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"Trucking Shortage: Drivers Aren't Always In It For The Long Haul," NPR tells us. "The U.S. Is Running Out of Nurses," reports The Atlantic. "There's A Nationwide STEM Teacher Shortage. Will It Cost Us The Next Einstein?" Forbes laments. '"'The Future Depends on Teachers,' PSA launched targeting teachers amid shortage," notes a local FOX affiliate.

Every few weeks, we hear about an essential industry suffering from a critical "labor shortage" –– nurses, truck drivers, software engineers, teachers, construction. According to corporate trade groups and their media mouthpieces, these industries simply can’t find trained workers to fill their ranks.

But a closer examination of "worker shortage" claims reveals that there’s very rarely an actual worker shortage –– what there is, time and again, is more accurately described as a "pay shortage": industries not wanting to provide adequate compensation or safe work conditions for the available labor market that is perfectly willing and ready to work. Instead of a "worker shortage," there's a “"not hyper liquidity in the labor market" problem for capital –– the perfectly capable and trained workers industries do have are not easily replaceable, potentially or already unionized, and making demands of capital those industries simply don't like.

In an effort to increase recruiting of new potential employees, promote legislation that loosens licensing or health and safety standards, and reinforce media-ready memes that American workers are lazy and greedy, industry lobbying groups constantly whine about "labor shortages," knowing the media will mindlessly repeat these claims without any skepticism or curiosity as to why they're reporting on the exact same "labor shortages" every year for 40 years. 

Our guest is CEPR's Kevin Cashman.

Ep135 The "Labor Shortage" Ruse :  How Capital Invents Staffing Crises to Bust Unions, Depress Wages

And introducing...Kanye West! Chris and Molly are joined by online expert Felix Biederman to discuss Kanye's latest tear through Twitter, his sudden (but not necessarily unexpected) embrace of Trump, his new music, his ability to bend the world to his will, the intersection of politics & celebrity, and why hip-hop beefs have gotten so lame. 

Songs:

Runaway (wade pod dub)
Kanye West - Ye vs. the People (starring TI as the People)
Kanye West -  MAGA Hat Full Freestyle
Kanye West - Lift Yourself
Kanye West - Father Stretch My Hands pt. 1
Cam’ron feat. Kanye West - Down and Out (Instrumental)

And Introducing Podcast

#25 KANYE WEST! (ft. Felix Biederman)

We take a moment to salute the life and achievements of Sen. John McCain, and then are joined by comedian Jake Flores (@feraljokes) to hear all about his run-in with the Department of Homeland Security.

For Jake's Tour Dates check his twitter account @Feraljokes

Read Katherine Krueger's interview with Jake here:
https://splinternews.com/the-brooklyn-comedian-whose-joke-about-ice-got-him-a-vi-1825865670

Support International Whore's Day and fight SESTA/FOSTA:

https://macc.nyc/2018/05/11/International-Whores-Day.html

Donate to Rakem Balogun:

https://www.gofundme.com/help-with-the-fbi-sabotage-recovery

Listen and Subscribe to Pod Damn America:

https://www.patreon.com/poddamnamerica

Chapo Trap House

Episode 210 - ICE to See You feat. Jake Flores (5/13/18)

​Will and Virgil peel back the curtain to give an intimate backstage look at their recent media hit with Jesse "The Body" Ventura on RT.* They're then joined by political scientist David Faris to discuss his book "It's Time To Fight Dirty". Faris out lines all the ways a slim democratic majority could and should shortcut norms and the constitution to build enduring power, while Will and Virgil supply all the reasons they'll probably be too chicken to actually do so. Finally, a reading from the good book.


*Note: Our segment seems to have been cut before airing lol we still love you Jesse! 

Buy the book:

chapotraphouse.com

Episode 214 - 6 Weird Election Tricks That ACTUALLY Work! feat. David Faris (5/27/18)

Due to overwhelming popular demand, we've unlocked this recent episode...

Felix talks with @intifadarling, a Palestinian-American activist based in Ramallah. They discuss the context of the May 14 massacre of Palestinian protesters in Gaza, the political situation between Israel, America and Palestine, and the future of the Palestinian people.

UNLOCKED  - In Conclusion, Palestine is a Land of Contrasts feat. @Intifadarling (5/23/18)

It's sports night here on Chapo! We're go deep into the Red Zone with local radio call-in favorite, PFT Commenter. We go around the horn and take a tour through the wide world of sports takes: Is Lebron overrated? Should we play the National Anthem before movies? Should you kneel? Did Robert Redford make the right move by leaving Kristen Scott Thomas at the end of 'The Horse Whisperer'? 

We analyze the athletes who clash on the gridiron and the heroes who cover them in the sports media.

