved government agency, because everybody knows they're most workers.
44:19
[SPEAKER_03]: Then I said this the other day, everyone knows their UPS driver, everyone knows their postal worker, everyone knows that the male person who drops their mail off may not like them all the time, because the bills they bring, but the consistent person that keeps bringing knocking on your door, unlike the Amazon gig worker who's, you know, every time it's a different person or the FedEx worker, who, you know, half the time, it's someone different, that's the constant with the postal surface.
44:43
[SPEAKER_03]: We turn the postal service into the next gig scheme, where we got who knows delivering who knows what or where.
44:50
[SPEAKER_03]: And then we start dwindling down access and now we got to go to town to get our mail.
44:55
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, we got to pay for a box and then it becomes just another way to get their hands and our pockets to subscribe to their service that was once our doing.
45:05
[SPEAKER_03]: We did it for ourselves and now we need a profiteer to bring it to us.
45:10
[SPEAKER_01]: That is the crystal ball.
45:13
[SPEAKER_01]: That is the accurate read of the crystal ball work.
45:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
45:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And we all love our crystal workers.
45:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's why coalitions, like hours and work, like you and your listeners are doing to get the word out and get people riled up works.
45:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Because many like me have a relationship with our crystal worker.
45:38
[SPEAKER_01]: When I moved four months ago across Detroit to the Renee Red, I hugged my post-worker Cheryl and cried.
45:48
[SPEAKER_03]: My wife.
45:49
[SPEAKER_03]: My wife is the maker cookies.
45:51
[SPEAKER_03]: My with hand the cookies out to the the UPS spirit driver and the in the postal delivery person.
45:57
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that's that's the part of the fabric of our community.
45:59
[SPEAKER_03]: So the question that because I don't know anybody who doesn't want to save the postal service.
46:04
[SPEAKER_03]: I know a couple of right-wing cranks like, you know, we can do good a better deal if we let Bezos run it.
46:09
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that's worked.
46:12
[SPEAKER_03]: How do we save it?
46:13
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, one of the ideas that I've been talking about for years is I'm a big fan of the idea of postal banking.
46:19
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm a big fan of the idea of allowing people to have bank accounts and to do basic banking through the postal service.
46:26
[SPEAKER_03]: It would certainly help low-income people get them away from those predatory lending groups and all the schemes that are out there to screw poor people over.
46:36
[SPEAKER_03]: It would bring more revenue, more opportunity, more people in.
46:39
[SPEAKER_03]: It seems like maybe we should try it, but the people who are running our business don't seem to want that to happen.
46:47
[SPEAKER_03]: Do that.
46:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Correct.
46:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Correct.
46:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, saving the post office, a big question, but fairly simple answer.
46:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Just look at proposals that are already out there.
47:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Like the People's Postal Agenda came together.
47:04
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the first time in 2021.
47:05
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a set of
47:09
[SPEAKER_01]: The American Postal Workers Union and several other groups who are also in our coalition got together and drafted this plan for keeping the Postal Service public expanding the services.
47:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, there are more post offices than Starbucks and McDonald's combined.
47:29
[SPEAKER_01]: They're in every single community.
47:32
[SPEAKER_01]: they have retail space, they can, they can, they're being underutilized.
47:38
[SPEAKER_03]: And if I get cut in real quick, it's the reason they want to privatize it.
47:42
[SPEAKER_03]: Not because they want the service.
47:44
[SPEAKER_03]: They don't want to do the business.
47:45
[SPEAKER_03]: They want to steal the land.
47:47
[SPEAKER_03]: I've been saying for a long time, this would be the largest transfer of land since we stole it from the Indians.
47:54
[SPEAKER_03]: And the sad reality is, is nobody, I've heard nobody position it in that way, because look, I used to deliver mail to the post office, to the distribution centers.
48:04
[SPEAKER_03]: So I would take it from one place to another in big trucks and in New Jersey there are a couple places that the postal service, they're like million square foot facilities that are basically gold.
48:16
[SPEAKER_03]: that the amount you would you would get for that land would just be incredible amounts and they wanted for pennies so if they can privatize it basically sell off everything that that we own those post offices those distribution centers all of that land what a coup for our oligarchs.
48:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Truly we're I mean world class real estate prime real estate all across the country
48:46
[SPEAKER_01]: They want to get their hands on it because it's profitable and stick the taxpayers with the bill because at the end of the day and we've been saying this every time
48:56
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, the private carriers cut routes and add surcharges and deem zip codes to rural remote to have the same low prices they had before.
49:08
[SPEAKER_01]: The postal services, the one goes out there.
49:10
[SPEAKER_01]: They go on a plane to blah, blah, blah island up in North Michigan and like here on like in the winter.
