 This is the Humanist Report with Mike Figueredo. The Humanist Report podcast is funded by viewers like you through Patreon and PayPal. To support the show, visit patreon.com forward slash Humanist Report or become a member at humanistreport.com. Now enjoy the show. Welcome to the Humanist Report podcast. My name is Mike Figueredo and this is episode 284 of the program. Today is Friday, April 2nd and before we get started I want to take some time to thank all of the folks who make the show possible. All of our newest Patreon, PayPal and YouTube members all of which either signed up for the very first time to support us this week or increased the monthly pledge that they were already giving us and that includes Al Perez, Brian St. John, Crypto Mojito, Kimberly Yu, Rasta Fergheller, Sleeper Johns, Tara Chapman, Tiki Taki and Voss. Thank you so much to all of these kind individuals. If you'd also like to support the show and join the independent progressive media revolution you can do so by going to humanistreport.com slash support, patreon.com slash Humanist Report or by clicking join underneath any one of our YouTube videos. We've got another great show for you planned today. Conservatives are officially uncanceling cancel culture because now they found someone who they definitely want to cancel. I'm of course talking about Lil Nas X and his satanic panic controversy. Georgia's governor swears that his new voter suppression law is totally not Jim Crow 2.0 guys. He promises you it's not racist at all. The CDC director practically begs states to continue to take COVID-19 seriously. Amazon continues its attack on Bernie Sanders. Stuart Barney teams up with Amazon in the fight against unionization. Marjorie Taylor Green fearmongers about the COVID-19 vaccine and Arkansas passes a law that criminalizes healthcare for trans youth. And we'll talk about why it's incredibly dangerous. And finally we close the show by talking to fellow podcast host and MMT theorist Steve Grumbine who's also the founder of Real Progressives. So that's what we've got on the agenda for today's episode. Hopefully you'll enjoy the program. Let's get right to it. So it is still currently the case that it is socially acceptable and even admirable in many instances to hate on trans people and be openly discriminatory and prejudiced against trans people. And all of this hysteria and fearmongering over the mere existence of trans people has now amounted to a nationwide push by Republicans in state legislatures across the country to further criminalize the existence of transgender Americans. And a majority of the bills that are being proposed in state legislatures all are aimed at harming trans youth. The most vulnerable of the population. Now there's a number of bills currently being considered that would literally criminalize healthcare for transgender youth. But Arkansas just did something that's unprecedented. They actually passed a bill that criminalizes healthcare for trans youth. And now it's a question of whether or not their Republican governor is going to sign this into law and odds are he will given that just not too long ago he banned transgender high schoolers from participating in school sports. So as Andrea Germanos of Common Dreams reports, Arkansas is poised to become the first state in the nation to ban healthcare for trans youth after state lawmakers on Monday passed House Bill 1570. The ACLU of Arkansas warned last week that the legislation which blocks healthcare providers from providing gender affirming care or referring patients for such care was one of the most extreme and harmful anti-trans bills in the country. HB 1570 easily passed the state Senate Monday in a 28 to seven vote. It now heads to Republican governor Asa Hutchinson who last week signed into law a ban on transgender girls from participating in school sports. Hutchinson is facing demands to veto HB 1570 because as the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund put it, trans youth lives are at stake. Critics of the measure include the American Psychological Association, American Medical Association and American Academy of Pediatrics. Now the reason why all of the experts are against legislation like this is because it's based on misinformation, pseudo science and this will literally lead to trans youth dying. So I don't know how much time they'll be between the time I record this and the time that you see this video but in the event the governor of Arkansas has not signed this into law, perhaps you can persuade him to make the right decision by calling him at 501-682-2345. I'm not necessarily very optimistic here but this bill, it has a lot more of a concrete impact on the lives of trans youth than the sports bill does and that in and of itself is harmful but this is next level. Now the reason why this is so significant is because if Arkansas does it, then other states who are currently considering this sort of legislation might do it as well. It could trigger a domino effect. And in fact, it looked like Alabama was gonna be the first state to pass this type of legislation but Arkansas actually leapfrogged but I do wanna point you to a vice documentary about this issue in Alabama because they kind of run through how prevalent this anti-trans wave of legislation is and it is deeply, deeply troubling if you actually care about trans youth. So far this year, lawmakers in 29 states have introduced legislation targeting trans youth. The majority of these bills would ban trans kids from participating in sports but 17 states are also trying to make gender-affirming healthcare illegal. All right, next Dr. Ladinsky. I practice in Birmingham and am part of the subspecialty gender health team. Now here's what we do and what we don't. Genital surgery is never performed on minors in Alabama. Puberty blocking medications are 100% reversible and can be life-saving. Now some older teens, not seven-year-olds merit hormonal therapy but initiation involves lengthy informed consent, lengthy mental health oversight and the subspecialized care provided. Folks, neither parents nor youth are making the decisions on drugs. It's a team, not children. People are looking to Alabama because if this passes here that may be a green light to do so in other states. Dr. Marisa Ladinsky is one of the few providers in Alabama who specializes in healthcare for transgender youth. What happens to you if this bull passes? Myself and my colleagues who prescribe these medications would either risk criminalization, a class C felony, 10 years in prison and a hefty fine. More than anything, I worry about my kids. I'm worried about the message this sends to gender diverse youth and their family that their healthcare is now against the law. I'm worried about what happens long-term when you remove hope. More than half of transgender youth have considered killing themselves. Of that group, 41% attempted suicide. Trans advocates are worried that bills like the one in Alabama could make things worse. It definitely will. And conservatives ironically are feigning concern about youth which is why they wanna block them from receiving gender-affirming healthcare. We're not talking about bottom surgery. We're talking about gender-affirming care in general. But this is literally called the safe act as if they care about these lives when this is going to lead to greater rates of self-harm. Trans youth are going to kill themselves because of legislation like this. And folks who demonize trans-Americans all the time, you're part of the problem. You're part of the reason why there's this wave of anti-trans legislation that's happening currently. Now, gender-affirming care for trans youth saves lives. This is not me saying this. This is the conclusion of a meta analysis conducted by the Trevor Project to explains pubertal suppression, otherwise known as puberty blockers, is associated with decreased behavioral and emotional problems as well as decreased depressive symptoms. Prior to pubertal suppression, 44% of youth experienced clinically significant behavioral problems. However, after an average of two years of pubertal suppression, only 22% experienced them. And 30% experienced clinically significant emotional problems prior to pubertal suppression compared to 11% after two years of care. Pubertal suppression has also been shown to significantly improve overall psychological functioning after only six months of care. Additionally, transgender individuals who desired and received pubertal suppression as adolescents have significantly lower lifetime suicidal ideation compared to those who desired but did not receive it. Research on gender-affirming hormone therapy for youth demonstrates positive effects on body image and overall psychological wellbeing as well as reduced suicidality. GAHT decreases both emotional and behavioral problems similar to what is seen in pubertal suppression. Recent research has also shown that GAHT decreases suicidality with one study of transgender youth demonstrating that after approximately one year of treatment the average level of suicidality was one fourth what it was before treatment. There have been many opponents to gender-affirming care for transgender non-binary youth. Some of the hesitance regarding gender-affirming care may be due to a misunderstanding of the causes of mental health challenges to transgender non-binary individuals. This brief demonstrates why such care is not only ethical but medically necessary. I repeat medically necessary. Further, regret is low for gender-affirming care interventions and a study of 55 transgender adults who had received gender-affirming care as adolescents showed that not one individual experienced regret. As the evidence for gender-affirming care grows medical and mental health organizations are increasingly shifting to support it. Many major medical organizations have guidelines for working with transgender individuals centered around respect for the patient and shared decision-making. With some organizations releasing statements explicitly opposing any efforts to prevent access to gender-affirming care. Given the well-documented risks of negative mental health and suicidality outcomes among transgender non-binary people it is necessary that those serving transgender and non-binary patients provide care that is patient-centered, affirming and evidence-based. So what the science and the evidence dictates is that this legislation passed in Arkansas and that's being considered in Alabama this doesn't help trans youth, it doesn't protect trans youth. It has the opposite effect. It harms them. But actually allowing them to have access to gender-affirming healthcare that drastically improves their lives, their psychological well-being. They're less likely to be suicidal. So if you genuinely care about the well-being of trans youth then you would support gender-affirming healthcare if you're following the science that is. But we know that Republicans don't actually care about science. They've never believed in science. And we know that they don't care about trans youth because if they did they wouldn't be doing something that would quite literally be so detrimental to their well-being that they kill themselves because of it. This is all about Republicans trying to control gender norms in America. Them trying to force people with gender dysphoria to live as the gender they were assigned at birth in the same way that they tried to force gay people to be attracted to the opposite gender. They're on the wrong side of history and anyone who assisted Republicans in this bigotry I'm talking about popular podcasters like Joe Rogan who spread misinformation about trans youth all the time. The blood is on their hands. Anytime a trans person takes their own life it is because of fear-mongering and misinformation and fake concern over their well-being. We know what the answer is. And this isn't new information by the way. We know the answer is to not force them to live as the gender that they were assigned at birth. The answer is to allow them to be who they want to be. It doesn't hurt anyone. And tolerance just is apparently... It's out the window, right? It's out the window because we don't want to tolerate the existence of transgender people because that goes against their religion or we don't understand it or maybe we just don't like them. Either way, this is harmful and the saddest part is this is only the beginning of a dangerous new trend in America. Do you remember during the Bush years back in 2004 when he ran his entire presidential campaign on criminalizing gay marriage? That was basically the most recent, strong anti-gay era that the most of us remember. We're currently in an anti-trans era in American politics where trans Americans and trans youth of all people are public enemy number one. And this is a war that isn't just political or rhetorical. This is a war that will actually have casualties. Trans youth are at risk and if you actually give a damn about human beings, then you would fight this and speak out against it because this is going to lead to people dying and the blood of trans kids that take their own lives because of legislation like this is on the hands of people who don't speak up and push for the demonization of transgender people. Senator Bernie Sanders has ruffled quite a bit of feathers at Amazon, especially as of lately because he's been so vocal and unapologetic in advocating for the Amazon union effort currently taking place in Bessemer, Alabama. And they're so angered at his advocacy for their workers that the CEO of Amazon himself, Dave Clark chose to publicly denounce Bernie Sanders via Twitter. We talked about that last week on the program, but Bernie Sanders did actually do a speech for the workers of Amazon. So we tweeted out a video of his speech, along with some of the testimonies from workers who share how the company abuses them and exploits them. And he also states, Amazon workers in Alabama are sick and tired of being treated like robots. They're standing up and fighting back and I am proud to support them. So we're gonna play the video that he shared and then I'm gonna show you the response from Amazon because once again, they sent one of their cronies to respond to and attack Bernie Sanders. In the issue of working conditions, I'm very proud of our working conditions. We now have documents that reporters have uncovered showing that Amazon is in fact aware of drivers peeing in bottles. These people in the name of the convenience of getting dropped at our door are being used and abused because it's peak season. The stories of the workers there that I'd met in Bessemer at that plant were horrific. We're being treated like we're prisoners. Who's there to get a job done? Constance and surveillance. You guys have a gadget on you that follows you all around or something? The inability to meet whatever the demands are. When I first got there, they said that after 30 days, you have an opportunity to move somewhere else. After my 30 days was up, they added another stipulation. You gotta peck 300 bucks an hour to be able to move to the bus. I don't know where that comes from. I have a lady right now who's my heart going out to right now because she's off with an injury. If history teaches us anything, is that big money interests do not give you anything. You gotta stand up and fight for it. My knee messed up on me while I was at birth and then they sent me right back to pick it. Martin Luther King said the best anti-poverty program he knew of was the union. What is the story about elevators? You can't use the elevators. They got tons of elevators in here. They just don't have them for the employees. You and you can rank in to make a change when it comes to job security. You're safe the way I fell. When I asked my superbars, I was like, I cannot do this. My knee. Why would y'all send me back to picking when this is what messed my knee up? And she was like, I can't help it. It's not me, you know? She said, it's the company. Let's win this thing. Let's make history. So we just watched the video. We all heard with our own eyes and ears, Amazon workers themselves describe the conditions. And on top of that, there's been other reporting. Journalist Ken Clippenstein explains how Amazon is currently deploying a troll form to combat anti-Amazon rhetoric online. I mean, this is a PR nightmare for the company, but when you have a monopoly and when you have so much resources, you know, you can put money into trying to spread misinformation at the behest of your company. So Bernie Sanders shared that video and guess who decided to respond? Amazon press person, Jay Carney, who says, with all due respect, Senator Bernie Sanders, you're wrong on this. We treat our employees with dignity and respect. It's funny because they just said that you don't in the video we all watched. We offer a $15 an hour minimum wage, healthcare from day one, and a safe, inclusive workplace. Once again, we invite you to take a tour so you can see for yourself. And since there are 40 million Americans earning less than Amazon starting wage, we ask you and your colleagues to please raise the federal minimum to $15 as well. So this is basically the same thing that Amazon CEO Dave Clark said. They use the $15 an hour minimum wage as an excuse as to why their employees shouldn't form a union when we all know that if their workers were unionized, they'd be making well over $15 per hour. So they can keep using that to make it seem as if they're progressive, but you're not a progressive organization when your employees are forced to piss in bottles and shit in plastic bags on the road because you refuse to give them breaks or you penalize them if they aren't as efficient as you want them to be. Now, if that name Jay Carney sounded familiar to you, well, you might have remembered him from the Obama administration because he actually was the White House press secretary for Obama and he now works for Amazon. Hey, Obama, come get your trash. I mean, this is just, I'd say it's infuriating but I honestly don't feel much emotions from this because I'm so numb to the bullshit and fuckery that we see from large multinational corporations that this isn't actually surprising to me but Amazon has just gone out of their way to be so shameless and shutting down any pro-union rhetoric online that they've gone and exposed themselves even more so than if they just shut the fuck up from the beginning. I mean, David, don't put out a phenomenal video of all of these fake accounts that are popping up online from bots or paid trolls to basically do propaganda at the behest of Amazon where they say, hey, I'm Peggy from Oak Four, that warehouse and I love my job at Amazon and I don't want a union because Amazon is a great job and we're like a family and I don't want any outsider to come into my family and dictate the terms of my family and I, it's just, it's laughable but some people buy this, it works on a lot of people and in Alabama, they have a right to work law that is on the books so I don't necessarily know if the Amazon union effort is going to succeed. I hope it does because this could be the start of a new wave of unionization in America and that's really important. Perhaps by the time you see this video, we'll have some more information because the vote has already taken place at the time I filmed this. I don't know how long it's gonna take for them to tell you the votes but this is something that needs to happen. If you care about workers, then unions are one of the most pro-worker things that you can support because this is what empowers workers. It gives them not an equal footing with the employer but it gives them more of a say and allows for less exploitation, higher wages. It's just, it's crucial and with how much Amazon is going out of their way to stop this union effort, that alone should speak to the importance of unions. They view unions as a threat and because they're doing so much to stop it, it goes to show you how powerful unions could be in the fight in America for labor rights. So yeah, I absolutely am rooting for the Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama. By the time you see this video, it may very well already be the case that we know what the result was from the Amazon union vote in Bessemer, Alabama. I'm really hoping that it is successful. Having said that though, during the process of supporting a union and them forming a union, Stuart Varney of Fox News, unsurprisingly, he sided with big business because this is someone who is one of the biggest shills in America. But the extent to which he tries to lick Jeff Bezos' boot in this segment I'm gonna show you is honestly shocking even for Stuart Varney because again, him shilling for large multinational corporations and capitalism, not surprising in the slightest. But look at how far he goes in trying to defend the Amazon and shut down the unionization effort. And quite frankly, censor foes to Amazon such as Bernie Sanders. I just think that maybe Mr. Bezos should do something about the Washington Post, which he owns, lock, stock, and barrel, which vigorously supports. However, as you know, that is separate from Amazon. That is a private investment by Jeff Bezos. But he's got control of the Washington Post. If he doesn't like Bernie and Elizabeth Warren, make a change in your editorial policy with the Washington Post for heaven's sake. Why don't you? Oh, so you're saying use the Washington Post to go after Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren if you were more pointed. Why not? Why is the Washington Post the most outrageous leftist organization in America with a few other exceptions? And it's owned by Bezos with Bernie Sanders having a go at him. Right. Come on, come on. Yeah. Take the gloves off. Utilize all leavers. Get on with it. Get on with it. I don't think that he realizes it, but he just inadvertently made