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Hit the Amazon banner and shop away a small percentage of everything you purchase helps keep the lights on here. It does not cost you more to shop on Amazon via the David Feldman show website. Now, back to our show. Welcome to the broadcast. I'm David Feldman, DavidFeldmanshow.com. Please friend me on Facebook. Follow me on Twitter and read Down with Tyranny, written by our guest, Howie Klein, who is the founder and treasurer of the Blue America Pack. And thank you for joining us, Howie Klein. You're welcome, David. And David, when we were talking earlier, you had asked me a question and I gave you the wrong answer. You asked me how much Wells Fargo had been sued for how much the fine was that they were going to be paying. And I told you it was $135 million. I was lost by $50 million, which is considerable. They have to pay $185 million in a fine. Okay. After the great recession, after the Republicans crashed our economy, President Obama became president. And by the way, that was his name before he was president, President Obama. And there was a bill passed called Dodd-Frank, written by Chris Dodd in the Senate and the great Barney Frank in the house. And it was a bill that, a bill that was passed, but it was a bill in search of actual statutes. They never really figured out what the bill was, but they passed it, and then they began to debate it afterwards. But one of the things that was in Dodd-Frank was the establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which would be housed inside the Federal Reserve. It would answer to the Fed, not Congress, not the president. It would answer to the Fed. And President Obama wanted Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which would protect Americans from predatory lending, from shady stockbrokers, and from horrible banks creating phantom accounts to cook their books. We have instead a guy named Caudry, who's the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The Republicans loathe the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This week, you write about Wells Fargo being fined $185 million by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Is that a lot of money for Wells Fargo, how he climbed? Well, it is. It's a lot, well, I don't know if it's a lot of money for them, but it's $185 million is a lot of money, anybody, anyway. And that's just the beginning of this thing. So that's just what they agreed to pay. Now, there's a lot there that isn't about that $185,000. They opened up $600,000 credit cards for people who didn't ask for credit cards. They opened up hundreds of thousands of accounts and charged people fees who didn't even know they had these accounts. They just did it. And how were they paying those fees to all those people? Were they paying those fees? And where was that money coming out of their checking account, their savings account? Yeah, so in other words, the problem is this. This is what it's down to. The higher ups at the bank, what we call the bankers or the banksters, in FDR's words, had more at Wells Fargo than any other bank by far, had this thing where if you were a low-level employee, just someone who could literally be threatened, if you don't do your job, you'll be working in McDonald's next week. So that level of a person. They're pressuring them that if any is a teller, say, or a telemarketer, anyone who's dealing with Wells Fargo customers, they're telling them you've got to sell more products. So it's people who already have an account, say they have a checking account. They're supposed to sell them other things, like whether it's a credit card or a savings account or a mortgage or something that Wells Fargo was selling. They had a quota that they had to sell, a very, very, very high quota. So it made it like a pressure chamber in that bank. Everybody was freaking out. And what they started doing, 5,300 of these, let's call them tellers, although they weren't all tellers, but a lower-level employee. 5,300 of them opened up accounts for customers without those customers knowing. All 5,300 of those people either have been or are in the process of being fired. The people who made them do it, the executives who forced them to do this, who threatened them and terrorized them, none of them are being fired. If you talk about $185 million, that money comes from the shareholders of Wells Fargo. That doesn't come from these executives who did this stuff. These executives still have to, hopefully, face punishment by the Justice Department. It's what I'm hoping is that they will be charged with something. Now, Obama doesn't charge any bankers with anything ever, so that's not going to happen. So the only hope we have is either President Hillary or President Trump pansy will do something when one of them take over. But Obama will do nothing. It's a very, very, very serious matter. And the Republicans, you brought up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is part of Doug Frank, something that Elizabeth Warren wrote. She wrote the Statute for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The Republicans have, the number one priority in terms of the financial industry has been to cripple that agency. That is more than anything else that they hate that agency. And it's not just the Republicans. It is basically all Republicans plus conservative Democrats. So what I did in my post that down with tyranny was to explain the whole Wells Fargo scandal and then go into how Wells Fargo, why would they have the nerve to do this? I mean, this is pretty