Jeff Wells joins the podcast to talk with us about the new book he coedited: Preaching the Uncontrolling Love of God: Sermons, Essays, and Worship Elements from the Perspective of Open, Relational, and Process Theology. Purchase his book! https://www.amazon.com/Preaching-Uncontrolling-Love-God-Perspective/dp/1958670324 To speak with Jeff or join the mailing list, contact jefferywells.love@gmail.com Join us October 17–19 in Denver for theologybeer.camp ! Use the coupon code TAKEHEARTHOBBIT for $50 off your ticket. Sign up before June 1 for reduced ticket prices. Email us at religioussocialism@gmail.com if you plan to come, we'd love to meet up.

“Half of recent US inflation due to high corporate profits, report finds” - That’s one of the many headlines which have noted the skyrocketing cost of living for US consumers since the 2020 pandemic. Utilities, gas, and other basic necessities have all massively increased in price since 2020. Since 2022 the average American pays 25% more for groceries alone. Of course most workers don’t need a headline or a statistic to tell them the obvious - their ability to live an affordable, prosperous, and dignified life has been hugely eroded in recent years. One of the areas worst hit by this ‘greedflation’ is that of housing. Already the largest single expense for the average American, Idaho workers are especially hard hit as places like Boise and Idaho Falls see record growth, and multinational corporations rush in to snap up properties expected to earn them a profit.

The burden of corporate profiteering is all too real for tenants at the 208 Apartments in downtown Boise. The 208 was recently purchased by Primrose Morse, LLC., a massive corporation based in California. Primrose wasted no time in exploiting their new property: raising rent by 25%, increasing laundry and parking fees, and issuing eviction threats to tenants on the strictest basis possible. No doubt the executives at Primrose expected the 208 tenants to quietly continue to fork over their paychecks to line their own pockets. Unfortunately for them that has not been the case.

Since March tenants at the 208 have been fighting back. Working to organize a tenants’ union, Boise DSA members have been gathering complaints from residents in order to eventually present management (Redstone Residential, Inc.) with demands. Potential demands by tenants include: having management fulfill maintenance requests in a timely manner, improved garbage disposal, and better access to utilities. Black mold is nearly universal, and in the past management has simply painted over black mold when reported. Other tenants do not have drinkable water and have had heater repairs delayed for months into the winter. Management has consistently denied or delayed their response to these problems, but has not hesitated to pressure tenants to renew their leases up to 8 months in advance of termination dates. Tenants are fed up and ready to fight back!

Efforts to resist the exploitation of working tenants at the 208 have just begun to pick up steam. While anger with Primrose and Redstone Residential is near universal, the success of the union in demanding better housing conditions and affordability is not guaranteed. The organizing committee of the 208 Tenants’ Union will fight for these demands no matter what happens, but the difficulties of fighting against management have demonstrated how badly Idahoans need an organized tenant class across the state. As the only existing tenants’ union in Idaho, we are limited in how much pressure we can bring to bear against our corporate landlords.

If more tenants organize in Boise and across Idaho our collective power can grow exponentially. By meeting and sharing problems with fellow tenants we can build a real community of tenants and renters in Idaho, a community which will have the strength to stand up and fight back against housing corporations endlessly working to take more and give less. With enough people fighting together we can build an Idaho with affordable, dignified, and secure housing for all!

If you or someone you know is interested in organizing a tenants’ union contact us at organize208@gmail.com or @organize.208

Hello readers, I am writing again about the housing struggle in Boise. As each successive generation becomes more unlikely to ever afford a house, let alone rent an apartment, I find it eternally pressing.

Recently, our state passed HB 545 ending section 8 housing regulations which mandated an amount of housing go to vouchers in the low income program. In addition, the bill also ends the $30 cap on application fees, which means landlords are more capable of accepting applications from people they have little intention of taking as tenants in order to make a quick buck. Meanwhile, I myself have known several people who have had to accept rent assistance from the state. To clarify, all landlords are no longer mandated to comply with any programs regulating how they price their rental properties, there will be no application fee caps, and rental properties that are condemned will no longer require the landlord to return the deposit to tenants.

It is worth noting that there is a sizable population in this state which can hardly afford rentals. The burden continues to get placed on everyone who pays taxes, although our tax rate is flat. This is patently bourgeois in every conceivable manner. First, the flat tax disproportionately affects the poorest earners, where 30% of 1,000 dollars may be less than 30% of 100,000 dollars, but the net is that one person has 700 dollars after taxes and the other 70,000. Second, the bill’s language explicitly states that this deregulation applies to “residential property” owners. Who are those people, exactly?

