9.3 k.p. Of the Berkeley 88 point one K.F.C.'s in Fresno 97.5 k. 248 b. Are in Santa Cruz and on line. Org The time is 12 noon stay 2 next for against the grain. Today against the grain nature cheap money cheap work cheap care cheap food cheap energy and cheap lives according to Rush but those 7 things are necessary for the survival of capitalism at a yard use they're running out and I'm Sasha will hear from Raj Patel about how the food system illustrates the need for those inputs and why capitalism and days are numbered that's after these news headlines. I'm Christina on a stud with these k p f a news headlines Oakland library senior centers parks and recreation another non-emergency programs are shut down today as 3 city unions began an open ended strike sci you local 1021 members say they've been working without a contract since July 1st and the city's understaffed relies too much on temporary help and workers are underpaid sci you 1021 member Lane a Hernandez is a temporary part time worker in the library department she appeared on k p s face up front this morning. Our labor force is currently made up of 50 percent temporary a part time workers who receive no health benefits and who receive no contribution into the city's retirement system at this moment they are at will employees and can be fired for any reason and we received no notice and no due process around that during the recession we lost so many full timers and the city realized that it was a cost saving measure to replace a full time employee with 2 or 3 temporary part time workers and that cycle has continued s.d.i. You into union supporting the strike had proposed postponing their walkout if Oakland negotiators agreed to enter informal Preem path med mediation with the help of former assembly speaker and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown he previously mediated Bart and janitors strikes but Oakland Mayor Libby shaft turned down the offer saying Brown was not neutral the union say they'll also picket outside a fundraiser for shaft re-election tonight at 5 as being held at 1111 Broadway 2 blocks from City Hall a long time Michigan Congress member John Conyers announced he is resigning effective today and door saying his son to replace him in Congress Conyers made the announcement in a radio interview on the Mildred Gaddis show 102.7 in Detroit this morning. We're going to do anyway I am very. Very near my own group I am very very. Conyers nephew in Conyers is also expected to run for the seat the 88 year old congressman was hospitalized for a stress related illness after he was accused of multiple acts of sexual harassment which he has denied Conyers today said this too shall pass and he wasn't worried the allegations would affect his legacy of working to protect civil rights and civil liberties. The Center for Constitutional Rights asked a judge today to throw out parts of a lawsuit that targets the earth 1st journal alleging the Earth 1st Philosophy. Financed a violent terrorist presence at Standing Rock protest against the Dakota access oil pipeline last year the suit may be the broadest slap lawsuit against an activist group president trumps a law firm Castlewood Svenson Torahs filed the suit yesterday on behalf of pipeline developer e.t.p. Energy transfer partners it claims earth 1st financed some $500000.00 with proceeds from drug sales to conspire with Greenpeace and other environmental groups to deceive the public about the environmental risks of oil pipelines according to the attorneys the $187.00 page suit does not mention the earth 1st journal all only Earth 1st which the journal editor Ryan Hartman says is a philosophy not a solid organization advocates say the suits are part of ongoing labeling of social activists as terrorists the filing comes one week after 2 environmental groups Greenpeace and bank track asked a federal judge to dismiss the lawsuit on grounds that their work in opposition of the Dakota access pipeline is protected free speech and Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency in Ventura County today and responds to wildfires that have forced the evacuations of tens of thousands of people it's the largest blaze that broke out last night in Ventura County one person is reported dead I'm Christina honest at reporting for k p f a. From the studios of Cape p.f.a. In Berkeley California this is against the grain on Pacifica Radio I'm Sasha the capitalism is a system that's based on ever increased expansion and that expansion depends on various crucial inputs some of which are obvious on some of which are often invisible clearly capitalism requires labor nature energy and money and it needs all those things to be cheap it also needs things that are less obvious like the unpaid care that we give each other to raise and look after the workers who keep capitalism taking over and expand and the expendable lives of the colonized women and people of color. Because those crucial inputs are no longer dependably cheap to radical thinkers argue that capitalism has reached a terminal crisis which it cannot solve Croppy its yields are falling global warming means that I recall chal produce is less abundant hence food is getting more expensive energy stores are being depleted interest rates have nowhere to go but up and workers paid and unpaid and the oppressed are increasingly angry Raj Patel along with scholar Jason Moore has penned a book about why the end of these inputs spell the end of capitalism it's called History of the world in 7 cheap things and guide to capitalism nature and the future of the planet Russia tell is the internationally bestselling author of the value of nothing and stuffed and starved He's a research professor at the University of Texas Austin in October he gave a talk at an event for speak out now in Berkeley we want to thank them as well as Jay-Jay in war for making the audio available to us today here's Raj Patel most people find it easier to imagine the end of the world than they do their managing the end of capitalism. And so for folks in this room as there is good news capitalism is ending. Part of what the book is for is that help explain to people who don't believe that why why it's ending and. Also to help folk understand why they have such trouble imagining the end of capitalism right why is it so hard to imagine a different part of the reason is that we are products of capitalism but like it or not we have been constructed in this world and if you are trying to persuade people that capitalism is going to end and people like you know that could never happen it's important to remember that we are built by. I