Building Real Democracy Starts on the Shop Floor
The fight for democracy in America didn’t begin, or end, at the ballot box. As labor organizer Erica Smiley, executive director of Jobs With Justice and co-author of The Future We Need: Organizing for a Better Democracy in the Twenty-First Century, reminds us, our democracy has always been "in training," a work in progress shaped as much by picket lines as polling places.
"Unions are schools for democracy," Smiley explains. In workplaces where people of all backgrounds must build consensus and fight for fair contracts, we learn the skills that sustain a pluralistic society. It's no surprise, then, that authoritarian movements often begin by attacking labor rights and education, because that’s where people learn to resist.
From union-busting in the U.S. to neoliberal trade policies abroad, the erosion of collective bargaining has left millions disenfranchised not just politically, but economically.
And that’s not just bad for workers: it’s fatal for democracy itself.
If we want to rebuild democracy, we can’t just “vote harder.” We need to organize smarter. That means backing unions, pushing for economic policies that distribute power, and demanding that corporations, especially those exploiting AI and automation, share the wealth they’re extracting from human labor.
As Smiley says, “Whoever’s in the White House, they still need us to make the cars.” That power can’t be ignored, unless we choose not to use it.
We may not know what the next 15 years will bring. But if we organize now, we might just build a democracy worth fighting for.
The song you heard in this week’s Gaslit Nation is “This Time” by Howard Jeffrey. Check out his music here: https://howardjeffrey.bandcamp.com/track/this-time. If you have a song to share on our show, submit your music to us at Gaslit Nation – we love hearing from you!: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1-d_DWNnDQFYUMXueYcX5ZVsA5t2RN09N8PYUQQ8koq0/edit?ts=5fee07f6&gxids=7628
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Howard Jeffrey (singing) (00:00):
Everything changes with time...
Andrea Chalupa (01:09):
Our opening song was this time by Howard Jeffrey, who also submitted this statement. This song tells the hands-on story of climate change and what it does. We live it here in rural Georgia. We've had two floods in the last two years and have had devastation to our property. Temperatures are erratic. You can't live here and tell me that climate change is not real. This song tells the story.
(01:36):
Thank you so much for your important music, Howard. Everyone can hear the full song this time at the end of this episode. To check out more of Howard Jeffrey songs, head on over to the show notes and to submit your own music to bring brightness into this dark world. Submit your song at the link near the top of our show notes for this week's episode. Thank you to all the artists out there. We need you now more than ever.
(02:20):
Welcome to Gaslit Nation. I am your host, Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones, about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine, the film that Kremlin doesn't want you to see, so be sure to watch it. We are joined this week by Erica Smiley. She's the executive director of Jobs with Justice and a veteran labor organizer focused on economic democracy and collective bargaining. A co-author of The Future We Need. She has led national campaigns, empowering workers, especially in the south and centers, racial, gender and economic justice, and her strategic organizing work. Welcome to Gaslit Nation, Erica.
Erica Smiley (03:06):
Hey, glad to be here, Andrea.
Andrea Chalupa (03:08):
The question on everyone's mind, how do we defeat the oligarchy, which seems very entrenched, drugged up and making itself at home and breeding, breeding baby oligarchs. So what do we do? How do we get out of this crisis?
Erica Smiley (03:24):
It's been a crisis for a long time. That's the piece of this, that it's not actually a new crisis. And the United States in particular, if we go back to the US Civil War, the war was in fact fought over this question of democracy and those who wanted to have the majority in decision-making and those who didn't, who wanted the kind of individual liberty to exploit the few, to exploit the many. And so I think for us, I think not acknowledging that over the last 140, 50 plus years and has put us in a bind because I think if you look at the constitutional amendments that came after the Civil War, during the great reconstruction era, those were amendments designed to expand democracy. They even explicitly said to build a multiracial democracy even as early as then. And the first amendment was a labor amendment the 13th to abolish slavery and forced labor.
