 Greetings, everyone. Welcome to Progressive Discussions. I'm your host, James P. Madonna, and this is part two of a pre-election show that is coming to you live streamed on YouTube from the Garden State of New Jersey. I have here a person who is most likely the only and the best progressive political candidate when she chooses to run, Lisa McCormick from New Jersey. Lisa, I'm very pleased to have you on the shelf for the first time. Thank you. And now, and she is with her good friend, Mr. Jim Divine, very knowledgeable man. Good to be here. Okay, great. Now, being that Lisa is the only true progressive that I know of in New Jersey, because New Jersey seems to be just congested with establishment politicians, regardless of which party, I think that those that are listening that are from New Jersey should really pay attention with this woman, as to say. Now, this election coming up Tuesday, like we said before, is most likely the most important election in modern-day American history, and people should make it their business to vote. It only takes me 15 minutes to vote, not counting me talking to my friends over there, but the actual voting, you get the sample ballot, you read it, you read the questions on the bottom, make your decision, and you vote. Easy. Now, in 2016, almost two-thirds of Americans didn't vote. So the lowest common denominators, the dregs of society always vote. So therefore, we have Donald Trump, sometimes I call him the bloated toad or Trump hands the, you know, but that's, that's me. That's not Lisa. But anyway, Lisa. Well, yeah, we were talking, we were talking about the importance of voting. And I think that when, when I talked to people about voting, I said, you know, it's one thing to think that we have crooked politicians and that everything's all corrupt and the systems are rigged. But we have to remember that we're the police. And we're the ones who are supposed to throw people out of office if they're not doing their jobs. And what I did when I ran for office is I wanted to identify the problems and why the average people, you know, can't run. Because, you know, we are frustrated with voting. And there's no question that the insiders put, it's to their advantage that they have based, I started when I ran for office and they said to me, well, how much money do you have? And so they didn't even want, you know, to talk to me or endorse me or anything. And the reason that that's so important is because if we don't have the candidates that we want on the ballot, it's very hard to get behind candidates. Now, of course, this election is coming up and we can't have Donald Trump moving forward with his terrible policies. And we do have to vote the Democratic line so that we get, you know, as much power back in the House and the Senate as we can. And we also don't want to, we don't want people discouraged into thinking that they don't have power. And I know we think that we're doing our duty by not voting because when we have a choice between bad and worse, it feels like, well, we're telling the system, you know, we're not happy with you, so I'm not going to vote. But the problem is, when we don't vote, we're actually telling them, go ahead, do what you want to do. You know, continue without our interaction with our power, without our, you know, without your power. And I tell people, yes, we're fighting discouragement and disappointment and apathy and ignorance when we don't vote. So we have to fight those things and vote despite these feelings that we have. However, we also have to unite and learn about the process and learn, why are we getting choices of bad and worse? And how can we work together to get better candidates on the ballot? And I can't tell you how many events I've gone to, progressive and others, that people say we don't get involved in free primary elections. And that is so important because otherwise we're leaving it up to the insiders to pick who's on the ballot. Now, after this election in November, when we have a choice between bad and worse, and we're going to, you know, try and get back to the House and the Senate, we're going to go forward and teach people that they have to run for office. And that we have to, if you're interested in running for assembly next year, you have to go out and get your signatures and have the signatures in by the end of March so that we can actually have progressive candidates on the ticket. So on one hand, you know, yes, it's very important to vote and we want to get out there and we want to claim back our power, but it's not enough. We also have to get involved in the free primary elections or, you know, in the free primary offices and encourage people run, get your signatures, figure out how to run for office, you know, and overcome the typical objections that people have of like, I don't have time and money. And I'm going to let you jump in here because I know this is your your forte. No, no, I think at least it made an excellent point that there's a lot of people and a lot of groups that have a policy where they don't make pre primary endorsements. They don't get involved until the party has selected a nominee. One of the things that we've talked about for a long time is that primary elections are the most consequential elections. They're the ones that really matter. First of all, if you don't have competition in the primaries, people who vote literally have no choice. And and that only breeds an opportunity for the Democratic Party to back the worst candidates that we could possibly muster. As a party, if you want Democratic candidates to excel, if you want to have the best choices, you have to give people choices at the primary level. And you have to not only be prepared to to, you know, back the candidates who win the primaries, but you have to be prepared to encourage and recruit candidates to run in those primaries. You have to give the voters a choice. That's that's without without a choice. Democracy doesn't work. It's a competitive system. It's dependent upon having that competition. Well, getting the primary elections is is the place to be for progressives? Well, Jesse Ventura, I think, inspired like the Our Revolution organization today by by running on a low low budget campaign when he ran for governor of Minnesota, and then he won on a low budget campaign. And whether or not he decided to stay is not the point. But that kind of, I guess, inspired independence. And I know Bernie