blatant. Cheating thousands and thousands and thousands of customers out of immense amounts of money. We don't even know how much money they cheated their customers out of yet. It's still being worked out. However, what I tried to get at is where does Wells Fargo have the nerve? The managers of Wells Fargo have the nerve. Now they have their own pack that puts a lot of money into politics, millions and millions and millions of dollars into politics. And I traced the money just for this year. It took me a whole day to do just the kind of money they were spending this year only, not last year, not for the last decade or two decades, but this year to see where that money was going. And they spend it mostly on Republicans. I mean, two thirds of it went to Republicans. And then most of the rest of it went to very conservative and corrupt Democrats. But it was mostly the Republicans. And it was targeted specifically at Republicans and conservative Democrats who have power over their issues specifically. So it went right to the committee in Congress called the House Financial Services Committee. That's the committee that Doug Frank came out of. Barney Frank used to be the chairman of that. And now it's a crooked Republican from Texas named Jeb Hans-Sawling. So I want to see what the patterns were of what would normally be called a bribe. I mean, these people in Congress have defined campaign donations as not a bribe. So legalistically, this money is not a bribe, but it's exactly a bribe. They're giving it to, and that's giving it to random people. They're not giving it to random congressmen. They're giving it to congressmen. For example, I'll give you one perfect example. The real big money would be like a $10,000 pop. That would go to someone like Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House. He would get $10,000. Now that's a lot of money from one company to get in one year. But there's only one person that got a bigger amount of money this year than Paul Ryan, who is the speaker and you know, it's a big shot in that world. And the only person who got more is a guy who you may never have even heard of named Sean Duffy. Sean Duffy is a relatively junior congressman, also like Ryan from Wisconsin. And Sean Duffy, why would he get $15,000? Very, very simple. He is a member of that committee. And more than that, he is the chairman of the subcommittee. So in other words, the exact subcommittee who's supposed to watch these banks and have oversight over them, the person who's supposed to do that is Sean Duffy. They gave him $15,000. Now how could that not be a bribe? In what universe is that not a bribe? I don't get it. I mean, when you look at the list of who they gave money to, it's just one powerful person on the House Financial Services Committee after another. Every single one who got the big amount, I'm not talking about the people who got $500 or $1,000. I'm talking about the people who got $10,000 and $8,000 and $7,000. Big amount of money from one company. And remember, we're just talking about one company now, Just Wells Fargo. All these banks are doing this and all of their trade associations and all of their lobbyists. They're all giving money and it comes to millions and millions of dollars every single year. And that's how they get away with this kind of behavior. And that's why they hate Elizabeth Warren so much. And that's why they hate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau so much. They are flipping out over this. They're trying to cut off their budget. They're trying to not pay the employees of this organization. They're trying to do anything they can to destroy the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose only job is to protect consumers. That's it. That's their job. Protect consumers. Who are these consumers? These are the people who vote for these congressmen. Is it fair to say that Elizabeth Warren wanted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau housed within the Federal Reserve to make sure it was immune from bribes like that? Well, yes. The direction you're going in is exactly right. She wanted it to be immune from the pressures of Congress. That was her goal, so it would not be politicized. In other words, the last thing you need is... The first thing that would happen if Congress got a tan on this, the very, very first thing would be there's no question what would happen. A banking lobbyist would replace Cordury. That's what would happen. That would be the first thing. And then they would do nothing. They would do the opposite of suing banks. They would be underwriting banks and giving banks permission to rip people off. That's what the job would be. So, of course, she was very, very smart to do that, to take it away from Congress. Congress, of course, is flipping out over that. And they haven't stopped. And the day that passed, they have not stopped trying to get their hands on this organization and control it. That's what they want to do. And they carry on about it no end. Then they pass. They pass all their nonsense over and over again. You know, we're lucky now because they can't get it through the Senate, that legislation through the Senate because the Democrats have been blocking it. And we have Obama in there who, at least, would veto it if it never did get passed. But who knows what's going to happen next year if the Republicans win... If they keep the majority in the Senate and they win enough seats to keep the majority in the House and then Trump wins, you know, anything goes. I mean, not anything goes. What goes is simple. They