(04:14):
The 14th was to expand due process and citizenship. And the 15th was to expand voting and suffrage. And our movements have been trying to build on those and actualize them in practice for the last 150 years while our opposition has been trying to roll them back to pre-Civil War standards. And one of the mistakes that our movements have made over the last 150 years is really seeing this question of democracy solely as one of voting of political democracy. And certainly that's really important. We wouldn't have lost lives. I have ancestors who lost their lives that we trying to get the access to vote, but it's not the whole story. And in fact, if we can't expand the majority's ability to make decisions and participate in standard setting in our economic lives, then our political democracy will not last. And that's basically what we're seeing now, that over the years we've allowed those who are post-democracy to erode our ability to organize and collectively bargain and basically set decisions at work in a way that has basically undermined democracy for the whole. And if a few people don't believe that the democracy is real, they'll stop investing in it. And that's really what we're seeing in this moment.
Andrea Chalupa (05:22):
In your view, how did we get here? So we had the Reagan revolution, which gave birth to the Frankenstein monster of Trump. And then Democrats were making headway into collecting Wall Street donor checks. And so they weren't going to join the union bandwagon. So you had Clinton and Obama sleeping on unions, and then Joe Biden came in and as much as the left loves to hate Biden, he was bringing unions back. He was saying unions are a great thing everybody and showing a lot of support after the Democratic Party really turned their backs on unions. Could you speak about the specifics, how both parties basically contributed to this current economic inequality crisis?
Erica Smiley (06:04):
Oh, absolutely. I mean, you named some of the past administrations who have been particularly invested in neoliberalism and expansion. So the Clinton administration, for example, opened up free trade. And the mistake that many of them made was selling these ideas as expansions of democracy. And so people in the countries where manufacturing jobs and other jobs were moving felt like, okay, well let's welcome this. And the people here in the US were like, well, wait a minute, but we want democracy too, but we also want our jobs. And people were really upset by that. People were still burned because essentially when we did those expansions of free trade, people got screwed. And in fact, for many countries to open up their borders for that sake, India or Brazil or Columbia, that their stipulation was they had to make the environment friendly for business. They had to crack down on their own unions. And then here in the US we had to crack down on our own unions. So they had to essentially de-democratize in order to supposedly expand democracy. Well, of course this has a...
Andrea Chalupa (07:06):
It was gaslighting. That's right. It gas gaslighting.
Erica Smiley (07:09):
It was a perfect gaslight. That's right. That's what we're talking about. So people were gaslit into believing that that was expanding democracy. And so now they think democracy screwed them when ultimately it didn't work when wages were suppressed, when unions were broken, when decision making was at an all time low in terms of, because if you think of a collective bargaining agreement, it's just a democratically designed policy for a workplace or an industry. And so all of that begins to get cracked down on they think democracy screwed them. Well, of course, many working class people all over the world are like, well, okay, well we don't want that anymore. We want something different. And so they're just kind of throwing a Molotov cocktail at the systems in place in order to get something better. The problem of course was those systems were never democracy. It was always just an expansion of global capital in a way that was trying to squeeze working people as much as they can and pay them as little as possible in order to expand the profits of a tiny few.
Andrea Chalupa (08:02):
Wow, okay. And so the Democrats were like, Reagan Revolution, greed is good. Let's go, right.
Erica Smiley (08:10):
To some degree. Or they felt like they were more compassionate maybe, but at the end of the day, they were gaslighting us. They were selling us essentially expanded exploitation of wages and labor conditions as democracy. And that backfired on them.
Andrea Chalupa (08:26):
Massively because now here we are. It's like now the Democrat sales pitches. If you don't vote for us, you're all going to burn in fascism.
Erica Smiley (08:34):
My goodness.
Andrea Chalupa (08:35):
You don't really have an option anymore. It's like emotional blackmail now. And that's an abuse of power with the Democratic party because it like, we can do what we want because you have no other option.
Erica Smiley (08:47):
It's like just delaying it a little bit more. That's right. But at the end of the day, even under the Democrats, I think everything you said about the Biden administration is true in terms of them elevating and investing in unions, but it's too late in some ways as we've seen. Right. I think that it's still not enough to address the harm that was done by some of these previous administrations. And I think you went back as far as the Reagan revolution. But again, I really think we have to go back to the Federalist papers from the seventies. We have to go back even to the new deal in itself and the compromises that were made during that period that put us on a track to where we tried to expand voting, even though that was constantly under attack too. But we were allowing democratic decision-making in our economic lives to be diminished through union busting, which has been on the rise since the 1950s through the diminishing of our academic institutions, student fee, autonomy, democratic decision making in those forums, the expansion of state's power and state preemption over local decision-making that even culminated most recently in attempted power grab by the Trump administration over all of DC's local taxes.