Sanders, organization with Nina Turner has been on a roll in many states. I have yet to see them full force in New Jersey. But that's another talk show. But we do have some active Our Revolution chapters in New Jersey. There are some key key differences between Jesse Ventura and Bernie's presidential election. First of all, Jesse Ventura was running against. In Minnesota, there was there were a Democratic candidate and a Republican candidate who had a high profile election, and both of them were very unpopular. Jesse Ventura didn't spend a lot of money on his candidacy, but he brought to the race celebrity quality. He was a character who attracted attention wherever he went. And, you know, in depending on the depending on the party or the the operatives, they call it earned media where that where you get publicity, where you get attention from the public, or you're in the newspapers, or you're on TV. And frankly, many, many candidates, Bernie Sanders is a presidential candidate was denied coverage by the major networks. Whereas this buffoon from New York, they'd spend all day covering nonsense that he put out as a tweet. So, you know, the news, the news media, the corporate owned news media can be highly selective in what they pick and choose to put in front of people. And that has a big impact. Yeah, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, too. He already came in with huge celebrity status and that helped him. Now, is am I like is it seems like Michael Bloomberg is starting to lean towards being progressive because of the insanity of Donald Trump? I know what by comparison to, first of all, Donald Trump is neither conservative nor liberal. He's a lunatic. And that's, you know, that's, he's a gentleman, too. Class. Michael Bloomberg is a billionaire. Now he's pro gun control. He's a billionaire. So if you're interested in promoting the 99%, Michael Bloomberg is not your guy. Oprah Winfrey is a billionaire. Tom Steyer, who wants to impeach the president is a billionaire. None of these guys are going to speak for the 1% because they don't understand the world we live in. You know, it costs about a billion dollars to run for president. So instead of going out and getting a million people to give you a thousand dollars, and that's a billion dollars, the most of us couldn't have couldn't manage a thousand dollar contribution. These guys would reach into their pocket right a check. So they live in an entirely different world until we get a grasp on political campaign financing. We're going to have a big problem and and electing billionaires or electing people who are popular among billionaires and willing to do their bidding. That's just not the way to reform democracy. We generally have we genuinely have to find ordinary people who are willing to rise to the occasion. And frankly, that was, you know, the greatest appeal for Lisa in this election and the greatest appeal to many people. I mean, an ordinary person rising up to meet extraordinary circumstances is kind of the American story. And Lisa's campaign showed that you can build a network and with the People Powered Campaign get 160,000 votes. Now, take bear in mind what that was 60 160,000 votes is more votes than were cast in the 2015 Democratic primary. That is more votes than the combined total of two congressmen and the assembly speaker in the 2013 US Senate primary. So what Lisa Lisa's vote total was an extraordinary accomplishment. She got almost half as many votes as Bernie Sanders did in the presidential year, which was, of course, a much higher turnout. And and while she did not succeed in winning the nomination, she certainly showed that there is a method to accomplishing progressive vote getting that we can manage without a great deal of money by using a People Powered Campaign that is truly dependent upon volunteers talking to other people to other citizens. And and what we what we also have to remember is what Bernie said. It's not me. It's us that no one person can do this, that we need to get people involved. We need to find 80 people to run for state assembly next June. We need to find maybe 75 people to run for county offices next June. We need to find hundreds of people to run for mayor and council in their local communities where those offices are on the ballot. And we need to find literally thousands of people to run for the grassroots level district county committee member. And if we can do that, if we can deal and put progressives on the ballot, we will win some of those elections and we will secure a place in in power for the left, which has been generally excluded. Now, the problem with the thing with the Republicans is they they it seems like they need to cheat to win, whether it be voter IDs, gerrymandering, etc. etc. You know, when those should be abolished, of course, you know, just keep it the popular vote, no electoral college, no superdelegates, and a driver's license requires your original birth certificate. So if your photo driver's license is not enough, I mean, I think it's a way of suppressing the minority vote, people of color, and you know, Lisa knows well about that subject. Well, I mean, I was gonna say, but they think the biggest obstacle that we have is the war against the 99% and Bernie called it, you know, the war against the middle class. And I said, Yeah, but it's more like us, the middle class was slaughtered because we weren't fighting back. Tax laws have been benefiting the rich and the corporations laws in general have been benefiting the rich and the corporations and our democracy has been for sale for a long time. At one point, we were told, Oh, if some millionaire runs for office, we won't have to make donations, we won't have to fund his campaign, he can do it for us. What we didn't realize is when we gave that that privilege away, we also gave away our power, because now it's it took away our ability to make the contributions and gave them money. Yeah, okay, they raised their own money. But now they're raising all their own issues and they're and they're taking care of themselves. And they've been making empty promises or promises like the trickle down theory that are just not going to work. They're able to with this money distort the message. They're able with taking over the media and buying what huge ads and spending a fortune on the media to brainwash people into thinking that something makes sense when it's just not true, and convincing people to vote