From the “mom and pop landlord” (and why should we care if the landlords are big or small, self-made or not?) to the massive complexes such as mine, we have a broad class of landlords who control an ever-increasing amount of the available housing in Boise. Now, with section 8 vouchers effectively optional, landlords can choose their profit margins over actually housing people, further proving that they do not provide anything of value so much as control it, and leverage it against everybody else. Why would a landlord choose section 8 housing besides maybe the opportunistic landlord looking to get “the rest of potential renters?” Given the cost of living in Boise being 5% higher than the national average, with groceries being more expensive than average and houses running for half a million, this legislation is sure to cause a spike in homelessness and also of people leaving the state. Further complicating things is the opportunism of real estate companies and landlords in a time when the housing supply needs to add ~2800 houses in order to meet the demand, and 2000 of those need to be affordable for people who can’t pay more than $600 for rent. Forget “political refugees” (i.e. affluent out-of-staters coming in to save money and finally start their own businesses,) we’re going to have “economic refugees.”

Why does it seem like our legislators are better at passing bills depriving people of housing, stripping trans people of basic dignities, or general culture wars/identity politics, than they are at fixing all the roads, ending the grocery tax, or simply incentivizing working people to even stay here? I predict Idaho becoming a state with one of the lowest working class populations over the next few decades, and what reason do I have not to? Just two years ago I got a job that started me at 8 dollars an hour. With my first promotion, it only went up by two dollars. When rent is around 1000 dollars a month around the valley? I can’t be expected to want to remain in this state — and there are thousands like me.

It’s ironic that people don’t want Idaho to become “another California,” while our legislators actively try to turn this state into a city like Anaheim, which should be known not just for attractions like Disneyland, but also a white, upper class commune resulting from mid-to-late 20th century white flights out of the Deep South.

But I do not mean to instill feelings of hopelessness in the readers, so much as just anger. Thankfully, there are plenty of things we working Idahoans can do collectively — but nothing is ever as easy as just doing it. To this point, might I recommend not merely “voting correctly,” but actually taking matters into our own hands through initiatives like a tenants’ union.

The purpose of the tenants’ union is to take a medium-to-large scale rental property and organize the majority of tenants to demand improved amenities and resist rent increases, which consistently reduces costs of rent. Naturally, the landlords would oppose this wholesale. Why provide things like actually good Internet (or Internet at all,) gas and electric, or even affordable housing when they can keep twisting the knife so they can afford all their pleasures you should be able to afford, all while giving you a shabby box with few amenities to live in? Anyone (and I mean possibly even Joe Normal next door) with a good credit score can take out a loan to acquire a small property and take advantage of tenants, and some even make enough money from this that they can become larger scale landlords. They feed on your labor, and the biggest benefit they can sell you is not having a mortgage, because if you can’t afford the housing, you are simply evicted with haste.

In this capitalist world, the landlord brings less value to the table than even the employer who squanders the workplace. Collectively, as all employers own the workplaces, so too do the landlords have a monopoly on rentals. Publicly-owned housing would solve so many problems and yet we do not have it, because the [establishment] politicians are not our friends and would rather stack a bunch of boulders at the Rhodes Skate Park overpass than house the increasing homeless population.

When the politicians says “property owners” or even something as clear as “landlords,” you should take what they says seriously, because they are not talking about your friend, but the tick that sucks off some of your life force in exchange for you not freezing during the winter. Some consolation prize that is!

Evict the landlords, consider getting into touch with myself or others actively trying to organize tenant unions at their apartment complexes, and may the fight for the world that we built end with it actually belonging to us.

In late March and early April, governor Brad Little signed into law three bills, all of which directly legislate and dictate the ways that transgender Idahoans are able to live their lives.

H.B. 421 redefines ‘men’ and ‘women’ as biological facts, that men are those who produce or should be able to produce sperm, that women are those who produce or should be able to produce eggs, and that any intersex person also fits into one of those categories as assigned by their doctors, regardless of the chromosomes that person has. It also equates gender with sex, defining them as one and the same, a definition that goes completely against the current scientific consensus.

H.B. 538 allows the discrimination of trans individuals by not compelling governmental (including teachers in public schools) workers to use pronouns or language that contradicts someone’s assigned gender at birth.

H.B. 668 stops gender affirming care, which is life saving in some cases, from being covered by Medicaid. Saga Christian, a trans woman from Caldwell, told the Idaho Capital Sun that had she not started utilizing gender affirming care, she would’ve been found “as a suicide statistic.”

As well as those recently passed into law, H.B. 71 was passed in April of last year bans care, medication, and surgery for transgender youth. Despite an ongoing suit in the Supreme Court against the state of Idaho, this law was allowed by the Court to go into effect.