a phenomenal case for us to utilize the antitrust laws that we have. The fact that Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post and he also owns Amazon. He's not the CEO anymore, but he's still majority shareholder. Right. The fact that he has Amazon and the Washington Post and Twitch, it shows you why all of these big companies have to be broken up because if your big business gets so big, so powerful, you literally have too much power in a late-stage capitalist society. And it's not just in late-stage capitalist societies where this is an issue. Just in general, this is an issue. But in late-stage capitalist societies, you control everything. You can set the narrative if it starts to trend against your company. So what Stuart Varney is literally advocating for is for Jeff Bezos to use Washington Post as his propaganda arm, as the Amazon propaganda arm, and go after their enemies. This truly is some dystopian shit that we're seeing here. He's cheerleading it on. He's so pro-Amazon, so anti-Bernie Sanders that he thinks it's ethical to have Jeff Bezos use the Washington Post to attack Bernie Sanders. Now, here's the thing. I don't even know that Jeff Bezos hasn't done this. Remember back in 2016 when Bernie Sanders was running for president and the Washington Post conspicuously published 16 anti-Bernie Sanders articles in 16 hours. They're already doing propaganda at the behest of Jeff Bezos and against Bernie Sanders. But the fact that he wants them to be more outrageous and he's so cavalier about it, why not? I mean, it just goes to show you this is the biggest shill on national television and nobody should take Stuart Varney seriously. And if him pressuring Jeff Bezos to make the Washington Post attack Bernie wasn't enough, he then took it even further and demonstrated the depths of his stupidity by saying, why is the Washington Post the most outrageous leftist organization in America? I mean, this is what true brain rot looks like where he's too far gone. He's such a bootlicker for corporate America and the oligarchs in America that from his view, from his perspective, even the Washington Post and establishment news outlet, that looks like it's far left. Jesus Christ, what would an actual far left outlet look like to Stuart Varney? Would he think that it's, it can't be communism and be like beyond communism? I just, I don't know how anyone takes him seriously and I don't necessarily think normal people take this idiot seriously. It's mostly, you know, he's there as a talking head to appease the oligarchs who watch Fox Business News, but it's embarrassing. He should feel ashamed of himself shilling that hard for Amazon. Do you have stock in the company? Like something is going on here. To be that brazen and to be that offended that Bernie Sanders is speaking out at the behest of Amazon workers. I mean, fuck off. I am honestly beginning to wonder whether or not conservatives are pro COVID-19. And I say that not to sound hyperbolic, but because when you look at their actions and their rhetoric with regard to COVID-19, everything that they've said and done has been in service to the pandemic. From the very beginning, when we learned about the effectiveness of masks, they were against that. You have anti-maskers such as Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeting about how wonderful it is in Georgia that they don't have to wear masks there and that they can be free to let their face be naked. As if you should have the liberty to spread your germs to other Americans during a pandemic. But now when we actually see the light at the end of the tunnel with these vaccines, now they're fear mongering about that too. No masks, no vaccines. I guess they just want the pandemic to last forever because maybe that's their way of owning the lips since their lives haven't really changed much since they don't take it seriously. So they like this. I don't know. But what I do know is that Marjorie Taylor Greene is playing a really dangerous game because now she's trying to dissuade evangelicals from taking the vaccine by speculating about whether or not it might actually be the mark of the beast. They want you to be required to have something called a COVID passport. And this would mandate your ability to be able to travel, your ability to be able to go to events, your ability to be able to buy and sell. And I asked the question earlier today, is this something like Biden's mark of the beast because that is really disturbing and not good. Oh, if you're gonna come into the football game or the baseball game or the concert, you need your vaccine passport because we're trying to do a good job to keep everyone safe. This is what the Biden administration is trying to talk to these private companies into doing. Well, let's analyze that. You see, it's still the same thing. It's still fascism or communism, whatever you wanna call it, but it's coming from private companies. So I have a term for that. I call it corporate communism. I continue to be amazed by the idiocy of Marjorie Taylor-Green. Every time I think there's no way she could say something dumber than this, it's like she takes it as a challenge. And I think that TJ Kirk, the amazing atheist, he put it best. He says, if stupidity was an energy source, I just found the battery to power the planet. And that's exactly it. What she just said there, it's not just stupid, but this is dangerous idiocy. If you're saying something that's silly and I can make fun of you, great, but this has broad implications. If you convince your deluded followers that the vaccine is the mark of the beast, then guess what? The pandemic isn't going to be going away because if we don't have enough people vaccinated to reach herd immunity, then the virus will continue to spread. New variations will manifest. And guess what happens if we get a new variant that is resistant to vaccines? We're all back to square one. Do you want that? Honestly, I want to ask one of these conservatives, do you just want the pandemic to go on forever or are you just ambivalent? Are you comfortable with it? I just don't get this. Are people really this fucking stupid? And listen to how dumb she is. She admits her own stupidity. She says that vaccine passports, it's, you know, even though it's private companies who are involved here, it's still fascism or communism or whatever you want to call it. Corporate communism. Except believe it or not, these words have definitions and fascism and communism are two very, very different things. You are a fascist. That's what you are, Marjorie Taylor Greene. And I think that she probably brought in communism at the last second there because she realized, oh, I'm kind of a fascist myself, so I don't want to necessarily demonize fascism or communism. We'll call it whatever bad thing that you think it is. Just don't get the vaccines. That's her message. Now she pretends as if vaccine passports, which is the new thing that Republicans are using to fearmonger about the vaccines and try to stop people from getting the vaccines. She's pretending like this is some new phenomenon. Anytime you register your kid for school, guess what you have to do? You have to provide proof to them that they are vaccinated. This isn't a new phenomenon. When I applied for a job at Walmart, guess what I had to do? I had to provide them with proof that I wasn't a drug user and I did that by pissing in a cup. This is not anything that's new and it's a necessary temporary precaution if we want to resume normalcy in America. You really think that it's unreasonable for private companies and even public institutions to ask that somebody show proof that they were vaccinated so we can contain the spread of this virus? Vaccine passports is not something that is going to be a permanent phenomenon unless you make it a permanent phenomenon because you are doing everything in your power to make sure that COVID-19 doesn't go away. This is a non-issue and the role that Joe Biden will play in this is minimal and I hate Joe Biden, but let's be real here. What she's basing this off of and what the rest of the conservatives who are spreading misinformation about the vaccines are basing this off of is a Bloomberg article by Fiona Rutherford titled, White House says private sector should lead on vaccine passports where Jen Psaki says, a determination or development of a vaccine passport or whatever you want to call it will be driven by the private sector. Psaki said, ours will be more focused on guidelines that can be used as a basis and there are a couple of key principles we're working from. So she's saying there's not going to be this centralized effort to make sure that people can only do certain things if they have their vaccine passport. She's saying this should really come from the private sector as was the case with the mask mandates, for example, because the federal government and state governments can only do so much as it relates to private businesses. You can regulate them, but there are certain things that the government cannot do. That's why they're relying on this. And I think that the government should be as involved as they possibly can be since this is a public health crisis. But conservatives, Fox News, Marjorie Taylor-Green, Newsmax are taking that article and Jen Psaki's comment on vaccine passports and they're trying to fear monger about the COVID vaccines and make it seem as if there's this big government conspiracy. It's Orwellian and it's the mark of the beast and you won't be able to do anything unless you have your vaccine passports. So what they're doing is tantamount to discouraging people from getting the vaccines. So they must want the pandemic to last forever. There's nothing else that I can deduce from this because you don't want folks to wear masks. You don't want shutdowns. You don't want to pay people to stay home so they don't spread COVID-19. You don't want them to get vaccinated now. So are you just pro COVID-19? Are you on the side of the virus? Who's that? Are you on? I know you're on the side of capitalism and capitalism absolutely is not going to allow us to do anything that would stifle economic growth or profits. So we know you're on the side of capitalism but it genuinely seems like you're just pro COVID-19. I mean, the vaccines, if you're a capitalist, shouldn't you like that? Because big pharma is making lots of money from these vaccines. I mean, that shouldn't even be allowed but if you're a capitalist, you should celebrate that. But it seems like you're doing everything in your power to prolong a public health crisis. And that's just deeply, deeply disgusting and infuriating. To do something like this is so irresponsible that every single person who hears Marjorie Taylor Greene espouse this nonsense should denounce it and make fun of her until she is thoroughly embarrassed because this is downright fucking dangerous. And I'm sick of it. I mean, conservatives, they just genuinely don't want any precautions against the pandemic. They just want to pretend like it's not a thing. No masks, no nothing. So we're just supposed to live with this forever because you're idiots and you want the human rights to go extinct. Like I'm just trying to figure out what the parameters are. Is there anything that we can do as a country to mitigate the spread of the virus that you won't be opposed to? I just, I don't get it. This party is the party of death and destruction and anything that they do is all to the detriment of the human species. And that's not to say that Democrats are fantastic but this is a death cult. These are psychopaths but yet a lot of them have power. And that is downright disturbing and it should scare all of us. That idiots like this have that much say over public policy when they're that fucking stupid. So I think I speak for approximately 100% of the population when I say I cannot wait for the pandemic to be over. We're all anxious to see the end of COVID-19. I want to meet my niece who was born during the pandemic. I want to see my nieces and nephews. The issue is as an individual, I can only do so much. I can only do my part in so far as I stay home as much as possible. But what really matters is what governments do at the state, at the local level because if they're not taking it seriously then the pandemic is going to be extended for all of us. And that's what's happening. So after the post holiday surge cases started to sharply decline in February and once a lot of state governors saw that the cases were sharply decreasing, they thought, all right, that's good enough. I'm washing my hands with this pandemic and it's over. We'll just go ahead and reduce all restrictions on indoor gathering and we'll even lift our mask mandates. Now that is for the states who ever chose to take it seriously. There are some states such as Florida and South Dakota who just pretended as if there was never a pandemic but states like Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and West Virginia are now just declaring the pandemic is over. Even if that is obviously premature, you have states like Arizona who has a mask mandate that's set to expire at the beginning of April and they're also lifting all restrictions on indoor gathering. But I mean, I would be remiss to not talk about how this isn't just what Republicans are doing. Even in many democratic controlled states, there are also two early lifting COVID-19 restrictions. In Connecticut, they're at least keeping the mask mandate which is the bare minimum that you can do to protect your citizens because they're not gonna wear masks unless you mandate it. I've seen in my state how that really does make a difference. We went from like 20% of people wearing masks to 99.9% of people wearing masks in public once it became mandatory. But in Connecticut, they're not going to get rid of the mask mandate but they're just going to get rid of all restrictions when it comes to indoor gathering. So if you wanna go to the gym, if you wanna go to church, that's okay. And in the state of Oregon, Governor Kate Brown has decided that all kids will be returning to school on April 19th. Doesn't necessarily matter where we're at with regard to the pandemic. Doesn't matter when we're in a fourth surge by then. I say April 19th and it's gonna be April 19th. So you can already guess what's happening. I mean, you don't have to guess. You see what's happening. You probably see the numbers. We started to see cases level off after declining sharply and now they're starting to rise once again. And we are possibly looking at another surge, a fourth wave. And the issue is that people are thinking, well, you know what, there's this vaccine coming so it doesn't really matter. We see the light at the end of the tunnel. So who cares? The issue is as the virus spreads that increases the possibility that new mutations, new variants will pop up that are resistant to the vaccines. And if there is a new mutation that's more contagious that is resistant to the vaccine, guess what happens? We're all fucked. The duration of the pandemic is a lot longer. So we can't just pretend as if the pandemic is over when it isn't actually over. We still have to be careful. The lawmakers are incapable of doing anything that's responsible because the responsible measure here is what isn't necessary to keep capitalism, the economy, the business elites happy. But the CDC director is really trying to level with people here. And she actually went off script and she got visibly emotional trying to describe how, listen, we're so close. We just have to hang on a little bit longer. Stop being fucking dumb. She didn't say this. This is what she said though. When I first started at CDC about two months ago, I made a promise to you. I would tell you the truth, even if it was not the news we wanted to hear. Now is one of those times when I have to share the truth and I have to hope and trust you will listen. I'm gonna pause here. I'm gonna lose the script and I'm gonna reflect on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom. We have so much to look forward to, so much promise and potential of where we are and so much reason for hope. But right now I'm scared. I know what it's like as a physician to stand in that patient room, downed, loved, masked, shielded and to be the last person to touch someone else's loved one because their loved one couldn't be there. I know what it's like when you're the physician, when you're the healthcare provider and you're worried that you don't have the resources to take care of the patients in front of you. I know that feeling of nausea when you read the crisis standards of care and you wonder whether they're gonna be enough ventilators to go around and who's gonna make that choice. And I know what it's like to pull up to your hospital every day and see the extra morgue sitting outside. I didn't know at the time when it would stop, we didn't have the science to tell us. We were just scared. We have come such a long way. Three historic scientific breakthrough vaccines and we are rolling them out so very fast. So I'm speaking today not necessarily as your CDC director and not only as your CDC director, but as a wife, as a mother, as a daughter to ask you to just please hold on a little while longer. I so badly wanna be done. I know you all so badly wanna be done. We are just almost there, but not quite yet. And so I'm asking you to just hold on a little longer to get vaccinated when you can so that all of those people that we all love will still be here when this pandemic ends. The trajectory of the pandemic in the United States looks similar to many other countries in Europe, including Germany, Italy and France look like just a few weeks ago. And since that time, those countries have experienced a consistent and worrying spike in cases. We are not powerless. We can change this trajectory of the pandemic, but it will take all of us recommitting to following the public health prevention strategies consistently while we work to get the American public vaccinated. I'm calling on our elected officials, our faith-based communities, our civic leaders and our other influencers in communities across the nation. And I'm calling on every single one of you to sound the alarm, to carry these messages into your community and your spheres of influence. We do not have the luxury of inaction for the health of our country. We must work together now to prevent a fourth surge. I mean, I don't know what else she can possibly do. She's literally warning us of impending doom. We see what's happening in Europe. We can take the precautions now to not see another surge, but people in America have just decided that they're over it. States have decided it's over and, regardless, we're just not gonna take it seriously. Our own stupidity is going to be our demise. And I'm speaking more broadly, not necessarily just with regard to COVID-19. I see the way that the United States and the world has mishandled COVID-19. And I think if we can't even handle this, a pandemic, how are we going to ever be capable of dealing with something like climate change? An issue that is more complex by several magnitudes. If we can't deal with this, how do we handle that? And it just kind of leaves me feeling hopeless and depressed because we're just, we're not ready. We're not ready. Maybe it's because human beings are stupid. I don't know. Maybe it's because our economic system renders us incapable of doing anything. I don't know. There's a number of things that's leading to our inability to actually capable deal with the pandemic, but it's just deeply frustrating because as someone who has tried to take it as seriously as possible, stay at home, get my groceries via curbside, all of that. I mean, there's only so much that we can do at the individual level. At the end of the day, government has to take the right actions and governments around the world, they've been failing. Now, when it comes to Joe Biden, he has done a lot better job in comparison with Donald Trump, his predecessor. And he's doing a lot to get the vaccines out. He actually did meet his goal of 100 million vaccinations within his first 100 days. And I think that he realizes that he was elected specifically because he's obviously more competent and capable than Donald Trump. So now he's trying to make sure that, you know, governors around the country don't undermine the progress that we've made. And he's even reissuing them, you know, the recommendation that you not be too stupid. Let's not have a fourth surge when we just have a couple of months left until everyone could get access to the vaccine. So as Brett Samuels of The Hill explains, President Biden on Monday urged state and local officials to reconsider lifting their coronavirus restrictions and to reinstate mask mandates that have lapsed as the US faces an increase in cases. Quote, I'm reiterating my call for every governor, mayor and local leader to maintain and reinstate the mask mandate, Biden said, at an event intended to highlight the rapid increase in vaccine eligibility. Please, this is not politics, reinstate the mandate if you let it down. Asked later if some state should pause reopening efforts, Biden said, yes. And I agree with him. The fact that this even has to be said is deeply frustrating to me. We've been dealing with this pandemic as a species now for more than a year. I think we understand the way that it works. We have some basic knowledge about it, right? We now know about the potential for new variants. We know that not everyone is vaccinated yet. We know that the reason why we had the surge in the first place is because people weren't taking it seriously. And now we're just going to become comfortable with hundreds of thousands of new cases as the norm. Finally, when it was starting to decrease, it just, it feels like the pandemic is gonna go on forever. And that's really frustrating. It's