against their own interests. And so yes, although gerrymandering does have an impact. And there are a lot of ways that they cheat. I think that the biggest one is the money in politics. And the fact that I could get 160,000 votes on, you know, under $5,000. What I want to tell people is, you know, that should give us all a hope that our democracy is not yet gone. We want candidates to run who'd agree that we are not going to be beholden to lobbyists, we're not going to try and get million dollar donations, we're not going to try and run a $7 million campaign to pay for our votes. We want to keep that big money out so that when we're in office, we can make decisions based on the right thing. We can make decisions based on how it's going to affect our environment. We're going to make decisions that help the average person and entitle people to healthcare and not give big drug companies huge profits because they don't have to negotiate with Medicare. So, you know, I mean, what we did was we sold out of our election, and people have to realize that we don't want millionaires anymore. One of the things that I protested when I went to when I ran for governor was the fact that they only let millionaires in the room. If you weren't a millionaire, the Democratic Party, you know, close the door, you weren't able to talk. And if his progressives don't fight that, then how are we going to get our voice heard? Progressives that are true progressive warriors will hold their feet to the fire. And if an obnoxious right winger like when Chris Christie used to yell at people sit down and shut up at his town hall meetings, real progressive would would not do that. And yeah, you're absolutely right. But what we have now is an insane asylum in the White House. So we need to counter that this Tuesday. That's truly the get the the Democratic establishment leaves a lot to be desired. But the fact is that there's clearly, you know, and I hear people say that that, you know, they're they're sick of voting for the lesser of two evils. However, the difference between voting for bad and worse, is that the one side is actually worse. Like don't ever imagine that it can't get any worse than it is. Or the frying pan onto the hot plate, you know, it's like five pan into the fire is one way to look at it. But you know what, if you're in the fire, if you're in the frying pan, you may want to stay there. And and although there are a lot of people that are discouraged by the quality of candidates that have been nominated, it's vital that they get out and vote and that we prevent people from from giving up on our system. And one, remember that the policies that the Donald Trump and the Republicans want to pass are going to kill people. Okay, they want to they want to eradicate protections from insurance companies refusing to ensure people with preexisting conditions. Okay, that's about 75 million Americans with preexisting conditions. And while Obamacare, for example, may not be all that we would like it to be. It's not Medicare for all. It's not a national health service. It's a it's a basically a requirement that everybody have private insurance private for profit insurance. And as well as an expansion of Medicaid. The bottom line is, it's better than it was. It's just not as good as it can be. So let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater because that's the Republicans plan. Well, Republicans either want to the poor to simply perish or they want to enslave them and maybe privatize prisons and other ways. My my ex wife from Colombia used to tell me how things were in her country. And that's like the perfect Republican paradise. You go to a hospital and you're sick and right away. You have insurance. You don't have insurance. You have money. Die outside the hospital, get off the hospital property and die out in the street. That's basically what they told people in Colombia. That's I think that's what they want. They want to turn back the clock to the the America of the 1900s, you know, before the industrial revolution when you were totally on your own. But then again, the industrial revolution started like what we have today, the corporate oligarch JP Morgan. He was like he was like the like a Donald Trump back then, you know, you want a child labor and then the unions came and every the FDR, the Second Bill of Rights and regulations to defang the wicked corporations. And Republicans, I just want to do away with all that. You make a very good point. Now, but I just want to point that you select you talked about two different periods of time. One was it and the post civil war period, right? The late 1800s when when the robber barons rolled, okay? And then in the 1920s, they they ran up to the Great Depression. Again, it was a period of great economic vitality that the rich got richer, the poor got poorer until they until they broke the bank and crashed the stock market. But the fact of the matter is that the progressive era, the Teddy Roosevelt, those and those and the Teddy Roosevelt, which are Wilson, as well as the extraordinary leadership of Franklin Delano Roosevelt after the Great Depression, right through World War Two, that brought us a new economy that that, you know, propelled this nation to the forefront as the world's richest nation as the strongest military power as a beacon for liberty and hope around the world. We have been in this situation before. The situation we're facing is drastic. Okay. And believe me, the Trump slump is coming and it's going to be pretty bad for everybody. But the fact is, we have met this kind of crisis before. We have had rampant inequality where the rich were extraordinarily rich and the system had crushed the middle class and we came back and we beat that. We beat the Great Depression. We equalized things after the Civil War. We have we have achieved greatness from the throws of catastrophic circumstances. And it's a prison to the occasion. But the fact of the matter is it depends on you and people like you and the people that are listening tonight to react and to be involved, to take responsibility and basically to run for office, to understand what's at stake, to appreciate the issues and hold a sound progressive platform, like the people's platform that a lot of us ran on, that that basically understands that the government can serve a dynamic and useful purpose for good and that the government is us. It's not some alien invader. It's us and