Through their natural resources which is where some of the most important and valuable resources of the country actually are and also rights or various groups of people like Al to be people and also women and it was a very progressive constitution in the model of a number of progressive constitutions and since Rebecca Gorton the philosopher of us has been following the Iraq war for decades it included 6 year term for the presidency so in 1990 the elections took place 6 years after 984 and a coalition of center right parties called now with woman named below letter to morrow as the presidential candidate won the election. And then something kind of amazing happened for the 1st time that I know of that in history a revolutionary organization that had taken power more or less by violent means although the truth is that every sector had stopped supporting samosa by the time that the insurrection succeeded in driving him out of the country but in any case a revolutionary organization actually accepted defeat at the ballot box and turned the government over to which was the name of this coalition however there was a period of several months between the elections and the transfer of power just as happens in this country we vote in November and. Not your race and takes place in January so during that time was a period that seemed to be known as not being Yeah an opinion it's a you know it's one of those. Paper say Tories that full of choice and candidate you break open and what happened was that people in the Sundanese to party people and the way we explained it to ourselves at the time those of us who wanted to still believe in the sunny nice to us was that these were people who had sacrificed so much they spent years living in the mountains as they had never you know because they've devoted their entire adult lives to the revolution and they never had a chance to you know have any kind of aconitine like life of their own so this was their opportunity not to starve whatever in any case what happened during the opinion is that the government was sacked and it was sacked for everything from vehicles to houses state enterprises to money. And many people believe that it was at this point and through the being that Daniel Ortega himself as well as some other Sundanese the leaders began to develop their own personal fortunes it was asked. And after again inside baseball but after an assembly of the sons and it's a party in which one current was asking for greater damage democracy within the party and that current law and a more are autocratic authoritarians reign one that quite a few people who were well known to people around the world who have supported the the revolution actually left the Sunday nice to party but the party itself remains and one thing one other thing to say about the 1990 election and the people in the crowd I were not stupid and they knew that as long as the Sundanese Does were in power the United States was going to continue to perform to be supporting this ugly vicious Contra War And so the only way they were going to stop the war was to get rid of the Sandinistas and that's what they did so we come to this in this period in between 199-2006 when Daniel Ortega again was elected to the presidency and in those many years in between she began cozying up to a number of frankly right wing elements of the president after some Moro in 1996 was a man named Ali Mohsen are not mine and he was a real right winger from the hard right from the old some of the party he was also really corrupt Sandinistas of the day which were not now the Olsen ministers made what was called. Or in the past the agreement between Ali. Party and the Sandinistas and when gun yeller tag was reelected as president in 2006. Came to. A money who in the meantime had been taken out of office and convicted of terrible corruption and he's still in hundreds of millions of dollars was put under house arrest and Managua when Danielle came into power he said Oh well Mr I'm on my not capital city is your is your house and then later on he said well actually all of your house so essentially he preyed on him and he also he and his wife. Had had a conversion to a particular charismatic form of Roman Catholicism with the result that among other things they became fanatically anti abortion and we cut our has one of the harshest anti abortion laws in the world as a result today so in the time since 2006 when Daniel was reelected she has brought in changes to the Constitution that allow him to essentially be erected over and over and over again there had been true limits a 2 term limit to the presidency in the past but now with a new constitution she can run as often as he likes in 2016 she got rid of the guy who had been his vice president and ran with. His wife as his vice president and he continues to run what many people believe is a very corrupt self-serving and autocratic government I will say I was there in October and I hadn't been there for about 8 or 9 years and I was truly surprised as I was mostly out in the countryside by. The level of development that has taken place it's not as though people who live in tiny houses now have running water way out in the countryside but what they do have all have cell phones many of them have generators and satellite dishes so people whose grandparents never went more than 50 miles from where they were born and whose knowledge of the outside world only chain through maybe the newspaper that might have come once a week to their town if they were even living in a town those grandchildren today are now connected to the entire world through their cell phones which have completely leapfrogged landline technology and through Internet access through satellite and it's a major major change in who the new car when people are in a way in addition there's been road building because an election was coming up there's also been a lot of work on big public option and all over you see these billboards these bright pink billboards with you know pictures of Rosario and yen and. Yannis mostly sociality Christianity and socialism and then it goes on and it's covered with hearts and flowers and these are you know you're These are your rulers who want the best for you but is there anything like a political opposition to her political opposition that's been developing it'll say this is the problem and this is what really really worries me there are a couple of there's a thing called the Revolutionary Sandinista movement and these are started by people like me as who was vice president back in the eighty's under gun dealer to go door on Monday at 10 who is known