| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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Talk about bipartisan efforts in Congress to combat financial fraud and scams. | |
| And National Energy Assistance Directors Association Executive Director Mark Wolf on the current state and future of low-income home energy assistance programs. | ||
| Also, Politico's E News Energy reporter Brian Dabs discusses the factors behind the rise in electricity prices. | ||
| Washington Journal is next. | ||
| Join the conversation. | ||
| This is Washington Journal for Saturday, July 26th. | ||
| This week, President Trump continued to face questions about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein as the Justice Department met with Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted sex trafficker and longtime associate of the late sex offender. | ||
| Also this week, Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, declassified documents, he says, prove intelligence officials in the Obama administration lied about Russia's effort to influence the 2016 election. | ||
| And lawmakers in Texas held their first public hearing on a controversial plan to redraw the lines of the state's congressional voter voting districts. | ||
| Those are some of the stories C-SPAN has been following. | ||
| And for the first hour of today's program, we're asking you, what's your top news story of the week? | ||
| Here are the lines. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| You can text your comments to 202-748-8003. | ||
| Be sure to include your name and name and city. | ||
| You can also post a question or comment on Facebook at facebook.com/slash C-SPAN or on X at C-SPANWJ. | ||
| Good morning, and thank you for starting your day with us. | ||
| We'll get to your calls and comments in just a few moments, but first want to start with one of those top stories just mentioned, and that is President Trump and the continued questions he is getting about his connection to Jeffrey Epstein. | ||
| This is the headline this morning in The Guardian. | ||
| It says Trump deflects Epstein questions as he arrives in Scotland for trade talks. | ||
| The article says the fervor over Donald Trump's ties with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein continued on Friday as new revelations about the pair's relationship threatened to mire the president's golfing trip to Scotland, where he arrived late on Friday. | ||
| After landing at Glasgow Prestwick Airport at about 8:30 p.m. local time on Friday, the U.S. President denied reports that he had been briefed about his name appearing in files pertaining to the case against the late Epstein. | ||
| He also claimed he had not, quote, really been following the Justice Department's interview with Epstein convicted longtime associate Ghelene Maxwell. | ||
| from yesterday here is president trump responding to those questions from reporters after landing in scotland no i was never never breathed out did you ask what are you hoping What are you hoping that they get on that? | ||
| I really have no really nothing to say about it. | ||
| She is being talked to by a very smart man, by a very good man, Todd Blanche. | ||
| And I don't know anything about the conversation. | ||
| I haven't really been following it. | ||
| A lot of people are asking me about pardons. | ||
| Obviously, this is no time to be talking about pardons. | ||
| But a lot of people have asked about pardon. | ||
| This is just not a time to be talking about pardons. | ||
| Todd will come back with whatever he's got. | ||
| You're making a very big thing over something that's not a big thing. | ||
| You should be talking about it if you're going to talk about that. | ||
| Talk about Clinton. | ||
| Talk about the former president of Harvard. | ||
| Talk about all of his friends. | ||
| Talk about the hedge fund guys that were with him all the time. | ||
| Don't talk about Trump. | ||
| What you should be talking about is the fact that we have the greatest six months in the history of a presidency, according to a lot of people. | ||
| And we had an amazing six months. | ||
| That was President Trump talking with reporters yesterday after landing in Scotland. | ||
| He will be there for the next few days. | ||
| We are asking for this first hour of today's program, your top news story of the week. | ||
| The lines there on your screens, Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| We'll start with Ralph in New York, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Ralph. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'm a UAW worker from upstate New York, and my top news story is the assault on their First Amendment by the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress. | ||
| The five freedoms of the First Amendment speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of government, and freedom of assembly. | ||
| Without that, you're left with state-controlled media. | ||
| His assault on NPR and PBS, a cutback funding. | ||
| This is fact-based journalism. | ||
| And I will close with the columnist H.L. Menken. | ||
| He was a columnist and writer from the 20s through the 40s. | ||
| The purpose of the press is to comfort the afflicted and inflict the comfortable. | ||
| And I thank you for your time. | ||
| That was Ralph in New York. | ||
| Elizabeth in Maryland, line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Elizabeth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for listening to me. | ||
| I want to talk about Gaza. | ||
| Palestine is in the worst shape it has been in in three years, almost two years. | ||
| Trump is not helping Gaza. | ||
| People are starving to death. | ||
| Children are dying of starvation. | ||
| Adults are dying of starvation. | ||
| The humanitarian aid organizations cannot get food, cannot get medicine. | ||
| We need to do something about that. | ||
| The world needs to stop, have a ceasefire in Gaza and get medical aid and food to the people of Gaza. | ||
| They're being displaced. | ||
| Israel is bombing Gaza, killing people. | ||
| It needs to stop. | ||
| It needs to stop. | ||
| We need to get food. | ||
| People need to call their senators and their representatives in Congress to get them to stop Israel from bombing Palestine and to stop them from denying Palestinians food and medicine. | ||
| That's all I want to say. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| That was Elizabeth in Maryland. | ||
| Cheryl in New York, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Cheryl. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Adding on to the first two comments, my news story is babies are starving because Israel will not allow them to have formula. | |
| People are walking around like dead corpses. | ||
| The Trump administration is shutting down all speech pertaining to Gaza. | ||
| C-SPAN, also, you are complicit. | ||
| You have not had any story about Gaza. | ||
| And all of the speakers you've had on in the last year have been pro-Israel. | ||
| And you don't even say go to the website anymore because you don't have anything to support the people of Palestine. | ||
| And this is so upsetting to me because we are complicit with this. | ||
| That was Cheryl in New York, also in New York. | ||
| John in Brooklyn, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| How you doing? | ||
| I'm John from Brooklyn, New York, February Halvin. | ||
| My main story is Trump. | ||
| Gasoline, the conversation that's in the news right now about this up situation. | ||
| I think he's using it just to take the tension off of the economy. | ||
| Everything is up. | ||
| Price is up. | ||
| The walls are not stopped. | ||
| And he is going later on, he's going to get a special prosecutor to do this case. | ||
| And the special prosecution got the control of it. | ||
| Like Mullins had when he did it. | ||
| His report. | ||
| They turned up general say what's in there, how it said when he said it, and Trump using that. | ||
| He's not interested in that case. | ||
| So he's known he's going to pardon everybody anyway. | ||
| He don't want people to know that price is up, meat prices is up, gas is up, rent is up, the economy is doing bad. | ||
| And he said he's going to stop the walls in Russia. | ||
| He haven't stopped that. | ||
| He said that he could stop all walls. | ||
| So he's just tricking people. | ||
| So be aware. | ||
| He's going to get a special prosecutor and they're going to end this thing and they won't remember what went on. | ||
| And that's my opinion. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was John in New York. | ||
| Ryan in North Miami Beach, Florida, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Ryan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| A registered independent, actually, the vote Republican Party line typically. | ||
| Just want to register my disgust with the administration. | ||
| This is one big distraction. | ||
| You know, older, powerful men like young girls, there's no secret here. | ||
| There's no mystery what's going on. | ||
| It's a huge distraction. | ||
| And look forward to all this being over for the summer and move on to something more sustainable. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was Ryan in Florida. | ||
| Let's hear from Ken in Lancaster, South Carolina on the independent line. | ||
| Good morning, Ken. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| My fellow Americans, Joe Biden had a year or so. | ||
| Is I'm on? | ||
| You are, Ken. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| President Joe Biden and the Democrats had a year or so to release the Jeffrey Emstein files. | ||
| He supposedly hung himself in a federal prison, 24-hour security. | ||
| And for my fellow black Americans, don't you find it highly ridiculous that all the black Democrats are supporting illegal immigrants when they're hurting black America the most in the workforce? | ||
| And the black mayor of California is paying illegals to hide from ICE and stay at home. | ||
| Are you serious? | ||
| I just don't understand the regular hardworking black American anymore. | ||
| Nobody fighting for black America, even the black Democrats. | ||
| And a country without borders is not a country at all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You cannot go nowhere in the world and become and move and come to that country and think you're going to be allowed benefits and allowed to stay. | |
| As soon as you go to a country and your passport is fire, you got to get the crap out. | ||
| So my fellow black Americans, you need to wake up to stop being so naive and follow this Democrat Party. | ||
| I'm an independent. | ||
| It's time to get off that Democrat plantation, Black America. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was Ken in South Carolina. | ||
| Brenda in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Hi, Brenda. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| My top news story for this week is Donald Trump suing all these media companies. | ||
| Considering the fact that Donald Trump has no problem exercising his First Amendment rights, shooting his mouth off about everybody and everything, he shouldn't be so thin-skinned. | ||
| I'd like to remind everybody that back in 2008, 17 years ago, Donald Trump started the birtherism bandwagon, and he never let up. | ||
| So President Obama should have sued Donald Trump for defamation. | ||
| And during the 2015 Republican primaries, Donald Trump held up the National Inquirer paper saying that Ted Cruz's father was involved with the Kennedy assassination. | ||
| So why didn't Ted Cruz sue Donald Trump and the National Inquirer? | ||
| So if Donald Trump can't take other people using their First Amendment rights to criticize and rebut things that Donald Trump says and does, maybe he shouldn't be so willing to shoot his mouth off about everybody and everything. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was Brenda in Pennsylvania. | ||
| Another story that C-SPAN has been following this week. | ||
| The headline from BBC Gabbard says, declassified report exposes Obama administration. | ||
| It says U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has released a previously classified report, which she says points to a quote treasonous conspiracy to undermine the results of the 2016 presidential election. | ||
| The House Intelligence Committee document takes issue with the conclusion reached by numerous intelligence reports, including one by the CIA, that Russia sought to help Donald Trump in that election. | ||
| Gabbard appeared at the White House on Wednesday and said the report reveals egregious weaponization and politicalization of intelligence. | ||
| From Wednesday, here is a clip of that interview of Tulsi Gabbard speaking at the White House. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Based on what you now see, do you believe President Obama is guilty of treason? | |
| I'm leaving the criminal charges to the Department of Justice. | ||
| I am not an attorney, but as I've said previously, when you look at the intent behind creating a fake manufactured intelligence document that directly contradicts multiple assessments that were created by the intelligence community, the expressed intent and what followed afterward can only be described as a years-long coup and a treasonous conspiracy against the American people, our republic, and an attempt to undermine President Trump's administration. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The Senate Intelligence Committee spent several years looking into this and unanimously agreed in a bipartisan fashion. | |
| Secretary Stay Rubio was a member of that committee, that there was no political interference. | ||
| There was a years-long Justice Department investigation into this as well that also concluded no political interference. | ||
| So help us, from a 50,000-foot level, explain what do you now have that refutes those two sheriffs? | ||
| I will encourage you in my role as the Director of National Intelligence. | ||
| My job, again, as I said when I came into this role, was to make sure that we are telling the truth to the American people and that we are ensuring that the intelligence community is not being politicized. | ||
| So I'm not asking you to take my word for it. | ||
| I'm asking you and the media to conduct honest journalism and the American people to see for yourself in the documents that we've released now close to 200 pages that point in multiple references, multiple examples, to include comments that have been made by senior intelligence professionals, who are some still working within these agencies today, that confirm the conclusions that we have drawn. | ||
| That President Obama directed an intelligence community assessment to be created to further this contrived false narrative that ultimately led to a years-long coup to try to undermine President Trump's presidency. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did two previous investigations missed that or covered it up? | |
| I'm telling you to look at the evidence. | ||
| Look at the evidence and you will know the truth. | ||
| More from the BBC. | ||
| It says the report Gabbard declassified was prepared by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee and is dated the 18th of September 2020. | ||
| It says it was declassified on Wednesday, a day after President Trump accused former President Barack Obama of leading an effort to falsely tie him to Russia and undermine his 2016 election campaign. | ||
| The next day, it was the spokesperson for President Obama who responded to those claims, saying, issuing this statement out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response, but these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. | ||
| These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction. | ||
| Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election, but did not successfully manipulate any votes. | ||
| These findings were affirmed in a 2020 report by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee led by then Chairman Marco Rubio. | ||
| Back to your calls, hearing from you on your top news story of the week. | ||
| Let's talk with Robert in Virginia, line for independence. | ||
| Hi, Robert. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| How are you doing? | ||
| I want to remind people that dictators and authoritarians are the same. | ||
| Nanyah and Donald Trump are both dictators and authoritarians. | ||
| If you look at the pictures coming out of Gaza, they're just almost identical as the ones that came out of Russia or Germany and what happened to the Jews in World War II. | ||