(09:57):
And so this is instead of identifying the problems issue by issue as the Democrats want us to do, and certainly instead of trying to basically get rid of democracy as the right and the Republicans want us to do, we actually need a democracy and perhaps not just like the old democracy that we supposedly had, but actually to imagine a democracy that we can all see ourselves in something that we might need to build for the first time. I mean, if you think of our country, we like to say we've been a democracy. We've really been a democracy in training all these years. I mean, we're an infant compared to some countries compared to Egypt, compared to China. We're still fairly young as a nation and our democracy, while the aspirations were very bold, the application of it, particularly in our economic lives has been woefully challenged.
(10:46):
We were just beginning to crawl and now we've been kicked back off of our knees. And so I think that instead of whether it's the Democrats or any other political institution that comes into play that's trying to reinvest people in this idea of democracy, it cannot just be trying to get back to what we had because what we had actually wasn't democracy. That in itself would be gaslighting us back into something that was never there. And we need to actually now build democracy in our current situation, in our current lives. And part of what we like to say jobs of justice is that again, we can't have a political democracy without economic democracy. Collective bargaining at its best is a path to democratizing our workplaces, our industries, our labor markets. It gives the majority of people in that situation the chance to consult, confer, weigh in on decisions and standards about the place where many of us spend the bulk of our time, which is at work.
(11:36):
And so that's the type of vision we need to build for people. We know unions have long been called schools of democracy for a reason because it's a place where you have to be in relationship with people who may not share your political views, your religious views, and you have to find common ground to get to a contract that rules that workplace, that rules that facility. And so of course, unions have then been the site of democratic struggle far beyond workplace issues because when you're in those types of relationships, that's where transformation can happen. And so if our opposition's goal is to get rid of democracy, then of course they want to get rid of unions. They want to get rid of academic institutions because that's actually where democracy is trained and bred and grows. And so that's why we fight so hard that our lane for expanding democracy is in the economic arena.
Andrea Chalupa (12:27):
Right. And in May, the Gaslit Nation Book Club, we read Martin Luther King Jr's Stride Toward Freedom, which he wrote as a young man, 27, 28 years old, on how he and the community in Montgomery led the Montgomery Bus boycott, a boycott, an economic movement that brought human rights desegregation with a landmark Supreme Court decision. And that was of course the famous Rosa Park story. And in that memoir, he writes about economic emancipation and how the work of this boycott led by black people grassroots black church movements also helped desegregate the labor movement, the unions. And when the white-led unions joined forces with the black led civil rights movement, that was danger for the oligarchs. And one of MLK's very last speeches before he was gunned down was calling out all of the corporate subsidies. They call it handouts for us, but then all these massive fat cat corporations are getting paid off by the government and it's like legalized corruption.
(13:31):
So the real danger of MLK was obviously not just taking on white supremacy, but also joining forces with poor white people to be like, Hey, they're actually trying to divide and conquer us in this brutal strategy of weakening us and beating us down. But if we unite, we're so strong. And that's when the real danger sets in when you go after people's money, and it's the same as lawless Russia, you get car bombed if you go after someone's money. In America, if you go after someone's money as a civil rights hero, they're going to finally get you. So what are your thoughts on how today we can overcome the same strategy of divide and conquer in a Fox News gaslit country?
Erica Smiley (14:14):
I'm so glad you brought up the economic elements of King and the movement surrounding him in his struggle today. We actually have a similar struggle happening at Target at the company that was one of the first, unfortunately to kind of kowtow to the Trump administration's diversity, equity, inclusion rollbacks. Meanwhile, it's a company that has long had a very diverse consumer base. And so black leaders have been boycotting Target since I guess February, it was like an Easter Linton fast that has kind of expanded and foot traffic has been down in that company since they're having a relatively large economic crisis.