will destroy the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau immediately, like the first day. Even before it builds the wall, they will destroy the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Citizens United has to be overturned. And we have to get the money out of politics because it has corrupted the political system to the point where we no longer control our economic destiny. The Federal Reserve was set up 100 years ago by Woodrow Wilson to protect the economy from the lobbyists. There are two types of ways to stimulate the economy. There's fiscal stimulus and then monetary stimulus. Fiscal stimulus is done through Congress. They control the purse strings. And if there's a recession, in the past, Congress would have a fiscal policy. They would pump money into the economy. I do something like, for example, infrastructure building. You build a bunch of highways, for example, and that stimulates the economy. It puts money into the economy. Few people having jobs and then they spend the money in the grocery store and then the grocer has some money and he buys a new car, etc. That's the Keynesian stimulus. And that's morally correct because you can follow that money. You can find the corruption. You can say, hey, this money wasn't spent properly. And as far as I know, Joe Biden was in charge of President Obama's 2009 fiscal stimulus, which wasn't enough. I think it was close to a trillion dollar stimulus package. Very little money was wasted, right? Weren't they pretty good about that money being spent properly? Yes, although the amount of money was cut back drastically. So I don't know what they really wanted to spend, but they didn't even get a quarter of what they wanted to spend. It wasn't enough, but the stimulus package really worked. And history will record it as being enough to change our environmental policy. We're bearing the fruits of solar power and cheaper batteries because of the stimulus package. So that's fiscal policy that's controlled by Congress and that's how you stimulate the economy one way. The other way is monetary policy. That's the Federal Reserve deciding what interest rate should be. And that's pretty cloudy. That is undemocratic. That is these high priests of finance controlled by bankers determining interest rates and you stimulate the economy by lowering interest rates and you slow the economy down to fight inflation by raising interest rates. That's monetary policy and that is voodoo. And nobody understands what's really going on at the Fed. They are doing quantitative easing, buying back bonds, but nobody really knows. They're printing money, but nobody really knows. Nobody really understands it. It's very mysterious. It's smoke and mirrors and it's undemocratic. And the bankers want it that way because Bernanke and Yellen, they're part of the revolving door on Wall Street and they're bankers. The Federal Reserve is a bank and they are controlling interest rates and they're controlling whether or not the economy is growing or shrinking. It's unconstitutional. The Constitution gives the power of the purse strings to Congress. It is Congress's job to determine fiscal policy and because of the corruption in Washington D.C., we no longer trust politicians to determine the fate of our economy. It's being left to bankers, private bankers at the Federal Reserve and they put the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau inside the Fed to enforce these Dodd-Frank because nobody trusts Congress because of the bribes. So they put the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the Fed where the bribes come from. So either way we're screwed. Right. Well fortunately they don't exercise control. I mean it's not like Janet Yellen or any of the regional presidents of the Fed control the Cordray. Cordray is the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Yeah. But you know they're doing, it's been around for a few years, they're really not kicking ass, are they? The Consumer Financial... They're doing pretty well, yes they are. I mean you know could they do better? I'm sure they could. But they're doing better than I expected them to, that's for sure. Yeah. They have been, you know, I mean their purview is very specific. I mean like I said earlier in order for these bankers to be held accountable it has to come from the Justice Department. You know right now, I mean I guess the theory is this. The theory is if you find which they can do and they do and when you find a bank then the shareholders lose some value and then the shareholders can then say well let's fire these executives. But that doesn't ever happen. It just doesn't work that way unfortunately. It's like never, never works that way. So when they find the bank it's just these portion of shareholders who lose. And that's the end of that. In another life you ran a record company. I did. And you dealt with lawyers and accountants and professionals. It was really possible but I did. Right. And you came out of that experience with a contempt for the professional class. Is that a fair statement? Uh, hmm... Yeah, partially. That there are white collar workers who call themselves accountants and lawyers who will license to be accountants and lawyers. And will what? Will lie? Will cheat? Right? To make numbers sing. Right? Uh... And don't they tend to say well it's the world we live in. Yes. That's, you know, it's not my fault. It's the system. I'm talking about the record industry. Right? I'm just trying to... Right, I'm just, you know, I'm not sleazy. I'm just, you know, this is the system and we