really frustrating. Back in 2020, at the beginning of 2020, I read a report about how some epidemiologists were predicting that social distancing may be necessary until 2022. And that was like the worst case scenario that they were envisioning. And now that seems pretty obvious. We're just incapable of getting our act together. And because of that, people are gonna suffer. More people are gonna die when if we all just stopped, if from the beginning we paid people to stay home, so they wouldn't have to risk spreading the virus and getting it themselves. That would have been the answer. But because we live in a late-stage capitalist, dystopian society, that is impossible. Prophets are more important than people's lives so that was never even on the table. But the least that we can do is keep these mask mandates in place. They don't cost anything. They're mildly inconvenient and it stops the spread. I mean, any governor who's doing this, already lifting mask mandates, they're just, they're stupid. They are stupid. They're trying to basically score political points because they know that their populations are tired of the pandemic. So they're just basically saying, you know what, it's over. You guys did your part, it's over. But that's not the way that it works. We are adults and we should act like adults. And if we actually want the pandemic to ever be over, sometime in this century, hopefully, let's just stop being dumb for an extended period of time until the number of new cases decreases, until people are vaccinated. And then it's it. We never have to talk about it again. I mean, we can study it from a historical perspective, but we can move on. I'm anxious to move on. I know you're anxious to move on. So let's hope that our lawmakers stop being idiots and allow this to happen. Nobody can move on if we don't take it seriously. Well, once again, there is a large portion of the American population that was incredibly outraged by something that they saw in pop culture. And no, I'm not talking about the woke mob that Fox News usually complains about. I'm, of course, talking about conservative snowflakes who were incredibly offended by a new music video put out by Lil Nas X, along with something else that he did. Now, the good news about this story is that maybe we can finally move on from Cardi B's wop. The bad news is that I take it they're probably going to be fixated on this music video and this story for a lot longer. So I can't play the music video for you, but I do want to provide you with some context. So I'm going to read you a description of what the music video represents. As Out explains, Lil Nas X combines Greek mythology and biblical references to essentially tell the story of queer self-empowerment in this world. He traces an arc of being judged and condemned by society for his sexuality, eventually being killed and sent to hell. But on his way there, he reclaims his sexuality and harnesses his sexual energy in order to seduce Satan and take over hell. And given that Satan and hell have been long upheld as the big bads by conservatives and have been used as a warning stick to beat children into submission, this understandably caused issues. So the message of the music video essentially is, all right, if you say that I'm going to go to hell for being gay, it is what it is. I guess I'm going to embrace it. I'm no longer afraid of the devil. And in fact, when I get to hell, I'm going to seduce the devil by giving him a lap dance. And that's what took place in this music video. So Lil Nas X slid down a very long stripper pole all the way into the depths of hell. And he seduced Satan by giving him a lap dance. Now, messages of gay acceptance in and of itself in 2021, not necessarily the biggest issue. That's not why conservatives are up in arms. What really I think triggered them here for lack of a better word is the images of gay intimacy. Because we can tolerate homosexuals so long as they provide us with comic relief or they entertain us with their drag shows. But the minute straight people are reminded that gay people are actually intimate themselves and they do have sex with other gay people, that's when you actually start to see this visceral response and this homophobia bubble up again. Now that's not to say that straight people should be watching gay porn or something to become comfortable with gay sex. But the issue is that there is this double standard where heterosexuals can display their sexuality, not necessarily women as much as WAP demonstrated, but they can be explicit in the way that they describe their sex lives. But the minute a gay person does it, then it's like, ooh, the icky factor kicks in. So that's what Lil Nas X did here. And to make matters worse, he then took things to the next level by announcing a pair of 666 shoes with human blood in them and this sold out in less than a minute. So understand what he's trying to do here. First of all, it's obvious he's trying to bait conservatives because if this is deemed some controversial thing, that's going to make people interested. They wanna see what he's doing. And if they think that they're gonna suppress it by condemning it, conservatives are wrong. But of course, they took his bait. They fell for it, hook, lie, and sinker. And the message here that he's trying to promote is great. He's saying, okay, you think that gay people are evil. They're the devil. Then we're gonna embrace that. We're gonna embrace what you say is evil. So we'll sell these demonic shoes, which I don't think actually look very good. But nonetheless, I had zero fashion sense. But I just wanna show you the response because if you thought that they were outraged over WAP, this is next level outrage. I didn't know who Lil Nas X was. Lil Thug, whoever, I had no idea who he was. We was riding this morning huts and said, well, you know what made him famous? I said, well, he was at horses. Got my horses in whatever that song. I was like, man, that's so, you got a cool beat. I'll never be able to listen to it again. A bunch of devil worship and wicked nonsense, pentagram wearing on your Nike Tennis U666. You think I'm gonna stand for that? You've lost your mind. You tell Lil Nas X, I said so. A bunch of Satanism, bunch of wickedness, bunch of devilism, bunch of demonism, bunch of psychotic wickedness. Jesus Christ. Slow the fuck down, Greg. Listening to him speak gave me a headache almost. Cocaine's a hell of a drug. This kind of sounds like cancel culture, doesn't it? Just a couple of weeks ago on Fox News, if you tuned in, they were talking about how bad cancel culture was and that we have to respect our cultural institutions. Mr. Potato Head, Dr. Seuss, the Muppets. But now, they flip like that and cancel culture is good. If we're canceling something we don't like, Lil Nas X and homosexuality and him glorifying the devil. But in actuality, he's not necessarily glorifying Satan so much as he's turning your attack against you. It seems like you use the devil for your own gain because you try to scare children into being straight literally by threatening them with an eternity of hell. So, I mean, he's giving you a taste of your own medicine but you don't like that. Now, even a governor of an actual state, Kristi Noem, who has let COVID-19 ravage her state because she has refused to implement any measures including a mask mandate, decided to respond to this because this music video and the sale of shoes by a pop star is more offensive than people in her own state dying and she tweeted out, our kids are being told that this kind of product is not only okay, it's exclusive. But do you know what's more exclusive? They're God given eternal soul. We are in a fight for the soul of our nation. We need to fight hard and we need to fight smart. And Lil Nas X then responded by saying, you're a whole governor and you're on here tweeting about some damn shoes. Do your job. To which she responded with a quote from the Bible saying, what good will it be for someone to gain the whole world yet forfeit their soul? Hey, governor Noem, question for you. Do you think that God, if he exists, which there's no evidence that he exists, but let's assume that he does exist and he's the God who you say he is. Do you honestly think he's gonna be more mad at Lil Nas X's shoes? Or you letting COVID-19 just ravage your state, kill thousands of your constituents? Which do you think he's more concerned with? And as a governor, why are you weighing in on pop culture issues? Don't you have something better to be doing? Like trying to stop people in your state from dying? How many people have these shoes killed compared to your government in action, your policies? Who's more evil in the grand scheme of things? The incompetent governor who lets her citizens die or the artist who very clearly is trying to bait conservatives into driving outrage over his product that will obviously increase demand for said product and draw more eyeballs to his music video? It's just astonishing. Now of course, Candice Owens weighs in on everything so she decided to weigh in and make a fool of herself, tweeting out, we've turned George Floyd a criminal drug addict into an icon. Wow, what a nice thing to say about someone who was murdered. We are promoting Satan's shoes to wear on our feet. We've got Cardi B named as Woman of the Year, but we're convinced it's white supremacy that's keeping black America behind. How stupid can we be? Hang on a second. So if I'm interpreting what she's saying correctly, she's saying that the reason why black Americans are oppressed in America isn't necessarily because of institutionalized white supremacy that's existed for centuries in America. And in fact, we're stupid if we think that. The reason why black Americans are oppressed is because of shoes and music videos. We're stupid if we don't see it. I don't think you have the right to call anyone stupid if that's what you believe. Now, if that wasn't bad enough, she then compared Lil Nas X to a sexual predator saying, why has Oh, but I'm gay become a default excuse for immorality? It was Kevin Spacey's line when he was accused of sexual assault. Andrew Gillums, when he was caught with a hooker and crystal meth. Now it's the reason Lil Nas X needs to make a Satan shoe with human blood. Now, if you think that that's homophobic, it's not according to her because, quote, I have four gay cousins, all of whom I'm very close to and all of whom have made it through life without using crystal meth, sexually assaulting anybody or creating a Satan shoe. Stop blaming your immorality on sexuality. Yes, because making a Satan shoe to troll you is morally comparable to sexual assault. And yet this dipshit is asking, how can we be so stupid? I don't know, it's almost like you're part of the problem, aren't you? Now, Lil Nas X responded to her in the perfect way saying, you know, you did something right when she talks about it. And of course, she then challenged him to a debate because why wouldn't she? But then it got a little bit more interesting and by interesting, I mean homophobic and racist because Caitlyn Bennett, AKA Gun Girl, AKA the pants-shitting Nazi, tweeted out, it's weeks like this that I'm thankful to be blocked by Lil Nas X, to which he responded by saying, I still see your tweets, shitty pants. She then responded twice to this in one tweet saying, the guy that takes up the ass from Satan wants to talk about shitty pants. And she also decided to get super racist by saying, do you still see your dad? To which he responded to her racism hilariously by joking about turning her dad gay saying, yep, and I might fuck yours. And I've just got to pause for a moment. Lil Nas X is a top tier troler. They don't even realize that they're getting trolled by him and they're getting outraged and triggered. And two days from now, they're gonna be complaining about cancel culture and how the PC police wants to, you know, sanitize everything and that nothing can be said, you know, in American culture anymore without someone getting offended. Meanwhile, they're offended by everything. But she responded to Lil Nas X saying, I'm gonna turn your dad gay by basically saying, oh my God, you're threatening to rape my dad. That's literally what she's taking away from that tweet. She said, Lil Nas X just threatened to rape my dad. Sounds about what I'd expect. And she then retweeted an article from a far right news outlet about the supposed quote unquote rape threat from a quote unquote journalist who tweeted, Free Chauvin, who, as you know, is the police officer who murdered George Floyd, which Caitlin Bennett then retweeted. And yet these are the people who are like, oh, well, you're immoral. You're the ones who are stupid. But yet Free Derek Chauvin, a murderer who we all watched, kneel on the neck of an unarmed black man for almost nine minutes. Conservatives are like going out of their way to rip the mask off. I would say that it's unbelievable, but this is absolutely on brand for conservatives. Now, a conservative country singer, John Rich, who just appeared on Candice Owen's show, tweeted out, Lil Nas X praises Satan and I praised the one who defeated him for eternity, the son of God, Jesus Christ. Oh wow, how noble of you. Lil Nas X can still give his life to Jesus and be saved. Pray for him to do so. I just did. And then Lil Nas X responded by saying, praise this ratio. John then responded saying, I'm praying for you. Okay. Great. So all of this, it just obviously exposes conservative hypocrisy to go from railing against cancel culture, Mr. Potato Head, Dr. Seuss, all these dumb ass stories to then quite literally becoming the outrage mob. I was gonna say the woke mob, the outrage mob that they were just announcing. Their hypocrisy is brazen. They are shameless. They don't even care how silly they look. And Lil Nas X actually pointed this out saying, I thought y'all didn't like political correctness. What happened? And he adds, y'all love saying, we going to hell, but get upset when I actually go there, LMAO. Now my favorite, he tweeted out a Chick-fil-A version of his Satan shoe, two of these conservatives. And this one is just awesome. I love it. So Lil Nas X made a friend out of me by doing all of this. I will say though, the left is defending him now, but the minute he starts flaunting his wealth, we will turn on him. So just FYI Lil Nas X, if you wanna keep us or you wanna stay in our good graces, then don't be a rich prick. But nonetheless, the message that he is trying to espouse about actually being himself, I think that's important. And when there are so few role models who are gay and actually proud of who they are, things like this actually do make a difference in the lives of gay people. It does, because you're less likely to hate yourself if you see other people who are like you. So the fact that Lil Nas X is explicitly saying, fuck your feelings, we're here, we're queer, and we don't care what you say about us, we don't care. Then you say, we're evil, I absolutely love it, I applaud it, and I think that this is art that is worthy of praise. As we all remember in the last election cycle, Republicans lost in the state of Georgia, which usually doesn't happen. The state flipped from red to blue. And this is largely due to a surge in voter turnout. Disproportionately, black Georgians came out and they supported Democrats. So in response, the Republican party that is currently in control of Georgia decided to make sure that this never happens again, that the change from red to blue isn't actually permanent. So they concocted a plan to suppress the vote. And that plan has now come to fruition and it is bill SB202. And it is one of the most draconian pieces of voter suppression that we've seen for decades. In fact, it's so bad it's being called Jim Crow 2.0 because that's exactly what the goal is to suppress the vote of black voters, specifically black voters. So as Vox explains, the bill known as SB202 gives state level officials the authority to usurp the powers of county election boards, allowing the Republican dominated state government to potentially disqualify voters in democratic leaning areas. It criminalizes the provision of food and water to voters waiting in line in a state where lines are notoriously long and heavily non-white precincts. It requires ID for absentee ballots and limits the placement of ballot drop boxes. SB202 will almost certainly make elections less fair, giving the GOP a structural advantage well outsized to its actual strength among Georgia voters. It doesn't signal the end of democracy in Georgia but it is the latest significant step in the Republican party's move toward becoming an anti-democratic political faction. The Georgia law is part of a broader wave of GOP efforts at the state and national level to undermine the fairness of American elections. What happened in Georgia reveals the true force of the modern Republican party, a far right institution that threatens American democracy even after Trump's defeat. Now it's been a couple of days since the governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp signed this into law and already there are calls for boycotts. The state is being sued over this law. The issue is that the conservatives currently have a very comfortable majority. So if this reaches the Supreme Court, then what's gonna happen? Well, I mean, even if Roberts decides to deflect inside with the liberals on the court, they can still uphold this draconian voter suppression law by five to four. So this isn't just something that could affect Georgia. This could affect a lot of other states as well. Georgia in fact is just a microcosm of the broader issue because states and legislatures across the country are currently seeing bills just like this. It's just that Georgia is the most brazen and shameless. And the governor is really angry that folks are saying this is like Jim Crow 2.0 and that this is racist, but it's funny for how worried he is about this looking racist and people saying it's racist, he sure seems really defensive and for actually not wanting it to be racist, perhaps he should have thought about the optics a little bit more. This is the picture the governor tweeted showing him signing the bill, surrounded by six white men, a picture that presumably was not intended to invoke Jim Crow in a state where about 30% of the population is black and one party, the Republican Party, is nearly entirely white. And the backdrop there is really the PSD resistance that also definitively should not evoke bad memories of the old self. That painting there in the background, that is of a slave plantation in Wilkes County, Georgia where at least 100 slaves owned by the Callaway family were forced to toil over 56 acres of land. Yeah, now while that photograph was being taken outside, this was happening. The governor is signing a bill that affects all Georgians. Why is he doing it in private and why is he trying to keep elected officials who are representing us out of the process? Exactly. You said you gave her one more time like you're gonna do something about it. You're a wimp, a wimp and a wimp. Are you serious? No, you are not. No, she's not under arrest. For what? Under arrest for what? For trying to see something that our governor is doing? Our governor is signing a bill that affects all Georgians and you're going to arrest an elected representative. Why does the governor have more power than a representative? Why are you arresting her? That's what I'm asking you. Stop arresting her. Why are you arresting her? Why? Sight the violation. Sight the code. What is she in violation of? I want you to cite the code. Sight the code. Sight it. What are you, cite the code. Sight the code. Sight the code. Call James Sight. Why are you arresting her? Under what? Under what? That is a state lawmaker who you kept out from the process and she now faces felony charges. Not racist though. Just ridiculous. Now in an interview with Fox News, which by the way had a little to no pushback, the governor tried to explain this bill and he made it seem as if it's really not that bad. In fact, this bill expands voting rights in some ways and liberals just don't want to talk about that. Almost everything he said here is either disingenuous or an outright lie. Take a look. Governor, your critics say and President Biden calling it Jim Crow 2.0 specifically the heaviest criticism is that this new law limits voting access to African-Americans specifically. What do you say to that? Well, I can truthfully look in the camera and ask my African-American friends and other African-Americans in Georgia to simply find out what's in the bill versus just the blank statement of this is Jim Crow or this is voter suppression or this is racist because it is not. It expands early voting in Georgia. It also further secures the ballot with the photo ID requirement and I would urge them to do just that and ask themselves, who's being truthful to you here? Is it the governor and the legislature that just voted on this bill or is it a lot of these third party groups that are making millions off of putting this false narrative out there or the president that obviously doesn't know what his own voting laws are in his own state? Governor, for our viewers, maybe just hearing this story, seeing the two sides of this, what is in this bill that people need to know about? What is most important? Well, obviously we talked about the access side of things. There's not gonna be two mandatory Saturdays. You can have the option if counties want to devote on two potential Sundays, which that is adding access. We're adding the photo ID requirement to absentee ballots by mail. We already have that requirement in our law when you go vote in person before the last election. 