Andrea Chalupa (14:54):
I'm going to give a big shout out to all the Gaslit Nation listeners who have said in our salons on Monday, I miss shopping at Target.
Erica Smiley (15:01):
I know I do too. But it's real. We have to stay strong. But it is like this is why we say that unions are schools for democracy because this is where this type of struggle can happen. And unions themselves only win when they center issues of racial equality, gender equality, when they treat workers as whole people and operate at the intersections. That's actually the key to winning. It's not just the right thing to do, but it's the strategy to win. And that's what Sarita Gupta and I said in our book, the Future We Need is really sharing those stories and case studies and case studies. An example after example. I mean, you mentioned Martin Luther King and labor movement integrating the labor movement. I mean, Walter brother, the president of the UAW ended up being a big supporter of civil rights because when they were trying to organize workers at Ford in the thirties, they were only able to do it after they started to work together with black workers and black people within Michigan and throughout the region, that the significance of this is not simply of just united we stand by that we fall, but actually multiple campaigns, we can show how multiple unionization efforts where workers are trying to get a collective bargaining agreement.
(16:06):
When they do that, such as the miraculous Amazon Labor Union agreement, or not the agreement, but the election victory in 2022. And we can also talk about where they fail miserably such as say the machinist effort at Boeing in South Carolina because they haven't actually centered working people as whole people as black people as migrants, depending on the base of that workplace. And so our opposition has been very good at creating divisions when people aren't in relationship through a union, that it's easier for them to go back to their own neighborhoods, their own homes, and then see each other as the enemy, as opposed to actually seeing the people who are exploiting both of them and talking out of both sides of their face.
Andrea Chalupa (16:46):
So in terms of where we are now, I think people are desperate to elect anyone who will just follow the Constitution. The bar is so low now.
Erica Smiley (16:55):
It's so low.
Andrea Chalupa (16:56):
But if you were to advise Democratic party movements, candidates, grassroots organizations, what is your strategy of how we dig our way out of this? What should be the priority? What should be the eye on the prize that we all need to keep front and center?
Erica Smiley (17:13):
Well, first of all, the first steps in winning a war is recognizing that you're in one. And while the violence and the cannons of the US Civil War may have ended 160 years ago, the ideological battle of the Civil War has raged on and they're winning and they're winning a lot. And so now we need to think about are a theater battle? Not so much in the lens of can we just pass a piece of legislation or can we get someone elected but actually need to think of the different battlefields? And one of the key battlefields that anyone running for office needs to recognize is that one of the primary sites of the fight for democracy is happening on the shop floor. It's happening where working people are trying to fight for decision making through the lens of a union contract or industry agreement or market agreement or whatever it needs to look like.
(17:57):
Community benefits agreement. While so many people have checked out of our political democracy, if you look at who got the most votes in the election, it wasn't even Trump. It was the no votes. It was the extensions of people who are eligible that the same people who have checked out of our political democracy are actively clawing to democratize their economic lives and their workplaces. And that's where the fight is. And so anyone who wants the attention of working people needs to acknowledge that. They need to acknowledge people like Jennifer who works at Amazon and New York and not at a LU, but at a different location who almost had a miscarriage because the company refused to accommodate her pregnancy, which is a law we just both federal and New York state law for them to do. Santoni Butler for a long time, built cars at Ford in Dallas, Texas, said while a lot of women were out in the seventies fighting for women's liberation in the streets, our women's liberation movement was right there on the shop floor when we got a women's bathroom put within walking distance to where we were operating, you've got Big Mike at Bessemer Alabama's Amazon facility who during the murder of George Floyd discovered with his coworkers the extent to which the company was using police surveillance to keep workers in line.
(19:07):
And he said very clearly, actually, as much as you guys march out there, this is our Black Lives Matter movement right here. And so these are concrete issues that are happening in the world, whether it's the Me Too movement, racial justice, gender justice, that actually the battles are live and fully raging in our economic lives, in our workplaces and in our consumer lives. And that for anyone who wants to argue that their job is to expand democracy, even through the political framework of electing new leaders, they need to also then see that the whatever laws are passed need to actually be systemic and increasing people's ability to have decision-making power, not just hoping on some savior to save us in Congress or in the White House, but to actually think about how we're expanding majority rule everywhere.