| But now it's the Jews doing it to the Palestinians. | ||
| This is wrong, and most people in this country know it. | ||
| And we've got criminals up there running the government that need to be accounted for, and they will be sooner or later. | ||
| But I can tell you something: if people don't get their mind right and decide to get up there and force him out one way or the other, then it's just going to get worse. | ||
| And these people like Dagon, these cabinet members of his, he hired them because they're all stupid people and he's smarter than they are. | ||
| That's what he thinks. | ||
| And they do his bidding, just like that woman for the Justice Department. | ||
| She's working for him, not the people. | ||
| Justice Department is supposed to be working for the people. | ||
| That was Robert in Virginia. | ||
| Barbara in Little Rock, Arkansas, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Barbara. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| I have comments about Gaza's well. | ||
| It just bothered me that I couldn't even sleep. | ||
| Just keep watching that and worried about that. | ||
| That's not right. | ||
| And This country always would talk about other countries, how they go in and they want to change the government and need a new government. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And Israel needs a new government. | |
| You have a lot of corrupt Jews in Israel, in every way else. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And every time you mention Jews, people get in trouble. | |
| They don't want to talk about the corruption. | ||
| All Jews is not the same. | ||
| It's a big difference. | ||
| A lot of the Jews come from out of Russia. | ||
| And move back to Israel. | ||
| All of them that move back in there, they grew up there, and that virtue is a lot different. | ||
| And they are very corrupt in Israel. | ||
| People that have visas there, been there, spent a lot of time there. | ||
| They don't have good intentions. | ||
| They don't mean well. | ||
| They're very selfish. | ||
| They're all for themselves. | ||
| And a lot of them in there need to go and they need to change that government in Israel and stop supporting corruption in Israel. | ||
| That was Barbara in Arkansas. | ||
| Sue in Louisiana, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Sue. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I'm a Reagan Republican, and I just don't appreciate how the president can break all these laws. | |
| Because if he's going to break all these laws, why don't we just let everybody out of the prison? | ||
| Because we're no longer a country. | ||
| I mean, he's supposed to be the example. | ||
| And he's going to get out of that anyway because once JD Vance becomes president, they're going to do a Richard Nixon. | ||
| And he's pardoned Trump. | ||
| So it don't really matter anyway. | ||
| Sue, you're a Republican. | ||
| Did you vote for Donald Trump? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a Reagan Republican. | |
| I just can't get into this MAGA thing because, no, at one time we were a strong party. | ||
| We need to start the jellybean party in honor of Ronald Reagan so we can get back to where we were. | ||
| This man is leading us down a bad hole. | ||
| That was Sue in Louisiana. | ||
| Kevin in Windsor, Connecticut, line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Kevin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yeah, I guess my biggest story is Epstein. | ||
| You know, last week, Pan Bomb Day, she fired the prosecutor in the Epstein case, Comey's daughter. | ||
| Okay, this week, the word Epstein shut down Washington. | ||
| Then Trump sends his own lawyer, personal lawyer, he's no AG from the Department of Justice, his own personal lawyer to talk to this matchup, the perpetratory traitor, instead of talking to the hundred victims that this guy and this lady molesting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, something's wrong here. | |
| Okay, this is a big cover-up when you fire the prosecutor. | ||
| Washington shut down. | ||
| And when it comes to guys and the kids, right? | ||
| I know Trump don't like the kids, you know, you know, but one word from Trump and that could end all the food problems for right now. | ||
| He could say open up all the gates, let the food in. | ||
| Trump could fix all this, but he doesn't. | ||
| But that's my line for today. | ||
| That was Kevin in Connecticut. | ||
| And Kevin talking about the Department of Justice meeting with Ghelane Maxwell. | ||
| It was yesterday that her attorney shared details after the DOJ's two days of meeting and interviewing with her. | ||
| Here is a clip from that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
David, the president today reminded people he has the power to pardon Ghelen Maxwell. | |
| Is that something that you're going to be for testimony or anything like that? | ||
| Of course, everybody knows that Miss Maxwell would welcome any relief. | ||
| She's been in very difficult conditions for five years, and so she would welcome any relief. | ||
| It's the right thing to do, and we have faith that the right thing will happen sooner rather than later. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did you get anything? | |
| Was there an ask? | ||
| Sorry? | ||
| Can you get a sense of what the goal of this was for us? | ||
| The goal is the truth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's time for the truth to come out. | |
| David, did she or you have an ask of the Deputy Attorney General? | ||
| No. | ||
| There have been no asks and no promises, and nothing like that has been made. | ||
| Did you expect that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's the next step in her process then? | |
| Well, Congress has subpoenaed her to testify. | ||
| We have to make a decision about whether she will do that or not. | ||
| That's been scheduled for the week of August 11th, and we haven't gotten back to them yet on whether we'll do that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You would say it was going to be based on how this meeting with the Deputy Attorney General went. | |
| Are you satisfied with how it went, and how would that inform your decision to participate in Congress? | ||
| I think Glenn did a wonderful job. | ||
|
unidentified
|
She literally answered every question. | |
| She didn't say, you know what, don't ask me that. | ||
| I'm not going to talk about this person. | ||
| She was asked maybe about 100 different people. | ||
| She answered questions about everybody and she didn't hold anything back. | ||
| We're asking you, what's your top news story of the week? | ||
| Kevin in New Jersey, line for Democrats. | ||
| Kevin, what's your top story? | ||
| What caught your eye? | ||
|
unidentified
|
A little bit. | |
| Good morning, first of all, and thanks for allowing me to speak. | ||
| I've been sitting back for the past six months listening to Washington Journal. | ||
| I enjoy this show every morning. | ||
| Three things. | ||
| Gaza, number one, with these children is horrific. | ||
| The man or the world needs to do something about helping these people. | ||
| Second of all, Epstein is dead, and the lady's in prison. | ||
| I don't care who's on that list. | ||
| Third thing, what about this economy? | ||
| What about this stopping the wars and to lower the prices? | ||
| I haven't seen that one bill of Congress or legislation done to help the American people as far as our groceries. | ||
| Those are my top issues. | ||
| And the last thing, Obama is not in office anymore. | ||
| Trump, you're in office. | ||
| So take your bites, take your bullets, and you know, stop blaming everybody else for the world's problems. | ||
| Look in the mirror, son. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was Kevin in New Jersey. | ||
| Robert in Michigan, line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Robert. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, America. | |
| Good to see you again. | ||
| And thanks for having me on. | ||
| This is Robert from the fascist town of Caspian, Michigan, which is affiliated with Iron River, Michigan. | ||
| My two top stories is the Gaza Strip. | ||
| And this business of Trump and trying to avoid confrontations with, you know, knowing his past with women and little girls and men and trying to avoid all that. | ||
| But the real thing is, I just paid $4.80 for a gallon of milk. | ||
| And last week, I paid $3.25 for that same gallon of milk. | ||
| And the price of gas, it jumped up another 20 cents around here. | ||
| And there's no stopping this inflation issue, which they're trying to avoid, also, I bet. | ||
| But this Gaza business is something else, man. | ||
| I mean, Trump himself admitted he wanted to turn Gaza into the Riviera of the Middle East. | ||
| He said that. | ||
| If you go back in the history, you can find it. | ||
| So he wants to level the Gaza strip completely, do away with all the Palestinians, you know, and it's just, they're displacing people all over the place. | ||
| And Trump is an idiot. | ||
| That's all there is to it. | ||
| And nobody to the Republicans around here that's moving around me. | ||
| You're all fools. | ||
| You are all fools, man. | ||
| You're naive to let this guy back in the office again. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was Robert in Michigan. | ||
| Lee in New York, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Lee. | ||
| Lee, are you there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Hi, Lee. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Hi, good morning. | ||
| Yes, my story of the week is of the Epstein file, the fact that Trump is on that list. | ||
| He's doing everything possible to hide it. | ||
| And yes, he's trying to change the conversation, try to change it just so people can look someplace else. | ||
| But yes, he's on that list. | ||
| He is basically a common rapist. | ||
| And the fact that people are saying, Trumpans are saying, hey, let's move on. | ||
| Forget it. | ||
| You can't forget it. | ||
| You can't ignore it. | ||
| This is a serious situation. | ||
| The fact that our president of the United States has done awful things to these children, we need to talk about it. | ||
| So I'm sorry. | ||
| We're not going to forget it. | ||
| We're not going to stop talking about it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was Lee in New York. | ||
| Betty in Jackson, Tennessee, on the line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Betty. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I'm calling. | |
| I've never called before, but I just wanted to make two statements. | ||
| I'm 96 years old. | ||
| I've lived in this world for a long time. | ||
| I don't care if they're Democrats or Republican. | ||
| They all tell fibs. | ||
| But when are the people of the United States of America going to start standing up for God? | ||
| Do you think that our Lord wants these children to be starving? | ||
| And Mr. Trump, I am so very disappointed in you. | ||
| I voted for you, and you have just turned us into a bunch of hateful, mean, horrible people. | ||
| And it's just, you know, I know we've got too many immigrants in this country, but my goodness, we don't have to be mean to them. | ||
| That's not what this country is built on. | ||
| I probably won't be here for the next election. | ||
| But my goodness, I'll never, ever vote Republican. | ||
| And I've been voting for 80 years. | ||
| Never missed an election. | ||
| I remember when Adelaide Stevens run for the governor of Tennessee, he told a little fib, and I don't think it was a real fib. | ||
| I don't think he believed it was anyway. | ||
| And they just ran him out of the state for it. | ||
| I can't believe that this country is letting things happen that's happening. | ||
| I'm sorry, and I'm sorry to have bothered you, ma'am. | ||
| You're a sweet lady. | ||
| Betty, when is your birthday? | ||
| You're 96. | ||
| When are you going to hit 97? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll be 97 on April 30th. | |
| And, you know, it just, I don't know, this country's just going in the wrong direction. | ||
| It just saddens my heart. | ||
| I don't hardly go to church anymore because even our churches have become political. | ||
| I told the pastor, I said, I come here to study the Bible, to learn about God, our Lord. | ||
| And you're up there talking about politics. | ||
| This is just getting to be ridiculous. | ||
| Thank you, ma'am. | ||
| That was Betty in Tennessee, a first-time caller. | ||
| If you haven't called in before and you'd like to join the conversation, please do. | ||
| The lines will put them up on the screen again. | ||
| If you're a Democrat, it's 202-748-8000. | ||
| Or Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| Timothy in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on the line for Independence. | ||
| Good morning, Timothy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Hi, Timothy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Yes, I'm calling in. | ||
| I'm 58 years old, and I followed the politics and stuff. | ||
| And I cried. | ||
| I cried January the 6th, and a lot of people weren't around happy. | ||
| Because we had a president who led an insurrection, and everything he does wrong, the Republican Congress act as if they don't see it. | ||
| They did not do their job. | ||
| And this country cannot say they are not a racist country when our president put the civil rights on the chopping block. | ||
| You're not saying this out loud. | ||
| You're not telling them that Obama and Biden remove more illegal immigrants out of this nation than the Trump imagined. | ||
| And we are not a Christian nation where we agree to pledge allegiance to slaughtering children in schools. | ||
| And we pledge allegiance to shooting innocent people in churches. | ||
| We play allegiance to police brutality. | ||
| And then we will go around bomb nations and kingdoms. | ||
| And then you around here and not holding up democracy and justice for all inside our borders. | ||
| We got murderers and hate groups and people who hang people and they white folks. | ||
| They molest us. | ||
| They just went out there and killed these two congresspeople and shot the other two congresspeople and it were crickets on this TV. | ||
| What is the evidence that they keep talking about Obama did? | ||
| Biden did that. | ||
| Don't you know where Obama got the seat, the teeth, to the nation? | ||
| This nation was on the brink of a great depression. | ||
| That was Timothy in North Carolina. | ||
| Robert in Birmingham, Alabama, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Robert. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'm amazed at how we've allowed ourselves to be doomed. | ||
| When you see what's happening in Ukraine, when you Trump gave Putin the green light to proceed with that, and he knows that. | ||
| And now he's wondering why they won't stop the war. | ||
| Trump approved of Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel going to the extreme against those people to Palestinian. | ||
| Both of those conditions have mass murder going on under the guise of a war, the just war. | ||
| We know that that's not right. | ||
| Those innocent, non-combatants, women and children murdering, dying for no good reason. | ||
| It is shameful. | ||
| And then you get closer here at home. | ||
| Every time we look at the media and see Trump standing, addressing the nation, you cannot forget that he is a felon of 34 convictions. | ||
| He led the insurrection. | ||
| And for some way, for him to be now standing as president of the United States with those transgressions, this country is sick. | ||
| And we have lost our direction. | ||
| And unless somebody has the courage to call it what it is and take the appropriate action, our days are numbered. | ||
| I'll just tell you that now. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was Robert in Alabama. | ||
| Another story that C-SPAN has been following this week, this headline from the Texas Tribune says, Texans Democrats condemn GOP redistricting plans at first public hearing. | ||
| You can find that hearing online at C-SPAN's website. | ||
| We carried it in full. | ||
| It says that speaking to two dozen state lawmakers, a packed hearing room, two overflowing rooms, and a robust virtual waiting room, Texans condemned the legislature's plan to redraw the state's congressional map at the House Redistricting Committee's first public meeting on Thursday. | ||