Episode 216 - First Time, Long Time feat. PFT Commenter (6/3/18)

We're told the world is getting better all the time. In January, The New York Times' Nick Kristof explained "Why 2017 Was the Best Year in Human History." The same month, Harvard professor and Bill Gates' favorite optimist Steven Pinker lamented (in a special edition of Time magazine guest edited by - who else? - Bill Gates) the “bad habits of media... bring out the worst in human cognition”. By focusing so much on negative things, the theory goes, we are tricked into thinking things are getting worse when, in reality, it's actually the opposite. 

For the TEDtalk set, that the world is awesome and still improving is self-evidently true - just look at the data. But how true is this popular axiom? How accurate is the portrayal that the world is improving we so often seen in sexy, hockey stick graphs of upward growth and rapidly declining poverty? And how, exactly, are the powers that be "measuring" improvements in society?

On this episode, we take a look at the ideological project of telling us everything's going swimmingly, how those in power cook the books and spin data to make their case for maintaining the status quo, and how The Neoliberal Optimism Industry is, at its core, an anti-intellectual enterprise designed to lull us into complacency and political impotence.

Our guest is Dr. Jason Hickel.

Episode 58: The Neoliberal Optimism Industry

The first 45 minutes and last 45 minutes of our nearly 3 hour show in Iowa City  on Feb 1.  Between canvassing and caucusing didn't have much time to edit this one, so it's dangerously uncut. Also the poor hosts couldn't hear the song on stage while singing, please forgive us coming irresponsibly close to posting cringe for Bernie.

TOUR DATES:ALL TICKETS AVAILABLE AT: www.chapotraphouse.com/tour
Las Vegas, NV Feb 18, @ House of Blues
San Diego, CA, Feb 23, @ The Observatory North Park
Sacramento, CA Feb 28 @ Ace of Spades

390 - Live from Iowa City: Solidarity Forever (2/3/20)

We celebrate Bernie's victory in the Iowa Caucus.

TOUR DATES:ALL TICKETS AVAILABLE AT: www.chapotraphouse.com/tour
Las Vegas, NV Feb 18, @ House of Blues
San Diego, CA, Feb 23, @ The Observatory North Park
Sacramento, CA Feb 28 @ Ace of Spades

UNLOCKED: 391 - Bernie Won (2/5/20)

Atorva Staton (@necrobranson) and Gerald Geranium (@intellegint) welcome Dr. Argyle Brownsnake (@charliewinsmore) to discuss the golden age of sports and the greatest generation of people who love the athletes of the golden age. Topics include cheerleaders and the most ancient American sports: football, baseball, hockey, and basketball.

115 - The Class Act

stand up comedian, activist and writer Kate Willett talks about how the death of her boyfriend, standup comedian Raghav Mehta pushed her to support medicareforall, fall in love with his friends she used to hate and turned into a Bernie Bro. Plus what she saw while canvassing in Iowa and New Hampshire, and what it's like being yelled at by Leftists online and liberals on the line, which is worse, how to convert liberals to the cause, why she likes bernie's yelling and what she wants people to know about Raghav. Check out Kate's piece at Elle https://www.elle.com/author/224656/kate-willett/

262 - I Hated Bernie Bros until I Loved & Lost One with Kate Willett

Waiting tables. Bartending. Hospitality, food delivery, beauty salons, rideshare driving. The service industry, as anyone who has worked in it knows all too well, is notorious for relying on tipping to undercut employee wages and deputize individual customers to determine how much money a worker should be able to take home. Amid increasing recognition of these injustices, a number of campaigns and new laws surfaced, pre-pandemic, to abolish or meaningfully reduce the practice of tipping.

But despite the best efforts of these campaigns, tipping remains the industry - and American society - standard. Indeed, the perverse logic of tipping has broadened into an ever-present 'snitch economy' - an ecosystem of tactics like mystery shoppers and Uber and Yelp rating systems designed to police the behavior of workers while outsourcing the costs of said supervision to customers and other workers. 

In the process, our snitch economy pits those being surveilled against those doing the watching, and the judging. Through a ubiquitous public-facing network of rating and reviewing other people’s labor - and often the behavioral disposition they exhibit while working - people with otherwise very little power are elevated to temporary positions of authority over others, fostering a culture of surveillance rather than one of solidarity. The snitch economy serves the dual purpose of not only giving working people a false sense of power when they’re the ones being served, but also reducing millions of human interactions to opportunities for not only snap judgments, but subjective rewards and retribution.

In this episode, we detail how businesses in the service industry, bolstered by friendly media, use tactics like tipping, mystery shoppers, and ubiquitous ratings systems in order to turn us all into petty, mean, busybodies carrying out the agenda of capital with nothing to show for it but a fleeting sense of self-satisfaction. 

Our guest is writer, editor and agitator Vicky Osterweil.