(19:50):
And look, I'll say this last bit here. It may seem bleak in this moment. Sure, we've lost the Citadel in the context of, but the war's not over. There's still plenty of fight. And in fact, I have a lot of hope around it. I like to think about how my own ancestors, African-American, how my own ancestors would've managed during the 1850 Fugitives Slave Act where it looked like people were literally getting disappeared from northeastern streets and sent the plantations even though they might've been born free in the North. And we're seeing the same thing with migrant workers being sent to like Gilmar being sent to El Salvador, even though he's technically as supposed to be here. And so I like to think about how my ancestors managed in that moment because there's no way they could have known in 1850 that the Emancipation Proclamation was 15 years away. There's no way they could have known that reconstruction was coming.
(20:45):
And so in this moment, as dire as it looks, to recognize the people who are fighting to recognize the battlefields where the fight is happening, it's not necessarily in the capitol in DC but on shop floors in every town throughout the nation, then it's important for us to then think about we have no idea what this will look like 15 years from now, but we have to keep fighting with that vision in mind. It can't just be about the next election. It actually needs to be about the next couple of decades and actually building a democracy we're fighting for.
Andrea Chalupa (21:15):
That's wonderfully said. I want to ask you if I may, about your thoughts on basic income. Automation, AI, definitely automation has been chipping away at a lot of so-called blue collar jobs. And now definitely AI is coming for the white collar jobs. And so you're about to see a lot of class solidarity because everybody is on shaky ground. They used to tell college students learn to code. The future is in computer engineering, software engineering. And now those are some of the industries with the highest number of layoffs now. And you have these oligarchs in Silicon Valley that cannot wait to replace their software engineers with ai, and they're just talking about this out in the open in press interviews. That's how arrogant and comfortable these oligarchs now are with their immense power and wealth. And I don't know how anyone can work for them, but people are just desperate to put food on the table, pay their mortgage and rent. So I wanted to ask you, what are your thoughts in your world? What do you hear from your colleagues and comrades in the fight on a basic income and how we get there? I don't see how we survive with what's coming without some sort of agreed upon safety net, like really secure financial safety net.
Erica Smiley (22:35):
Yeah, I mean, so as new as everyone tries to make these things sound, this is actually a very old fight. I mean automation, I mean, we can find things from the 1920s where people were saying to fear the robots and the coming replacement of our jobs. I do think that there are technological fixes, for lack of a better word, that capital uses to displace labor and to make our lives more precarious so that we'll accept working for less. And this is one of them. And it's happening in lots of industries, as you said, including some white collar sectors. And I think that there are a couple of solutions, but before I even go into them, the first thing I want to say is that there are still people doing work. Even within AI. This is part of the myth. There are still people having to put in function for chat GTP to give accurate information.
(23:27):
The integrity of what's available is still low and requires people to adjust it, to add information to it, and frankly to correct it when it's wrong. And that's been invisibilized in this discussion around ai. The second thing is, as AI automation, right platform work, as these things become more prevalent, the question is who benefits? So if productivity is increased and thus the ability to whatever it is that we're trying to do, whether it's drive, get people from point A to point B or get an application done or whatever the technology is being used for, if that's increased the efficiency and the time with which something can happen, then the question is who benefits? Do the workers who've lost their jobs and the people who need those services or whatever, we get more time off now because you're making more money. But with less staff, do we get to work half a week and still make the same amount of resources?
(24:29):
Because obviously the profits are increasing with these interventions. And even if they're not increasing, they aren't going down, otherwise they wouldn't be making the intervention. And so then the question becomes who gets to benefit from that success? And this is where, again, going back to the earlier question you said about the gaslighting that happened with trade free trade, the gaslighting that's happened with technology is very similar. This idea of increased production, you don't need people as much, but then what does that mean in terms of our ability to live? So I do think this question of a basic income is useful, but not necessarily as just a government question. I actually think it's useful in terms of where are the benefits coming from? How are the corporations who are benefiting from this increased productivity, sharing the wealth over the years, companies have, again, gas lit us by attempting to socialize the risk while privatizing the benefit. We obviously want to turn that around. So how do we actually socialize the benefit and minimize the risk that impacts regular everyday people when it comes to these technological shifts?
