 Welcome to this week's legislative update. I'm Jim Baumgart, your host. Thank you very much for coming and joining Cal Potter, my guest and I in our four week discussion and this is number four week dealing with the issue of the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazis and the actions that took place in Virginia and statutes and civil war and fairness, which seems to be lost in the process sometimes, Cal Potter. Welcome to the program. Nice beer. There is a far right. Yes. And the president, Trump, bless his soul, did get into some trouble when he tried to say the far left and the far right have issues on both sides. But when you take the far left and you're talking about neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan and the far right and a variety of others, you're not talking about left and right. You're talking about very radicals in the left. And so I think the president who has lost people on all kinds of councils and have resigned didn't have an understanding of the issue or if he did, he certainly didn't understand that he shouldn't justify people from that group as having a reason to be angry or justify their actions, because they're different. Well, we're a pluralistic country and when you become president, you have to, you need to keep that in mind. Like pluralistic, I mean. I mean, you can't put your foot in the mouth. Well, you've got to realize that we're a country of different religions, different races, different cultures. And it has always been a melting pot. It has not always been the pot melding the different parts together easily. We've talked about in previous programs that when people, Italian Catholics and Irish Catholics came here, oftentimes they did jobs that a lot of white Protestants didn't do and didn't want and or they were taking jobs and eventually they became very stereotypical. The Chinese worked on the railroads, the Irish worked on the railroads. And the Native Americans, they shipped out west or killed them. Sure. And so the different groups that make up our society weren't always treated fairly or rightly, but we've made progress, we've made some progress, but we do have people today that are right-wing that we call the alt-right that have added issues to them that are relying on prejudice and doing damage, I think, to the long-term well-being of this country by their viewpoints. For example, the alt-right has got this very strong support for building a wall along the Mexican border to the tune of many billions of dollars. Your normal person has probably started saying, well, those billions of dollars maybe oughta go into Trumpcare and see if we can help some people pay for their health insurance, rather than putting a wall up in the year 2017, 18, 1920, that doesn't make a lot of sense because of the fact that we're just simply blaming people from of Mexican heritage for some problems. So whether you're blaming black people, or you're blaming Irish Catholics or Italian Catholics, or Hispanic, whatever you pick out in history to be the scapegoat here, this is 2017. Maybe we oughta start looking at things a little more cerebrally and building that wall at the advice and console and pushing of the alt-right is something we oughta be looking at. Another thing is globalization. Yeah, we're becoming a smaller world, there's seven billion people, and we do share. We, communication today through the computer, you can email anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds. We have goods that come from all over the world. What we oughta do is we oughta trade policies that require workers in other countries, maybe to have workers' comp and unemployment comp and health insurance and some of the benefits that we expect workers to have when they give their services in employment. But we ought not to simply say, we're not gonna trade with people, we don't want to communicate with the rest of the world and we set up walls around people and around countries and discriminate. And that far left is willing to risk the economy of our own country to meet a goal that they would like to meet, a sort of entrenched kind of approach to my way or the highway. So, you know, extremism is not something that usually bears a lot of fruit. The answers are usually, as you know, somewhere in the middle, and it takes cooperation between different opinions, different political parties, and unfortunately, this president has not reached out to the middle nor to other parties to try to formulate a policy that reflects this country. It's not gonna be very long before this country is gonna be majority non-white. And to think that somehow we're gonna have white supremacy in this country is just ludicrous. In 20 years, it's gonna be minority as a majority. Sure. And that means that we need to get along and if the country's gonna flourish, we need to make sure that all people participate in government, in sharing of wealth, all these things. And so we can't put up these- You mean we can't let 1% get all the money? Oh yeah, we can't do that, not if you're gonna- I mean, we wouldn't wanna take it from them, but we'd want them to share and to maybe raise a minimum wage from $7.25 or $7.75 to $9. Well, if you look at periods in our history when this country has flourished the most, you'll find out that there were tax rates, income tax rates on a federal level and even on some state levels, that redistributed the wealth. Absolutely. And it did bring about a buying power amongst the lower and middle class that fueled tremendous growth in this country. If you go back to the 50s and the 60s and the 70s, and even go back to the Eisenhower administration, eight years that President Eisenhower was in, if you look at the tax rates on highest income, they were very, very high. What it did is it redistributed the wealth. It said that people who had so much, they ought to give part of it to the betterment