95%, average 95% of the people voted in person. So people are used to using the ID to vote in Georgia so it's not a big deal like people are making it out. And if you don't have ID, we'll give you one for free. We're addressing the drop box situation. The left and the outrageous people that are making money off this are claiming that we're taking away the potential to use a drop box. That was never in the law growth. It's never been in the state law in Georgia. We did that with this bill. We're just gonna make sure it's a secure process and that those drops boxes are monitored. And this whole ridiculous statement about water, you can get water if you're standing in line. Your county can provide a drink cooler for you to get water. But the real question is, people that are outraged about that, they should be asking, why am I standing in line that long to start with? This bill addresses that with the number of machines that should be at every precinct based on the percent of population that's gonna be voting in that precinct to help speed up the election. People should be outraged in these democratic run counties that they're having to stand in line for two or three hours here in the state of Georgia. That is not the norm around the state. Hmm, I wonder why it is that in democratic leaning areas, the lines are longer. That couldn't have anything to do with the fact that you reduced the number of polling stations in these areas because these happen to be the areas with a higher share of black voters, right? That doesn't have anything to do with it. No, it's because Democrats are controlling these areas and Democrats are bad. It's not because we reduced the number of polling stations. And you know, you would think, based on what he said there, that he's cognizant of the fact that the lines are too long and perhaps this bill will address it, even says that the bill addresses the long lines with the number of machines that should be at every precinct based on the percent of the population that's going to be voting in that precinct to help speed up the election. He says this, so you think, oh, wow, so you're adding more polling stations, right? Well, actually, no, the bill doesn't add more polling stations. In fact, the bill will contribute to longer lines because you're taking away the number of drop boxes that exist. So the lines are literally going to be longer as a result of this bill and you just happen for no particular reason to throw in this little clause that criminalizes people who try to encourage folks who are waiting in line to stay there by bringing them pizza and soda and water. So he knows exactly what he's doing, but he's trying to piss on our legs and tell us that it's raining. Now, this doesn't actually increase voter suppression. This is going to expand voting rights. And he keeps citing the detail about how, well, you know, this actually does expand early voting. Now, he's correct there, but it's funny how you throw that in there so you can try to sell it to us. So you have plausible deniability, but it doesn't matter because the overall net effect of this bill is to stop people from voting. And he tries to compare Delaware to Georgia. And first of all, this is irrelevant because even if Delaware has terrible laws, that doesn't mean that you should also adopt terrible laws. And he tries to basically hypocrisy burn Joe Biden and say, well, you know, Joe Biden, he is attacking my law, but he should pay attention to his state. That's irrelevant. He's the president of the United States. He's not the governor of Georgia. And he's very narrowly defining what voting rights means when this is disingenuous. So let's look at voting laws in states. There's a number of dimensions that we need to pay attention to. Keep in mind, this is before they passed this new law. So when it comes to early voting, it is true that Delaware requires an approved excuse, whereas Georgia does not. So they do get kudos there. When it comes to felony disenfranchisement, the states are pretty comparable. Although in Delaware, they don't restore voting rights to all felons if you were convicted of murder or rape. You don't get your voting rights back. So when it comes to voter registration laws though, a little bit different story. Georgia is one of the strictest in the nation and they actually have an exact match law. So if you try to register to vote, it gets rejected if your state records don't match 100%. So if you just moved and you forgot to change your address or didn't have a chance to, you cannot register to vote. Everything has to match. That's not the case in Delaware. When it comes to voter ID laws, again, Georgia is one of the most strictest in the nation. Oh, but in this one area, we expand early voting. Great. It's almost like you're using that as an excuse to sell a bill that is basically a draconian voter suppression bill. And then he lies about voting rights activists. He says, well, they say that there's all this stuff in the bill, when in actuality, you just gotta read the bill. What they're saying is that it isn't actually in it. But what he's leaving out is that the bill in this iteration, the one that was signed into law, even though it's super draconian, is less draconian than it was because he was forced to concede on a number of things because the bill was too brazen. As the New York Times explains, the law does not include some of the harshest restrictions that had been proposed, like a ban on Sunday voting, that was seen as an attempt to curtail the role of black churches in driving turnout. And the legislation now in fact, expands early voting options in some areas. No excuse absentee voting in which voters do not have to provide a rationale for casting a ballot by mail also remains in place. Though it will now entail new restrictions such as providing a state issued identification card. So basically what he's saying is, look, we were gonna pass this super, super draconian version of it, but we didn't. We only passed the last draconian version of it. That's still draconian. That's still amounts to Jim Crow 2.0. But we should get credit for that, right? And hey, we threw in an expansion of early voting. We're making it more difficult to register to vote in the first place. But if you manage to register to vote, you can vote earlier. Yay! I mean, this is just, it's insane. And again, I have to point out that Georgia is a microcosm of a broader issue because in state legislatures across the country, controlled by Republicans, they're doing this exact thing. So the only way this is going to be stopped is if Democrats pass HR1 at the federal level because you have to blunt this momentum in these state legislatures across the country. Because Republicans, where they're in control, they're going to restrict voting so they are able to maintain power. They don't care that they're killing democracy. And they know that the Supreme Court will likely be on their side here because the Supreme Court is a political institution. They don't care about the Constitution. So if Republicans pass these voter suppression laws, they're not going to do jack shit. They'll uphold them. So they know right now that they have to do this and they know that Democrats likely aren't competent enough to actually pass HR1. And as a result, the net effect will be that Republicans will be victorious in stopping black people from voting, which doesn't just hurt the Democratic Party, which doesn't just make it less likely that we see states flip from red to blue, as we did in January with Raphael Warnock and John Ossoff. But it hurts democracy in general because if you actually want a thriving democracy, you have to expand suffrage to everyone, not make it more difficult to vote. So this is a very, very bad sign. It's the start and more will come if Democrats don't take action in Congress. This is a serious threat to democracy and they need to actually treat it as if that's the case, because it is. I'll be honest, I still don't really know what to think about the Matt Gaetz story. I honestly can't make heads or tails of it. It's certainly bizarre. I don't really know how to even describe the details, but nonetheless, the circumstances surrounding this story, the allegations, what he says in response, it's all really interesting. So let's talk about it and try to dissect what's actually happening here. So yesterday, The New York Times published this article reporting Matt Gaetz is said to face Justice Department inquiry over sex with an underage girl. An inquiry into the Florida congressman was open in the final months of the Trump administration, people briefed on it said. Now they go on to add, Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida and a close ally of former President Donald J. Trump is being investigated by the Justice Department over whether he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old and paid for her to travel with him according to three people briefed on the matter. Investigators are examining whether Mr. Gaetz violated federal sex trafficking laws, the people said. A variety of federal statutes make it illegal to induce someone under 18 to travel over state lines to engage in sex in exchange for money or something of value. The Justice Department regularly prosecutes such cases and offenders often receive severe sentences. So there's a couple of things to note here. As the article states, this was not initiated by the Democratic Party. Trump was still in power when the Justice Department began this investigation into Matt Gaetz. And second of all, they don't necessarily know whether or not he was aware that the alleged 17-year-old in question was actually a minor. So there's some details that we don't know, but I will say that this seems a little bit relevant, don't you think? Quote, Florida Representative Matt Gaetz was literally the only person to vote against an anti-human trafficking bill. That's a little interesting. You have a bill with unanimous support for human trafficking because who wouldn't support a crackdown on human trafficking? And he's the one member of Congress who doesn't support it. That's interesting. Also, this tweet that he put out, Aged Like Milk, he responded to BB Rexha who said, there's no age that you can't be sexy. And he says, I say we change Florida's welcome signs to this. That is a big yikes from me. Jesus Christ. Now, I think that this next photograph, it tells you everything you need to know. Now, I don't know if you see it right away. However, if you look a little bit closer, well, I mean, this kind of tells you a lot about Matt Gaetz. N-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n. N-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n. No, no. A little bit suspicious, right? Is that where you go to order the kids, Matt? This is a pizza gates, apparently. That's the issue that we're dealing with. No, but on an unrelated note, a man named Matt Gaetz is having a really terrible day for no particular reason and I kind of feel bad for him. So I just wanted to put that out into the universe. Now moving on, Matt Gaetz decided to go on Tucker Carlson show to explain his side of the story and this just made matters exponentially worse. Things got not only more confusing, but he proceeded to implicate Tucker Carlson live on national television, literally. It is a horrible allegation and it is a lie. The New York Times is running a story that I have traveled with a 17 year old woman and that is verifiably false. People can look at my travel records and see that that is not the case. What is happening is an extortion of me and my family involving a former Department of Justice official. On March 16th, my father got a text message demanding a meeting wherein a person demanded $25 million in exchange for making horrible sex trafficking allegations against me go away. Our family was so troubled by that we went to the local FBI and the FBI and the Department of Justice were so concerned about this attempted extortion of a member of Congress that they asked my dad to wear a wire, which he did with the former Department of Justice official. Tonight I am demanding that the Department of Justice and the FBI release the audio recordings that were made under their supervision and at their direction, which will prove my innocence and that will show that these allegations aren't true. They're merely intended to try to bleed my family out of money and this former Department of Justice official tomorrow was supposed to be contacted by my father so that specific instructions could be given regarding the wiring of $4.5 million as a down payment on this bribe. I don't think it's a coincidence that tonight somehow the New York Times is leaking this information smearing me and ruining the investigation that would likely result in one of the former colleagues of the current DOJ being brought to justice for trying to extort me and my family. And I believe we are in an era of our politics now, Tucker, where people are smeared to try to take them out of the conversation. I'm not the only person on screen right now who's been falsely accused of a terrible sex act. You were accused of something that you did not do and so you know what this feels like. You know the pain it can bring to your family and you know how it just puts people on defense when you're accused of something so salacious and awful but it did not happen. It is not true. You just referred to a mentally ill viewer who accused me of a sex crime 20 years ago and of course it was natural. I'd never met the person but I do agree with you that being accused falsely is one of the worst things that can happen and you do see it a lot. Let's go back to the investigation. You say that it was or is underway what is the basis of that investigation? What is the allegation that really not very clear from these news stories? Yeah, again, I only know what I've read in the New York Times. I can say that actually you and I went to dinner about two years ago, your wife was there and I brought a friend of mine, you'll remember her and she was actually threatened by the FBI. I told that if she wouldn't cop to the fact that somehow I was involved in some pay for play scheme that she could face trouble and so I do believe that there are people at the Department of Justice who are trying to smear me, providing for flights and hotel rooms for people that you're dating who are of legal age is not a crime and I'm just troubled that the lack of any sort of legitimate investigation into me would then permute, would then convert into this extortion attempt. I don't remember the woman you're speaking of or the context at all, honestly. Yeah. Quote, I'm not the only one on this screen who has been accused of a terrible sex act. Tucker Carlson is sitting there just thinking, are you serious? And he totally, like a media trained professional, stone faces it, but in the back of his mind he's thinking, are you fucking serious right now? People don't know about this. I mean, I certainly have never heard about this. Also, Matt Gaetz then goes on to say, you and I went to dinner about two years ago. Your wife was there and I brought a friend of mine. You'll remember her. Tucker Carlson is sitting there like, me? Really? Seriously? I bring you on to do you a favor and you're now bringing me into all of this? First of all, is this dinner that you're referring to the 17 year old? Matt Gaetz claims later on in that interview that she doesn't exist. So I don't know who he's referring to and why he thought that that was relevant to talk about the dinner that he went to with Tucker Carlson. But it's nice to know that these media elites are chumming it up with politicians, not shocking at all. But then Tucker Carlson goes on to deny that. And since he roped Tucker Carlson into this, Tucker Carlson then made a remark about it. Now there's a cut at the beginning of this video. I pulled this clip from the YouTube channel at Fox News. I don't know why the cut is there, but nonetheless, watch how Tucker Carlson reacted to that interview. Matt Gaetz's interview, that was one of the weirdest interviews I've ever conducted. That story just appeared in the news a couple of hours ago. And on the certainty that there's always more than you read in the newspaper, we immediately called Matt Gaetz and asked him to come on and tell us more. Which is, you saw he did. I don't think that clarified much, but it certainly showed this is a deeply interesting story and we'll be following it. Don't quite understand it, but we'll bring you on when we find out. So basically his response was, thanks a lot, Matt. I guess I'm gonna be expecting a call from the Justice Department or the FBI now. Thank you so much. Great friend. This is weird. This is really, really weird. I still don't necessarily know what to take away from this situation. If it is the case that he's being extorted, which he also stated via Twitter and kind of said the same things that he said in that interview with Tucker Carlson, he didn't really add anything new, although a question that I was thinking was pointed out in the replies. This person asks, how can they extort you for sleeping with an underage girl if you didn't do it? So if there's actual evidence of a crime and they're trying to extort you, this story is very, very complicated and we're only beginning to scratch the surface. Nonetheless, we don't have all of the details. I don't necessarily know what to take away. I don't know if there's any culpability here. All that we know, the facts of the matter as reported by the New York Times is that there was an act of investigation into Matt Gaetz. Whether or not the truth comes out, I don't know, I hope so, but this is certainly very, very weird. There's nothing left I could really say. You know, I can't supply you with substantive commentary until we have more concrete details, but certainly Matt Gaetz is not helping himself at all here. The White House has unveiled Joe Biden's infrastructure plan and this isn't yet in bill form. It's not a final draft, although there are some details that I think are important that is laid out by Jeff Stein of the Washington Post. This is what is promised. So electric vehicle stations nationwide replace every lead pipe and universal clean drinking water. This obviously sounds great. Two million homes retrofitted or built universal affordable high speed broadband by 2030. Now, I don't necessarily know what this entails. If he means investing in municipal broadband, this could be a game changer in the fight to protect net neutrality. If this just means additional infrastructure to make high speed internet more accessible to people who live in rural areas, that's good too, but really we have to know the details in order to determine what the effect will be. Additionally, fixed 20,000 miles of roads and bridges and the pro act will also be included in this infrastructure bill. Now for a dollars breakdown, we go to Kyle Griffin of MSNBC who explains 650 billion will be allocated to rebuild US infrastructure, 400 billion to care for the elderly and disabled, 300 billion for housing infrastructure and 300 billion to revive US manufacturing. So that's the short and sweet summary based on a couple of tweets. But if you really want a full comprehensive breakdown, I will point you to the article written by Jeff Stein from the Washington Post. And I also want to share this graphic with you because this breaks it down even further. And as you can see, clean drinking water and replacing lead pipes, this is a really, really positive thing to include. Will this amount of money be enough to actually achieve this? I'm not necessarily sure, but this is positive. I'm not sure. Again, with the high speed broadband element will entail. Nonetheless, you know, there's a lot of good things in here. But before I tell you too much about my opinion on this, I do want to share what Biden believes this bill is going to be. Quote, this is not a plan that tinkers around the edges. It is a once in a generation investment in America. Unlike anything we've done since we built the interstate highway system and the space race in the 1950s and 1960s, Biden said, we have to move now. I'm convinced that if we act now in 50 years, people will look back and say, this was the moment America won the future. So to him, this is his response to calls for a jobs program, the Green New Deal. So using that metric to grade this, is this going to be sufficient? Well, let's put it this way. In order to actually stop a climate catastrophe, it's going to require $50 trillion to be spent over the next two decades. Now, this isn't just for the United States to be clear, it's for the entire world. But if this actually is a once in a generation investment and possibly our last chance to stop catastrophic climate change and meet the IPCC's now 10 year timeline, is this actually enough? And I think that we all know the answer to that. No, it's not enough. It's a start. There's a lot of great things in here. And in the event this were to pass, there's a lot of positives. The pro act, replacing lead pipes in America. There's a lot in here that's great, that I would like to see passed and become law. The issue, however, is that he is attempting to pass this and basically say, look, I answered your call climate activists, people who want a federal jobs guarantee. This is what you get. I did this. This is a once in a generation opportunity. Well, if that's truly the case, then you need to shoot a lot higher for this because assuming that this is all going to be in the bill that you propose, it is going to get watered down. So you ask for 2.2 trillion. You're probably gonna only get 1.5 trillion if you're lucky. So you should be asking for much more anticipating this bill to get watered down. And even if we got everything in this bill, is this still enough? Well, I think that AOC does a good job at putting this into perspective. She tweeted out, the important context here is that it's a 2.25 trillion dollar spread over 10 years. For context, the