just have to accept it. Right? Yep. And we don't have to accept it. Right? I have a story that I worked on that's coming up in a couple of hours on my blog that is a letter of resignation from someone not from the record industry, although I talked a little bit about the record industry as a matter of fact, but it's someone who worked at Wells Fargo. And he writes a letter to the CEO of Wells Fargo telling him why he is residing from the company. He refused to be part of this system that they were using to rip off their own customers. And when I wrote about it, I certainly was thinking the entire time I was writing how similar it was to the record industry, which is funny. I mean, you and I obviously didn't speak about this before in any way, shape or form, and here we were both taking in the same direction. Yeah. My advice, one of the things I've learned as I get older in dealing with the professional class in America is don't talk to them on the phone. Use email. There are some tricks that they use. They all want to talk on the phone. They all want to have conference calls. They're not willing to put any of their advice into writing. If you're dealing with a lawyer, an accountant, a broker, a real estate appraiser, anybody who has a professional title, get it in writing. They all want to talk on the phone. They all want to inject the human element into this because there's no accountability when you inject the human element. Get it in writing. If they say something, have them put it in an email. Back it up with words. This is a professional class in the United States. It's all cronyism. It's not just politics. It's not just Washington, D.C. It's the whole system is cronyism. You all circle the wagons for each other, protect each other, and then you're good. But God forbid you're a whistleblower like this person from Wells Fargo who quits. Nobody wants to work with that person because they won't circle the wagons and protect their own. And it doesn't happen in other countries the way it does in the United States. It really doesn't. It's really endemic to America. People just say, well, it's very complicated. It's a very complicated system. No, no, you're greedy, incompetent, you're lazy, and you're making it more complicated to cover up the fact that you're just sleazy. Hey, gerrymandering Howie Klein. You still there? I am. Gerrymandering. I read an interesting article. It's axiomatic that the Democrats will not win the House in November because of gerrymandering. But I read an article that says that the Democrats can win the House because the Republicans are spreading the districts thin. In other words, there aren't enough Republicans to spread out into other districts to turn a purple district red. Have you heard this? Yes. Well, it's a theory. And unfortunately, the theory is irrelevant. It could be true. You have to think of it in terms of the actual districts themselves. So you look at the three suburban districts around Philadelphia as a good example. These are three gerrymandered districts to protect Republicans. And what they do is they'll take lots and lots of Democrats and dump them into one district. All the Democrats are concentrated in one district and that gives the Republicans a little bit of breathing space and they don't have to worry about all these Democrats. So in other words, the one Democratic district with all the Democrats in it will be, say, a D plus 10. That's a lot of extra Democrats plus 10. Whereas the Republican districts that they create around it will be R plus 1, R plus 2. So if they have a bad year, they can lose those districts. It's possible to lose them there. An R plus 1 or an R plus 2, they favor Republicans, but not overwhelmingly. No Republican is going to win a D plus 10. But it's absolutely feasible for a Democrat to win an R plus 1 or an R plus 2 or even an R plus 3. So that's what you were getting at. But my problem with this is when you're talking about winning back the House this coming November, let's go back to those Philadelphia districts again. Here are three R plus 1 and R plus 2 districts that are very, very targetable. In fact, so targetable that the DCCC said we will not win back the House if we don't take these districts. These are the districts we need to take. So basically suburban districts around New York, for example, around Philadelphia, around all the big cities. There are districts like this. Guess what? The Democrats failed at recruiting candidates that they're not supporting candidates in these districts. So let's take one, as an example, Pennsylvania 7. This is an important district. It was formally held by Joe Sestak, a Democratic congressman. When he retired to run for the U.S. Senate, a Republican won the district barely. But he's a Republican. A weak, unimportant Republican named Pat Meehan is now a congressman. It's basically almost all of Delaware County except the black people who they pushed out into a Democratic district so they don't have to worry about the black people who they're afraid were all those Democrats. They're not in the district. But it's still a close district. Obama won it against McCain closely and he lost it against Romney closely. But it's very, very close both times. So there's a prime district that the Democrats have to win. Hillary is ahead in that district by gigantic proportion. I mean, 40 points. That's how much she's ahead of Trump. There have been educated white people who normally are very happy voting Republicans. Some of them vote Democrats. Some of them vote Republicans. But the Republicans are not going