to many people he was the minister of Minister of Health under the early Sandinista government and a number of other people. That you are people who've been following you could I would recognize but it's a tiny party and it has no support base it has no real base it doesn't do it doesn't win anything at the polls there is no coherent organized force that would be ready to step in if you were to take the government were to collapse the way the smoke to government did in 1979 people who have been coming out onto the streets in their hundreds of thousands especially. The university students they call themselves out on book which means self convened in other words nobody is running them and they are running themselves which is lovely on the one hand it means that they're not beholden to some puppet master say in the United States but at the same time they do not represent an organized force with a program the way the Sandinistas were and organized for the program ready to hit the ground when Somoza was. Removed and this really really worries me it would be a desperate shame to cut our turn into the kind of you know what's called a failed state which would of course immediately open the way for us intervention because we can't have a failed state in our backyard and the history of u.s. Intervention in Ukraine is a long and bloody. But at the same time this repression this outright murder not only through police and military but through the paramilitary guards can't continue it's just it's just too. So it's a very bad situation the only thing that I'm really sure of is it's a situation that we're bringing even worse if the u.s. Were to decide to insert itself in some way those are the Gorton the philosopher another teacher at the University of San Francisco Her article The liquor Ogwyn troubles appeared and told us that she was reprinted by not letting the start of the program was behind the news back after his school break. In. Person of the 2nd movement Schubert's piano trio number one performed by the Bose arch trio next strikes but friend and frequent guest think Michael Levy likes to quote one of her mentors Jerry Brown the former head of 1199 New England Health Care Workers Union saying the strike is like a muscle if not exercised about. Trophies and with it the power of the working class strikes of largely disappeared the us the repeater strike several months ago but even if that level of activity were to continue for the rest of the year the annual measures of work stoppages would barely rise to the levels of the 890000 to thousands What does this mean and what is it about the workplace and they strike so important here Alex Gourevitch assistant professor of political science at Brown to explain he explores all this is a recent article in the jacket magazine website Alex group which was a brief uptick in the number of strikes in the Us particular the teachers but that you know there's been a long downtrend in strike activity in the u.s. For the last couple of decades mean for the working class well I think you and I agree there is no substitute for militant collective action by the working class. Evidence suggests that all of these other strategies. Trying to work with management and finding corporate strategy public pension funds will take a more active role in management and the kind of alternative to the political legislative strategy by the unions spend a whole bunch of dollars trying to let candidates who screw them when they get elected stuff works and the story of the last 3040 years since about 1974 when there was a precipitous decline in strike activity or when that decline began we've seen the power and income and wealth of the working class decline that they've either side of 974 years before Reagan fired PATCO which is often taken as a watershed what happened in the mid seventy's that really got things going badly for the working class to good question I mean that's the beginning of the counterrevolution by capital against the kind of growing militancy of the 60s early seventies is the point at which it looked like the Lasix years on which it looked like a mass mobilization around racial equality. Would connect up with owing massive working class resistance Vietnam and declining living standards and produce a really massive working class movement there's likely to say that the sixty's had the working class in the seventy's yeah exactly and I think you see it politically I mean you know why is it that suddenly the house is starting to be ready to withhold funding for Vietnam because all these working class constituencies throughout the country were demanding that their representatives just stop supporting Vietnam and that they would stop voting for them because it was the working class you know was getting slaughtered in Vietnam as well as some members of the middle class strikes were becoming more militant much more wild cats a lot of large numbers of workers who are willing to strike against advice or support Labor leadership and for demands that weren't just higher wage demands but against the war I think a whole story that still really hasn't been told yet but it's kind of peaks in 7273 and Capitol changes realize it's going to change strategies there's other geo political things happening the collapse of Bretton Woods the kind of growing profits because you know Western Europe is now really and. So there is more intense capitalist competition globally and American capitalists increasingly start rethinking the post-war contract and start putting a tighter squeeze on workers and they go in particular after. Labor practices and legal practices that they workers sort of more leeway in organizing and striking and so what matters about Pac and the replacement of strikers is actually I mean the back story is this in 1939 there was a Supreme Court ruling called Make a radio and which there was this weird little piece of legal dicta and which they said Ok workers have a right stright you can't fire them for organizing you want to organize a union or starting a strike however employers can. Imminently replace them but for about 40 years employers sometimes do that and they don't do that because workers for well organized Fanaa and there was a broader political culture that required most businesses to instead kind of negotiate with unions and union leadership and it seems for getting unions and union leaders to basically become administrators of the labor contract they would limit the militancy of membership in exchange for a go shopping at some place at the bargaining table some contract with employers and some limitations on what