COVID package was 1.9 trillion for this year alone with some provisions lasting two years. It needs to be way bigger. And I totally agree with that sentiment. If this really is a once in a generation opportunity here to pass something like this and we're not gonna get this opportunity again for a very long time, you shoot for the moon. You don't come up with a 2.2 trillion dollar plan over 10 years. Again, I don't wanna discredit or be too down on the good stuff here because there are good elements in here. But if you're expecting us to accept that this is all we do with regard to climate change and the federal jobs guarantee and investing in clean, green, renewable technology, it's very clearly not going to suffice. And that's what he's trying to sell it to us as. And as Jake Johnson of Common Dreams points out, climate activists are not accepting this. President Joe Biden's rollout of a 2.26 trillion infrastructure and climate spending blueprint on Wednesday was met with an icy response from progressive advocacy groups and environmentalists who argued the proposal in its current form is inadequate to the task of combating the climate crisis by overhauling the nation's polluting energy and transportation systems. Biden's industry-friendly infrastructure plan squanders one of our last best chances to stop the climate emergency, warned Brett Hartle, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. Instead of a Marshall plan approach that moves our economy to renewable energy, it includes gimmicky subsidies for carbon capture, fantastically wishes the free market will save us and fails to take crucial and ambitious steps towards phasing out fossil fuels. Winona Haader, executive director of Food and Water Watch, said that while Biden's proposal is more ambitious than previous efforts, the American Jobs Plan still falls woefully short of truly addressing the multiple crises facing our country and our planet. In a blog post on Wednesday, Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute sketched out a rough estimate of the spending that would likely be necessary over the next decade to meet the nation's most pressing needs in the areas of infrastructure, green energy investment, higher education and healthcare. Considering the costs of proposals that are under discussion for the new package, as well as policy ideas not currently on the table, such as expanding Medicare to children, Bivens puts the ideal level of spending at just under 10.5 trillion over the next 10 years. So if this is truly it, the last chance we have in a really long time to see Democrats in full control of government, even if their majority in the Senate is super narrow, you've got to do way, way better than this, way better than this, because you're not going to say, hey, I passed the American Jobs Act, we're done. We can wash your hands when it comes to climate change and infrastructure and our jobs, program and America. This isn't going to suffice. And again, if the recommendation here is 10.5 trillion over the next 10 years, which I think sounds more reasonable, you need to ask for 15 trillion, because again, you have to anticipate this is going to be watered down. It's going to be watered down. And so if you don't shoot high, then you're not going to get what you want. You have to anticipate that some provisions are going to be taken out. Now, I haven't seen the final bill yet. We don't know what's going to be in this and it's probably going to be really long and lengthy. And there's probably going to be some poison pills in here, to be honest, that we need to try to suss out. But it's clear that he's trying to sell this as something that it's not, not a plan that tinkers around the edges. It is a once in a generation investment in America. Then you actually have to put those words into practice because even if this is to be fair more bold than anything we've seen from Democrats, even Obama would refuse to go above one trillion in any bill, it's still not good enough. And you ran for president. You told all of us that you could meet this moment. We knew it was a lie, but don't tell us that you're going to meet this moment if you won't actually meet this moment. Now again, I want to be extra clear here. I'm giving him credit words too. If this were to pass, it would be in that positive. It would be good, right? But it's not good enough. We can do more, we can always do more. And it's time that the Democratic Party stops just doing the bare minimum. They are tinkering around the edges most of the time. And we need bold systemic changes if we actually want to save the planet. When you have a really limited window of opportunity, there is no time to just make small tweaks around the edges. Even Joe Biden is saying that he doesn't want to tinker around the edges. So if that's actually the case, then show us. Don't tell us. Now, this is just the preliminary proposal. We'll have to wait and reserve judgment. But if this is all that we get, and we're not going to get another chance to pass an infrastructure bill, I mean, don't you think we can do a little bit better than this, at least a tiny bit better? So if you're fortunate enough to not have been on social media as of lately, as someone who is on social media pretty frequently, unfortunately, let me fill you in on what's been happening. Amazon, in an effort to thwart the unionization effort that's currently taking place in Bessemer, Alabama, has become increasingly desperate to the point where they're embarrassing themselves. Now, at the time I filmed this video, it's already the case that the employees at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama have voted on the union. We're currently just awaiting the results. So if you know more about this by the time you see this video, just understand that at the time I filmed this, I don't necessarily know the outcome of said vote. Having said that, though, the lead up to this has been quite interesting because Amazon has gotten a lot more vocal lately on social media, literally going after politicians like Bernie Sanders, Mark Pocan. And we've also noticed, for those of us on Twitter, a really large influx in the number of trolls that we've seen online. Now, it's really difficult to prove that it's Amazon who's behind 100% of these accounts. A lot of parodies have popped up. But still, Amazon hasn't even really been trying. So if this account here is Amazon, it's hilarious because they didn't even bother to pay for a stock image. They just used the actual photo of the Dude Perfect YouTube channel. And if they wanna use any photo from a YouTuber, this is not it because this is a YouTube channel with more than 50 million subscribers. So either it's the case that they stole this photograph from Dude Perfect or the man from Dude Perfect, the star of that channel, has time to not only work at Amazon, but also tweet about how terrible unions are. I don't believe this at all, just so you know. And given that a lot of these accounts have been purged by Twitter, I'm assuming automatically it really goes to show you that Amazon didn't really even try to hide their astroturfing. And they've even been responding to journalists in leftist circles. So Walker Bragman tweeted out that Amazon workers should vote yes on the union and a paid show responded to that. And I can't show you what that paid show said because their account was purged. But if you watch a video by David Dole of the Rational National, he did a really good job at breaking down just how ridiculous all of these fake accounts are. And what's interesting is that they're all saying the same thing. So I assumed and many also assumed that these have gotta be bots. Like they're not actually human beings behind these tweets because who would say these things? Normal human beings wouldn't say something like this about their employer. Who speaks glowingly about their employer? I've worked at Walmart, I've worked at Subway, I hate them, they're terrible. So you're never gonna hear somebody speak glowingly about a company as shitty as Amazon. So it's just hilarious to me that they would use these robots. Or so I thought because apparently, according to a new report by journalist Ken Clippenstein, these aren't even robots. These are actual human beings that Amazon paid. They hired these folks to do astroturf, to do propaganda and defend them, salvage the reputation and stop the unionization effort. So Ken Clippenstein writes, Amazon's Twitter army was handpicked for great sense of humor. Leak document reveals, we didn't see any of that by the way. Amazon ambassadors were trained to defend Jeff Bezos and clapped back at Bernie Sanders under a program codenamed Veritas. Now it goes on to explain anticipating criticisms of worker conditions at their fulfillment centers in particular, Amazon designed Veritas to train fulfillment center workers chosen for their great sense of humor to confront critics, including policymakers on Twitter in a blunt manner. The document produced as part of the pilot program in 2018 and marked amazon.com confidential, also includes examples of how its ambassadors can snarkily respond to criticisms of the company and its CEO. Several examples involve Senator Bernie Sanders, a longtime critic of the $1 trillion firm who has been targeted by it in recent days. It also provides examples of how to defend Bezos to address speculation and false assertions in social media and online forums about the quality of the fulfillment center, associate experience. We are creating a new social team staffed with active, tenured FC employees who will be empowered to respond in a polite but blunt way to every untruth the project description reads. FC ambassadors, FCA, will respond to all posts and comments from customers, influencers, including policymakers and media questioning the FC associate experience. Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokesperson, said via email, FC ambassadors are employees who work in our fulfillment centers and choose to share their personal experience. Sure Kelly, the FC ambassador program helps show what it's actually like inside our fulfillment centers along with the public tours we provide. In 2018, Amazon admitted that the ambassadors were employees paid to honestly share the facts about what working in its fulfillment centers is like many Twitter users had at first believed the ambassadors were automated bought accounts due to the nearly identical format of their account bios, all of which feature the Amazon smile logo and begin with the handle at Amazon FC. But that format was specifically mandated by Amazon, the Intercepts document shows. We could also add an emoji to the username to give personality, for example, small box emoji the document suggests. So this is hilarious to me. This is the worst AstroTurf campaign I've ever seen. They should have outsourced it, but they're too cheap to do even that. But they hire people for their good sense of humor, but yet they train them to talk to people online as if they're robots. And the only thing that they can do to actually allow their personality to shine through is add an emoji to their name. I mean, this is absolutely embarrassing. And they're going through all of this, all this headache, this effort, all to stop one union. So that goes to show you that unions are very powerful. And if they're doing all of this to stop one union, they know that this could catalyze a domino effect where more and more Amazon warehouses around the country start to unionize. And they know that all of this that they're doing, all of this funding of AstroTurf online and attempts to union bust, all of this is cheaper than actually allowing their employees to unionize because they know that if their employees had unions, they'd be paying them a lot more than the $15 an hour that they brag about. So this story is hilarious. It's so pathetic. This is a multi-billion dollar company, a trillion dollar firm as the article lays out. And their bots are just terrible. Their paid shills are terrible. I mean, even David Brock's paid shills for Hillary Clinton back in 2015 did a better job at humanizing themselves and didn't let you know that they were paid bots as easily, even though it was still obvious, but this is just next level. And the frequency that we see them confront people online is honestly startling. Like we've all come into contact with these Amazon bots and every time it happens, they get dunked on and then the account ends up getting deleted. So it's just, it's sad, but good. I'm glad that Amazon is getting embarrassed and exposed because they deserve it given how poorly they treat their employees. So if you're wondering why the Biden administration wasn't allowing journalists into the migrant detention facilities, i.e. cages where we keep little kids, I think that this photograph from The Daily Beast shed some light onto why that's the case because when they finally allowed journalists in, they snapped this photo and they learned this as Martha Mercer of The Daily Beast reports, 500 migrant kids crammed into plastic pods meant for 32 people. So before I get to the article, let's just stop and reflect on this. We're in the middle of a pandemic and this is happening. There is absolutely no justification for this. There's no excuse. Yes, there's an influx of migrants at the border and at the beginning of something like this, I can understand an administration being flustered, trying to figure out where to house these migrants in a way that is actually humane, but there's been ample time now for you to come up with a solution. This is no longer excusable. Resources should be dedicated to immediately changing this because this is not safe during a pandemic. Now, as The Daily Beast reports, journalists were allowed in for the first time Tuesday to see the US Customs and Border Protection's biggest facility for unaccompanied migrant children and returned with shocking details. Kids with foil blankets sat shoulder to shoulder inside plastic pods. Each pod was made to house 32 people, but held more than 500 kids, all wearing masks, but not tested for COVID-19 unless symptomatic, the AP reports. Younger kids are held in walled play pens. In all of the tent facility in Donna, Texas, which opened February 9th, now holds more than 4,100 migrants, though under the CDC pandemic guidelines, it should have no more than 250 people. Oscar Escamilla, the Border Patrol's Rio Grande Valley Sector's Acting Executive Officer, told the AP the positivity rate at the center was 14%. The kids are supposed to stay no more than three days at the facility, but a Department of Health and Human Services backlog meant they're held much longer with hundreds more unaccompanied migrant minors crossing the border each day. So this is unacceptable. This is unjustifiable. This is an emergency. A lot of these minors that come here, they actually have family in the United States. So while you process them, perhaps you can allow them to reach out to family members and stay with them. Either way, like however you cut it, this is completely indistinguishable from what we saw from the Trump administration. Sure, it's not the case that Joe Biden is intentionally separating families at the border as a means to deter further immigration from Mexico and South America, but this is not sustainable during a pandemic. It's still, even if it weren't a pandemic currently, how is this justifiable? Or we have them sleeping in cages? Do we not have a more long-term solution? Are we always scrambling when it comes to these issues? It's just, it's not acceptable. And all of the liberals who told us that Trump caging kids was absolutely human rights abuse, where are you now? What do you have to say about this? Don't be like the Republicans. Liberals and leftists shouldn't be like the Republicans who are hypocritical and they change their political view on something depending on who's in power. So Republicans all week have been insufferable. Ted Cruz, other Republican senators, they went to the border and they've been grandstanding all week talking about how cruel this is. And it is cruel. The issue is that you weren't saying anything about this back when Donald Trump was doing it. When he was separating families at the border and they had to build extra facilities to house toddlers, you didn't say anything. But now that Biden is president, all of a sudden you're feigning outrage. It is outrageous. But we know you're lying and you're just using these kids for purposes of political expediency. So the right are absolutely grotesque. They're hypocrites. But the left and even liberals, I expect to condemn this. Yes, this is a very complex situation. There's a lot of nuances and this is an issue that is difficult. If there is an influx in minors at the border, unaccompanied minors at the border to be clear, then you have to figure out a way to house them. We don't turn them away, but we house them. The issue is we don't treat them like animals, like cattle and shove them in these cages where they're only meant for 32 people. This is not safe and it's inhumane and there's nothing left to be said about that. This is unjustifiable. It's indefensible and it's an emergency. You know, if Biden actually wants his actions to match the rhetoric that he's using with regard to immigration and migrants at the border, then you actually have to solve this problem. You can't just let this go on. This is absolutely unacceptable. Even prior to the pandemic, healthcare insecurity in America was a gigantic issue, but obviously the pandemic made matters worse because if we tie healthcare in this country to our employers and millions and millions of Americans lose their jobs as a result of the pandemic, obviously that's going to further exacerbate the crisis. But now we're learning specifically how many Americans can't actually afford quality healthcare. And we're not talking about whether or not they can afford a medical emergency because a lot of Americans can't afford to bear the cost of a medical emergency. A new poll just asks them simply, can you afford quality healthcare if you need it? And 18% of Americans say that they cannot. So as Jake Johnson of Common Dreams reports, a new study released Wednesday morning shows that nearly 50 million Americans would be unable to afford quality healthcare should the need for treatment suddenly arise, a finding seen as further evidence of the immorality of a for-profit insurance system that grants or denies coverage based on a person's ability to pay. People can't afford their goddamn healthcare. Tim Faust, a proponent of single-payer healthcare, tweeted in response to the new report, family spend less on food so they can make insurance payments. This problem is felt by all but concentrated among poor people and black people. The American model of health reform throwing money at private insurers cannot solve it. The rot is pervasive and it runs deep, Faust added. People who cannot afford healthcare just don't get healthcare. Wealthy men get to live 15 years longer than poor men. We have condemned poor children to die from things which do not kill rich children. In America, sickness makes you poor, poorness makes you sick, then you die. According to the report by Gallup and West Health, 18% of US adults, around 46 million people, say that if they needed access to quality healthcare today, they would not be able to cover the costs. The same percentage of adults report that amid a deadly pandemic, someone in their household has opted to skip needed care over the past year due to inability to pay. The chances of any given household suffering from this form of health insecurity are inversely related to annual household income with 35% of respondents from low income households, those earning under 24,000 per year, reporting forgoing care in the prior 12 months. Gallup's Dan Witter's notes in the summary of the study's findings that has five times the rate reported by those from high income households, 7%, defined as earning at least $180,000 per year. And need I remind you that this is occurring in the richest country on the planet. And before the pandemic, we learned, according to a study conducted by the University of Florida and University of Maryland, that if we actually adopted Medicare for All, that wouldn't just save $450 billion every single year, but it would actually save 68,000 lives every single year. So this is a crisis. And for whatever reason, it's not being treated like the crisis that it is. And I'm sorry, I don't care that Joe Biden threatened to veto Medicare for All. I don't care that the current political climate in America isn't necessarily conducive to Medicare for All being successful. I don't care. That doesn't mean that we stop pushing for what's right because it's not necessarily possible in the short term. If you would have told civil rights activists in the 60s or gay rights activists in the late 70s and early 80s that they shouldn't be pushing for their civil rights because the current political climate wasn't necessarily accepting of them, they would have rejected that because you don't fight for what's possible. You fight for what's right. So even if it's not possible currently, that doesn't mean that we don't fight for it. That doesn't mean that we don't currently push the envelope. The answer is clear. It's Medicare for All. And there's a lot of reasons why we aren't making any progress towards this in spite of it being incredibly popular according to public opinion polls. It's because we have a Democratic Party that has been bought and paid for by the health insurance industry. In fact, during the Democratic Party primaries in 2020, the health insurance industry actually bet everything on Joe Biden to save them from the momentum of Medicare for All and Bernie Sanders who was a proponent of Medicare for All. And now that Joe Biden is in power, we're expected to just kind of roll over and die when in actuality, that's not gonna happen. Grassroots activists are not going to stop fighting for Medicare for All. We're not going to stop advocating for Medicare for All because this is the objectively correct policy that would save lives and money. Now, I care more about lives, but if you care about money, whatever argument you wanna make, a small business tax credit, I don't care how you sell it, but the answer is very clearly Medicare for All. And part of the issue here is that the mainstream media has completely failed us. They failed us. They're not treating this like the crisis that it is. This is a public health emergency. 