This whole idea that other countries stole our jobs, like our factory jobs and all that. As far as I remember, that's not the case. Bill Burr has been good on a lot of topics having to do with politics for some time, but especially ever since Donald Trump got inaugurated. [00:00:16] He's like, must listen. And he decided to do kind of an impromptu history of capitalism, socialism, the labor movement on his podcast. And so let's jump into a little bit about the industrial revolution. This next clip. In the 1800s during the what the what was that period [00:00:34] called the Industrial Revolution? They had like kids working in factories like 12, 14 hour days, like 4 or 5 year old kids in dangerous situations, and people weren't making any money. And the one guy who owned the factory was keeping all the money. [00:00:50] The working man finally has enough. They start organizing unions, the robber barons hire police, the army, all of these people to come in and kill these people in riots. Crack their skulls, do unbelievable sorts of damage to them to try and force them [00:01:09] to go back to work for sweatshop wages. These people died, were maimed, catastrophic injuries so that we could have a decent wage in this country. And they had unions and all of that. [00:01:25] All of what he's saying there is true. And we'll have more from him. And it is such a massive, I don't know, shame feels like kind of a crime that after all that was done over the course of decades and decades, to achieve all these amazing wins and to give us, you know, the life that we [00:01:41] have right now, most people have now been propagandized to for a couple of decades. And they despise unions. They think that they're wasteful at best. Corrupt criminal shouldn't be a part of them. They should be crushed. In fact, a populist republican movement should probably kill unions. [00:01:57] That's unfortunate. And before we discuss, I do just want to dive into one thing that he talked about there. He talked about kids working in factories and things like that. Back in this prior movement. Well, get ready for that because, we're already seeing it in multiple states, including just last month, [00:02:12] Florida was debating lifting some child labor laws to fill jobs vacated by undocumented immigrants. Remember the jobs that undocumented immigrants took from good working adult Americans? Except maybe not. And we do still need those workers. [00:02:30] And so I guess we're just going to try to, like, flood the labor market with cheap kids. I guess that won't be protected that way. We don't have to pay adults higher wages because it's more competitive. The entire thing is so nonsensical. But I do think it's a great time for this history lesson, because [00:02:45] this seems to be that period of time seems to be the model that Donald Trump and Elon Musk want to take us back to. Yeah, I think the part of the propaganda that bothers me the most is when people talk about corporations like they're humans. You know, as Mitt Romney famously said, corporations are people, my friend. [00:03:05] And and, of course, the Supreme Court, said that in decisions in 76, 78 and then in Citizens United. And so, and so then they have these absurd conversations about, you know, well, our American company is going to be patriotic. [00:03:20] Are they going to do their duty and are they going to they're not going to do any of that. They're going to maximize profit. We wrote the code. I think we made a mistake. Other countries have written slightly different codes than that, have gotten to better results. And we had one line in the code. Maximize profit. [00:03:36] And that has led to them to doing all of these horrible things. So it's it's basically like a robot and people keep talking about, oh my God, what if the robots took over? Too late. They already took over. They. That's. Those are corporate robots. [00:03:51] And we programed to maximize profit at our expense. And they've been doing it now for a long, long time. So, yes, when they began the union movement, as Bill Burr is referring to. And they decided, hey, if we pull our, you know, ourselves together here. [00:04:07] We'll actually begin to have leverage. Otherwise they can fire us one by one. And they were right. And that leverage helped to get higher wages. And corporations despised it because it was higher costs for them. So for a while they tried to break the unions and they literally murdered people, [00:04:22] as Bill Burr was referring to the Pinkertons. ET cetera. Why? Because the only code was maximize profit. Morality be damned, community be damned, your workers be damned, this country be damned. So then they moved on to phase two. [00:04:38] So they said, all right, well, if you guys are going to protect the average American, we're going to go to a country that doesn't protect its citizens. We're going to go to China, we're going to go to Vietnam, etc. We're going to find the lowest wages. These things are inevitable. If you say the only you know rule you have is maximize profit, [00:04:56] those corporate machines will roll over all of us, the entire globe. And that's exactly what's happened. So now that we've outsourced a lot of the jobs, but then we still need labor here because we have, you know, good unemployment numbers. But our wages are have been stagnant since those Supreme Court decisions in [00:05:14] 1976 and 78. And that's not an accident. And I talk about that in my book, Justice is Coming. That's actually the single most important rule change that there was. The activist justices on the Supreme Court said, corporations are human beings. They have speech rights, and money is speech. [00:05:30] So they could buy all of our politicians unlimited bribery. And that is what ruined this country. And now that they're kicking out, more undocumented immigrants, they're saying, well, we need child labor back because under no circumstances are these [00:05:47] corporate machines going to serve you. We didn't write the code to serve us. We wrote the code to