The question then is how does this affect the trans community and individuals of Idaho? To answer this I conducted an anonymous survey to gauge not only how legislation would hurt trans individuals, but also the experiences in general of living in Idaho. Idaho is consistently rated by the ACLU and other sources as a high-risk state to live in for transgender adults, and actively dangerous to live in for transgender youth.

The survey respondents were in total thirteen people, ranging in location from Boise and Nampa to Pocatello and Cottonwood. Those who filled out the survey listed their gender identities as trans women, men, agender, nonbinary, and “none”.

It must be stated that this survey was only able to cover gender identity as a metric. Race and class are both incredibly impactful with how someone is treated in the United States, and one cannot separate aspects of class when talking about gender just as one cannot separate aspects of class when talking about race.

All participants rated on a five point scale the danger of living as a trans person in this state, with five being the safest. Most respondents rated Idaho a three, citing fears like not knowing if spaces “are actually safe or not”, facing harassment if they are not viewed as cis-passing, and that the state itself is “trying to systematically destroy us.”

When asked about their political orientations, all participants were decidedly left with their politics. Political ideologies ranged from “Marxist”, “anarchist” and “communist” to “Green Party”, “leftist” and “democratic socialist”.

The idea of being trans also cannot be removed from politics, as one participant stated, “being trans itself is a radical act.” And it is - transness is first and foremost a recognition that the system we are born into is not only imperfect but systemically flawed. American culture at large and capitalism specifically is a system of rigid binaries and biological essentialism that demands to be perpetuated and have those binaries placed onto all people at birth. Being trans then is the rejection of that system entirely. Transness lies within the framework that, to make the world better, to make your body better, is to destroy the notions that we come to accept as normal and unable to be changed.

Other answers included that “I have to be leftist to fight for my right to be alive”, that “it’s easy to recognize that me and my politics have to be interconnected” and that leftism is “more than performative politics. It’s about taking action.”

The legislation that was recently passed then would impact not only trans people in Idaho, but all vulnerable communities susceptible to discrimination and hate. This legislation makes it so that it’s harder for those communities to get “access to care that I have desperately wanted my entire life [...] a bill like H.B. 668 makes that dream feel like I may never grasp it”, to make it “harder to work, live, and reside in Idaho” and to be “forced back into the closet.” This legislation not only allows for discrimination, but signs it into law, making underrepresented people and groups that much less represented, signing away not only their rights but their personhood as well.

There are spaces, though imperfect, spaces for trans people to come together in community and fight for a world that takes care of them. Places like “leftist organizations such as the YDSA [Young Democratic Socialists of America] and DSA [Democratic Socialists of America]”, “DIY music scenes” and online spaces.

This survey shows that the problems of trans people in this country, the unique hardships they face, are consistently under attack by those in power. For a liberated working class, there must also be a liberation of all unique sectors of it. And the liberation of trans people begins in community organizations like the Boise DSA and YDSA at Boise State.

It is vital that an ideological throughline for liberation be found within the community, and to stand forever with all those oppressed by the parasitic capitalist class to work and fight together for a world worth living in.

We all seem to understand intuitively that the government doesn’t work for us. Whether one is a warehouse worker like myself, a waiter, or an office worker, we all have this in common: the feeling that our "leaders" don't give a damn what we want or need.

Sure once every four years you’ll go vote Red or Blue but what good has that ever done you? If the Republicans really gave a damn about your rights to bear arms they wouldn’t’ve championed the 1994 gun ban. At two former Republican presidents’ urging they banned many semi-automatic firearms at the federal level for ten years. Likewise, if the Democrats really cared about abortion rights wouldn't they have codified it when they had the power to do so? Of course not! This is a well choreographed dance with each political pirouette designed to keep you focused on hating anyone in the opposite colored shirt. When was the last time either of these parties, composed nearly exclusively of Ivy League nepo-babies, has done a damn thing for the common man? Increasing the minimum wage in pace with inflation for example would drive other employers, like yours, to increase their wages likewise.

Workers have precious little political power in this country; we are told to vote once every four years for the color of the next swindler’s tie and be done with it. And what else can we do when things are as tough as they are for the average man? Who’s got the time to get politically active when you’re struggling to feed your family?

That's where the struggle for workers' rights comes in. We endeavor to enfranchise the working class and make policy not on the basis of what is most profitable but instead on the basis of what needs done for the average citizen. We endeavor to be citizens, in the real sense, with power over our government and more importantly power over our future, to be more than just subjects under an aristocracy! After all, it was over nearly the same conditions that the American Revolution was fought in. No taxation without representation? Of course! But what representation do we have now?