| It says at the first of seven public hearings, Democratic lawmakers echoed those calls, pressing their Republican colleagues on why redistricting is being pushed through during an overtime special session. | ||
| It goes on to say the unusual attempt to redraw the congressional map in the middle of the decade comes after pressure from President Donald Trump, who wants to pad Republicans' narrow majority in the U.S. House ahead of a potentially midterm, potentially tough midterm election. | ||
| The legislature has not yet revealed any proposed revisions of the existing map, which was drawn in 2021 and has since reliably yielded 25 seats for Republicans and 13 for Democrats. | ||
| And there are responses to what's happening outside of Texas. | ||
| This is a headline from the LA Times. | ||
| California Democrats may target GOP congressional districts to counter Texas. | ||
| It was yesterday that Governor Gavin Newsom explained why he's considering congressional redistricting after meeting with Texas Democrat state lawmakers yesterday. | ||
| Here's a clip from that press conference. | ||
| We talked about everything that's at stake. | ||
| Everything is at stake if we're not successful next year in taking back the House of Representatives. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course, we want a fair playing field. | |
| We want to play the game on the terms where everybody is playing by the same set of rules. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's no longer the case. | |
| We have to disenthrall ourselves that that's the case. | ||
| Not with Donald Trump, not when he made a call to the governor of Texas and talked about finding five additional seats so that he can try to hold the line and maintain the majority in the House of Representatives. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The game has changed. | |
| They don't even want to play by the same set of rules. | ||
| In fact, they just want to throw the entire board. | ||
| And they want to throw it all out. | ||
| It is a five-alarm fire for democracy in the United States of America. | ||
| And so that's why we're here to have the back not only of those representative from Texas, but the people of Texas that are struggling, suffering from the same kind of assault on not just the rule of law, but this assault on democracy that binds us together as a nation. | ||
| And so a threat, I think, threat of injustice anywhere, as Dr. King said, is a threat of justice everywhere. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so we feel a connection. | |
| We feel a sense of responsibility. | ||
| And we feel it's right to assert ourselves a little bit more moral clarity at this moment, using not just our moral authority, but using our formal authority. | ||
| And considering, as we now have, that there is a chance to ask the voters of the state of California to reconsider their prior position. | ||
| I've asked myself that same question as someone that actively supported independent redistricting, that believes it should be nationalized, but we have not seen the nationalization of independent redistricting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Things have changed, so too must we. | |
| Again, you can find the full Texas Senate hearing online at c-span.org and ABC, the ABC affiliate for one of the Austin stations, noting that I'm sorry, I lost the link, the ABC Austin, noting that there are additional hearings this weekend. | ||
| It says that two more public hearings are scheduled: one in Houston, that is today, at the University of Houston at one, I'm sorry, at 11 a.m., and another in Arlington on Monday at UT Arlington. | ||
| That's at 5 p.m. | ||
| Folks who are interested in going, it says each hearing will be capped at five hours of public testimony with two minutes allotted per speaker. | ||
| Back to your calls, asking your top news story of the week. | ||
| Let's hear from Angela, who's in Texas on the line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Angela. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'm actually here visiting. | ||
| I'm from Ohio. | ||
| I was just so touched when the 96-year-old lady called in. | ||
| It just burned my heart. | ||
| And I too have never, ever called anywhere, written anything, but she reminded me of my mom who has passed on. | ||
| And I just cried on the inside. | ||
| When people ask me what I am, I say I'm an independent Republic. | ||
| My mom was a Republican. | ||
| My dad was a Democrat. | ||
| And I feel like I'm an independent. | ||
| I have served in the community as a realtor by trade, a minister by calling. | ||
| So I look at things broadly, I think. | ||
| My heart is so grievous because I have 10 grandchildren. | ||
| Our oldest daughter and her husband gave us three. | ||
| My youngest daughter and her husband gave us seven because they were trying to get a girl. | ||
| They had all boys. | ||
| So I have nine grandsons, one granddaughter. | ||
| And I think about what is it going to be like for them. | ||
| And it just, it almost makes me cry. | ||
| I have a 21-year-old senior at Ohio State University. | ||
| And he sits with me and we talk. | ||
| And he says, Grandma, if somebody strong doesn't get in politics, our country's going to you know where. | ||
| I said, buddy, somebody's going to get in that's got a fat phone, and God will not allow this country to go down like it appears to be. | ||
| I just am saddened by the display of the Republicans, honestly. | ||
| I can't believe it. | ||
| I can't believe it. | ||
| I mean, Mitt Romney and John McCain would never stand up for things that they're standing up for. | ||
| It reminds me of gangsters. | ||
| And I know people choose different ways of life for different reasons, so I don't judge. | ||
| But it seems like this president is acting like a Don and some kind of way, he's strong-arming the Republicans, because I can't imagine that many Republicans without a backbone to stand up against just moral degradation. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| So I don't want to stay on the phone. | ||
| I know a lot of people need to call in, but I had to call in, and I've never, ever done it before. | ||
| God bless the lady that is going to be 97. | ||
| God bless you. | ||
| And thank you all so much for allowing this way for us to communicate. | ||
| God bless. | ||
| That was Angela in Texas, visiting Texas from Ohio. | ||
| Let's talk with Karen in Whitmore Lake, Michigan, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Karen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I wanted to let you know that my top stories were the expose of Microsoft using Chinese text to give them access to our Department of Defense, the expose of Obama's involvement in creating the false Russia collusion story. | ||
| The fact that Jocelyn Benson, the Michigan Secretary of State, is being investigated now, has been requested, records have been requested of her regarding our qualified voter files. | ||
| And, you know, likely that will be converted into an indictment on Jocelyn Benson. | ||
| And lastly, Brian Ignatowski's campaign kickoff launched for the Michigan 48th district to unseat progressive radicals in our area. | ||
| We're going to go from purple back to our strong red state here in the state of Michigan. | ||
| Super exciting week for us. | ||
| So there's that. | ||
| Karen, is that your district, the 48th? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, it is. | |
| And I'm so excited. | ||
| We're going to take it back because we only last go around. | ||
| We only lost it by just a very small amount of votes. | ||
| And then it came out that at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, where they had the, it was an election, a poll place that was where the Chinese were caught voting illegally. | ||
| So chances are we're going to, you know, have a more fair election this go around. | ||
| So I'm super excited. | ||
| We're going to flip our seat back. | ||
| Karen, are you volunteering with the campaign? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah, absolutely. | |
| And with all of the rest of the Michigan government, you know, the Michigan GOP, wherever I'm needed. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| That was Karen in Michigan. | ||
| Catherine in Plymouth, Massachusetts, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Catherine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, and I too want to congratulate that 96-year-old woman. | |
| And I do think it's the old timers who lived through the civil rights movement who are so offended by so many things that Trump is doing. | ||
| It's like make America white again and unequal. | ||
| And I'm very, very disappointed in those policies that are getting rid of diversity and equity. | ||
| Also, with the immigrants, too. | ||
| I mean, I wish somebody would come out with the accurate numbers. | ||
| They say 11 million came into the country under Biden, but 10.5 million came in under Trump. | ||
| And I wish the real numbers would come out. | ||
| But my biggest concern this week is Gaza starving those people. | ||
| And when you look at those people in Gaza that are starving, you can't help but think of what Auschwitz was like. | ||
| And maybe because we're older, we have seen those pictures so many times, and it's just disgraceful. | ||
| And for Trump to have taken away the USA aid and for Netanyahu to block the aid that's going in there, I find that very, very offensive. | ||
| But also with Trump, I grew up in New Jersey, and he wouldn't rent or sell to blacks or non-whites in the 80s. | ||
| And in the late 80s, 90s, they took him to court, and he had to do it. | ||
| So if there is anyone out there who doesn't think that Trump is a white supremacist, they just need to look at his record. | ||
| That's what he is. | ||
| It's Make America White Again. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| And I appreciate your show and having the ability to make other opinions known. | ||
| And I hope the old timers keep going to America is the greatest country in the world. | ||
| And that's another thing that bothered the heck out of me about Trump talking about the economy. | ||
| The economy was lousy when he left office. | ||
| Inflation was 9%. | ||
| I don't understand why the American people think that he's done anything economically to help us survive. | ||
| So thank you so much. | ||
| I appreciate your show, and I appreciate the fact that you can get on here and say something. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was Catherine in Massachusetts. | ||
| John in Florida, line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Just to refute that last caller, what Trump has done for the Americans so far is no tax on tips, no tax on overtime. | ||
| I'm going to go buy a new car today because I could write all the interest payments off on it for the next four years. | ||
| So just so you know, there's plenty of things that President Trump has been doing and is doing first. | ||
| And by the way, the stock market's at an all-time high. | ||
| A lot of TDS on this program this morning, which goes to show you the propaganda press is working overtime. | ||
| Now, for the two topics, headlines that I have, one was definitely what's happening in Syria with the Druze and the Christians talking about a massacre and slaughter. | ||
| The Syrian forces are killing Christians and the Druze at an unprecedented rate. | ||
| It's a horror story if anybody cares to look at it. | ||
| You won't hear a peep from the propaganda press on that. | ||
| And the second one was what's happening with Tulsi Gabbard and the DNI. | ||
| I mean, with the paperwork that's come out, we know now that Obama just didn't push this narrative. | ||
| He ordered it. | ||
| He buried the truth. | ||
| He let his buddy Brennan sell the lie. | ||
| They included bad information. | ||
| They overruled the CIA analysts. | ||
| They ignored contradictory evidence and then leaked the conclusion before the port was even finished. | ||
| They had one goal, and the goal was only to undermine Trump. | ||
| And this is a huge story. | ||
| And again, you won't hear anything about it from the propaganda press. | ||
| I appreciate the time this morning. | ||
| You all have a good day. | ||
| I'm going to go drive my new truck and then go right off the interest payments. | ||
| That was John in Florida. | ||
| Sam in Crystal Springs, Mississippi, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Sam. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Jamie. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Doing well, Sam. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The gentleman that just spoke, he was 100% correct. | |
| And I wanted to correct the lady before him saying that the interest rates were at 9%. | ||
| I'm sorry, inflation was at 9% when Trump left office. | ||
| That is a total lie. | ||
| It was more like 1% to 2%. | ||
| Biden came in, and of course it spiked at 9%. | ||
| So she needs to be corrected on that. | ||
| I think you need to tell her that. | ||
| So, secondly, first of all, these, I don't know what's going on in Minnesota, why they're, and I know there's a lot of good Republicans in Minnesota, but this guy that's running for mayor in Minneapolis and probably going to win looks like a cartoon character. | ||
| I don't understand why Somalia, Somalians are taking over that state. | ||
| You've got a congressman there that hates America, wants to do everything she can to disparage it, even though she came from a hellhole in Somalia. | ||
| Secondly, the mayor that's probably going to end up being a mayor in New York. | ||
| I don't understand why the New Yorkers would want a communist. | ||
| He's not a socialist. | ||
| He's a communist. | ||
| Based on what past comments he's made on video, I don't understand that. | ||
| And then, last but not least, this thing with Jeffrey Epstein. | ||
| Bill Clinton was a primary, he was one of the main ones that was going down to the island. | ||
| And we know how Bill is about women. | ||
| And I have no doubt in my mind that when it comes out, he's going to be in a lot of trouble. | ||
| Obama is a fraud. | ||
| I think that this thing he ordered with John Brennan, I mean, it's just so many things that happened this past week that's negative towards the Democrat Party. | ||
| And I don't understand why these people continue to vote for the Democrat Party because they are definitely a Democrat socialist party now. | ||
| There are exceptions, but I don't understand why they would want to become a socialist party like they are. | ||
| The people that are putting up for office and I just think it's just terrible for the United States for this to happen. | ||
| Look at the UK. | ||
| You look at a lot of these European countries that all these Muslims have come into the country and have just totally destroyed their way of life. | ||
| The UK is basically, I think all the major cities in the UK are headed up by Muslim mayors. | ||
| So, and then Germany is the same way. | ||
| Sweden, Sweden is the same way. | ||
| Several countries are basically letting all these Muslims come in, and they're trying to not assimilate. | ||
| They're trying to just try to dominate the world with their religion. | ||
| And it's not. | ||
| That was Sam in Mississippi. | ||
| A couple other stories from this week: a couple notable deaths. | ||
| This is the headline from the Associated Press: Ozzy Osborne, who led Black Sabbath and became the godfather of heavy metal, dies at 76. | ||
| Ozzy Osborne made an appearance at the 2002 White House Correspondence Dinner. | ||
| You can find that event online at our website at c-span.org. | ||
| Another death this week, this headline from Variety: Hulk Hogan, Hall of Fame wrestler and actor, dies at 71. | ||
| Hulk Hogan was at last summer's Republican National Convention. | ||
| Here is a clip from that event. | ||
| You know, when I look out and I see all the real Americans, I think about how Donald Trump, his family, was compromised. | ||
| When I look out there and I see Donald Trump, I think about how his business was compromised. | ||
| But what happened last week when they took a shot at my hero and they tried to kill the next president of the United States? | ||
| Enough! | ||
| Wars enough! | ||
| It is so! | ||
| Let Tropomania run wild, brother! | ||
| Let Tropomania rule again! | ||
| Let Trump-a-mania make America great again. | ||
| Just a few minutes left in this first hour of Washington Journal asking for your top news story of the week. | ||
| Let's hear from Alfred in Florida, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Alfred. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm from Miller Vale, New Jersey. | |