exploit us and to crush us so that they could make more money. We have to change the laws. Otherwise this is going to happen for the rest of time. [00:06:03] Yeah, we always have to look at levers of power and counter power and ways to establish leverage over forces that are disenfranchizing and exploiting so many people. You know, as, as we're looking at these, the, the insanity of these tariffs [00:06:21] and the kind of volatility. It's, it's, it's presenting to so many people's lives, including people's 401 S. It's it's a reminder of an era that Trump worships that he discusses. Now, he didn't discuss it as much back in the 2016 days. But he did talk about tariffs, which is the Gilded Age. [00:06:38] Right. And so, you know, sometimes I'm doing nice fun things in the evening to kind of lift my spirits. But sometimes I'm doing things like watching documentaries about the Gilded Age. Don't ask me why, but that's me, a glutton. So so when I. What's very notable about the Gilded Age is it was, [00:06:56] there was a few robber barons that were able to exploit the Technologies of that time to reap and gain all the benefits, while obviously. Disenfranchizing and screwing over workers and the wider public. Right. [00:07:11] And so I think that is uncannily similar to what is occurring now. And as you mentioned, Jenkins, about, taking all the profit and making all the money. In particular case of today, when it comes to tech and kind of the dodging of our lives. And this, all this doge stuff, it's not always it's actually not [00:07:29] even always about profit. It's it's sort of more of a feudal system. And it's a system of amassing. Massive, massive valuations. Right. A company like Amazon, for example, was not profitable for the first decade or so of its existence. Uber wasn't either. [00:07:44] But in the meantime, they knocked out all worker organizing. Knocked out all the competition. Essentially became close to de facto monopolies. And then basically could do whatever they wanted at that point, including hijacking markets and so on. So, you know, it's, it's a it's it's a reminder this this story and and Bill [00:08:05] Burr's, warnings that greed begets greed, as we've talked about before, or even a reminder of, you know, Gordon Gekko, if you all remember, Wall Street greed is good. Somehow there's this sort of vision that is out there. But it's that what the vision is of an economic future for this country, and this [00:08:25] planet is completely under articulated. And we need a progressive response that discusses what our vision is of an economic future. It's good stuff. Listen to this on corporate greed. Eventually, these corporations just got sick of dealing with these unions and [00:08:41] their hard nosed negotiating and all that. And then they just said, well, fuck you then. Here's, you know, keep your union, keep your factory. We're leaving. And they took their factories outside of the US and went back to 1800 wages. What the. You should be making those things here. [00:08:57] And then what the corporate guy said was, well, you know, we would make sneakers here, but if to pay the American worker and everything, the sneakers would, then instead of costing 50 bucks, they now cost 700. And I was always thinking why? [00:09:15] It would cost 700 bucks. I can't afford that. And what it really was was they weren't going to lose the profit of sweatshop labor. So if they came back to America, we weren't going to work for that. So and they weren't going to take they weren't going to lose the profit of sweatshop labor. [00:09:31] So they were going to pass it on to the consumer. Yeah. Yeah, that was the argument. We hear sort of updated versions of that now. Jenk any quick thoughts about that? Yeah, they always have an excuse for, you know, getting more and more profits from us. [00:09:46] Oh, we'll hold all your prices hostage and we'll do this and that. So each industry is different, and we might have lost some industries. I understand that right. But there's a lot of industries we could have protected. And, and more important than anything else. Look, guys, our government was supposed to be a democracy. [00:10:05] I wrote about this in justice coming to. And our founding fathers warned us about corporations. They partly did the American Revolution against the British East India Company. The Tea Party where they threw the tea overboard was against that corporation, [00:10:22] not against the British Empire. Okay. And they heavily, heavily warned. And I've got some of the quotes in the book do not let corporations take over. And we didn't listen. And slowly they took over. And and now we're at a point where they threaten us every once in a while. [00:10:38] If you don't listen to us, you'll have to pay $700 for your sneakers. Okay? And you know what? We're going to use your children. We're going to put them. And you know that law in Florida that isn't just like, oh, having a summer job at Burger King? No, it's to let kids work the overnight shift while during school days. [00:10:57] I mean, it is exploitation on Steroids because our government doesn't work for us. That's what populism is saying. Get the government to work for the people again. Turn it back into a democracy and not have it serve the donor class [00:11:16] and corporate rule. And so that's basically what Bill Burr is pointing out there. He's absolutely right. One of our members wrote in, you know, everybody's asking for Joe Rogan to the left. I mean, Bill Burr is amazing. And and it isn't about left or right. It's common sense and it's fighting for the average guy. [00:11:33] I mean, who so do. My last point to you guys is do not let corporate media brainwash you into believing any of this corporate propaganda. They do not have to rule us. They and they and we don't have to pay their ransom. [00:11:50] We can actually take our government back and reset it to serve us rather than them. Every time you ring the bell below, an angel gets its wings. Totally not true, but it does keep you updated on our live shows.