Andrea Chalupa (25:35):
Alright, good to know. So in terms of where we go from here, we have people across the political spectrum who are feeling burned out. They feel like they have no choice, but they feel like nobody's coming to their rescue and that everything is just beyond hopeless. And that what's the point of joining together when the enemies are just so well funded and so good at being evil. And one of the ways they express this is through protest voting and just saying, I'm not going to vote or I'm going to vote. Third party, even though there's a very close election on the ballot, we saw that definitely play an impact in the 2024 election where Kamala Harris, yes, she lost, but not by much. Not by much. And the analysis so far has showed the Democrats that stayed at home really made a difference. They did vote by not voting, and now Trump is back in power and the level of corruption, it's just so funny.
(26:33):
This New York Times article that came out this spring was how it was a very straight laced report, not an editorial, a reported New York Times article saying basically, Trump's corruption is the greatest corruption of all other corrupt administrations combined from big teapot dome scandal, watergate, all of it, morphing into one giant corrupt baby of a monster like the marshmallow man monster of corruption in the White House. And so my question to you is, what are your thoughts on protest voting? If somebody next time we get a chance, if we do get a chance at an election and somebody's like, well, both are evil. Democrats suck. The establishment sucks. I'm angry. What would you say to that person?
Erica Smiley (27:14):
Well, they're not wrong. I mean, just to be completely transparent, they're not completely wrong. And I would want to start by addressing that pain and validating their sentiments. The second thing I would say is that the key to democracy is not simply one vote. And so while I would want to treat elections as one side of struggle, it's not the only side of struggle. The idea that people are continuing to organize and collectively bargain is key. Now the question becomes then how do we engage in elections in a way that's not just our emotional reaction or anger, but actually to decide how does the election create a different playing field for the struggle for democracy? So again, broadening out the lens from one particular issue or election to this multi-year, potentially multi-decade war, to expand democracy in this country and in the world. If we look at it that way, then any election is just one point in battle that we are trying to advance our position. So yes, let's try to get back the citadel. Let's try to get back people in Congress who will make it easier for us to advance our ability to expand democracy, to expand organizing collective bargaining power, to expand academic freedom. That would be the approach to see the elections as a part of the strategy and tactics of building democracy and not simply as the end all be all in terms of the solution itself.
Andrea Chalupa (28:33):
That's a very mature attitude. Unfortunately, some people are just voting with their trauma voting or not voting because of the trauma that we're all tracing. But some are choosing to say, look, this all sucks. Our lives have not been getting easier. We don't feel like there's any adults at all that are really at the helm protecting us from these many crises. There's a very much a feeling of betrayal. Even if we get our democracy back, the Democrats are just going to punt again. They...
Erica Smiley (29:02):
Are going to ruin it again. Yeah.
Andrea Chalupa (29:04):
Yes. It's like, why are we, is it We're an abusive relationship with both parties.
Erica Smiley (29:10):
Which is not wrong. It's not wrong. But I mean, here's the thing though. So the Trump administration is running the country like a giant business. Many people...
Andrea Chalupa (29:20):
Well, I wouldn't even see a business. It's more like a crime spree.
Erica Smiley (29:25):
Well, but that's what business is. This is the point. Many workers have actually been experiencing oligarchy and autocracy and authoritarian rule in their workplaces for decades. I mean, this is not actually new. This level of corruption, even before Trump was president, he was reneging on contracts and leaving many building and construction trade workers hanging out to dry. He closed down his casinos in Atlantic City, and the Atlantic City school system lost a third of his population overnight. I mean, this isn't new business in many ways, particularly under global capitalism, which we all live under is corrupt. And he's running the country that way. I'll stop the war in Israel-Palestine, as long as you sell me the coastline, I will support Ukraine's as long as you sell me your minerals, I'm going to sell off government buildings. He's running the company like a traditional corrupt American business.