68,000 Americans dying every single year because they don't have healthcare. That is a crisis. How are we not talking about that? How are mainstream news pundits not pressing every single politician, Democrat and Republican, what they're going to do to save the 68,000 people who are dying every single year. And now that number's probably a lot higher. And when you look at this study, I'm assuming that if you ask them a bit more questions, the number of people who can't afford healthcare would be higher because you have a lot of folks who pay for healthcare. They have health insurance. So technically, they believe that they're protected, but in actuality, they don't realize that there are additional costs and co-pays and their insurance doesn't cover everything. So if they were educated and they knew about the healthcare that they would receive and how much it would cost, I think that the number would actually be higher. And more people would say, I can't afford my healthcare. So I'm sick and tired of hearing about healthcare insecurity in America. I'm sick and tired of hearing about all of these studies, study after study after study, showing how cost-efficient and effective Medicare for all will be. We're beyond that. We're beyond the selling and the marketing of Medicare for all. Now is the time for action. Now is the time to fight. And nobody's going to realize how important this issue is if people with power and influence don't actually elevate the salience of this issue. So I need members of Congress to talk about this issue, speak about the health insecurity issue in America like the public health crisis that it is. I'm talking about members of the squad, even Bernie Sanders. And there's so many issues that affect us. It's difficult to really disproportionately focus on any one issue. But when 68,000 American lives are being lost every single year, probably now more after the pandemic, that is something that is of the utmost concern or should be of the utmost concern and priority to everyone. So there's not going to be a sense of urgency if the media, politicians and influencers don't elevate the salience of this issue. The answer is Medicare for all. Now anyone who doesn't support it, Joe Biden, Democrats, Republicans, they're part of the problem. They are the enemies and they must be exposed and thoroughly defeated. There's absolutely no excuse for a politician to not support and unequivocally embrace policies like Medicare for all before the pandemic, but after the pandemic and during the pandemic, if you don't support Medicare for all, you're not just heartless. I actually think you're a lunatic. You're a psychopath. If you don't support the policy that is objectively going to save lives. And it's not a matter of cost. It's something that we can afford easily because overall net healthcare spending in America will go down. It's a matter of actually doing what's right and going to war with health insurance companies that fund the Democratic Party. But we know why they don't wanna do it. So we have to keep pushing, keep fighting, keep organizing and it's not gonna be easy, but just because it's not gonna be easy doesn't necessarily mean that we shouldn't do it. It might be seemingly impossible, but there were other things that were impossible in America that we were able to accomplish. It's just a matter of we keep fighting and we don't get discouraged because there are going to be many obstacles that pop up, many defeats along the way, but that doesn't mean that we've lost on this issue. We just have to make sure that people know how bad the situation is and we treat it with the urgency it requires. Hello everyone. I have a fantastic guest for you today. I'm here with Steve Grumbine who is the founder of Real Progressives and he's also the host of the MMT podcast, Macro and Cheese and also he's a co-host of the New Untouchables, the PCORA files and he is here today to educate me as well as all of you about the fundamentals of modern monetary theory. Steve, thank you so much for coming on the program. Thanks Mike, I'm glad I could be here. This has been a long time coming for those of you who don't know, we tried to do this interview before and there were so many technical difficulties that we had to basically nuke the entire thing. So Steve, I'm so thankful that we can finally do this and I have so much to ask you. So first of all, I think that my viewers know about modern monetary theory but for those who aren't aware, what's the easiest explanation that you can give? What is modern monetary theory? So modern monetary theory is a lens of macroeconomics in general. It is the way it is today, it doesn't need to be implemented, it doesn't need to be accepted. Your acceptance or lack thereof doesn't make this any less more valid. It is the blueprint of how federal finance works in the United States and really it represents a free-floating sovereign fiat currency that's non-convertible, not pegged to gold. You can't force redeem it by gold and this goes for countries all around the world, Australia, UK, Japan, China, Russia and a number of other ones, not the European Union but definitely the United States. And what it does is it says, hey listen, the pieces of paper are the least important thing when it comes to this. The question really comes to resources. Do we have the real resources to handle whatever it is that we wanna spend money on as a nation? And the bottom line is that modern monetary theorizes that a nation that creates its own currency cannot go broke on debts denominated in its own currency. Pretty straightforward. It's the bank, it is the creator of the dollar. And the thing that really, really made it stick for me was that the dollar for the United States is really a unit of measure. It's like an inch or a pound. You can't run out of inches and you can't run out of pounds. And then the next question is, is that where do points come from at a baseball game or a hockey game or a football game? Where do those points come from? And where do they go when you add them up and put them on when the game's over? Where do they go when you're done? They're just there, right? You keystroke them in. They're really a unit of measure for how many points you've scored in that game. Well, the dollar is the same thing in terms of the United States and around the world. What it does is allows us to have a legal arrangement. The US has the patent, if you will, on the US dollar. It has farmed that out to the Fed to kind of be its central bank. It was just spoken into existence by Congress in 1913. And it has been the subject of every possible conspiracy under the sun for the last, I don't know, forever. So really what you've got is a blueprint for how federal finance works. It's an operations manual, and it describes perfectly how federal finance actually works. Most of what we see today by Congress and by our newspapers and our other media outlets is a lot of fiction, a lot of stuff that was taught in school incorrectly, beginning with how money even comes to be. And most of the people think that the United States government has to borrow money from China. It has to borrow money from some nefarious bank or the Rothschilds and all the other crazy stuff that goes around out there. And in reality is that when Congress spends money, when it authorizes spending, okay? President signs a bill into law. They send that over to the Federal Reserve who then, in fact, keystrokes with, you know, their little fingers on a keyboard, dollars into the Treasury's accounts. The Treasury then spends those dollars into existence that didn't exist before, didn't come from your tax dollars. And that brings us to the next big thing that MMT talks about, which is the role of taxation. We have what they call a tax-driven economy. It's not that taxes actually pay for anything because taxes are functionally deleted when they're received. What taxes do is they provide the magnet that keeps the circuit going by having an obligation payable only in the nation's unit of account. You have a situation, an obligation that causes us to require to get those pieces of paper, those dollars. And so we have to find a way to get those dollars, right? And so the government uses that as a way of provisioning itself. This goes back to the day of kings and stuff like that, where a king would say, hey, I wanna build an aqueduct. I wanna build a coliseum. I wanna have a standing army and go to the people in the town and say, hey, I'd like to build this thing. Will you come help me? And the guy's like, no, I'm out here picking potatoes and I'm having fun with my kids and I'm fishing. I'm not interested in doing that. And he goes, well, I'll give you this gold coin. And the guy says, well, I'm not really interested in the gold coin. What am I gonna do with your gold coin? He says, good point. He says, I tell you what, this coin with my face on it, you have to pay 10 of these to keep your house. Oh, shoot. Well, how do I get those coins? Funny, you should ask that. I wanna build a coliseum. I wanna build an aqueduct. I wanna build a standing army, whatever. And so that's the story of that state money. And it's been going on since the day of Caesar's render under Caesar, right? Caesar didn't need the money. He already had the money. Just like the United States doesn't need the money. Doesn't need your tax dollar to spend. It requires your tax dollar to stave off inflation to create different behaviors, to modify behaviors and to incentivize or disincentivize certain behaviors. That's kind of the net net of modern monetary theory. Basically says we don't have a budgetary constraint that matters other than a fictional one we put on it. We have an inflationary constraint and it depends how much inflation do we want in the economy. And maybe we want a little, maybe we want a little bit less. It just depends. And that's how you would do your tax base. That's how you would do interest rates to be able to adjust to accommodate inflation concerns. That's a long story, but that's it in a nutshell. And that's a really, I think, excellent summary. And the reason why this is so important for those who don't already understand is because the implications of this are absolutely world changing. If we actually acknowledge money for what it is and have a realistic view of the way that money works as a country, then there's no excuses anymore. There's no more questions of how do we pay for Medicare for all? Or are there enough rich people to tax in order to do policies X, Y and Z? The money's already there. It's just a matter of we're not doing what we need to do to take care of our people. And once you understand the way that money works through the lens of modern monetary theory, then it actually makes sense. And, you know, the United States, we've kind of been stuck on what has been known as voodoo economics for decades now, trickle down economics. And all of this, I think, we're on the cusp of a paradigm shift. I don't necessarily know that a lot of politicians will embrace modern monetary theory, but it's certainly become more popular. And I know that the book, The Deficit Myth, by Stephanie Kelton, I just started reading that. So I've always had, you know, an understanding and knowledge of the deficit myth. But after reading her book, or at least most of her book, now I'm a true believer. And now it's just a matter of actually learning how to talk about it in a way that makes it catch on. Because really, and ultimately at the end of the day, you know, what normal Americans believe or don't believe doesn't matter. It's what the government actually does. So my question to you is, how do we actually push politicians to accept modern monetary theory? Republicans have functionally done modern monetary theory when they're in power. Is that correct? So how do we get the left to do it? Well, you know, great questions and great, great observation. The Republicans have been the kings of modern monetary theory since Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was the, I mean, I hate to sound anything positive about Reagan, okay? But let me just say, if bombs were food, Ronnie was the best progressive of them all, you know? But they weren't, he understood that we could spend, spend, spend on the military, okay? And this was a way to functionally make the economy boom. And this is why during the Reagan era, the economy did boom for a long time. And we hadn't gotten to the point yet where it started getting under Clinton and Obama and even W where you see the radical income inequality. It started under Reagan, definitely was like steroids under Reagan for sure. But the deal was is that people, regular people hadn't gotten pinched yet. There was a lot of people. Yes, there was a lot of poor people. There was a lot of people that were cut out of the Reagan economy. But because of the timing, we realized we left the gold standard in 72. We went through Gerald Ford. We went through four years of Carter and then the Reagan revolution began. And he went through a recession at first and they didn't quite figure it out because they had the Volcker thing going on in the 70s, the oil shocks, all the other crazy stuff to dig out of. But once they started really, really investing in the Cold War, okay? This is real money going through the economy. It doesn't matter whether it's good, it's bad. Don't even moralize it at the moment. Just think about it in terms of stocks and flows. Reagan had the thing going, screaming, high, it just booming. So flash forward. And what you've got now is a situation where the average Republican knows when a Republican administration is going on that deficits don't really matter. Not in the way we think they do. And so they do all the tax cuts for their friends, all the rich get richer, et cetera. But then when the Democrats take over, they, and when you talk to these folks, it's like you wanna just give them a hug because it's like they're so wrong, but they have the right, they think they're doing right. You know what I mean? They're like, well, we gotta be responsible now that the Republicans are out. We've gotta fix what they messed up. And so they start jacking taxes up. They start trying to pay down the deficit, which is not even a thing. They try and do all these things to be responsible. We gotta pay down the debt and so forth. And you look at Obama. Obama was the king, he was telling us to eat our peas and he didn't even put a trillion dollars out during the great financial crisis. I mean, he was a stingy, right wing, Austerian with a Democrat name, right? But the fact is, is that as long as Democrats believe that they are the adults in the room and that they have to be the fiscally responsible ones and stuff, you're never gonna see that. So in my mind, the way to really get to the politicians and the way to get to the broad masses is to influence the influencers. And a guy named Delman Coates is famous for, he actually talked to Ice Cube, who is now an MMT guy. So we've got some people starting to wake up, right? Us little guys, we get to go for a big fish like you, trying to get you to see MMT. And so from my vantage point, watching you guys get it is my, you know, it's my win. I get the victories when I see you guys doing the lights go on, this is so exciting to see you with that book in your hands and to see you interested in talking about this stuff. Because we haven't received a lot of love from that upper crust of the alternative media sphere. And you said to me offline, a lot of people just don't know how to even frame it into their conversations. They don't know how to answer questions that this naturally brings up. Because it fundamentally changes the entire battlefield. If everybody's fighting, we need to raise taxes to pay for stuff. It's a price of living in civilized society. And the other guys just say, no, we gotta cut taxes for the rich and stop, you're just lazy and back and forth the same silly pitch battle goes on. But once you realize literally everything they said both sides is just bullshit. It totally, you can pull back and you could say, well, wait a minute, Republicans, I get it, you want to lower taxes, I do too. Hey, Democrats, we get it. You want to have robust social spending on the people. Hey, we do too. So, hey, guess what guys, we can do both. Hey, you guys hate, you know, immigrants. Why do you hate immigrants? Because you're afraid they're taking your jobs. You're afraid they're taking your lunch. You're afraid of all these things. It's beer-based. But guess what, we can pay people to have a federal job guarantee and every one of those people coming in the door, instead of calling them a mooch or calling them whatever. Hey, here's a federal job with a living wage with benefits, you name it. And it's not taking anything from you or your children. Wow, what a change, right? So I think that getting guys like you to be involved in this, to get it and then take it to your constituency, like what we're doing right now, this is huge. And those politicians, there are people that are in power that listen to you, Mike, and they hear the stuff. And it's an opportunity to change them through your wonderful platform. And that's how I hope we get there, I really hope so. I think they are though. I mean, I've seen evidence. I mean, a lot of these people that were growing up in the Bernie movement, then turned around and started running for office. That's true. Now these people that we knew and loved on social media are now suddenly making laws. So then they grew up listening to Mike Figuarito and the Humanist Report. And they grew up listening to Kyle Kalinsky and they grew up listening to all of our other friends out there, Jimmy, Dore, and all the other folks that are in this space. So it is an opportunity, unlike any other, to really bypass the rich, to bypass the power brokers in the mainstream media and fundamentally change the world from the grassroots up. And that's what we MMTers are trying to do and you're being a part of that. It's great. I think that's the path forward. Create a bunch of activists and make it happen. Yeah, it's really the first step. And for me, the question that I think about is because this really, it does seem like a paradigm shift in the way that we think about money and governance and whatnot. Are there any politicians that you're aware of that actually embrace modern monetary theory? I know that Stephanie Kelton was an advisor to Bernie Sanders on his campaign trail, but I don't know that Bernie actually subscribes to modern monetary theory. So is there anyone in Congress that you're aware of that supports modern monetary theory besides Republicans who inadvertently support it just by their actions, but don't embrace the theory itself because, you know, they wouldn't. Absolutely. Well, I can tell you right now, there is a metric ton of these folks out there that are being advised by MMTers today. Rashida Tlaib has put out two or three bills, bam, bam, bam, that are literally MMT-using. Number one, she put the ABC Act out there, which was the digital payments to give people pandemic payments on the card. Didn't pass, of course, but she wrote that. Now you've got Ayanna Presley putting forward a federal job guarantee. You've got, yes, so yes, an AOC was brought into the fold. I mean, there's pictures of her out there sitting at a dinner table with some of the modern money network folks and Stephanie Keltner on one side and Pavlina Cheneva on the other. And so AOC is definitely aware and involved with MMT. I would say that Jane Sanders and Larry Sanders are down with MMT. And I would say that Bernie has every step along the way from his time at the Senate Budget Committee Chair, with him being the minority, he brought Stephanie in there. He brought Stephanie in on his first campaign and he brought her in on his second campaign and she was part of Sanders Institute. I would say Bernie knows MMT. I would say that he has been doing this for 50 years and he's probably not up for changing his language. I think that there's a lot of people out there that find this to be challenging, that have written a lot of books, that they'd have to go on an apology tour to explain away the things that they said were wrong. So I think that Bernie's contribution here is giving access to people like Stephanie Keltner, like Randall Ray and others who are really advising a huge, huge cadre of new congressional people and even senators. I know Ro Khanna has been exposed to it. I know, you would have liked to have seen Tulsi Gabbard who, I don't know what happened with her, something weird happened, but she never got it. But there are quite a few of them that are starting to really get it and it's very encouraging. It's incredibly encouraging. Right, right. I also wanted to ask you because this is something that is easy to dismiss if you don't understand it. And there are criticisms of MMT that I was hoping that you could speak to. And it really, the main critique that I hear about MMT is that this is gonna lead to inflation. If you overspend, that will lead to inflation. So what do you think is the easiest rebuttal to that argument? So the easiest rebuttal is that our economy is a bathtub, okay? The bottom, the