| I'm a Democrat. | ||
| I heard some new Jersey callers call in. | ||
| I would say if you won't know who voting in New Jersey, look at Bob Menendez and Corey Booker. | ||
| I think Bob Menendez was the guy that was involved with the 12, 11 and 12-year-old girls in Costa Rica and was convicted of it and taking bribes. | ||
| And you wonder why New Jersey is like it is. | ||
| You know, you know how that is, you know. | ||
| And I wonder what happened to my Democratic Party. | ||
| I can't imagine how dumbed down they are and how stupid. | ||
| And they vote for all the evil stuff. | ||
| There's no such thing as a Christian voting Democratic because everything they stand for is not for anything God would have anything to do with. | ||
| That was Alfred in Florida. | ||
| Let's hear from Dolores in New York, line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Dolores. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I'm just grateful that Gaza is finally getting some coverage, American coverage. | ||
| The children, the starving children, it's been going on for so long. | ||
| But I am just grateful. | ||
| Guys, America, we look bad. | ||
| We look bad, America. | ||
| You know, the UN twice dual resolution to allow aid to get into Gaza because they know that this is what's going to come or it was coming. | ||
| Twice, Congress vetoed the bill. | ||
| Every single member in Congress vetoed the bill. | ||
| In other words, allowed the children to die. | ||
| This is a big deal. | ||
| The entire world is watching us. | ||
| How does that make America great again? | ||
| Guys, who's looking out for you, the American people? | ||
| Because this starving children, it's against American values. | ||
| You know, you want to save our beloved America. | ||
| We have to put our heads together and stop the division because we're very divided people. | ||
| While we are fighting, the rich and the elite are taking everything. | ||
| They're stealing it because they have, and then they're going to send it to their countries, making their countries great again because they have no loyalty to America. | ||
| I'm just grateful that finally Gaza is getting some coverage. | ||
| I feel so bad. | ||
| Maybe because I'm a nurse, I see it in the hospital. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Imagine your baby is starving to death. | ||
| Just let that take a little bit. | ||
| Most of us are very good people, America, because when I worked during COVID, I saw how we got together, how you send your messages, how you send food and sneakers and socks and message of encouragement. | ||
| Americans, let's stand up together and save our people of America because we don't look good at all on a global stage. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was Dolores in New York. | ||
| And our last call for this hour is Jim in Winter Park, Florida, on the line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Jim. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Tenny. | |
| I've been trying to get in for over a month, and it's hard to get through sometimes. | ||
| But a couple of things that I want to talk about, my biggest news story is one that didn't even make it in the news. | ||
| For a month, over a month, it hasn't made it in the news. | ||
| First of all, there were three women that were killed in the past six weeks by illegal immigrants, and it has not hit the news. | ||
| First was a young lady that was on a kayak in Texas, and two illegal immigrants on a jet ski hit her and killed her. | ||
| And then they fled. | ||
| They got their jet ski out of the water, and they tried to get away. | ||
| They ran into cars and parking lot to get away. | ||
| And nothing. | ||
| I think I saw it once on the regular news. | ||
| And then it went away. | ||
| And the reason why it went away was because there were illegal immigrants, and the media does not want to press that situation. | ||
| There was a mother that was killed in North Carolina. | ||
| Three children, black women, killed by a couple of immigrants. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Nobody said anything about it. | ||
| And here in Florida, there was a lady that was out jogging one morning, and it was big news the first two days until they found the guy that hit her with his truck who drove away and got away. | ||
| And he was an illegal immigrant. | ||
| And that went away completely. | ||
| Haven't heard a word. | ||
| Crickets. | ||
| People talk about Trump. | ||
| 10 years they have been talking about Trump. | ||
| I am not a Trumper. | ||
| I am not a Trump fan. | ||
| I want real politicians that know what they're doing to be running this country. | ||
| But the Democrats just keep putting up way, way, way too far liberal people. | ||
| They just don't, they have no control over what they want to spend. | ||
| You had a lady on about four weeks ago that spoke about Trump knocking people out, getting rid of people in the health field. | ||
| And it went right by everybody. | ||
| Nobody said a word about it after that on that show. | ||
| And I tried to call in right away and I couldn't get through. | ||
| This woman talked about a man who was working on trying to fix the problem with, I think it was silica or something in the water. | ||
| He's been doing it for 28 years. | ||
| He was hired in 1998. | ||
| And right now, he is still working on it. | ||
| 28 years to try and fix something, and he has failed for 28 years, and we keep paying him to do this. | ||
| And what has this stuff that was in the water done to anybody in the United States? | ||
| We don't have any proof. | ||
| We don't have anything. | ||
| It's just spend, spend, spend. | ||
| And then fix it more. | ||
| And it doesn't work. | ||
| And Trump has tried to stop it. | ||
| He's the first president that has tried to stop it. | ||
| And actually, he's not. | ||
| Bill Clinton tried to stop it. | ||
| And the media pushed it away. | ||
| The government pushed it away. | ||
| Nobody wants to stop spending the money. | ||
| We are at $37 trillion in debt. | ||
| And all we want to do is spend more money and spend more money. | ||
| And we have nobody in the Congress or in the House or in the Senate that wants to try and fix anything. | ||
| These guys have been there. | ||
| They make a lifetime career out of their job. | ||
| And they spend their whole life doing nothing for the people that voted them in. | ||
| They do it for the parties. | ||
| Got your point, Jim. | ||
| That was Jim in Florida. | ||
| Our last call for this first hour of Washington Journal. | ||
| Still ahead. | ||
| Politicos, EE News, energy reporter Brian Dabs will join us to discuss the factors behind the rise in electricity prices. | ||
| But next, we'll talk with R Street Institute Fellow Carolyn Malear about bipartisan efforts in Congress to combat financial fraud and scams. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
American History TV, exploring the people and events that tell the American story. | |
| This weekend, as the nation prepares to celebrate its semi-quincentennial, American History TV begins a year-long series, America 250, on the American Revolution and its impact on the country. | ||
| On Lectures in History, Ithaca College professor Michael Trotty on the escalating tensions between colonists and the British government before the American Revolution. | ||
| We'll visit Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York for a Revolutionary War reenactment. | ||
| And later, historian Bruce Venter explores the significance of the May 1775 capture of Fort Ticonderoga by American Commander Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys. | ||
| The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum's annual book festival in Hyde Park, New York, where historians discuss the history of the U.S. Navy, American spy craft, and the role of breweries in the New Deal. | ||
| Exploring the American story, watch American History TV every weekend and find a full schedule in your program guide or watch online anytime at c-span.org slash history. | ||
| Book TV, every Sunday on C-SPAN 2, features leading authors discussing their latest nonfiction books. | ||
| Here's a look at what's coming up this weekend. | ||
| Book TV continues the celebration of America's 250th with author conversations on the American Revolution. | ||
| At 2 p.m. Eastern, contributors to the book Waging War in America, 1775 to 1783, discuss the operational challenges that American, British, French, and German military forces face during the conflict. | ||
| And at 6.45 p.m., U.S. Marine Corps Major General Jason Bohm explores the origins of the Marine Corps, including the formation of the Continental Marines during the American Revolution, in his book, Washington's Marines. | ||
| Then at 8 Eastern, Rick Atkinson shares his book, The Fate of the Day, examining the middle years of the Revolutionary War, from the 1777 capture of Fort Ticonderoga to the 1780 siege of Charleston. | ||
| Also this weekend, at 5.30 p.m., how did the like button become so ubiquitous? | ||
| Author Martin Reeves explores the origins of the thumbs-up symbol and how it changed the internet with his book, Like, The Button That Changed the World. | ||
| And at 10, Martha Blanding broke a color barrier at California's Disneyland, becoming the park's first black official tour guide in 1971. | ||
| She tells the story of her 50-year career with the Walt Disney Company and of social and cultural change in her book, Groundbreaking Magic. | ||
| Watch Book TV every Sunday on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at booktv.org. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Joining us now to discuss bipartisan efforts in Congress to combat financial fraud and scams is R-Street Institute Fellow Caroline Malear. | ||
| Caroline, thank you so much for being with us this morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Tammy, for having me. | |
| We want to start by just letting our audience know about your organization. | ||
| Can you tell us about the R Street Institute, the mission, who you work with, and how you're funded? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, of course. | |
| So we are a public policy research organization. | ||
| In my role, I research topics in finance, financial regulatory policy, as well as insurance issues. | ||
| We work with key stakeholders, with organizations of like mind, and we are funded by philanthropic and corporate donors, but our research is always independent. | ||
| And you mentioned that you focus on finance, insurance, and trade. | ||
| That's your specialty. | ||
| And you have some analysis from just last week. | ||
| Bipartisan efforts are underway to tackle financial fraud and scams. | ||
| So let's talk about what's happening. | ||
| Your report mentions that more than 12 billion in fraud losses were reported last year and that it was a 25% increase from 2023. | ||
| It is interesting you noted that the total number of incidents has remained pretty much the same. | ||
| It's steady, but the total amount per loss has increased. | ||
| Explain why. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that's correct. | |
| So we see reporting from the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, shows that 2.6 million Americans reported fraud or loss. | ||
| And like you said, that is very similar numbers to 2023. | ||
| However, the total amount lost at $12.5 billion reported is higher. | ||
| And we do see a big increase in financial scams. | ||
| So scams that are targeting individuals, asking them to invest their money in something that might be fraudulent, and ultimately they lose their entire investment. | ||
| And who's typically the target of financial scams? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It could be anyone, honestly. | |
| And I would imagine most of your viewers, if they haven't been personally victimized by this, they know someone who has. | ||
| So the targets are really anyone and everyone, unfortunately. | ||
| So we see that through a lot of different channels, whether that be spoof phone calls. | ||
| So calls that come up on your phone with a familiar area code. | ||
| However, they're not even originating necessarily in the United States. | ||
| We see it through email. | ||
| We see it through social media channels. | ||
| So it's not necessarily targeting one population over the other, although the elderly do tend to be victims of the scams a bit more for a couple of reasons. | ||
| One is greater access to funds for these type of scams. | ||
| And another is because of the technological advancements, it can be a little bit more challenging for that segment of the population to keep up and recognize when something is fraudulent or a scam. | ||
| You mentioned a challenge there. | ||
| There's also a challenge when it comes to finding or prosecuting the people who are behind these scams. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, absolutely. | |
| So when it occurs on U.S. soil, it's a little bit easier. | ||
| And we have a whole variety of federal government agencies that can prosecute and target individuals who are running scams within the United States. | ||
| However, the issue is we're seeing a lot of this is happening internationally. | ||
| So there's a few countries that are kind of typically behind what's going on here. | ||
| Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia are a few. | ||
| The Philippines recently had a huge scam operation that was busted by the United States Department of the Treasury. | ||
| So we placed sanctions on a company out of the Philippines, which had defrauded Americans out of $200 million. | ||
| But that's just one. | ||
| And like we talked about, the total amount that was reported was $12.5 billion. | ||
| So $200 million sounds like a great victory. | ||
| And it is to be able to bust up that ring, but it's a drop in the bucket of the overall number. | ||
| And I think something that's important as well to note is that that $12.5 billion, that is just what is self-reported by the American public. | ||
| So the actual number is likely to be quite a bit higher. | ||
| And in fact, a report from the Government Accountability Office estimates that the number is significantly larger than that. | ||
| And we're going to get into some of the proposed legislation to combat what's happening. | ||
| But before we do that, what kind of current regulations and laws are in place to prevent this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, of course, scams are illegal. | |
| There's a wide variety of legislation that is already in place to stop scams and frauds. | ||
| You know, that's a whole host of things that viewers are probably fairly familiar with. | ||
| There's anti-money laundering. | ||
| There's call spoofing is illegal when it is done with the intention to defraud someone. | ||
| But again, the international nature of the crimes is a really, really big part of the challenge here because a lot of times there can be a lack of jurisdiction to prosecute the crimes. | ||
| And that is something that we see when people are reporting at the local or the state level. | ||
| And there's a lot of mismanagement and misunderstanding about how to tackle the issue. | ||
| So not only do consumers not really know where to go to get help or relief, local law enforcement and state law enforcement also doesn't necessarily have the resources or the know-how to tackle these issues. | ||
| Caroline Malear is a finance, insurance, and trade fellow at the R Street Institute. | ||
| She is with us for the next 30, 35 minutes or so to discuss bipartisan efforts in Congress to combat financial fraud and scams. | ||
| If you have a question or comment for her, you can start calling in now. | ||
| The lines for this segment a little bit different. | ||
| They're regional. | ||
| If you're in the Eastern or Central time zone, it's 202-748-8000. | ||
| If you're Mountain or Pacific, it's 202-748-8001. | ||
| And if you have been the victim of a financial fraud scam, you can call in at 202-748-8002. | ||
| You mentioned a few of the problems, the challenges with finding people who are doing this, who are doing the scams. | ||
| Talk about some of the current challenges to deal with financial scams when it comes to what we see in place right now in terms of legislation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so there isn't really a great framework right now to deal with this. | |
| There are different agencies where you can report these issues. | ||
| The FTC, as I mentioned at the top, is one of the places where you can report it. | ||