for Trump. They detest him. I was reading this long family at Washington Post this week about that area. It wasn't about that district per se, but about the whole area. It was based on focus groups that show that these educated women, they don't even hear Trump's message anymore. They won't listen to what he says. To them, he's a lout. He's a racist. He is what they want to protect their children from. They don't want him in the White House. They will vote for Hillary or they'll sit on their hands. They do not want him. So you take these districts, changing them massively. What have the Democrats done to take back the house that you're talking about? Nothing. They recruited a Wall Street creep to run in the district with just a nothing candidate. The local Democrats told them, you're crazy. We've got our own candidate. Don't bring in some outsider. And the DCCC, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told them to shut up. And they brought in their own candidate. The locals ran a political science professor, a really good candidate named Mary Ellen Balchunis. Mary Ellen Balchunis beat the Atollo Vistausian candidate and all the money and outspent her 20 to one or something. She beat him 74 to 26%. She got 74%. He got 26%. What does the DCCC then do? These people who say they want to win back the house and identify this district as a district you have to take. They pack up their tents and they walk away. They're not supporting her. They're telling donors not to give her money. They don't want anything to do with her. And they're just giving up the district and letting Padme hand Republican win it again. And they're doing this. I'm telling you about one district. They're doing this everywhere in the country. You can name any state and I'll tell you where they're doing the same thing. That is the DCCC. That is why these theories about what could happen and what might happen don't matter. When you read the COOP report telling you about this nonsense, if they're not going district by district and telling you what the real story is on the ground, it doesn't matter what these theories are. It makes no difference. Because, you know, let's take another one so I can make the same point. Under Tom DeLay, a very corrupt, very powerful Texas congressman who is the also, when Denny Hastor was the speaker of the House, it was really Tom DeLay who was the majority leader who ran the show. Hastor didn't run any show. It was all about DeLay until he was forced to resign or go to jail. But before he was forced to resign, he oversaw a redistricting of the whole state of Texas in the way that you and I just talked about. They gerrymandered the state up. They went from a majority Democratic congressional delegation to a big majority Republican delegation. So they would do things like take the city of Austin, which is, you know, Travis County and Austin is the county seat. So take that county, divide it up in four, and spread it out to Democrats so that they're inconsequential to these districts that went all over the state. So instead of like Austin, Texas would be two Democratic seats. If it was just Austin, Texas or just Travis County, that's two Democratic seats. Instead, it's three Republican seats and one Democratic seat. That's how they were able to divide up Austin. And this is what they've done all over Texas. Let me add a quick question about this. I'm sorry to interrupt. You always think of Texas as a diehard red state. So isn't it fair that Texas should send more Republicans to Washington than Democrats? Well, you shouldn't think of it as a diehard Republican state. I mean, it's not. I mean, it's the way it's gerrymandered it is. Well, they have, you know, Anne Richards hasn't been governor for 20 years. I mean, they do tend, they send Republicans to the Senate. They have Republican governors. Doesn't it follow? They always vote for the Republican. It's definitely a red state. But there are big pop, I mean, you know, Texas is now either has just become or is just about to become a minority majority state. So in other words, less than 50% of the state is now white. So it's, you know, Texas is changing also. There are big swaths of Texas. I just gave you an example of Austin, which would absolutely be two Democratic congressmen and is now three Republicans and one Democrat. We've got to wrap Howie. We're running out of time. Very quickly, I wanted to ask you about President Obama and Nancy Pelosi. Is Nancy Pelosi to the Democrats want the House back? Or is that, or are they afraid that, is there more money for the Democrats not to have the House? No, they want the House back. They do. But they're incapable of getting it back. Nancy Pelosi has passed her prime many years ago and is not capable of putting together a cohesive DCCC. She's in charge of it. She's completely failed. It's the worst failure of her entire career. She can't put together a DCCC that has the capacity to win. Do they want to win? Yeah, they want to win. But there are other priorities. For example, the people who run the DCCC would rather remake the Democratic Party into a conservative force and they put their priorities there. So like I told you about when we talked about Pennsylvania 7, they were trying to get a conservative in there when the conservative was defeated by a progressive, they walked away from the district. Fantastic. Howie Klein writes the down with tyranny blog. It's a must read. And he is the founder and treasure of the Blue America pack. Let's talk next week, I hope. Okay, I look forward to it. Thank you, buddy. Thank you.