(30:16):
And so in some ways, this weakness is also our strength because many people who have been fighting for democracy in our workplaces, in our economic lives know all about not only Donald Trump himself as a boss, but know about this model of corruption and know about this model of leadership that is opposed to democracy. And they've been trying to fight for it for the last few decades. And so if we actually take a model out of, sometimes you have to ask people who've been losing the longest, what the key is to winning. If we actually take a strategy and a plan out of the model of workers of labor unions, learning from the lessons where we have failed historically and trying to build on that for the future, then I actually think that applying that not only to our workplaces and our economy, but now to also our political life, which is being run, our workplaces have always been run is the key to our success.
(31:07):
At the end of the day, they still need us. Right? This is one I think Renee Barry, who's a part of the Volkswagen campaign in Chattanooga, who's trying to negotiate a contract there. She said to me just a couple months ago, she's like, whoever's in the White House, they still need us to make the cars. And if we don't make the cars, there's a problem. Target still needs us to shop there. If we don't shop there, there's a problem. And so no matter how much money they have or think they have, if we actually organize strategically, there's more than enough opportunities for us to reclaim and start getting back on track to building a democracy.
Andrea Chalupa (31:39):
Yes. So that question, I mean, a lot of what Trump is doing is very much what Spectrum Comcast, what they do in their customer service, what Disney does in their customer service. That's right. All of every single county, I swear there's all these news reports like Surprise, all these corporations just poisoned your water. You're all going to get cancer. That part. Exactly. All the plastic we've been shoving at you at your children, you're all going to die from it. So absolutely. So there was this saying I heard when I lived in Ukraine in 2005 that I repeat all the time on the show, and that is a Ukrainian said to me that the oligarchs see the people like the shit they grow their money in. And so Trump is basically the extension of that. And I talked to a Goldman Sachs banker who is not a Republican, but he works at Goldman Sachs.
(32:29):
God bless him, all that money coming in. But he was saying he's like all the Republicans that work there, they're salivating over all the regulations that are going to be rolled back, including all the protections on the banks that ensure that put some breaks on another George W. Bush era Global Bank collapse. And he's like, all these bankers are just salivating. They just cannot wait for all the regulations to go away. It's not like we had many to begin with. That's the thing. Right? Right. So it's like, great. And I know this is going to be another pattern of America hitting rock bottom so hard that anybody but a Republican has a very strong chance to be elected in 2028, even if they try everything to steal another election. I feel like we're just a plane, a Boeing plane. Speaking of deregulation and corruption, a Boeing plane that's just been a nose dive and like we did under George W. Bush, we did under Trump in 2020. And that's really the advantage that the person with a D for Democrat extra name has in 2028. It's like things are going to be so bad that they can't even steal their way out of it.
Erica Smiley (33:39):
I think that's possible if we get an election. Yes. I mean, I think part of what has been most damaging about this administration versus previous administrations is that they have actually attempted to change the rules or to abolish the rules, but to make it easier to do what they're doing, such that anyone who gets in regardless of the letter by their name in the coming years, well, if they don't prioritize adjusting structures to ensure that this could never happen again, then this is just like a cycle to the bottom. And I don't think we fit bottom. I don't even think we're close, but we're definitely on our way. And that kind of Boeing bounce back wouldn't necessarily stop it without this level of foresight. The thing about our movement is we're trying to build a democracy of the future that we can all get into and our opposition is trying to benefit right now.
(34:29):
So that's the motivation that would allow a company that's trying to build, say, semiconductors or microchips, which is a heavily dependent on water to manufacture. They want to build in the desert in Arizona, because that makes sense. It makes sense for them. And the immediate term, it would be devastating for the globe and for humanity in the long term. But that's the war that we're in. That's actually the fight that we're actually a part of. And so sure, I do think you're right. It's going to be, if there's an election, I think it'll be very difficult for our opposition to win if people are actually voting and if they think democracy is possible. So I actually think it's still theirs to lose and that the actual fight for democracy has to happen in many different places to ensure that authoritarianism is not even an option.
Howard Jeffrey (singing) (36:51):
Everything changes with time...
Andrea Chalupa (38:31):
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