| People go to their local law enforcement. | ||
| People might turn to the FBI. | ||
| People also turn to their financial institutions. | ||
| But there is not a comprehensive overall network that is congregating all of these scam reports or issues in a single place. | ||
| And that is a big part of the problem is, you know, there's not a centralized location to be tracking these issues. | ||
| So it's a really, really fragmented approach right now. | ||
| And that is part of what some of the legislation that is being proposed is attempting to solve. | ||
| So I would say that that is one part of the problem. | ||
| Another part is the advanced nature of technology. | ||
| A lot of this is being driven by artificial intelligence. | ||
| And the changes there are really, really rapid. | ||
| And they're very, very advanced. | ||
| So we see things like voice spoofing where maybe someone gets a call from someone and they say, hi, it's your granddaughter. | ||
| I've been in an accident and I need money right away. | ||
| And they have used a voice recording of that individual and they are using it to trick a family member into sending money immediately, making it sort of a this needs to be done now crisis situation. | ||
| So it's really advanced and it's really tricky even for really savvy, tech-savvy consumers to always understand what is happening. | ||
| And there's that pressure, that time pressure there too, right? | ||
| That tries to make you make an emotional snap decision. | ||
| And that's just one example. | ||
| There are loads of other examples and types of fraud and scams that are going on. | ||
| And so I think that something that we need to consider is that the bad guys, quote unquote, they are using artificial intelligence and they are using technology to advance forward their scams. | ||
| And so we need to be on the forefront of artificial intelligence and technology as well to make sure that we are not a step behind, that we are using the same tools that they have and even better tools than they have in order to combat the issue. | ||
| So that's certainly a big thing. | ||
| And we also need to work on a little bit more education and awareness to help individuals know when they may be being targeted. | ||
| And Caroline, I want to talk about one of the pieces of legislation that has been introduced. | ||
| It's the Task Force for Recognizing and Averting Payment Scams or TRAPS Act. | ||
| It creates a task force composed of representatives from various federal agencies and financial institutions. | ||
| That's including the Treasury Department, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, and Justice Department. | ||
| It also directs the task force to examine payments landscape and compile legislative and regulatory recommendations. | ||
| It also requires a task force to update the report annually for three years. | ||
| When we hear a piece of legislation like this that is forming a task force and you see the number of $12.5 billion lost to people in a year, is a task force, is it going to help people soon enough? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think that's a fair question. | |
| And I think that it is a first step forward that is very, very necessary. | ||
| And like I alluded to before, it is something that is going to bring the entire issue together in one centralized place because the fragmented approach that we're working with now obviously is not working. | ||
| And I think an important part of that as well is financial institutions will have representatives involved in that as well. | ||
| They have a really big role to play here too. | ||
| And they already invest a lot of money and do a lot of work to detect fraud and to fight fraud. | ||
| But their value and their input is very important as well. | ||
| So bringing industry, government, regulatory agencies together to fight this is a very necessary first step. | ||
| We have callers waiting to talk with you. | ||
| We will start with Joe, who's in Bedford, Virginia. | ||
| Good morning, Joe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yes. | ||
| Thing is, when you're older like I am, they think you're senile or a sucker because you wouldn't believe the amount of mail and phone calls that I get from scammers, you know, like threatening letter, I'll pay up or I'll buy the state, you know, you got 48 hours to pay up or you're going to lose your license and you're going to be in jail and this and that. | ||
| And it's like, you know, I have a spotlessly clean driving history. | ||
| I have no criminal record, never have. | ||
| And even aftermarket auto insurance, I was hounded for like two years straight about a black Mercedes for aftermarket auto insurance. | ||
| I've never owned a Mercedes of any color. | ||
| I must have blocked over 100 numbers. | ||
| And then these computers, they could be in China, Africa, Asia, anywhere, and they're cleaning out your bank account. | ||
| Because that happened like 20 years ago when me and my late wife lived in another town. | ||
| I checked my bank account and it was way lower than it should have been. | ||
| And it turned out somebody in California apparently had gone on a spending spree. | ||
| I've never been to California and weird stuff that was purchased. | ||
| I would have never purchased being a married man, you know, and I had to have cancel, you know, my checks and cards and everything and start from scratch. | ||
| But, you know, I always alert the local sheriff whenever there's scams like that because, you know, that way they can alert others, you know, and know what's going on because most of the time they're already known from other people reporting the same thing happening to them, you know? | ||
| Caroline, your response. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, Joe, I can tell you it's certainly not just you. | |
| I get those phone calls. | ||
| I get those text messages. | ||
| Most people I know, and I've been talking with people ahead of this appearance, and I don't think I spoke to a single person who hadn't experienced at least some degree of what you have. | ||
| And I'm sorry to hear about the loss that you had, but it is good to hear that you did report it. | ||
| And I think that it's very important when people do experience a scam or a fraud, absolutely report it. | ||
| And I think what the federal legislation needs to be focused on is a central reporting database. | ||
| And again, I think it's important to hammer this home. | ||
| We can't have this fragmented approach because it's not working. | ||
| The scammers are organized. | ||
| This is not a single individual sitting behind a computer with a hoodie and sunglasses on. | ||
| These are criminal enterprises. | ||
| And even a report from The Economist a few months ago said that the scam industry, which is effectively an industry now, is almost as big as the illicit drug industry. | ||
| And it actually comes at something of an advantage to the individuals who are operating these scams. | ||
| It's not as dangerous. | ||
| They a lot of times are using slave labor to have the people who are actually sitting behind a phone or behind a computer. | ||
| Those a lot of times are actually slave labor that is contacting individuals. | ||
| And they know that Americans are a good target right now because we don't have a good framework to fight it. | ||
| So I'm sorry to hear what has happened, but I am glad to hear that Joe reported it. | ||
| Bill in Annapolis, Maryland. | ||
| Good morning, Bill. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Morning. | |
| How you doing? | ||
| So he said they've sold $12.5 billion. | ||
| The number's probably far greater. | ||
| So let's go with a rough number of $50 billion. | ||
| Let's go back 40 years before electronic payments, Visa cards, debit cards, and credit cards. | ||
| How much money were the thieves able to steal when they actually had to reach in your pocket and physically take the cash or walk into the bank and physically take the cash? | ||
| Because ultimately, in the end, we all know that we, the consumers, us, the little people at the bottom, are the ones that are paying for this billions of dollars in theft in bank fees, interest charges, and any other expense that they can pile on to us to cover the losses for the money they can't recover. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I feel like if America knew the true number of what was stolen from us, because we are all electronic financially now, I think we would all throw the electronic finance system in the trash can and go back to cash. | |
| Well, I think that's an interesting point. | ||
| I think that the electronic payments offer a lot of really great benefits. | ||
| And I think a lot of Americans are really quite happy with the benefits that they do offer. | ||
| And look, we are a technology-focused society at this point. | ||
| I am joining you on TV from my computer in North Carolina. | ||
| So that's an incredible thing that I'm able to do to be able to be on this call. | ||
| But yeah, I think that there are struggles with technology that we maybe haven't fully kept up with. | ||
| And like I mentioned earlier, I think that being at the forefront of artificial intelligence is going to be an important thing here. | ||
| We need to make sure America is at, is the global leader in artificial intelligence. | ||
| And I know that the president spoke about that earlier this week. | ||
| I don't know that he specifically mentioned fraud and scams, but there is a huge role to play in this space with artificial intelligence. | ||
| So the technology is going to be there. | ||
| It is a reality of the world, but we have to be at the forefront of the advancement. | ||
| Caroline, there was a Senate judiciary hearing last month, and during it, Senator Sheldon White House posed a question about the role platforms play in financial scams. | ||
| When we're talking about technology, I want to play the clip and we'll get your reaction on the other side. | ||
|
unidentified
|
One of the things that helps the fraudsters is anonymity. | |
| That is very often provided by VPNs or by fake names. | ||
| Very often the big platforms have a role in all of this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And we don't have a whole lot of time right now. | |
| But I really would be grateful if each of you, if you have thoughts about what the best things that we could do to penetrate the anonymity where it is a part of the scam and to figure out how to hold the platforms more accountable for supporting these frauds. | ||
| Caroline, the witnesses at that hearing didn't get a chance to respond, but curious your thoughts on those two issues. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I do think that they do have a role to play. | |
| And I think that it would be unwise to ignore that aspect of things. | ||
| One brought to my attention is that when some of these scams are originated on a social media platform, for example, a lot of times the conversation will begin in the social media platform. | ||
| And then at some point, the victim of the scam will be asked to switch to a different app. | ||
| And that is a huge red flag that people need to be aware of. | ||
| And I do think that there is more that could be done on that front to help consumers understand if you are being asked by someone that you don't know or that maybe you think that you know or you think you've gotten to know, but you don't have a personal relationship with this person and they ask you to switch to communications on a different app, some alarm bells should go off. | ||
| And I think that we should be putting a little bit more warning in that, on that role there. | ||
| Let's hear from Mary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. | ||
| Good morning, Mary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning, C-SPAN. | |
| I just wanted to let the American people know that we integrated our financial system under President Reagan. | ||
| Every government agency is looking at the same information. | ||
| IRS, Security Exchange Commission, Treasury, the State Department, the CIA. | ||
| We know who these people are, but no government agency is willing to step forward to prosecute these people. | ||
| I remember when we combined our resources and prosecuted them together. | ||
| This has stopped under the politicians that we have in place. | ||
| It's several departments that can do this immediately. | ||
| We're looking at almost a trillion dollars in COVID fraud. | ||
| We're looking at almost a trillion dollars in offshore accounts. | ||
| And primarily our government officials are involved in this. | ||
| So wake up. | ||
| We have the information. | ||
| We have to thank President Reagan because we were in a financial situation. | ||
| We were in a recession under President Reagan. | ||
| And he made sure that he knew where every last dollar went to with funding people that, nonprofits, that income is not being counted when they hire people. | ||
| We have people that making themselves as illegal landlords, renting out properties. | ||
| Just keep in mind, all income is taxable, earned or unearned income. | ||
| I want to thank you, and you have a good day. | ||
| Caroline, any response for Mary? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, well, I think we unfortunately don't have a central database that is reporting scams, tracking, monitoring, and that is vital. | |
| It's something that I think we absolutely need. | ||
| I did mention this earlier, but maybe it's worth mentioning again. | ||
| We did recently place sanctions on a business out of the Philippines that had scammed Americans out of $200 million. | ||
| So there are efforts, but once again, it's fragmented. | ||
| It is not centralized. | ||
| There is not a cohesive federal plan right now to really tackle this issue. | ||
| We talked about one of the pieces of legislation that would help fix that problem you just mentioned. | ||
| Another piece of legislation that has been introduced is the Guarding Unprotected Aging Retirees from Deception or the Guard Act. | ||
| It allows state and local law enforcement to use eligible federal grant funding to investigate financial fraud and quote pig butchering, scams against retirees. | ||
| It also permits federal law enforcement to assist state and local law enforcement with tracing tools for blockchain technology. | ||
| We had a caller earlier mention that in his case he had referred his case to the local sheriff. | ||
| We'll talk about this legislation. | ||
| Before we do, if you can explain what pig butchering is and also what current resources at the state and local level look like. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, so pig butchering is when someone is sort of fattened up and they are promised that they will get great returns on an investment, for example. | |
| And over time, there's a relationship that is built where the victim of the scam feels that they can trust the individual they are communicating with and they are fattened up, like I said, and then ultimately butchered. | ||
| Once the money is handed over, they never see it again. | ||
| They never see any return. | ||
| Their money is gone. | ||
| It's stolen. | ||
| So that is effectively what pig butchering is. | ||
| And as far as resources at the state and local level, I can't speak too much to that, except to say that it really varies widely by region, by state. | ||
| And it's, again, there's not a great central understanding of the course of action or where to report or what exactly to do. | ||
| How would the legislation, the GARD Act, improve what we're seeing at the state and local level? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so it would leverage federal funds to allow investigation into some of these scams, and it would also allow for artificial intelligence to be used in order to fight the scams. | |
| So it is something that would give these local and state law enforcement officers a little more assistance on the funding front in order to tackle this. | ||
| Let's hear from Sam in Rockville, Maryland, who is on the line for a victim of financial scam. | ||
| Good morning, Sam. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you so much for taking my call. | ||
| I just want to just on an outset say I did report this to the Better Business Bureau, and it's a housekeeping cleaning scam. | ||
| They're like predatory scammers, and I live in a 55 and older community, and they took advantage of us in this community. | ||
| So they advertise, even on commercial television, that they can come out and clean your house for $19.99 the first time. | ||
