Jacobin Show: Life in the Labor Movement w/ Richard Hooker
Jacobin Radio
Jacobin
4.7 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 19 February 2021
⏱️ 112 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Every Wednesday at 6 PM ET, Jen Pan, Ariella Thornhill, and Paul Prescod host a new episode of The Jacobin Show, offering socialist perspectives on class and capitalism in the twenty-first century, the failures of liberalism, and the prospects of rebuilding a left labor movement in the US. This is the audio version of the broadcast on February 17, 2021.
Richard Hooker, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 623, discusses how he became involved in rank and file union organizing in the labor movement, how unions help break down racial tensions, and the challenges that he and other UPS workers have faced during the pandemic. We also cover the Texas power outage and workplace surveillance.
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Transcript
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| 0:30.0 | Good evening. Welcome to another episode of the Jackman Show. My name is Paul Prescott. |
| 0:41.6 | I'm here with my co-host, Ariela Thornell. We have a really great show today. We have |
| 0:47.3 | some great segments. We have a really special guest. We're going to be having Richard Hooker, |
| 0:51.6 | who is a General Secretary of Teams' Local 623 here in Philadelphia. So make sure you stick |
| 0:58.3 | around for that and make sure you're hitting like and subscribe. So how are you, Ariela? |
| 1:03.2 | I'm good. I'm glad we get to do a show together. Yeah, I know. It's been, like, two months |
| 1:08.7 | since the first show, right? Well, I thought maybe we could talk about something in the news. |
| 1:15.9 | As you all know, the Green New Deal failed. We've seen it fail in action in Texas. |
| 1:21.6 | The power outages across the state have been making news and the right wing has not failed to jump |
| 1:28.2 | on the train of blaming this on the Green New Deal, blaming this on solar and wind energy. |
| 1:34.5 | I've seen some of these memes on Facebook. I don't care if you can start that up. |
| 1:39.4 | Positive fuels. They don't care if the sun is out. Ariela, look at these snow-covered solar panels |
| 1:44.6 | and this frozen wind turbine. That must be what is going on there. That's what did it. Right. |
| 1:50.3 | And there couldn't be any other explanation. Right. And by the way, this is why I stay friends |
| 1:55.0 | with some right wingers on Facebook because I just need to see what they're saying. But in fact, |
| 2:00.3 | I mean, to break this down. So of the 34 gigawatts that went offline, 26 of them came from natural |
| 2:07.8 | gas and coal sources. So natural gas and coal was failing actually much more than the wind and solar. |
| 2:13.8 | And there is a reason for this. You throw up the other graphic. So the grid in Texas, |
| 2:21.1 | they are, as you see, totally isolated from the rest of the national grid. This was a deliberate |
| 2:27.3 | decision. This was done deliberately to avoid federal regulation and maintain a privately-controlled |
| 2:33.4 | profit-making utility system. And then if you can throw up the other graph, surprise, surprise, |
| 2:38.2 | look at where all the power outages are concentrated. So that really is what has been going on here. |
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