49:18
[SPEAKER_03]: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no
49:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, we just have to get loud at our louder than we already are at our members of Congress anytime there is a serious threat of privatization.
49:57
[SPEAKER_01]: So like whoa.
50:00
[SPEAKER_01]: early at when Trump first got into office this second time and he announced that he was going to merge the postal service in with a department of commerce and fire the whole postal board like somebody within his administration leaked that to the press.
50:14
[SPEAKER_01]: And we all got together and organized a national day of action and then it just sort of never happened.
50:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And so when folks are hearing like,
50:28
[SPEAKER_03]: the, they're a tough way, no, we keep, we keep winning.
50:32
[SPEAKER_01]: We keep winning.
50:34
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's where again, you come back to the response that I've gotten from people.
50:38
[SPEAKER_03]: They've been trying to do that forever.
50:40
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, they've been trying to do it forever, but good people like you, Annie, have been out there raising the alarm, getting people all riled up and ready to fight back.
50:49
[SPEAKER_03]: and defending our postal service, as we should have been doing with our water supply, our sewers, our turnpikes, our parking authorities, go down the list of our public parks, all of the things that we've allowed them to steal from us, probably should have been put up a fight to that.
51:04
[SPEAKER_03]: So last question, give me a direct act, go to a website, scream out your window, call your congressman, what?
51:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh gosh, I would say right now call your senator and tell them not to put these two Trump guys on the post award because you know the what is the saying the snake rocks from the heads.
51:34
[SPEAKER_01]: We have to have people who believe in the public promise of the postal service who are in bed with bankers and who think that public postal banking is just the beginning of what's possible for the postal service and.
51:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Understand that you cannot price hike your way out of a deficit, no postmaster can, it's time to start looking at like new community services that serve the public as the public service mission of the postal service intended and also bring in new revenue for example, there is office of inspector general report.
52:13
[SPEAKER_01]: It's some years old now, but they estimated that if the postal service is like the postal service is on like Inspector General had a report that said that they could raise as much as $8.9 billion in annual revenue from offering like non-bank financial services.
52:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's conveniently about what the Postal Service has been losing every year for the last three years.
52:42
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's just one thing.
52:43
[SPEAKER_03]: No, look, we've got to honor Wall Street and the criminals who are our bleed-nust dry.
52:49
[SPEAKER_03]: But I argue go to financial secure.
52:52
[SPEAKER_03]: Our financial security dot org if you want to check out the work that Annie and her group Americans for financial reform do she is the lead there at the save the post office coalition There's stuff all there get involved.
53:04
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a direct ask a dust action get involved in that But Annie I appreciate the time as this continues.
53:11
[SPEAKER_03]: I'd love to have you come back and and share some more thoughts with us and and keep us fired up and moving in the right direction
53:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Would love to Rick.
53:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for having me on today.
53:20
[SPEAKER_03]: Thanks so much.
53:21
[SPEAKER_03]: Any Norman associate director of campaigns there at Americans for financial reform.
53:27
[SPEAKER_03]: One of your thoughts email me Rick at the ricksmiths show dot com.
53:29
[SPEAKER_03]: What do you think public banking.
53:32
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm a big fan postal service banking want to hear it.
53:36
[SPEAKER_03]: Rick at the ricksmiths show dot com right back.
53:43
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm Rick Smith, and this is Labor History Inter.
53:47
[SPEAKER_03]: On this day in Labor History, the year was 1981.
53:51
[SPEAKER_03]: It was a dark day in U.S. Labor History.
53:53
[SPEAKER_03]: Nearly 13,000 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controller's Organization had been out on strike for two days.
54:01
[SPEAKER_03]: At issue, we're working conditions and hours.
54:04
[SPEAKER_03]: More than 6,000 flights were cancelled on the first day of the strike alone.
54:09
[SPEAKER_03]: President Ronald Reagan held a press conference at the White House's Rose Garden to address the work stoppage.
54:14
[SPEAKER_03]: He declared that the strike constituted a peril to national safety.
54:18
[SPEAKER_03]: He also announced that strikes by federal workers were illegal, although this was technically true.
54:25
[SPEAKER_03]: Federal workers had participated in more than 20 strikes and sickouts in the years leading up to the Pat Ko Walkout.
54:32
[SPEAKER_03]: yet President Reagan seized on the opportunity to bust the union.
54:36
[SPEAKER_03]: And in what has been called the shot heard around the boardroom, he announced that every Pat co-worker that did not return to work within 48 hours would be fired.
54:46
[SPEAKER_03]: He made good on his promise, and more than 11,000 air traffic controllers lost their jobs.
54:51
[SPEAKER_03]: The President also decreed that the strikers could never be rehired.
54:56
[SPEAKER_03]: By October, the Federal Labor Relations Authority had de-certified the Union.