of society. Society cannot operate when you have a few people having all the wealth. It just doesn't work. I ran into two old ladies one time who just said to me, you wanna let those rich people keep their money? I says, it isn't a matter of letting rich people keep their money, it's how does the economy operate? There is just so much money. Everybody can't be a billionaire. It's not possible. In other words, you can't keep on pumping money, printing money so that everybody gets a billion dollars. You can't do it. So what you do is there's a certain amount of money out there and when 10% of the people have 90% of the money and 90% of the people have 10% of the money, that 90% or 10% of the money don't buy cars, they don't buy houses, they don't buy refrigerators, they don't buy stoves. They've got them already. Yeah, well, they don't have them and they're not gonna get them. That's what it amounts to. So what you need is you need a tax policy that allows money to be redistributed through preferential tax burdens on lower income people and programs to help them participate in the society. And when they did, in the 50s, in the 60s and the 70s, this country developed a middle class that the world has never seen and a working class of people who had houses and cars and television sets and a standard of living that no people in the history of mankind ever had. It's changing and what's changed is the fact that we have allowed now about 10% of the people to have the majority of wealth and what are they doing with it? They're not necessarily investing in this country. They're swirling it away in Swiss banks and so it's not just Americans. I mean, the Russians are a classic example of it. What's gonna come out of this Mueller report is gonna be some real dandy stuff. These rich oligarchs who control fertilizer and aluminum and mining and whatever, all Putin's friends, they're raping Russia. They're taking billions of dollars and they're shipping it off to banks in Cyprus and other countries of the world and what they're gonna find out is some of them were German banks and some of those branches of the German banks were in New York City and some of the money you lent from those German banks are people who are associated with Trump Camp King. Now, I'm not saying Donald Trump is part of a Shreister movement who's involved in this. But his money was all over the place. Well, some of his friends were beneficiaries of a lot of that money I think they're gonna find out and they're finding out of the laundered money that Putin has sent over to the overseas. I wish the Russian people could rise up and just throw that bum out. He's a dictator, he's a former KGB and he's probably the richest person in the world and he's got billions of dollars that he's taken from his own people by getting cuts of the aluminum industry. Whatever, when communism was dissolved and the state didn't own these industries, they were auctioned off at a cheap price to a few people. They were his friends and they're rewarding him with billions and billions of dollars and they have billions and billions of dollars that they're laundering and they're laundering it through real estate deals, some of them in this country. So what I'm saying is a few people having all the wealth does never benefit the majority of the society and the people or the well-being of the society in the long run. No society has done well when a few people have all the wealth. Mexico's a good example of that. One of the reasons why Mexicans have always tried to come over here is because a few percentage of Mexican rich people have run that country and when they've run that country, it has not been in any way fueling hope for the poor and with a large population increase, those people have come across the border looking for landscaping jobs or long dishwashing jobs, whatever they can get. Working on farms so it gets three square of the day. Sure. So you can see examples of this idea of discrimination of against people, of being against trying to globalization and being fair to everybody. This idea of pitting one group against another has not boarded well for most countries that have had this type of problems. And that shift in wealth, whether it's people spending $40 or $50 million of their company's money in campaigns, doesn't make for a better country. Certainly what you want is entrepreneurs that are entitled to earn as much money as they can but must share part of that money. They shouldn't be held back, but they shouldn't be told you get to keep 90% of the wealth and you don't have to share it. That hasn't worked out well as you mentioned and it's not gonna work out in the future. The whole issue of labor unions. So why did labor unions develop? Well, labor unions develop because if you go back in time in the 1920s, the laissez-faire conservatism that we had at capitalism did have a lot of rich people. To turn it a century, these big mansions that we see in this country built by the Rockefellers and the Vanderbiltz and the Melons and the Morgans and so on, those people had a lot of money, they flaunted it and they did a lot of good things, I mean the carnities and so on. But what happened is that we did have a disparity of wealth in this country and it was the growth of the labor union saying this is crazy working 60 hours a week at a very low pay with no safety, with no health benefits, no insurance. You mean letting five-year-olds and 10-year-olds work in factories? So we had a labor union movement. But we must take care of our labor which is to end the program, but you're right. People need to understand that to have a successful country we need to all work together and to share and that doesn't mean that people shouldn't pay a fair price for their being Americans and they should do that. Thank you, Cal Potter, for joining us and until next week, this has been Legislative Update. Small thing.