Some, understandably, believe the system is broken, but the reality of the matter is that the system is working exactly as intended. From the ground up the State apparatus is designed to keep power AWAY from you and your peers! We toil away keeping the country running while the parasites on top take the lion's share of our labor, sitting in their ivory tower and occasionally feigning interest in our well being to curry votes to maintain their positions of power. So what is there to do?

Join a union!

Unions are the most powerful tool we have for both political potency and financial security. On average union wages are 15 percent higher than comparable non-union jobs. That coupled with better job security and more paid leave is reason enough to start or join one. However, there's an even greater reason, bigger than all of us as individuals: the ability for members of the working class to bargain as a collective and demand not beg, that our conditions be improved. It's only thanks to unions that we have weekends, an 8 hour work day as opposed to 12+, sick leave, paid vacation, and many other labor rights we take for granted. And of course, there are some who have been burned by unions in the past, but this is not an enduring trait of unions' nature, rather the opposite; it is a consequence of the worker being at the mercy of union bureaucrats and of reduction of workers' voice in unions overall. Both are antithetical to labor unions’ explicit goals. We must stand firmly against any structure which acts against the enfranchisement of the worker.

The dictatorship of the elite must be replaced with true democracy, true power for the working class. It’s only by upsetting this unjust balance of power that we can truly be secure in our workplaces and in our nation's future. It’s only by throwing the bosses off our backs that we can be our own leaders and assume our proper place as the rightful stewards of this American experiment which has so regrettably fallen into disrepair. We have the tools to remake it, to construct a country where each and every one of us truly has liberty and justice delivered to us, by us.

We built this country and it’s only fair that we own it, don’t you think?

May Day has been the day of celebration globally for the class which creates all that is necessary to live and to live well, the working class. It is celebrated in more than 140 countries and territories around the world on May 1 or the first Monday in May as a show of international worker solidarity. Although the significance of this day traces its origin to an event in this country, it has been largely ignored here in the United States.

On Saturday, May 1, 1886, thousands of workers around the United States went on strike and marched under the slogan "Eight Hours for work. Eight hours for rest. Eight hours for what we will." Nearly half a million workers from Chicago to New York, to Milwaukee to Detroit marched in solidarity. In Chicago, this is often remembered as leading to the infamous Haymarket Affair in which a bombing took place at a labor demonstration four days later, May 4, 1886, at Haymarket Square in Chicago, Illinois. Eight workers would be framed and convicted of conspiracy though only two of the eight were even at the Haymarket at the time and the two could not even be connected to the throwing of the bomb. Seven were sentenced to death and one to a term of 15 years in prison. Eventually four were hanged on November 11, 1887, one committed suicide while in prison and the remaining three would remain wrongfully convicted until their pardon in 1893. Just before his execution, August Spies, one of the convicted men, cried out the famous words: "There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today."

In commemoration of the general strike and those workers targeted and imprisoned, worker organizations and trade unions demonstrate on the First of May for the material demands of the working class, the demand for a living wage, a respectable and decent job, and a Democratic way of life which has shown to be unattainable under the rule of landlords, bankers and bosses embodied within the economic system we live in.

U.S. resistance to celebrate International Workers' Day in May stems from a resistance to emboldening worldwide working-class unity. In his book, The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day, British labor historian Peter Linebaugh states "The ruling class did not want to have a very active labor force connected internationally … The principle of national patriotism was used against the principle of working-class unity or trade union unity."

In efforts to encourage working people to forget this history President Grover Cleveland signed a law making the first Monday in September of each year a national holiday to remove any association of the original May Day. Much later in 1958 President Dwight D. Eisenhower declared May 1 "Law Day" dedicated to the principles of law and order, and in 2021 President Joe Biden declared May 1st "Loyalty Day" further burying the history of the working people in their struggle.

In the global south, May Day celebrations also commemorate anti-colonial/pro-democracy struggles associated with the nation’s history. In South Africa, the public holiday has come to signify not only the sacrifices made on the long road toward building worker power, but also the bitter battle against Apartheid in which trade and labor unions played a key role. Continuing with this tradition, this year on May day, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa released a statement calling on workers around the world to mobilize for Palestine. “The working class are the creators of wealth, and it is the united power of the working class that has the power to overthrow hateful, brutal regimes like Apartheid Israel … On this Workers Day, we call on workers of the world to unite in defense of Palestine so that its people can be free, from the river, to the sea!”

It is quite remarkable that a spark lit by the oppression of workers in Chicago more than a century ago continues to be a source of inspiration for workers globally towards building worker power.