| They take your credit card, and then the next thing you know, your credit card, not only do they not show up on time or at all, they take your credit card number, they take it down, they charge it, and then they schedule you for other appointments, outlier, like other appointments that you did not subscribe to. | ||
| And if you try to cancel it, you can't. | ||
| And then they say cancellation is another $200. | ||
| And so if you try to go on their website and cancel it, you can't. | ||
| If you try to call their customer service, there is none. | ||
| And then when you try to call the last person who called you, they say, wait a minute, I'm just a contractor, house cleaner. | ||
| I've never seen an office. | ||
| I've never been there. | ||
| And I don't know. | ||
| We just, it's an app that we go on to to be a house cleaner for them. | ||
| But I've never seen an entity of brick and mortar. | ||
| And I've never seen a manager or something. | ||
| So my only remedy, because I had all these scheduled appointments, and they say if you cancel, this. | ||
| And so they're taking advantage of us here in this community. | ||
| And they're called homeoglow on television. | ||
| But anyway, I'm saying that I had to call my financial institution and ask them to cancel my credit card. | ||
| And that was a whole thing because I had things coming out of that. | ||
| But anyway, I said cancel that because they're just sucking me dry and like a vampire. | ||
| And I said, how do people get away with this? | ||
| And so I feel violated. | ||
| I feel like I had to go through all of these machinations just to stop this organization, if they are, to stop sucking money from me. | ||
| So I have a dispute resolution going on with my financial institution. | ||
| I have to go through all of this and I had to warn my neighbors. | ||
| I'm like, how does this allow to go on in this day and time? | ||
| And I will hang up and wait for your answer. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Caroline. | ||
| Yeah, thank you, Sam. | ||
| Oh, I'm sorry. | ||
| Thank you, Sam. | ||
| And I'm really sorry to hear that. | ||
| That's really awful. | ||
| And, you know, who knows if that is originating domestically or if that is international. | ||
| If it is domestic, I think it'll be a little bit easier to ultimately pin that down. | ||
| It is pretty shocking that they're able to run advertisements on TV, but I think you absolutely did the right thing contacting your financial institution. | ||
| And that is a benefit of credit cards, too, is that you do have some recourse. | ||
| There is laws that already protect consumers. | ||
| There's a difference on a technical level between a fraud and a scam. | ||
| So if you willingly give your card over, which would have been in the first instance, that would have been willingly giving over your card information, then the financial institution won't necessarily, but sometimes will reimburse you for the loss. | ||
| But the subsequent charges where you were not willingly entering into a purchase with the company, in a lot of cases, the financial institution will make you whole again. | ||
| And so there are some technical differences between the fraud and scam. | ||
| All scams are fraud, but not all fraud is scam. | ||
| So it can get a little bit into the nitty-gritty of the details there, but it is good to cancel your card. | ||
| And again, I'm sorry that happened. | ||
| And hopefully that is something that can be reported to law enforcement. | ||
| Financial institutions do work with law enforcement. | ||
| They do report these kind of issues when a consumer says that they have had fraud on their card. | ||
| Financial institutions do report that to the appropriate law enforcement to help investigate that. | ||
| And hopefully others who have been a victim of this are reporting it as well. | ||
| Janice in Virginia. | ||
| Good morning, Janice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| I know AI is good in some instances, but we had a community member here received a call saying that her nephew was in trouble, sounded like him on the phone, and they were demanding money, shitting your credit card information here. | ||
| And, you know, but my thing is, I just want everybody to be very aware. | ||
| You receive a call and a family member is in trouble, take their information so you can have it to report it to the police. | ||
| But contact that family member to make sure they are okay. | ||
| There are so many different scams out here that people need to be aware of. | ||
| And I think if it's DOE or the Trump administration are trying to eliminate the CFPB, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. | ||
| So if you get caught up in one of these scams now, you might not have any recourse. | ||
| People, please do your diligence. | ||
| Find out if these calls are legit. | ||
| I got a call about four weeks ago saying there was a warrant out for my arrest. | ||
| They're going to be here in 24 hours. | ||
| And I told them I'm going to have tea, coffee, and snacks when you get here because I knew it was a school. | ||
| Please watch out for your elderly. | ||
| Make sure that they are not giving their personal information, credit card information, to anybody calling them. | ||
| All of that information is available for free on the internet. | ||
| They can have the address, your apartment number, anything, because they can search it. | ||
| But look out for your family members, for the elderly, and make sure they are not getting caught up in these scams. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah, she's absolutely right. | ||
| And I think that that's great advice. | ||
| And the example that she mentioned, that is something that I discussed at the top of the call here. | ||
| That there is an emotional pull, and you feel that you're in a time crunch and you have to send the money now, or your relative is going to be in harm. | ||
| And so they're trying to capitalize on your emotions to get you to make a snap decision that maybe even an hour later, you might start to think, wait a minute, that didn't make a lot of sense. | ||
| Or maybe by that point, you've contacted that relative and found out they are okay. | ||
| I actually did have that happen to a family member of mine who someone called claiming to be my husband and saying, I need $5,000. | ||
| I've been in an accident. | ||
| So I have personally known a close family member who that has happened to as well. | ||
| And I understand it's horrible and it's stressful and it's not fair. | ||
| It's not right. | ||
| And I'm glad to see that both sides of the aisle are really trying to come together to work on this issue and get it figured out for the American people because I mean, it's clear, it's absolutely vital and it's something that we must take care of. | ||
| Caroline, you just mentioned the bipartisan aspect of the pieces of legislation that we've talked about this morning. | ||
| With the rest of the chambers, where is the interest when it comes to potentially passing these bills, which is a process? | ||
| I'm sorry, with the potential for Congress, both chambers of Congress, the rest of the members, not the ones who have introduced or have signed on to the legislation. | ||
| But what's the potential for these becoming law? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think that the potential is quite good. | |
| I think that there is a lot of interest in this. | ||
| I think that constituents are calling their members of Congress and they are saying that this is an important issue, that this is happening to them on a frequent basis. | ||
| And so I do think that there is a lot of interest in getting this passed. | ||
| There's another bill as well, which we didn't discuss. | ||
| It wasn't in my recent piece, but it's the Senior Security Act of 2025. | ||
| That has passed out of the House, and that is one that would create a task force within the Securities and Exchange Commission to help seniors, among other things, to help detect fraud and scams. | ||
| So we do have a little bit of an insight into this Congress of how these bills might move forward. | ||
| And so, like I said, that has passed out of the House. | ||
| And so there are outside of those bills too, I think that there's other things that can be done. | ||
| And maybe the task force will come to these conclusions as well should that TRAPS Act pass. | ||
| But I think tackling call spoofing is one thing. | ||
| Call spoofing is technically legal, although you cannot spoof a call if you have the intent to defraud. | ||
| Obviously, people who have the intent to defraud don't really care about that little footnote. | ||
| But call spoofing, in case your viewers aren't aware, that is when you receive a phone call from a familiar area code, it makes it more likely that you will answer the phone call, but it could be originating anywhere in the world. | ||
| And so that is something that I would imagine viewers are aware of. | ||
| I get call spoofing all the time, both phone calls and text messages. | ||
| And so a lot of scams are originating there. | ||
| And it is technically legal under the right circumstances. | ||
| I think that we could be doing more to be stopping call spoofing. | ||
| Danette in New Jersey. | ||
| Good morning, Danette. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was concerned. | |
| I know there was a cryptocurrency week this month, and I'm concerned that because there have already been instances of cryptocurrency fraud, and I mean big time where people have even been prosecuted, I know there was legislation being looked at by Congress regarding cryptocurrency. | ||
| And I was just wondering, is any of that legislation pertaining to helping people not be defrauded if they invest in it? | ||
| I'm kind of old now, so I don't know if I will, but I know how popular it is at this point, and it's even being pushed directly from the White House, this cryptocurrency. | ||
| So I would like to know, are you aware of any newer instances of fraud pertaining to this cryptocurrency? | ||
| Because it's apparently going to be around for a while, but it's not federally regulated. | ||
| And any input you could give on that, I would appreciate. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Yeah, thank you. | ||
| And it's a really good question. | ||
| I do not work on cryptocurrency policy, so I can't speak too much to it. | ||
| I can tell you that there is a crypto regulatory framework that is currently being looked at in Congress. | ||
| But again, I don't know the inner workings of that because it is not my policy area. | ||
| But you are correct that some of the scams are originating from people claiming to have a new cryptocurrency that you can invest and you'll get great returns. | ||
| I think that that is some of what's going on with the pig butchering. | ||
| And I do know also that a lot of the fraud and scams, they are being paid in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. | ||
| So again, I don't work on that policy area. | ||
| So I can't speak too much about what's in that bill, but there is a crypto regulatory framework in the works right now in Congress. | ||
| Caroline, we have one last caller for you. | ||
| It's Robert out in Ketchum, Idaho. | ||
| Good morning, Robert. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I think the FTC is being somewhat hamstrung by the political class because I know they've been trying to smooth over the automatic renewal that seems to be endemic every time you look at something and you might want to sign up for it. | ||
| There's been a case of Amazon Prime, which has been hanging fire for a number of years. | ||
| And I recall a recent article, oh, within the past month, where they wanted to put stricter controls. | ||
| You should be able to resign from an automatic renewal as easily as you got onto it. | ||
| But that's not possible. | ||
| And I can only believe that's because of political contributions that are being done throughout the country. | ||
| Caroline, any response for Robert? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I can't speak too much to that. | |
| I do know what he's referencing. | ||
| There was a proposal that would have been one click to cancel different subscriptions. | ||
| I think the issue that we're discussing is a little bit different, more so on the consumer scams front. | ||
| So that is something of a separate issue. | ||
| And I'm not too aware of where that stands right now, but I am familiar with what he's discussing. | ||
| Our guest, Caroline Malear, is a finance, insurance, and trade fellow at the R Street Institute. | ||
| You can find her work online at rstreet.org. | ||
| Caroline, thank you so much for being with us this morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Tammy. | |
| Next on Washington Journal Politico's EE News Energy Reporter Brian Dabs will join us to discuss the factors behind the rise in electricity prices. | ||
| Plus, we'll get an update on the current state and future of low-income home energy assistance programs. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In a nation divided, a rare moment of unity, this fall, C-SPAN presents Ceasefire, where the shouting stops and the conversation begins in a town where partisan fighting prevails. | |
| One table, two leaders, one goal, to find common ground. | ||
| This fall, ceasefire on the network that doesn't take sides, only on C-SPAN. | ||
| Sunday on C-SPAN's Q&A, progressive professor Cornel West and conservative professor Robert George talk about their decades-long friendship and teaching together at Princeton University. | ||
| They also discuss their new book, Truth Matters, a dialogue between the two on such topics as American history, great books, faith, and free speech. | ||
| It's that intellectual humility that comes from the recognition that we are fallible that should lead us to be open to the challenges from other people, even to our most sacredly held views, the views that are absolutely sacred to us. | ||
| Cornell and I take the position in our seminars and in our lives that there is no view we hold, no matter how deeply we hold it, that we want to have immunized from critique. | ||
| We're fallible, therefore we ought to be humble, but it doesn't mean we're not tenacious in what convictions we do have. | ||
| And by tenacious, it means willing to sacrifice, willing to take a risk, willing to pay a cost, which means it will never be a question of just how much status or position or money we have determining what we think. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Progressive Professor Cornell West and Conservative Professor Robert George, Sunday night at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN's QA. | |
| You can listen to QA and all of our podcasts wherever you get your podcasts or on our free C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| America marks 250 years, and C-SPAN is there to commemorate every moment. | ||
| From the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the voices shaping our nation's future, we bring you unprecedented all-platform coverage, exploring the stories, sights, and spirit that make up America. | ||
| Join us for remarkable coast-to-coast coverage, celebrating our nation's journey like no other network can. | ||
| America 250. | ||
| Over a year of historic moments, only on the C-SPAN networks. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Joining us now to discuss the rising energy costs and assistance programs to help combat, to help pay for them, is Mark Wolf. | ||
| He is the Executive Director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association. | ||
| Mark, thank you for your time this morning. | ||
| We had a couple callers earlier in the week bring up LIHEAP. | ||
| They were concerned about the program. | ||
| Explain what that is and who uses it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LAHEAP, it's a federal program, provides grants to states to help low-income families pay their home energy bills. | ||
| That's both heating and cooling. | ||
| There are about 6 million families that receive assistance every year under this program. | ||
| And it's important because energy bills are rising faster than inflation. | ||
| In the last three years, inflation has been about 5.5%, but the cost of home energy has gone up by 10%. | ||
| And what's important here is that families are falling behind on their bills. | ||
| One out of six families are behind. | ||
| They owe utilities about $23 billion. | ||
| So LAHEAP is an essential lot. | ||
| I'm sorry, LAHEAP is an essential lifeline for these families to help pay their bills, but only pays part of it. | ||