55:00
[SPEAKER_03]: President Reagan's actions had a chilling impact on the labor movement.
55:05
[SPEAKER_03]: Before Patko, there were 300 major strikes on average in the United States,
55:10
[SPEAKER_03]: each year.
55:11
[SPEAKER_03]: Afterwards, that number dropped 233 decades after the decision, Joseph McCarton, a professor at Georgetown University, described the impact in a New York Times article writing, more than any other labor dispute of the past three decades.
55:25
[SPEAKER_03]: Reagan's confrontation with the professional air traffic controllers organization, or Pat Co., undermined the bargaining power of American workers and their labor unions.
55:35
[SPEAKER_03]: Labor history in two brought to you by the Illinois Labor History Society and the Rick Smith Show.
55:47
[SPEAKER_03]: Again, I go back to this idea that I've privatized in the post of service and I'll ask the question again because I've asked it pretty consistently for 21 years now.
56:04
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, tell me something that we've privatized.
56:06
[SPEAKER_03]: Tell me something that we used to do for ourselves, that we put into the hands of private interests that actually came back to us in a better, cheaper form.
56:19
[SPEAKER_03]: Because we were told to turnpikes, so we just privatized the turnpikes.
56:22
[SPEAKER_03]: I'll be driving to Indianapolis.
56:26
[SPEAKER_03]: You go through Indiana, you go on their turnpike, it's a disaster.
56:30
[SPEAKER_03]: The places where we've handed that stuff over, it's been a disaster.
56:35
[SPEAKER_03]: And none of it's gotten cheaper.
56:39
[SPEAKER_03]: And none of it's gotten all that much better.
56:42
[SPEAKER_03]: I think about the parking authorities.
56:44
[SPEAKER_03]: Good luck having a parade in a lot of cities where the parking authority is not privatized.
56:51
[SPEAKER_03]: Ask my friends in Chicago.
56:54
[SPEAKER_03]: These are about making profit and think about the postal service.
56:58
[SPEAKER_03]: I want to say like 55 cents now to send a letter across the country Go to places where the price the postal service is privatized.
57:07
[SPEAKER_03]: No.
57:08
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, not that And certainly not come into your house every day Now there are things that could be done and we for years we were talking about it.
57:19
[SPEAKER_03]: There were things that could have been done to make the post office more efficient
57:23
[SPEAKER_03]: uh... the they just what they weren't allowed to and they like to blame that it's that you know it's the union it's not the union it's not the workers the workers want the postal service to be as efficient as possible because that's their job that's their career they want to be able to come to happy people in their homes and go here's your stuff and it got here quicker than you expected there's nothing worse than having a postal worker come and go looking at the there it is
57:51
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm telling you right now, if this is allowed to happen and right now it's under the context of, you know, even conservatives that I knew before who were like, you know, maybe we hold on to this because it's a good asset, it's a lot of land, it's a lot of investment, I'm like, no, we could, we could, we could, we could break elections.
58:08
[SPEAKER_03]: and you've got people saying immediately, Trump should immediately privatize the post office, to steal the next election.
58:14
[SPEAKER_03]: So if you need a reason to be against privatizing the post office, and I could lay out a bunch, the number one is their intent is not to help you.
58:24
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not to make costs cheaper, it's not to make the service better, it's not a dad.
58:29
[SPEAKER_03]: First, right now, it's about stealing the next election.
58:31
[SPEAKER_03]: It's about making sure that you don't get your mail in ballot.
58:35
[SPEAKER_03]: That's what it's about.
58:37
[SPEAKER_03]: And they've got to give him credit, got to give him credit.
58:41
[SPEAKER_03]: In this instance, Trump and company are not lying.
58:44
[SPEAKER_03]: They've come right out and basically set it.
58:48
[SPEAKER_03]: So every one of these schemes now is just about making sure that they stay in power.
58:55
[SPEAKER_03]: And that should scare us.
58:57
[SPEAKER_03]: But for me, the long term ramifications of handing our this valuable asset off is insane and on the public banking side, I'm a huge fan of when the collapse happened in 08 You know North Dakota was the state that you know the bank that didn't have all of the risk that everybody else said they didn't get bailed out Because they were a publicly held back and made loans the right way Not on speculation, but on you know, can you pay for it?
59:28
[SPEAKER_03]: Seems like a good idea.
59:29
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe, I don't know, maybe we should stuff that we should be looking into.
59:33
[SPEAKER_03]: When you hear your thoughts, email me Rick at theRicksmithshow.com as always.
59:36
[SPEAKER_03]: Thanks for being here.
59:38
[SPEAKER_03]: We'll see you back here next time.
59:54
[SPEAKER_04]: Until next time, this has been The Rick Smith Show.
59:57
[SPEAKER_04]: We're working people, come to talk.