drain is taxes. The spigot is the spending. So when we never just keep printing money, that's a relic from the gold standard. First of all, we don't print money anymore. It's all digital. But second of all, the tax drains out of the bathtub. That's the deletion process. Money keeps getting spent into the economy. Money keeps getting deleted from the economy. So that's the standard answer, right? The bottom line is that we don't. In fact, we're way overtaxed for the very limited subset of programs and services that we receive. We are so overtaxed for what we actually receive. It's not funny. So there's that. The other thing is that why do you suppose that we never hear a peep one about inflation when we bomb around the world, when we do tax cuts? We never ever hear this, but yet this right-wing thinking creeps in and says, hey, what about inflation? You're gonna give somebody food. Hey, what about inflation? Alan Greenspan and Paul Ryan, you remember that guy, the cool guy with the red hat and the muscles, you know? I love those pictures, still cracks me up. They're so good. He tried to take Greenspan, the task. Now Greenspan's probably the biggest jerk on the planet next to Paul Ryan maybe, right? But Greenspan and he were sparring over social security. And Paul Ryan was trying to say, wouldn't it be better? Wouldn't it be more solvent if we privatize social security? And Alan Greenspan goes, you know, I don't know if it would make it more solvent because we can spend as much money as we want to. There's no constraint whatsoever, as long as we have the real resources to create the economy for the people that now have this money, as long as there's goods and services to buy. For example, in New York City, if you were to try and rent an apartment, it would be through the roof. Why? Because people are squatting on those properties, there is limited access, and they've premiumed it out the wazoo. So they have literally made it so that it's impossible to get housing in New York. Places like that where you've got a scarce resource like housing. So that's the question. If we want to give houses to all in New York City, we either, A, have to build a lot more houses to be able to do that, or B, we have to realize that the real resource constraint of the amount of houses there just isn't adequate to meet the demand. So this is an MMT truism. It's about resourcing the bill, not the dollars. The dollars are irrelevant. To pay for something is not a thing. We can do it anything. The real issue is, do we have the real resources? So the inflation thing is the most talked about thing in MMT land, within MMT tiers, because we recognize an inflation constraint. And the way we look at that is usually, do we have real full employment? In other words, if we actually pass a federal job guarantee and all of our slack labor is bought up, and you know that right now we manage inflation by keeping like 5% of the people unemployed, forcibly unemployed. It's NARU. It's the Fed's way of making sure inflation doesn't happen. And if you remember, AOC took Jerome Powell to task about the Phillips curve, which is it's one of these fake models that economists do to baffle us with BS. And she said, you know, you've been using this Phillips curve here, and quite frankly, none of it plays out as you said. He's like, you know what, I think our model's a little outdated, because you think. I mean, so this is kind of, it's starting to happen, you're starting to see it. And so the average person has been so infiltrated by libertarian Ayn Randian thinking from Milton Friedman and the old 70s thing of, oh my God, if we print more money, there's going to be hyperinflation. They always point to Zimbabwe. They always point to Argentina. They always point to Venezuela. They always point to Weimar Republic, right? So let's just, for grins and giggles, knock them down one by one real fast, okay? So the hyperinflation, you know, ventilators, they always get caught up on these things. Zimbabwe, Mugabe had taken all the farmland from the colonizers and gave it back to the people, okay? The colonizers went ahead and burned the crops down, and they also had issues with the people not knowing how to farm very well. So their productive capacity, their real resources for Zimbabwe were completely obliterated. They had food sovereignty one day, the next day they did not have food sovereignty. So that meant they needed to buy things with foreign goods that they couldn't use Zimbabwe's money for, okay? So you had very, very scarce amount of food, and really you couldn't have printed enough money for people to eat, they were desperate. So this is what happened in Zimbabwe, okay? Radical shock to the supply chain. You go up to Weimar, the Treaty of Versailles was brutal. I mean, they were brutal, and the French, being French, they wanted to make sure that they were being paid in French francs, and the Germans were sitting there having German Reichmarks, right? So debt in a foreign currency, remember I started this out saying a country can never go broke on debt denominated in its own currency. Well, the Treaty of Versailles said, now you're gonna pay it in French francs, that's number one. There was also a strike in the industrial sector, okay? So they literally killed the production. And so now you've got a supply shock, debt denominated in a foreign currency, and wild amounts of corruption. Obviously the Nazis, you know, let's be fair, that whole period of time was a pretty rough period of time. So that's what happened to Weimar. You know, you had the World War I and all the ramifications of the Treaty of Versailles. You go down to Venezuela, and what you've got is once again, another situation where you've got a single commodity, and their dollar is pegged, instead of to gold, it's pegged to the US dollar. Their currency is pegged to ours. So not only were they ripe for messing with, you know, this is the thing, whenever you peg something to anything, when you peg it to gold, peg it to the, you can screw with the commodity or whatever it is that you are tying your currency to, and if it depreciates, now all of a sudden, your ability to pay off your debts is eliminated. You can't pay your foreign debts anymore. And so they had a single commodity in fuel and crude, not even refined oil, crude, okay? And the Saudis screwed with them. So you have them screwing with the price of barrels of oil, which depreciated their ability to be able to pay their debts. The only thing that they could have used was their oil supply. So once again, had nothing, you notice I haven't said anything about printing money yet, right? Not one single thing has been, hyperinflation is not a monetary phenomenon. It is simply not. It is always corruption. It's always some sort of a supply shock. It's always some sort of natural disaster or debt denominated in a foreign currency. And so you can go through this each step along the way and it's gonna always be something like that. It's never going to be an issue of printing money. So for folks listening, please trust me, take this one to bed. You don't want to talk about it again. Walk away and call it a win. But regular inflation though, which is what most people cry about, but they don't really understand, is a rise in all prices. It's not a rise in my one thing or the other. However, if you have a real resource like petroleum product and it's short, you make plastics, you make lubricants, you make all sorts of things, cooking supplies, you name it. Fuel for vehicles, fuel for airplanes, fuel for buses, trains, you name it. So all of a sudden a rise in price of fuel will create a rise in price in those things that require fuel or petroleum products to make. So this is how you could get widespread heighten. I'm just using this as an example of a common commodity that could really create an inflationary situation. But this is not what they talk about. They don't know about printing money. It's got nothing to do with printing money once again. So printing money usually happens after the fact with these things. And so what you also hear, and this is something to be thought of, this is important to think about, back to the Paul, Ryan, Alan Greenspan thing, it's like, can you create an economy where the real goods and services that people want are available for them? So you're not having shortages of things, right? So hypothetically, we go ahead and we give people Medicare for all. Well, Medicare eliminates a lot of noise around. There's a lot of economic activity that makes up all that denial of service that goes on. There's a lot of people getting paychecks to not know how to use service. And my goodness, you don't want to eat their job away, right? Well, Medicare for all is actually a deflationary, deflationary service, why? Because it's efficient. And so now you've gotten rid of all these different revenue streams that you're thinking of when you're thinking of the medical services and the medical system, and now it's efficient. So efficiency means less money spent, which means the economy is gonna require, you're losing jobs, a lot of jobs will be gone if you don't have a federal job guarantee or a just transition to move them into other fields. And shebang, you've got a situation now where if you don't have enough doctors, nurses, gurneys, hospitals, whatever, now you could have a rise in prices over there. You could have a shortage of the real resources. So I don't think you would have that because you have all these people that would be losing their jobs, would be desperate to fill jobs up to fulfill the Medicare for all. But that's the other side of that game. I don't know, I hope I answered your question. I think that that was a phenomenal answer. It totally makes sense. And you have such a good grasp of the theory and the material and all of these concrete examples that I think that your advocacy is so important for it. Just to kind of further hammer down the concept of modern monetary theory. So could you explain the differences? I mean, you kind of alluded to it, but with the United States, modern monetary theory is applicable here because we have our own currency as is the case with Japan, the UK. But why wouldn't this apply to the European Union, France, for example, because they use the Euro? What specifically makes that different? So the currency user is the people that can't create the currency themselves. The currency issuer is the one that creates it. Well, in Europe, they have the European Central Bank, the ECB, and they have the Troika. They basically have this system that is not state-owned. So France can't just print money or spend money into existence. And they've got percentages. I mean, I'm going to butcher this. So forgive me, my friends in the UK. Let's say they have a 5% threshold for deficit spending in any of these states. Well, all of these countries are like Delaware, Texas. They're like Maine, that's it. Once they gave up their own currency, they in essence became like California or one of these other states in the United States. In the United States, every state here has a balanced budget for the state. The state must run a balanced budget. Now they may invest in bonds and stuff like that to carry them through ebbs and flows that might short the pension funds and so forth. But at the end of the day, they cannot generate currency on their own. They could create a complementary currency. They could do a number of things, but they could not create the US dollar out of thin air. Only the federal government can do that, which is why you don't want to see states trying to do Medicare for all and so forth. Because let's say California gets away with it because they've got a big economy and they can absorb it. Well, try that in Mississippi. Try that in Alabama, try that in Maine. Try that in Pennsylvania. I mean, most of them will not be able to do that. So if you have any kinds of ebbs and flows at all, if you have any kind of shock, like a natural disaster or something like that, and let's say you have a pandemic, the only way you could afford this is through the federal government. Well, let's go back across the pond for a minute. If you have an issue like in Greece, Greece is a net importer. Greece is not a net exporter. So if you think about it, all their money is leaving the country to go buy goods and services. And because they are no longer on their own drachma, they're now on the Euro, they can't deficit spend enough to make up for their net importer position. Germany, on the other hand, is a major net exporter. And so they get all that money coming in, they make the great cars, they got the ottoman, they got all these cool things, they bring a lot of money into the country. And so they are able to make a robust social infrastructure, they're able to do all sorts of stuff. They're living La Vida loco, while down in Greece, those people are really, really struggling. France is struggling, Italy is struggling. All the Southern European countries are struggling. Spain is struggling, you name it. And so it really is, which ones are the net importers? Which one are the net exporters? And they're reliant on that European central bank. Well, I interviewed a guy recently, it's talking about this new plan called Fiscal Money, where they provide these tax credits to people that it's like an alternative currency of sorts. It's like a receipt that they give to the bank and it has small markup and the bank absorbs the negative equity, so to speak. And that's a way of bypassing the ECB's strict rules. I butchered that a little bit, but for anybody out there that knows what I'm talking about, that's the MMT friends out there in Europe. You know what I'm talking about. I'm probably not the sharpest on this particular segment of it, but suffice it to say none of these countries can actually print their own money anymore. That's why the UK stayed with the pound sterling. They knew that they needed to be able to print their own money, so to speak, okay? And so they didn't want to give up monetary sovereignty. You know, they didn't want to have, forget the Brexit stuff for just a minute. It's just really about the currency because Brexit wasn't really about the currency because the UK never was on the euro. That was really about open borders, that was really about jobs coming and going. And if you go back and you remember what I said about the federal job guarantee, if they had a federal job guarantee in the UK, they wouldn't have been worried about foreigners coming into their country and taking those jobs because that would have been absorbed, no problem. So just something to think about there. But that's really what the deal is, is that they lost their ability to spend money into existence when they need it. And so now they are heavily relying on taxes, they're heavily relying on investments, and the market and everything else, it controls their existence unlike in the US. We are freed from the constraints of the market. The bond vigilantes can go to hell. We can do anything we want to do. In fact, we could even lower the interest rate to zero and stop worrying about selling bonds altogether. We don't want to do that because bonds are like UBI for the rich. And that's really all it is. So anyway, I don't know if I answered your question. No, that makes sense. And even though you just thoroughly debunked this notion that MMT theorists want to print money, in other words, in short, basically, if you don't have your own sovereign currency, you can't make the money printer go burr in a nutshell. So go ahead. No, I was just gonna say, I think it's important to understand that there's something called sectoral balances, okay? And this is gonna get a little wonky, so follow me here, okay? If we split the economy into three segments, we go internal debt, private debt, we've got public debt, and then we've got rest of world, okay? So rest of world, we call the balance of trade, balance of payments on the trade side, okay? Private debt would be all the stuff you've made your citizens absorb in the economy, like student debt, their car payment, their house payment, all that stuff, the level of private debt. And so you look at this as like an EQ on your stereo. You look and see where the private debt level is, look and see where the public debt level is, and look and see what the trade balance is. If we have a net trade deficit, okay? I'll say 500,000. That's 500,000 that has left the economy and gone around the world, and somehow or another that 500, say 500 billion has to be made up somehow or another, okay? And so this is where a federal government could spend money to offset that trade deficit to keep the economy humming so that there's imports don't have a real negative aspect on the economy. Because really at the end of the day, you're giving them pieces of paper for real resources, right? And so this is a really big thing. So if you're looking at these, you could have predicted the great financial crisis. You could have seen the private debt through the roof. You could have seen the public debt down, and you could have seen the trade imbalance, and you would have known right off the bat. In fact, that's how MMTers were able to predict this and nobody listened back then. They used the sectoral balances approach to viewing the economy and it showed. So if you think about it like that, the only thing that doesn't matter is that public debt. Public debt is a misnomer. It's just the net money supply. That's all it is. So if you delete the debt or you get rid of the debt, you get rid of the money supply basically. So every time we've tried to pay down the debt, what we've ended up doing is create a massive recession, a depression, horrible things have happened. So this is more fuel for the fodder we can keep talking about, but I just wanted to throw that out there for you. If I didn't totally confuse things by doing that. No, no, everything you're saying totally makes sense. And as you explained this to me, and I get a better grasp of MMT in the material, it's almost like this frustration builds because you explain all this and you think, wow, so another world actually is possible and it's really easy. So the question is, why don't we have Medicare for All? Why don't we have a federal jobs guarantee? And it's because this isn't an economic theory that enough people adhere to in DC. Certainly Joe Biden, he's an austerion. So I mean, you know, lost cause there. But here's what I wanna ask of you. In terms of how leftists should approach MMT, I'm trying to work it into my usual political analysis, but it's kind of like I'm on this one rhythm where the standard things that we say as leftists is, well, we need to tax the rich and we don't need to tax the rich. Do I want to tax the rich? Because I do wanna punish them contrary to what others might say. Yeah, I want them to pay. But that's not actually what we need to do in order to invest in social safety nets and public programs. So is there any advice that you can give to kind of just casually work this into conversations? Medicare for all, cancelling student loan debt. How do we as leftists, particularly political commentators, how do we talk about this in a way that's more easy to digest that might pick someone's interest enough to where they go and pick up a book or they start watching macro and cheese with you. What do you think is the gateway? Because I wanna radicalize people as much as possible and I wanna get more effective at the way I speak about this. So what would you say to that? That's kind of a big, broad question. This is a great one though. I love this question. So I started off years ago saying federal taxes don't fund spending. It's a bumper sticker. You can fit it on a bumper sticker, right? And people's heads were exploding when I said that. But the thing was that it made them think and we got the talking, right? If you decouple spending from taxation, we can have two totally different conversations. We want taxes to be strong enough to make sure that the dollar has the right level of buying power, right? We wanna make sure that the dollar has whatever we want whether we want a hard dollar, we want a really strong dollar or whether we want a weak dollar and we may want it for different reasons, okay? So taxes are really about inflation control but they're also, and this is hugely important, they're also about making life more fair and balanced because income inequality in a nation like this is a toxic mess. It's a virus that destroys democracy, okay? So if you think about it like that, you tax the rich because they're too damn rich. You tax the rich because it's the right thing to do. You tax the rich because most of their ill-gotten gains are ill-gotten gains. You don't make that kind of money without stepping over people and trampling them and quite frankly, milking off of their labor, okay? And so there's a good rational reason to tax the rich but don't do it because you think you're gonna pay for a program. Don't eliminate the military budget because you think we need to save money here to spend money there. Eliminate the military budget because you have a fundamental moral decision that you don't wanna blow up people around the world or maybe you wanna release those real resources that are tied up in the military and redeploy those real, not the money. The money is irrelevant. It's the real resources, right? So when we talk about the left and being a socialist, right? You can talk a little bit about Marxian theory and you can start talking about labor theory of value and you can get into some of the stuff. In and of itself, you have to understand the material conditions of the day and understand where we are. It doesn't matter whether you want a socialist utopia whether I want one right now or not. The fact is we are in a capitalist environment. So how do we either A, revolt and flip the tables and make it a socialist