| And so I think that's what's so important about this. | ||
| Because as we talked about it, you know, the president recommended killing LAHEAP, basically ending it. | ||
| But right now we're fully funded. | ||
| We received about $4 billion through the end of September. | ||
| The question really is next year what happens. | ||
| You know, when Congress considers funding LAHEAP, will they provide the same level of funding for the coming year? | ||
| But more importantly, what happens when they appropriate those funds? | ||
| The administration has talked about rescissions, basically taking the money back. | ||
| They've also talked about impounding funds, not spending them. | ||
| So we're going into a new fiscal year where we have a president that's proposed to end the program, but a program that's also very popular. | ||
| It gets bipartisan support. | ||
| Both Democrats and Republicans support it. | ||
| So this is one of those issues where what happens next. | ||
| But right now, to your point, the program is fully operational. | ||
| All six million families are getting help. | ||
| Many states still have funds left over. | ||
| So if you find you're falling behind on your bill, certainly apply for assistance. | ||
| But the big concern for us right now is next year. | ||
| And Mark, when we look at the budget for next year, you mentioned that President Trump's request could potentially kill the program. | ||
| You also mentioned that there's a lot of support for the program itself. | ||
| Members of Congress probably hearing from their constituents on the issue. | ||
| Do we know if members could vote one way or the other? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, the initial votes come through the House and Senate Appropriations Committees. | |
| We have very strong support in both committees. | ||
| Senator Collins from Maine, who's chair of Senate Appropriations, you know, Maine is a poor state for all purposes, and many families there still use heating oil. | ||
| So this is the problem. | ||
| If you're receiving or you're heating your home with, say, electricity or natural gas, the regulatory commissions can require utilities to continue providing home energy through the winter. | ||
| So you can't be shut off when it's freezing, for example. | ||
| But if you're receiving or using heating oil or propane to your home, that's very different because those are small companies often, and they're not regulated the same way electric or natural gas monopoly, independent corporation is regulated. | ||
| So that's one of the big differences as we go into the winter. | ||
| And the other thing is that, you know, in the House, for example, Representative Delauro, she's the ranking minority system of Connecticut, another very strong supporter. | ||
| So we have political support in the Congress. | ||
| The big issue really is what does the president do? | ||
| Because he has said that he doesn't have to follow the rules that we've had in the past. | ||
| So before, you know, if Congress appropriated money for LAHEAP, the administration would spend it. | ||
| That was the rule. | ||
| That's the Constitution. | ||
| Now they're saying that it's up to us. | ||
| We might not follow those rules. | ||
| So our concern is that we have a program that's very, very time-sensitive. | ||
| It starts in the winter. | ||
| Winter starts, you know, November, so you have to have the funds available. | ||
| We're confident Congress will appropriate them. | ||
| The issue is, will the administration spend them? | ||
| And that's up in the air. | ||
| But in the short run, at least, we know that we're operating. | ||
| And one of the signs that was kind of positive, when the president came into office, there was still $400 million that had not been released to help families pay their home energy bills, only about $3.6 billion. | ||
| And I was concerned the funds would not be released, and they released them. | ||
| So that's, I think, a good sign. | ||
| And then also, you know, we have, because the Republican support in the Appropriations Committee is so strong, I think the administration will release the funds and will go along with it. | ||
| But again, we're in a land of uncertainty. | ||
| But I think for, you know, your viewers who are listening who receive energy assistance, right now I think we have to assume and be confident that the funds will be released. | ||
| The program will continue. | ||
| The administration had arguments. | ||
| You know, why should they get rid of LAHEAP? | ||
| And they were kind of puzzling. | ||
| One of the arguments they made was, well, California and New York get the most money. | ||
| Well, they're some of the biggest states in the country. | ||
| Of course they get the most money. | ||
| They also made an argument that funds go to utilities. | ||
| Well, utilities provide 90% of home heating and cooling. | ||
| Of course the money goes to utilities. | ||
| So some of the arguments seem flawed or sort of like an afterthought. | ||
| So I think that I'm hopeful they're not serious about cutting LAHEAP. | ||
| Because when they did the Health and Human Services budget that the administration is going to present, they needed to find $40 billion in savings. | ||
| And so I think they were just putting numbers together. | ||
| And when it comes down to it, because, as I said, that the senior leadership of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, and then also the senior leadership in the House and Senate, strongly support LAHEAP. | ||
| I think it's likely to continue. | ||
| And I think the other underlying concern that's there is that energy prices are going up faster than inflation. | ||
| This is the third year now that energy prices have been more than the average cost of inflation. | ||
| So it's becoming more and more unaffordable. | ||
| And so when we think about energy poverty, it's kind of a global term. | ||
| What does it mean? | ||
| It really means that people struggle to pay these bills. | ||
| And it's not just the very poor. | ||
| We have research now that shows that families in the bottom 40% of the population fall behind on their bills. | ||
| And that's of great concern. | ||
| And as I said, one out of six are in debt to their utility. | ||
| So that's a huge population. | ||
| And I think that LAHEAP helps to play kind of a bridge. | ||
| It doesn't cover the full cost of home heating and cooling, but it pays part of the bill. | ||
| So I think that, again, we're in an uncharted time. | ||
| So this is a very different time in the country. | ||
| The House and the Senate and the administration are at odds on many things relating to appropriations. | ||
| And so we really don't know the outcome. | ||
| But I think I'm confident that we will have a program this coming year. | ||
| And it will continue. | ||
| It might not be funded at the same level as, you know, both the House and Senate Appropriations Committees are under enormous stress. | ||
| They're cutting the budgets. | ||
| But I think our program will continue. | ||
| And Mark, if people want to get more information about LIHEAP or follow along as this works its way through Congress, where can they get more information? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, the best thing to do is call your local community action agency. | |
| Not just for LAHEAP. | ||
| It's a companion program called the Weatherization Assistance Program. | ||
| It helps you make your home more energy efficient, helps fix the furnace if it's broken. | ||
| We still have funds. | ||
| The other place that calls your local utility, many utilities offer discounts on top of the LAHEAP funds that can help pay most of the bills. | ||
| So for example, I think one of the most aggressive programs that company now is Illinois. | ||
| Illinois provides an 83% discount for very low-income families. | ||
| Connecticut provides a 50% discount on electricity for low-income families. | ||
| So you need to look both at your local community action agency, which in most states is the local administrator. | ||
| States contract with community action agencies to sign people up. | ||
| Most state programs don't require asset tests. | ||
| It's just based on your income. | ||
| And the idea is to move people quickly. | ||
| So if you think you might be falling behind on your bill, and for example, home cooling this year, we're estimating it's going to cost close to $700 to run your air conditioning system. | ||
| That's an enormous increase from just two years ago. | ||
| If you don't think you can pay your bill, call your local utility, call your local community action agency and see, are funds available, or get on a payment plan. | ||
| Because you don't want to wait too late to when you're in a shutoff situation. | ||
| And I think that what's changing now is that we're learning how to adapt to rising temperatures. | ||
| And there are two factors going on. | ||
| It's not just the cost of electricity, which is going up faster than inflation. | ||
| It's also the amount you use. | ||
| You just need more of it to cool your home. | ||
| You need more electricity or natural gas to keep your house warm in the winter. | ||
| So I think the bottom line is if you're falling behind on your bills, if you're not sure you can pay them, don't wait to get a shutoff notice or you're shut off from power. | ||
| Call your local utility, call your local community action agency, and ask them, what are the programs that can help me pay these bills? | ||
| Mark Wolf is Executive Director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association. | ||
| You can find them online at NEADA.org. | ||
| Mark, thank you so much for your time this morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| And joining us now to discuss the factors behind the rising prices of electricity is Brian Dabs. | ||
| He is Politico's E ⁇ E News Energy Reporter. | ||
| Brian, thank you so much for being with us this morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks so much for having me. | |
| We just heard Mark talking about the rise and how much prices have gone up. | ||
| Exactly what does that mean for consumers? | ||
| How much have they increased? | ||
| And when did we start seeing the higher prices? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so I know Mark, it was really good to see him there on TV, but prices right now are rising and they've been rising for a long period of time. | |
| Year on year through May, prices across the U.S. rose about 6%. | ||
| They rose about 20% over the duration of the Biden administration. | ||
| And that's a result of a laundry list of dynamics. | ||
| The U.S. electricity grid is highly complex, balkanized, and in some cases, atrophied. | ||
| So there's a lot of new infrastructure that's being built now in terms of new power plants, new transmission lines, new safeguards against extreme weather like wildfires. | ||
| And there's also just a huge demand influx. | ||
| And in some ways, this breaks down to kind of a supply-demand calculation. | ||
| There's simply not enough supply to meet some of the looming demand. | ||
| And that's across the board in the U.S. | ||
| But unlike oil prices, which are determined at a global level, electricity prices are determined regionally. | ||
| Talk about some of the factors that impact how much people could pay depending on where they live. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so it really has to do with what type of power generation you have in your region, what type of transmission infrastructure is available in your region. | |
| Some regions of the country, like New England, where some of the highest prices are, have a limited natural gas pipeline capacity, and that has been tied to higher prices. | ||
| So, it really is a mix of a lot of factors. | ||
| It also has to do with things like clean energy policies that force states and utilities to build more infrastructure, which costs a lot of money and is largely passed on to customers. | ||
| And how much Americans pay for electricity is largely out of the hands of the White House. | ||
| But President Trump, who declared a national energy emergency on his first day in office, his administration, they've taken several related actions. | ||
| What do some of those look like? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so it's important to keep in mind that President Trump really weaponized energy prices on the campaign trail along with inflation writ large. | |
| He vowed last year to cut energy costs in half within a year. | ||
| And that certainly will not happen. | ||
| And in fact, the trend is going in the opposite direction. | ||
| And the White House acknowledges this. | ||
| They just released a report this week that highlights the potential boon to the U.S. economy from fossil fuels. | ||
| And at the same time, warning that electricity prices could rise by more than 50% through the end of the decade, absent a lot of new low-cost generation. | ||
| Our guest is Brian Dabs. | ||
| He's Politico's EE News Energy Reporter. | ||
| Our discussion is on the factors behind the rise in electricity prices. | ||
| If you have a question or comment for him, you can start calling in now the lines for this segment. | ||
| If you are in the Eastern or Central time zone, it's 202-748-8000. | ||
| Mountain or Pacific, it is 202-748-8001. | ||
| And a reminder, you can also text us your question at 202-748-8003. | ||
| Brian, you mentioned something, the action that the White House took this week on fossil fuels. | ||
| They have focused on increasing the output of fossil fuels, have made cuts to renewable energy sources, and have cut clean energy credits. | ||
| What impact have those actions had on the price consumers are paying for electricity? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So these new policies really take time to manifest, certainly in utility bills. | |
| So the Trump administration is really doing a full core press to boost fossil fuels and to marginalize wind and solar energy and batteries and to just make it more challenging to build those projects. | ||
| And the Republican mega law that was passed in recent weeks and signed into law on July 4th really took a lot of the same position. | ||
| So it aims in a big way to cut the cost of producing fossil fuels. | ||
| So it cuts royalty payments for developers that produce fossil fuels on public lands. | ||
| It cuts taxes for developers of fossil fuels. | ||
| And those policies certainly could bring down the costs in the future. | ||
| However, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress, again, are also making it more challenging to build clean energy, which is some of the energy that is most ready to go onto the grid now. | ||
| So efforts to make it more challenging to build clean energy could in the near term raise prices. | ||
| The electricity prices are more than just the actual generation of electricity. | ||
| Experts have blamed transmission for the bulk of higher electricity costs. | ||
| What's being done to modernize and improve the ability to transmit and possibly bring the cost down that way? | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is a major area of public policy. | |
| You hear a lot about infrastructure permitting reform, which essentially means that policymakers in the Trump administration want to speed up permitting of new infrastructure projects like power plants. | ||
| The results of a lot of these policies will certainly raise the cost of clean energy, and that can be passed on to consumers in the near future. | ||
| It's important to keep in mind here that demand in this country is rising dramatically. | ||
| So that is a big part of the calculation of why prices are rising. | ||
| A lot of that is spurred on by clean, excuse me, artificial intelligence data center projects. | ||
| So demand in this country right now is forecasted to rise at a rate that we haven't seen in more than a quarter century. | ||
| Let's talk with callers. | ||
| We'll start with Nina in Florida. | ||
| Good morning, Nina. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I would like to know regarding the data centers and the enhancements, or at least the support for AI, how that's going to impact on the grid that we currently have, and also who are they getting subsidies? | ||
| Who's actually paying for that kind of thing? | ||
| Yeah, it's a really good question. | ||
| So demand, again, demand in this country spurred on by artificial intelligence projects could increase year on year 3% over the coming years, which is a dramatic departure from the past. | ||
| And these data centers can really consume eye-popping amounts of energy. | ||