it's the tool we use. And and basically by using the government to make the entire society prosper, the richest won't be quite as rich, but the poorest won't be quite as poor either. And I remember when I was young, everybody, nobody was nobody I knew. Was phenomenally rich enough. Everybody had more than enough. Public education, people they would that would pretty much last their whole lives and pay them enough that they can buy a home and raise a family and retire at 60. Come face or working two or three jobs and can't make ends meet. We have an extraordinary amount of personal debt and school student and we have a giant, you know, federal deficit that's been run up since Reaganomics caused federal revenues to go down. Now, there's people talking about that way. So we have to abandon the flood thinking that got us here and we have to reject the political establishment that is very, very comfortable while millions of Americans are suffering. Now, I was going to say, I wanted to jump in here too, because I think one of the things that I was talking about earlier was teaching people the messages that just aren't true. And one of the things a lot of people are accused of is being taxed and spend liberals. And what they don't realize is that tax cuts are not good for everybody. Not everybody is paying so much in taxes, yet they may not be making enough to live. And when we talk about the fair tax, you know, the taxes that we have to raise, if you as a CEO are making 400 times what I'm making as your employee, at what percentage can we tax them to be fair? I mean, it's not going to be like the same percentage for them as it is for somebody who's a regular person. And people mistake the fact that you are not the 1 percent. You are the 99 percent. And the taxes that we are taking back from the 1 percent is raining. First of all, it's going to help with the economy and it's going to bring in more tax revenue so that we can afford the programs that we want. And also, sorry, you're distracting me. And also that, you know, we'll be able to use this money to have the programs and help people out. I mean, we are the richest, most powerful country in the world. And the fact that all of us are struggling means that the gross productivity is going to the 1 percenters and we as the average person cannot, we do not have our fair percentage. And the only way to control the corporations and bring back this fairness is by having a government that's willing to regulate the corporations that's willing to tax the rich and the willing to take this giant profit that we're making. Now, we used automation has taken away a lot of jobs. So the average person is competing for a job that doesn't exist anymore. Well, you know what? I think that the federal jobs guarantee is a fantastic idea because I know I see so many areas in which we can better our country and we can go for green energy and we can clean up the environment and we can work on immigration so that we were not backed up with the court systems. And I just think of all the jobs that could be created to make our world better, not to mention infrastructure and schools and, you know, so much that we can invest back into the country so that we have a better America from the tax revenues. Whereas somebody who's sitting on a billion dollars or making a billion dollars a day, what are they doing with it? They're watching it accrue and it's not helping the economy, it's not really helping them, it's more money than they can spend in their lifetime and we take that money back so that they're not buying up all the TV advertising and convincing us to vote against our will and they're not spending all this money on think tanks to come up with ways to trick the average person. And what we want in our politicians are people who care about other people and not people who care about profits. It should never be profits over people. And I think that once we take money out of the equation, I think that we can get ourselves back on track and realize what's important in life. And I'm gonna let Jim jump back in. I know that we're getting towards the end here, I want to wrap it up, but I want to let people know that to get involved and get into this, you could sign up at Lisa's website at LisaMcCormick.org and you could go to the volunteer section or you could make a donation. If you want to run for office, and if you don't want to run for office, at least hear out what the opportunities are and help us find people who are willing to serve their country and their community because we definitely need to give voters a choice. If they don't have a choice, then elections are essentially meaningless and the people that are selected by the political establishment haven't been doing the job and the people that are running the political establishment aren't looking out for you. Well, thank you for showing us that. We need to feel... There you go. Oops. Better? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I see you, it's going... Did I just get... Uh... You hear me? I hear you. Okay, yeah. I mean, of course, thank you for showing that web link. Of course, if we discuss all the issues that apply to today's America, the show would probably go on for hours. But what Lisa mentions on Twitter often is when America was prosperous, which sounds like post-World War II, 1950s, Eisenhower, America, where the middle class was doing quite well, and that's what I remember as a child. My family was a very successful middle class and it was a different life. And when the top 2% paid their fair share in taxes, they're still living high on a hog. When the middle class carried a tax burden, there... Since... How many refrigerators did a rich buy? The middle class are the greatest source of jobs, the primary consumers, the backbone of the country, and Main Street is where it's at. Think of the soldier aunt in the Amazon. One aunt is... One aunt does nothing, but a whole colony is unstoppable. So that's how I want to end it to summarize it. So vote. Yes, go vote. Good night. Vote what? The early vote Tuesday or do it. Millennials, women, everybody. People of color, everybody. Vote. And I had... Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you. Lisa Bacormick and Jim Devine. It was a great show. And anytime Lisa wants to say anything, just let me know. And we'll do it again. All right. Thank you. All right. Bye-bye. The show is ready for action. All right. All right, bye-bye.