traditionally and ideas that we have no idea no sense of how it is that we construct it and so what I want to do is just a run through how it is the going to this book works what we're saying is that capitalism is sort of underwritten by 7 things and they are rendered cheap by capitalism and they are running out of those 7 things on nature work money care food energy and lives the cheapest of all of these things is in peril for capitalism. And again if you want to understand that. If you go to the ads were seen Raise your hand if you've heard of the idea of the entrepreneur so if you haven't heard of it the Anthropocene is this idea that if there is a future civilization that going to uncovers the fossil record and they'll be able to know that we here because we've left some traces like you know the the isotopes from atmospheric nuclear tests all plastic in the sea you know that by 2050 they'll be more plastic in the sea than fish. But another way of knowing that humans were here is. This is the world's most popular bird Gallus gallus to make domestic us the ticket there are 12000000000 of them alight alive today but not for long. As humans go through them fairly fairly quickly in any given year these days about 50000000000 chickens are born and killed for us to eat. And how is it to there will be trillions of chicken bones laid into the fossil record because we started eating one lot of them if you look at the United States it used to be that Americans had chickens maybe eggs but after the 2nd World War The meat industry ramped up its push to get us to eat more chicken if you know the particular. This particular part of the industry if your name for it if you think of it as big but. They've been very successful not just in the United States in persuading us to eat now 90 pounds of a year. But globally we're starting to see. Because the consumption of chicken approaching the sort of rates that Americans when I did the 160 s. Right the meat if occasion of the global diet means that now globally every person is eating about 30 pounds of chicken a year. Now that's dependent on the 17th they design I want to use chicken as a way of just getting into 7 cheap things and how they're running out so for example we were able to have these chickens because the original jungle the red jungle fowl was taken from the jungles of Asia and genetic material was used freely to breed the kinds of chickens that are so large it's big breasts the so large that the chickens can't walk but this appropriation of nature and this ownership of nature. 1 is selective if it's profitable then capital will take it but if it's not profitable then it will be discarded as at the same time as we have $50000000000.00 of these but of certain kinds of birds 50 percent of species that existed you know the beginning of last century and now extinct. And this idea of treating nature as disposable is something that we see in a range of reports about the world right now. To see if I can summarize it into it's a one off. The graph of bad things and they get worse. The trouble with this is that if we go through all of this stuff and we see how things are getting it's. It has a sort of mouth you see intent to it right the there's the idea that populations a swelling and that we're you know the humans on just devouring the planet and I'm not here to praise not this I'm here to bury him this is this is not an argument I'm making it's sort of the opposite. And it's important to remember that because I'm not like not the saying that. The working class that's causing these problems on the contrary I think it's capitalism that's causing these problems and that's not something the mouth has ever said. We'll get to that but it's just important to right now because the council is and we're driving more and more of the planet towards a state shift an irreversible change in the way that ecology works that will radically transform the planet that's not because of humans it's because of capitalism. The. Chickens don't turn themselves into nuggets by themselves you need workers and in the United States workers are incredibly badly paid in general and particularly in the food industry they are exploited viciously if you think about the chicken industry occupational illnesses are 55 times higher . In regular occupations. 7 times higher repetitive strain 10 times higher just give you a sense for every dollar that is spent on fast food chicken $0.03 makes it to workers. Would be the workers who are lucky enough to have some sort of a. Contractual relationship with the with the chicken production company. Have been brought onto the chicken line as part of rehabilitation or as part of outpatient services these workers will pay $0.25 an hour and some of them be made to work for free as part of their rehabilitation. And. It's not. In general the food industry is premised on exploiting labor so if you go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and look at the look at the numbers take the lowest paid jobs in the United States all of them by median wage and you saw that sort of mind all in $0.25 an hour and. $10.58 an hour but everything that this highlighted is a food system. Some of the worst paid jobs in the United States are about food. In the food system now. While. Agencies like the National Restaurant Association trying to keep wages down and there's a new push for example the something on the president's desk at the moment that the National Restaurant Association the other n.r.a. Have been pushing they've been saying that if workers are paid minimum wage then the owners of the restaurant can take back the tips that were given so you're presented a bill you have to take on it that it will go to the owner to the bosses because the workers are being paid a big paid minimum wage instead of the $2.00 an $800.00 which is the minimum wage. So it wage theft is important but there are other ways in which workers on stolen from the National Chicken Association wants to do things like speed up this line this is you know this is part of the p.r. And what they're showing is the chicken line and women working on that you can buy what they want to do is make it go fast so at the moment the chicken line runs about 140 buds a minute which. This is. They want to bring it up to. This oppression of workers is global what you're seeing is that now. The less work is a rising up and fighting back and you'll see this even in the heartland of what is considered to be cheap work in China there is an increase in the number of strikes and work in the place that the jobs went to find cheap work is becoming increasingly more expensive and that's