Ep. 118 - The Snitch Economy: How Rating Apps and Tipping Pit Working People Against Each Other

"Biden Calls For Hope And Healing In Speech," NPR reports. "Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot calls for return to Sept. 11 unity," writes The Chicago Tribune. Following the 2014 Ferguson protests, a CNN headline read, "Obama: Now is the time for peace, healing." "Filmmaker Ken Burns aims for healing with new documentary about Vietnam War," the San Diego Union-Tribune has told us. Everywhere we turn columnists, celebrities, pundits, and politicians are insisting we have "unity," "come together," promote "peace" and work to "heal the divisions."

On its face these concepts sound fine enough: after all, who doesn’t like peace? Unity sounds great! Who wouldn't want to "heal" our wounds? Wounds are bad! But in the majority of political contexts, these warm and fuzzy buzzwords rush past the messy and difficult work of justice, substantive change, or reparations and get straight to the part where everyone just feels good about themselves.

In a world where 2100 billionaires hoard more wealth than the 4.6 billion people who make up 60 percent of the planet’s population, where billions live in abject poverty, what do concepts like peace mean? After an administration that has carried out deliberate policies of ethnic cleaning at the U.S border, what does unity entail? In a country that has leveled much of the Middle East, Korea, Vietnam, and overthrown numerous democracies in Latin America, what does healing involve? Without concrete policies of accountability, restitution, restoration and reparation, squishy liberal notions of "unity" and "healing" achieve little more than protecting the status quo.

This isn’t a unique problem: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously reminded white liberals that "True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice," a point he made literally hundreds of times in his years of advocacy to a handwringing media insisting everyone just calm down and go home and let the lawyers at the Department of Justice take care of things.

Nevertheless the problem persist decades later: time and again, before there's been any concrete changes, policy proposals, or restitution to victims of injustice, those in power evoke abstract notions of "healing," "unity" and "peace" to shut up activists and act as of it the work is done right before pivoting back to business as usual.

On this week's episode we will examine the origins of the concepts of "unity" as a political PR gambit, detail how concepts of "healing" which can are very useful in grassroots and interpersonal psychological contexts have been cynically appropriated by those in power, and breakdown how media consumers can avoid the shallow allure of "peace" and "unity" rhetoric in the face of routine, everyday racism, violence, exploitation, and injustice.

Our guest is Lara Kiwani, Executive Director of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC).

Episode 128 - The “Healing” Con: How Warm and Fuzzy Appeals for "Unity" Are Used to Protect Power

"Elon Musk sent a thank-you note to Tesla's workers returning to work," Business Insider squeals. Walmart teams up with UPS to air an ad "thanking essential workers." "Jeff Bezos Just Posted an Open Letter to Amazon Employees About the Coronavirus. Every Smart Business Leader Needs to Read It," insists an article in Inc.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, corporate leaders, politicians and celebrities have been quick to paint "essential workers," and those often described as "frontline" workers, as heroes — laborers conscripted, presumably against their will, into a wartime-like scenario of heroism and sacrifice as our country battles the ongoing coronavirus scourge.

The sentiment behind this rhetoric is understandable, especially from everyday people simply trying to express their deep appreciation for the underpaid labor doing the work to feed, house, care for and treat everyone else. But when deployed by powerful politicians and CEOs, the "essential workers as heroes" discourse serves a more sinister purpose: to curb efforts to unionize, preemptively justify mass death of a largely black and brown workforce, protect corporate profits and ultimately discipline labor that for a brief moment in spring of last year, had unprecedented leverage to extract concessions from capital.

As Wall Street booms and America’s billionaires see an increase of $1.1 trillion in wealth since March 2020 — a 40% increase — while the average worker suffers from unemployment, depression, drug abuse and a loss of healthcare, it’s become increasingly clear that “essential” never meant essential to helping society at large or essential to human care or essential to keeping the bottom from falling out, but essential to keeping the top one percent of the one percent’s wealth and power intact and as it turned out to be the case, massively expanded.

Indeed, 2020 saw the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in decades, a transfer largely made possible by the essential worker as hero narrative, with little discussion or debate. In March 2020 everyone agreed in this wartime framing that was going to send off millions of poor people to their deaths for a vague, undecided greater good of the quote-unquote "economy," when really it was for the seamless maintenance of Wall Street profits.

On this episode, we explore the origins of the concept of "essential work" and those deemed "essential workers"; how it's been used in the past to discipline labor during wartime; how hero narratives provide an empty, head-patting verbal tip in lieu of worker protection and higher pay; and why so few in our media ask the more urgent question of all: whether or not low wage retail, food, farming, and healthcare workers ever wanted to be heroes in the first place.

Our guest in Ronald Jackson, a worker and organizer with Warehouse Workers For Justice.

Episode 131: The "Essential Worker" Racket - How 'COVID Hero' Discourse Is Used To Discipline Labor

Citations Needed is a podcast about the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. It is hosted by Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson, and produced by Florence Barrau-Adams.

Episode 131: The "Essential Worker" Racket - How 'COVID Hero' Discourse Is Used To Discipline Labor

Citations Needed Podcast