lawyer employers are willing to do and one of the things they didn't do tends to do was her member a place workers when they went on strike but in the seventy's in the midst of this beginning of their interest moments and in the lead up to the kind of change in corporate governance and financial structure you talk about Wall Street actually employer start just becoming much more openly hostile to workers they no longer think there's any need to kind of manage labor relations and so they just start stopping negotiating with union leaders and openly violating labor laws and then replacing workers when they go on strike and they have been doing they start doing this in the mid seventy's in the late seventy's there's kind of like an amazing strike in Iowa in 1980 actually white packing workers and they go on strike and are going to permanently replace and the only person who shows up as Angela Davis who's on the communist ticket and there's like amazing moment where the only person strikers openly is neither Republican or Democrat but Angela Davis this a black communist running a communist if that's all these like Iowa workers are kind of like thinking about communism again because they're all the elder they're like what happened to these relations we thought we had and then what Packer does is say it's open season everyone can do this because at the very top the state's going to take the side of capital and that's it like. It is then employers just really put the hammer they start trying to provoke so that they can replace workers because if the workers stay out for a year then they can decertify the union as well and just wait the union entirely and redo a union out of their scab workers and that's just the long precipitous decline there but PATCO is more the kind of declaration an open declaration of who side the state is on it's not going to try and manage in any way relations between capital labor it's just on the side of the capitalists and it just kind of puts approval on what they've been doing for about a decade now and here are articles the Jacobin article which is based on a longer academic article who review the ways in which employees are seriously subordinate it relates in their relationship with their bosses This is a real authoritarian relationship 1st remind us of all the dimensions of that inequality What I find you a saying look the way to think about the right to strike is that it's a right to resist oppress and by open I just mean to unjustified of all constraints on people's freedoms and there are some things that people think about all the time like. The working class. And so the labor market because it doesn't have any reasonable alternatives to find any job in the thing about the workplaces you know if you compare it with the family the family is now close to at least legally speaking an institution based on equality like women when they get married are not subject to curvature laws anymore where like the husband owns their property they don't have air or property can force them to work you can take their wages they stand as equals you know there's no fault divorce custody laws you know sometimes even if they were women there's been some liberalization of family law in the workplace that's just not the case and it's a completely unequal relationship employees are formally understood or subordinates they're required to obey the commands of. Their employers include control over things as intimate as when they can go to the bathroom the employer decides almost all disciplinary procedures can and require they engaged mandatory drug testing can fire them for totally arbitrary reasons like not being attractive and I sort of collect a number of examples like this they also determine what kinds of work are going to be done when those kind of work are going to be changed when I covered the rise of the strike one of the objections of these arising workers was that any time they wanted to go back there more are going to think of water they had to call and ask permission from their manager and if their manager didn't formally give them permission but they went to the bathroom anyway they'd be sanctioned and could lose like a month of work so it's a very authoritarian place people don't often think about this. But it's actually one of the most important forms of oppression that I think workers tend to resist when they go on strike so normalize the Often people don't think twice about you know people don't think twice about it I mean they don't think twice about it on the other hand like lots and lots of people who actually work are very aware of it and I think some of this is sort of a matter of just who gets to do a lot of the official thinking in our society but the people get to do a lot of the official thinking in academia and the chattering classes the commentary they come from the upper class they come from either the educated professions where they tend on average to be more personal autonomy and in the work they're less directly subject all kinds of crazy bosses or they are just wealthy and they do it to the degree that they're even ever had to work in workplace in the typical workplace they did temporarily see it as not a permanent feature of their life and sort of ways much less heavily on their thinking the moment I really noticed this was there was this funny moment in one of the presidential debates in 2016 when Clinton raised this incident where Trump had refused to pay. Somebody who he owed money for work on a hotel something like that and I remember Trump interrupted her and said because he did a bad job and I remember just thinking if Clinton had even an ounce of class awareness that would have been just the best moment to just I'm what was on a popular experience which is anyone who's ever were most people working class have worked for bosses who make them do stuff and then underpaid them or didn't pay them at all it's an extraordinarily common occurrence of the kind of deal experience of oppression she sees that and kind of need much more not just he's rich but the special kind of asked he has not been asked Trump but it's just the typical rich employer who tries to screw workers of course he was the daughter of a small businessman. Was born from the other side I'm talking about something that would happen obviously I mean as you pointed out her state with crossing the picket line like that you know she has none of those political instincts some are thinking about it and that was a moment where because most of the official thinking happens by people who have no real contact and don't really think about these daily