another trend it was in the end of nature we're also seeing the end of cheap work. Put into board to recognize also that. Workers bodies are broken by the production So what happens to them after they bodies are broken on their bodies or broken systematically and in the chicken industry this is. The u.s. Government's assessment of the various injuries that you can work as a prone to what happens to them in general they all cost out back into the community and it's the community's job to care for them. And that work falls disproportionately to women and capitalism treats that as a subsidy so you mean to give you a sense of the magnitude of that subsidy in 1995 World total output was around 33 trillion dollars but 16 trillion dollars was unpaid work of which 11 trillion dollars was the number put on women's unpaid work on The trouble is capitalism. Is becoming more expensive in every o.e.c.d. Country just think of health care as an example care is much bigger than just health care is about community building about teaching about compassion about a range of things but just that health care health care costs are outstripping g.d.p. Everywhere. Care is on the way out to one of the ways that is possible though is by making sure that people get to eat complete chicken. Feed to come in the United States as a result of one and a quarter $1000000000.00 of subsidy every year one of the quarter $1000000000.00 a subsidy for the chicken but workers need food too that's why. You know this sort of thing the idea of the dollar. Is a subsidy to the working moms. Keep food is important if you're being paid minimum wage cheap food is vital in order to be able to survive and even then $50000000.00 Americans on food insecure but it's not just about America this is a global phenomenon around the world industrial processed food is cheap and fresh fruits or vegetables in Mexico was made substantial enough that because what we did is. In Mexico with the end of NAFTA chicken in Mexico become much more expensive and 5 percent more expensive both 75 percent of the tariff rate will be reimposed as a result of after. Globally this is running out as well because of climate change. Will full in perpetuity all the major cereal crops are going to going down across the planet the era of cheap food where we can imagine planting things and having the climate favor us that era is over. One of the ways that you can increase crop yields traditionally to apply fertilizer fertilizer is basically energy and the era of cheap energy is also running for chickens in order to keep chickens alive you need cheap propane he says of course that results in carbon emissions but the possibility of fossil fuel running our economy is also coming to an end cheap oil the year of cheap oil is that it is over a capital expenditure on getting oil out of the ground is going up and up last year all the projects that extracting fossil fuel that happened most of them were made possible because the us government subsidized them in other words. In order for fossil fuel to happen you need an injection of cheap money. You need low interest loans to be able to my. Fossil fuel happened to make up and you also need of course to make chicken out and this is a franchise. Subsidized by the Small Business Administration the small business ration will give your franchise alone up to $2000000.00 because every franchise is a small business. But even with. This giveaway of cheap money rates of profit of falling around the world and if you look at interest rates the federal interest rate I mean of the spike in the 1980 s. We're now at a time when interest rates as low is that's pretty much possible to go so the era of cheap money also Ned and that's why we've returned to one of the darkest. We're seeing a return to the idea of cheap lives. If you look at the people who own the chicken line it's predominantly women and it's predominantly people of color. The idea that some people are outside society is. More closely a part of nature is one of the original sort of founding justifications for capitalism . At the same time is you get cheap nature you have visions of what humans humans are part of society which humans are part of nature. So in the United States of course we have that dark history but it's. Very much that certain kinds of people are outside society are fair game literally fair game. Known by white people as Little Crow he's got fetched a bounty of $500.00 because he was organizing a rebellion against the spread of capitalism on this program this threat of a closure you know he was hunted and killed as were the bison on which his people had a deep intimate relationship. These goals of course were crushed and turned back into fertilizer to be applied on the Great Plains but the idea of a certain kind of supremacies built into Dominion not just over nature but over people. Of the history of capitalism. And that is Raj Patel speaking just you know about the 7 cheap inputs that make capitalism run and how they are running out and the implications of that for all of us I'm Sasha this is against the grain and we are here today in the 1st day of k.p. a Phase December drive. What it's a short drive we're here to raise money to keep keep if they going through these tumultuous times and very pleased to be able to offer to you today the full length talking flooding question and answers with Raj Patel the history of the world in 7 cheap things you can get it on d.v.d. For $100.00 pledge of K.B.'s to k.p. Affair you can get it on cd for $75.00 pledge to k.p. If a by calling 18043957321804395732 as easy to remember as 1800 hake a p.f.a. You can also go to k. P.s.a. Dot o.-r. G. And of course December reminds us that the year is coming to an and and so this is a wonderful time to make your tax deductible donation to k p a faith it's deductible to the fullest extent allowed by law a great way to support a and direct some of your money away from. Well least half of your. Taxes go to the military so to redirect some of that to an institution that was founded by war resisters 180-439-5732 that's 1800 Hey Kate p.f.a. And we're going to play more from this talk by Raj Patel I should say that we're also very happy to offer his book that he co-wrote with Jason Moore and he's talking about the arguments that they. Jointly have put together the book is called The History of the world in 7 cheap things a guide to capitalism nature and the future of the planet and if you'd like to pledge for that 125 dollars pledge of support to p.f.a. . Naomi Klein says of business their book Raj Patel and Jason w. Moore have transformed cheapness into a brilliant an