country which you can clearly see. We don't have the appetite for unfortunately. People talk but they don't have it. I promise you that we are not there yet in our arc. The arc of revolution has not struck yet. Unfortunately, I think you're right there. I wish I wasn't because I'd be more radicalized by the minute. I mean, I'm reading some heavy duty stuff too and it makes it hard to talk in today's, because it's so yuck, right? It makes it even yuckier. But if you think about it from a leftist perspective, you know that your goal is to make life better for people. Your goal is to right now we have an existential crisis with the environment, okay? It doesn't matter whether we want a socialist utopia or whether we want to have a go crazy and go full Ayn Rand. At the end of the day, people will die. There will be migrants coming, we're gonna climate migrants, climate immigrants, people that are moving away from the coastal areas or severe drought, you name it. Tsunamis hitting their towns, you name it. And these people are gonna be moving around because hey, the place that they once were where there was food and water and toilets and everything else is no longer there, it's underwater. So you're gonna have that. And imagine if India starts migrating into Pakistan and starts, you know, all these wars and things like that. So this is a real thing that's coming. And it's not something that we get to say, well, I don't believe that it's gonna happen. It's happening now, you watch it happen. So it's my hope that as leftists, we realize that our goal is to find a way to create public policy while we're fighting for a revolution outside the process. But we create spending in such a way that we leverage the power of the public purse to affect climate change, to affect these things and to, you know, reconfigure society for a sustainable world. And a federal job guarantee with a just transition, eliminating oil based employment and call all these dirty jobs, eliminate them and then move those folks into, you know, mobilize them like a Marshall plan almost to get them out, to literally serve in the environmental salvation that we need to go through. I think there's a tremendous opportunity there for the left to fundamentally change society with a somewhat of a revolution. But you said something a little bit ago that I wanna touch on, I think it's really important. You asked why, why don't we do these? It's not just that they don't believe in modern monetary theory. If you go back and you, if you've ever read Howard Zinn and the people's history of the United States, Howard Zinn clearly shows that like, for example, the war of independence in the United States was not a, you know, a worker's revolt. This was a bougie, you know, the wealthy landowners didn't wanna pay money back to England. They wanted to be free to be rich here because they saw all the vast resources at their disposal and they had all these slaves and they had all these people that are willing to work for them, you know, bottom line is that was not a revolution for the people. That was not an independence. That was rich people being rich people and using poor people for fodder. And so you ask why we don't have these things? It's because from day one, capital has sought to oppress the people and use us as labor, use us as whatever it is that they want. And so the more secure we are, the less likely we are to take the crumbs they throw at us. And we all of a sudden have freedom. We have decisions that we can make that are different than what they want us to make. And so the reason they don't want us to be secure, they don't want us comfortable is because if unstable citizen is gonna be a much more pliable, much more willing to accept whatever they throw at you. I mean, if you think about how many people do you know have actually said, I wanna work at Google and I wanna do this thing or I wanna work at this company and wanna do this. No, you apply for a hundred jobs in whichever one calls you back you take, right? That's the world we live in and it sucks. But if you actually could choose, if you had a choice, you might choose something very different than what you do. I might have been a school teacher instead of trying to be an IT guy. You know what I mean? I might have been a bunch of things had I had the freedom to really choose. But the pay of a school teacher is not nearly enough to provide for, and you know when you got stars in your eyes because they pump capitalism into your brain, you gotta succeed, you gotta be the maker, you gotta keep going, going, going. You make very, very different decisions that are no longer rooted in things that maybe would have made you happy like me being a history teacher, what a geek I could have been, right? You know, open my own games workshop and play Dungeons and Dragons or something crazy. Whatever man, I mean, you do things differently because capital drives you and that's why these things are not happening because every time the government does for you, it's something that Wall Street can't provide you at cost. It can't profit off of it anymore. So that profit motive and you ask yourself, how do the rich measure themselves by the distance between them and the next guy beneath them? And that right there is why they don't want you to have this stuff because how else will they feel superior? MMT allows us to make the rich irrelevant and do it anyway without them. I think though, the problem is, is that we don't understand power dynamics. We haven't studied theory, we haven't studied history, and because of that so much of the stuff we do, we think it's the first time somebody's ever thought of it. And all you gotta do is look at the French Revolution, go watch the Haitian Revolution, go watch each of these steps throughout the process and you realize that this whole arc to get freedom, to get what you need, it's a struggle. There is no way around it and people aren't ready for struggle and so this is where we're at, unfortunately. Yeah, Steve, you are blowing my mind right now. I've gotta ask you. So we're kind of seeing a lot more people become radicalized. Socialism is actually, thankfully, increasing in popularity and you see people say, read Marx, read Marx. And then oftentimes they'll order capital and it'll be like that thick. I'm exaggerating a little bit. Pritz not small too. Yeah, yeah. So I always recommend them, get the Marx Engels reader, get a Professor Richard Wolff summary of Marx. It's called understanding Marx and these are kind of like my go-tos, my socials, Bibles, if you will. Do you have an MMT Bible? Because I think that this honestly is part of radicalization of the left. MMT has to be part of it alongside with socialism. I think it's the companion economic theory to the socialist world that we all want. If you could like simplify it and say, everyone watching this, if you're intrigued, pick up a book, what would you say would be the best book for them? Right, so I would say that the three books are, A, you've got the one on your wall right there. The deficit myth. This absolutely must read. I would agree. It is an airline. You're sitting there waiting for your plane or you're in the bathroom kind of read, okay? It is not a deep thing, but you don't need to be deep. You just need to, the country can do these things. That's really, the end of the day, that's really all you do need to know. Right, right. That way you don't want to eat your peas if you don't want them. You freaking know they can. That's what that book will give you is an insight into the overall, the overview. It's not the be all end all, but it's more than enough for the average person. It's a great entry point for someone like me. I will recommend that. Well, I would say, you know, I read Warren Mosler's book, Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds. You can get it for free. You can actually go to our website at realprogressives.org and we have a PDF type version of it, but it's just a great, great book. It's super simple. But if you really want to start understanding the power dynamics, you need to understand the neoliberal fight, the fight of neoliberalism that started, you know, basically back in the Milton Friedman era and the Mount Pellerin society and, you know, all the other things that have happened from the 60s up to present. And this mad push for privatization has fundamentally changed how we view everything. Milton Friedman and Volcker, when they basically said that, you know, if you print money, we're going to have inflation has made every single person on the planet terrified of inflation. Okay. And so as long as these kind of neoliberal things exist and are that go unrecanted, if you will, or unfought back against, I mean, look at every single thing your friends and my friends and the alternative media even say. I mean, we are plagued with neoliberalism even when we're doing it. We don't even realize it. I watched a Roseanne show when it first came back on the air. First episode, very first episode. And I only watched it out of curiosity because I hated her, right? But I watched this one episode and the very first episode, her and her sister are fighting about Jill Stein and they're fighting about Medicare for all. And she's like, you know, something the only thing wrong with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money. Ha, ha, ha. When you realize that that's complete bullshit because the taxpayer myth, the idea of the taxpayer dollar is the biggest racist, freaking disgusting line that the left continues to use like a cudgel. I want my hard earned tax dollars paid for Israel. I don't want my hard earned tax, you know? And this is what Roseanne, it's baked in. This neoliberal thinking is baked into our churches. It's baked into our sitcoms. It's baked into our children's stories. Everything, neoliberalism is everywhere. And so eradicating that mindset, eradicating that space and starting to change it back to the public purpose and stuff like that is really important. So that's why I like Bill Mitchell. He has got a book called Reclaiming the State. And some people complain about it because it is a bit about nationalizing, understanding the nation state and how its exertion of its ability as the currency issuer can fundamentally change everything within that nation state, okay? But it talks about the history of neoliberalism. It talks about all the lies and stuff that are going on even to this day. You know, the idea that somehow or another, deficits today are gonna be carried on the backs of our children tomorrow. It's a crock, it's bullshit, it's a lie. And so this book, Reclaiming the State to Me was a really, really fantastic book. Mitchell and Fawzi wrote it. And I would also say there's probably about 40 other books that I could recommend, but I can't recommend enough understanding theory and history to go along so you understand how we have been divided every step along the way. Every time blacks and whites have tried to unite in class struggle, the powers that be have thrown a wedge issue out there. They've given the poor white people a nickel more than the poor black people to create space. It's always been a divide and conquer strategy. Identity politics has been used as a weapon. It has not been used as a weapon for the people that need it. It's been used as a weapon by the power elite to keep us from uniting. And unfortunately, this continues to happen. So liberal politics tends to focus on identity, whereas socialism tends to focus on class. And I think that because of the two, we have to find a way to have an intersectional movement that understands the role of power, understands a role of history, understands the plight of these minority communities and communities that have been ravaged by capital, and then also understand the MMT angle. You can't have them without the other. I mean, otherwise you just end up with what Republicans do. And I think it's important to have that understanding of class and understanding of money. You put it together and we can change the world. Yeah, I think that that is beautifully put. This does have to be intersectional. It has to be looking out for marginalized communities and also acknowledging the class differences, but realizing what can be done, knowing modern monetary theory. Yeah, it's just, it's a new world if you understand it. And it's funny that you bring up the neoliberalism that is kind of baked into everything, including popular culture. I even find myself saying it to where I'll be talking on the show about how, hey, we're getting our tax dollars extracted before we even see our paychecks. So I wanted to pay for something like Medicare for All. I wanted to not go to killing children in Yemen. And so it really, it is gonna take a lot of deep programming because when it comes to neoliberalism and just capitalism more broadly speaking, it really controls every single aspect of our lives. And once you realize the way that it controls everything about us, you know, from the minute we get up to the time we go to bed, then you kind of can start that deep programming process. But I think that modern monetary theory is a little bit different in the sense that if we knew the way that money works, then we would understand the impact that it could have on us, if that makes sense. It's a huge thing. And you know, we talked before the show, I want to talk for everybody to hear this because I think this is a very important point. Neoliberalism wants us to have more money to spend because it wants us to keep capitalism alive. It wants us to go and buy some random thing, you know, some impulse buy it, wants us to go on a binge on Amazon. It wants us to, you know, just start buying things on these discount pop-up ads that show up on Facebook and other things. They want us to buy, buy, buy. That's how capitalism thrives. And so throwing cash at the problem is decidedly neoliberal. And so when you think about the UBI, which is the sweetheart of a lot of Silicon Valley folks, the uberization of our society, right? The subsidization of shit wages. This is the neoliberal Trojan horse to dismantle the entire social safety net, okay? And it goes down, if you look at reparations even, take reparations as a UBI of sorts, it's not. It's deserved, it's earned, okay? But if you look at reparations, reparations is far more than just cash. Reparations is a substantive change to society. Cash is a part of it, but it's also fundamentally making the systems and structures that support people to be equitable, right? It's about bringing up people that have been left behind and bringing them up to where they should be, not giving them a handout, okay? And so when you think about the UBI, which has gotten popular because of Andrew Yang and Scott Santens and other folks, it is literally just throwing cash at the problem. It doesn't change anything. In fact, the Rante class is begging for the UBI because the UBI will ensure that they just, it's a pastor, here's your money for rent. Why not provide people with housing as a right? Why not provide people with debt relief? Why not get rid of student debt instead of here? We'll give you $1,000 a month towards your student debt. I want my healthcare for free. I don't want to be debt ridden. And all that throwing money at this thing does is temporarily provide some minimal relief, but then everything rises up because they know what slack is in the economy and the prices rise to meet that. And so unless your UBI is constantly rising, okay? And it's enough to really pay for your needs. You are gonna be a subsidized wage hound for some uberization of our society. And to me, it is probably the single most horrific thing that has come through the door as kind of like the, you know, it's like the silver bullet to fixing all poverty. It's a crock, right? Give people a federal job guarantee, a guaranteed wage paid by the feds administered by your local community. We want local communities thriving again. Think of everything going on in your local community that is not funded right now. Think about the beautification arts. Kids are no longer getting to take band class or going to gym. Everything is trimmed down to the bone, right? We have an opportunity there to fundamentally change how we view work. We can pay moms to stay at home. Or dads even, you know, it doesn't have to be gender specific. And all those women out there that have stayed in bad marriages their whole life terrified of what it would be like to leave because they've got a brutal husband that has beaten them or whatever, they have freedom. So this is an MMT course staples the federal job guarantee is baked into. The thing is, you know, the tax creates the first unemployed person. If you remember my story of the king, okay? So MMT provides a solution to that with the federal job guarantee. If you're gonna put a tax on it, we're gonna provide you with a way to pay the tax because capital and private business, they have a decided urge to not hire you. They wouldn't hire as few people as possible. It's not in their bottom line best interest to have full employment. So there's no way the private sector would ever provide full employment. It was gonna require the federal government to step in. But the UBI is so sexy because it sounds like it is this cure all and all it really is is one more excuse for libertarian minded people to destroy the social safety net. It doesn't matter whether you would do that. It matters that that has been a 50 year plan of the libertarians going back to Milton Friedman. And it's probably even further back than that. So this is why I said history is such an important thing in understanding theory because just throwing cash, even MLK, he's wrongly pinned as the guy who wanted UBI. Martin Luther King Jr. wanted a federal job guarantee and he wanted a guaranteed minimum income for people that could not work for whatever reason could not work. It was not a universal give it to everybody thing because what that is is status quo. If you literally raise everything all you're doing is providing money. You have fundamentally changed absolutely nothing. And it's a shame, but I'm hoping people will wake up to this. I've written an article out there that UBI is neoliberalism on steroids basically. You got Pavlina Chernova who has written the book The Case for a Job Guarantee and she breaks down these things in her book. It's all out there. You just have to ask yourself, do I wanna be held prey to the private sector and their profit motive? Or would I rather the federal government who can pay any bill it needs to to be the one that carries those basic needs forward not cash? And I think that if you think about it like that providing people's basic needs as a right it eradicates generational poverty. It eradicates all the structures that keep people down. I think it's a fundamental game changer and I think that we need to start thinking about basic need guarantees and not cash. Yeah, I totally agree with that actually. And as you learn more and more about modern monetary theory I think that these things kind of become evident because you can take a policy that is on its face seemingly progressive but again we need structural changes and the only catalyst for that is modern monetary theory. We can't actually fundamentally reshape society with one policy like UBI. So Steve, you've given us so much. Is there any lasting words that you want to say before we close? Yeah, please, by all means, focus on the current situation with the teachers in Arkansas right now. Right now fighting in the Supreme Court against big Wall Street interests because their pension fund got screwed up during the great financial crisis. And there's a lot going on right now with extreme control fraud that is blinding us from the possibilities of what we could do with MMT. It's the root cause, the fraud, the control fraud. Our entire government is in bed with Wall Street right now. And unless we dislodge that unless we start making real substantive change by one person, each one teach one weaponizing knowledge they're gonna continue to do that. And so we have a podcast with all the experts on it called you raised it up the new untouchables, the PCORA files. We also have macro and cheese which you can find on our website realprogressives.org under media. Both of these are in my opinion, it's not me, I mean, yes, I'm in it, but it's really about the experts that I bring on and the conversations we pull through. Please do check it out. It's not infotainment, this is weaponized knowledge. And I hope that, you know, people take a look at it listen to it and spread it around. It's really important. Well, thank you so much, Steve. It has been a pleasure. I appreciate the time that you've taken this time and the last time where we tried to film, but we couldn't because my computer decided to just implode. I really appreciate it. You're gonna be my designated MMT guy for cool with that. And I will continue to reach out. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it, Mike. Well, that's all that I have planned for you today. Thank you so much to my guest, Steve Grumbine. And if you've watched and made it this far in the show, I truly appreciate your viewership before we leave. Of course, as usual, I have to send a special shout out and thank you to all of our Patreon, Paypal and YouTube members for helping us not just to survive but thrive as well. And if you want more Humanist Report and this full episode wasn't enough, you can catch my streams over at twitch.tv slash Humanist Report. I'm currently playing Monster Hunter Rise. I just started it last weekend and plan to continue it this weekend. So, you know, if you wanna hang out and just talk some video games and casual political conversations, come and join me. But that's all that I have on this episode. I will see you all next week. Thank you so much for watching. Take care, everyone.