| So one hyperscaler data center could consume one gigawatt of electricity, which is roughly the equivalent of powering something like 800,000 homes. | ||
| So there's a lot of concern among consumer advocates and policymakers that the increase in demand from these projects will cause prices to rise for communities around those projects. | ||
| So right now, the Trump administration is trying to cut regulations to potentially bring down some of those costs, trying to speed up permitting. | ||
| And the Trump administration just announced at an event last week in Pennsylvania nearly $100 billion in new AI projects. | ||
| So this is on the horizon and it really can, if not handled properly, have a major impact on utility bills for consumers. | ||
| This question coming in from Jay Sanders on X says, could you address the cost shift from solar customers to non-solar customers, which is quite large in California? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The California grid is a very interesting scenario. | |
| So a lot of the new costs that are tied to rising prices in California are actually associated with wildfire prevention. | ||
| So that's protecting utility lines from wildfires really spurred on by climate change. | ||
| A lot more analysis is being done that ties specific weather events such as fires, such as floods, to climate change. | ||
| So rising prices are something that's kind of pervasive throughout California, regardless of the energy source. | ||
| But certainly there is a big push in California to get more clean energy onto the grid despite the kind of reputation that clean energy has raised prices there. | ||
| Earlier you mentioned permitting reform. | ||
| Explain how that comes into play. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So this is a big topic of conversation. | ||
| It's been an elusive area of congressional agreement for a long time. | ||
| For many years now, we've been talking about permitting reform. | ||
| Again, that means measures that can expedite the permitting of projects. | ||
| So essentially, any power plant, any pipeline needs to undergo a lot of environmental reviews in order to get approval from regulators. | ||
| And that's essentially meant to ensure that local communities don't suffer the most adverse impacts of pollution. | ||
| So right now, I would not gamble that there will be major infrastructure permitting reform on Capitol Hill, but the Trump administration is doing what it can administratively to cut down on environmental reviews. | ||
| This has been a big focus area for them. | ||
| And it was just a couple days ago that the Trump administration, President Trump, put out an executive order called Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure. | ||
| You talked about the demand that data centers are putting on electricity, the supply. | ||
| How do those two intersect when it comes to supply and demand? | ||
| If we're increasing data centers and how many there are, but we're not able to produce more electricity, what happens to the consumer? | ||
|
unidentified
|
If those scenarios are not handled properly by policymakers and by utilities, prices could rise dramatically. | |
| And there's a lot of warnings around that now. | ||
| So the demand, again, a supply-demand calculation, the demand for electricity from these data centers could spike electricity bills for consumers if enough power generation is not secured. | ||
| So the Trump administration, again, through the order that you just mentioned, is trying to cut down on regulations, trying to cut down on environmental reviews, and trying to site new AI data centers on federal land, actually, where they could be given some preferential treatment. | ||
| John in Florida is on the line next. | ||
| Good morning, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Brian. | |
| Thanks for making it on the show today. | ||
| My question, I want to deal with clean coal, and I don't think that really exists, but we're talking about AI now. | ||
| Maybe we could have these data centers start using the clean coal to run their operations, because I don't think the locomotive is going to make it back into American technology. | ||
| So what's your view on the clean coal? | ||
| Thanks for your appearance, and I'll listen off the air. | ||
| Yes, thanks very much for the question. | ||
| So the issue there with coal in data centers is that a lot of these hyperscaler tech companies are trying to run with clean energy. | ||
| They think it's more marketable. | ||
| Their products will be more marketable in the future if they use clean energy. | ||
| They're trying to champion themselves as part of the solution to climate change. | ||
| So I would not expect a lot of hyperscaler data centers to be using coal at those facilities. | ||
| There's a big push. | ||
| I mentioned the announcements that were made last week in Pennsylvania. | ||
| There's a big push to be using natural gas to power some of these data centers, but also nuclear and also wind and solar with advancements in batteries. | ||
| John in Wyoming. | ||
| Good morning, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, how are you guys? | |
| Yeah, I am from Campbell County, which is the center of the coal industry in the country. | ||
| And I'm a big advocate for coal. | ||
| Right when the last election, the 2020 election was going on, and President Biden announced that he was going to kill coal, it was at the same time that coal was like really getting on top of efficiencies. | ||
| Morning, John. | ||
| And I'm sorry, I've got to shut this off. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| Anyway, I just think that we might have killed coal too soon and that coal is a great way. | ||
| It's very, very low cost and it's stable. | ||
| The cost is stable over long periods of time as opposed to gas. | ||
| Gas is great, but the price fluctuates so much. | ||
| And coal is stable over, you can predict the value of coal over 20 years, which is what I think business likes, the predictability. | ||
| What's your thoughts on that? | ||
| Certainly the predictability, and thank you very much for the question. | ||
| So the predictability is an asset. | ||
| Often we talk about coal and natural gas and nuclear as baseload power, which means they can produce electricity 24-7. | ||
| But wind and solar really have, and natural gas have become lower cost to generate power in many cases over coal. | ||
| That's not true of all cases. | ||
| It varies by region. | ||
| It varies by infrastructure, including transmission. | ||
| But it is important to keep in mind that a lot of these coal plants are atrophied. | ||
| They're very old. | ||
| They require a lot of maintenance costs to maintain, to keep running. | ||
| So for instance, the Trump administration, which has made coal a big priority and coal production in this country has ticked up a bit in recent months, through the Energy Department, forced the continued operation of a coal plant in Michigan past its planned retirement date. | ||
| This took place a couple months ago. | ||
| And the utility, the utilities there had preferred to go with clean energy and gas. | ||
| That's why they were planning to retire the plant. | ||
| And the Public Service Commission there said that the order to force the coal plant to continue to operate will raise costs for consumers. | ||
| Joel in Raleigh, North Carolina. | ||
| Good morning, Joel. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, ma'am. | |
| Hey, I wanted to talk about, again, with the diversification of our energy producing, and also just touch a little bit on, in regards with the push to electric vehicles to power our transit grids, a little bit of that. | ||
| And I'm going to hang up and listen. | ||
| Why wouldn't we have a bipartisan government private entity cooperation to make a massive push, one, to address this energy issue, to make us energy secure? | ||
| In other words, from being dependent on foreign crude products and fossil fuel products, totally. | ||
| And doing that, going moving towards a short-term solution for our transition, for our transportation grid, then natural gas is the best option with that. | ||
| And then with a long-term push and have a massive cooperation, a Manhattan-type project towards either EV or hydrogen-powered for our transportation grids. | ||
| And also in regards with supporting EVs, we should, why isn't there a massive deregulation to bring more nuclear power plants online? | ||
| And I was not aware. | ||
| I'm glad y'all brought up the issue with coal. | ||
| I was not aware about a lot of the facts about coal that y'all mentioned. | ||
| But anyway, they have a diversified approach to this. | ||
| And to also, in regards with EVs, to make a massive push technology watch it's coming, but it would come faster if there was a collective push towards solid state battery technology that doubles the distance that you can travel on a single charge. | ||
| They weigh a third and a half less, and they last three times longer than the current lithium-ion batteries. | ||
| And I appreciate the information, very informative here. | ||
| And I'm going to listen now. | ||
| Thank you so much for the question. | ||
| You hit several major points. | ||
| So it sounds like you're steeped in a lot of this discussion. | ||
| In terms of public-private partnerships, that was really the thrust in a big way on clean energy from the Biden administration. | ||
| So through the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, which in large part was repealed in this mega law signed on July 4th, there was a lot of grant and loan funding authorized for the federal government. | ||
| And since then, both by congressional action in that bill signed on July 4th and administratively in the Trump administration, there's been a huge scaling back of those public-private partnerships. | ||
| So there's been discontinuance of potential loans. | ||
| For instance, you mentioned transmission earlier. | ||
| The Trump administration just announced that they wouldn't be moving ahead with a project called the Green Belt Express, which aimed to ferry a lot of new clean energy from the Great Plains to urban centers in the East. | ||
| But in terms of electrification, generally, EVs, you mentioned EVs. | ||
| EVs really do face a challenging future here in the U.S. Our EV adoption rates are slowing. | ||
| They're still growing, but they are slowing. | ||
| You mentioned the Manhattan Project. | ||
| It's really an interesting reference. | ||
| Energy Secretary Chris Wright often describes the AI push as the next Manhattan project, essentially describing it as a pitch battle between the U.S. and China. | ||
| You also mentioned nuclear. | ||
| There is a big push to bring nuclear online in a bigger way. | ||
| So for instance, Microsoft, a hyperscaler, is trying to develop or restart a reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. | ||
| That's the site of a meltdown in the 1970s at a different reactor. | ||
| But the cost of nuclear is very expensive. | ||
| You also mentioned batteries. | ||
| So one thing that clean energy advocates and manufacturing advocates often say is that clean energy can help prepare the U.S. economy for the future, make products that are made here more marketable. | ||
| We could be producing some of the most advanced batteries here. | ||
| We could be producing next generation hydrogen systems here. | ||
| We could be producing some of the best carbon capture systems in the world. | ||
| So clean energy not only has an impact on electricity in a specific country, but it also makes your economy more marketable on the global stage in the future. | ||
| We had a caller ask about data centers. | ||
| A couple others have been sending text messages and social media posts about that issue. | ||
| But another power-intensive activity is cryptocurrency mining. | ||
| And this is from Energy Star, which is an energy efficiency program under the EPA and the Energy Department. | ||
| It says that buildings used to house cryptocurrency mining can create a massive strain on local electricity grids with a single crypto transaction consuming more energy than that required to power six houses for a day in the U.S. | ||
| It says the estimated global annual energy consumption of the current cryptocurrency market is over 68. | ||
| It's TWH, that's a terawatt hour equivalent to more than 19 coal-fired power plants operating continuously. | ||
| It says due to the technical nature of blockchain, this number is projected to grow to 100 terawatt hours annually. | ||
| You were talking about wattage earlier, just so our audience is aware, a terawatt hour is a unit of energy that is equal to 1,000 megawatt hours or 1 million megawatt hours or 1 billion kilowatt hours. | ||
| When we hear those kinds of numbers in the energy that they consume and with President Trump pushing to make America the crypto capital of the world, recently passing the Genius Act into law, do crypto miners and residential users share electricity sources and what impact is that having on local and regional communities? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So obviously these calculations when it comes to wattage and demand could get very complicated and esoteric. | ||
| But generally speaking, the cryptocurrency industry is another element of this massive spike in forecasted demand. | ||
| So it's a little bit opaque about how much cryptocurrency is being produced in the country and how much electricity that's consuming. | ||
| But certainly cryptocurrency is going to increase dramatically and will increase demand for electricity in this country, which again could raise prices on consumers absent a lot more new low-cost power generation. | ||
| So cryptocurrency right now, Bitcoin is at some of its highest levels. | ||
| I haven't checked in the past couple of days, but there is breathtaking amounts of crypto interest in the Trump administration, including from the Trump family. | ||
| There's a lot of crypto investments by President Trump's sons, for instance, and a lot of his closest affiliates, some of the people at the highest ranks of government. | ||
| The new de facto head of the Energy Department's loan program office just came from a business that was producing crypto in Pennsylvania, burning coal waste. | ||
| So the crypto interests are really pervasive right now in the Trump administration. | ||
| And a lot of crypto supporters are benefiting from the Trump administration's promises to make cryptocurrency a priority here in the U.S. and to see it grow here. | ||
| Larry in South Dakota is next. | ||
| Good morning, Larry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| You know, let's start with a basic premise. | ||
| The basic premise is Enron, Enron, Enron. | ||
| And we all know that 4,000 fake companies were developed by Enron to charge people more money for their electricity and whatever else Enron was selling. | ||
| But the thing is about Enron, we're having it happen all over the United States over again. | ||
| Black Hills Electric and Rapid City, South Dakota has bought up every single small electric company for probably 100 miles around it. | ||
| They bought up everything. | ||
| And then they go to the PUC, Public Utilities Commission, and say, we have all these expenses. | ||
| We need to raise our prices. | ||
| And they just don't go buying the various electric companies. | ||
| They change out all their accounts. | ||
| Does Black Hills Electric have an accounting for, say, your bills that come in? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| You have to go to Arkansas where they have bought a company down there that does that. | ||
| Do you have to go to someone else to have a problem with your electricity? | ||
| Oh, they've got a whole electric, another accounting firm for that. | ||
| They got an accounting firm. | ||
| They have different firms for their security. | ||
| They have different accounting firms for everything you can possibly think of. | ||
| So they can raise, and they own these places. | ||
| So they regulate the costs. | ||
| So when you see a cost, that's a cost that they made. | ||
| And when they go to the PUC to raise their prices, that's their price increases. | ||
| Those guys are Enron over and over. | ||
| I've lived in the same house for 30 years. | ||
| I have a neighbor that has electricity, two neighbors that have electricity going down the same line, and I'm on the very end of it. | ||
| I am 35 feet away from them. | ||
| They have never changed the lines. | ||
| They have never changed the pole in 30 years. | ||
| They charge me $75 a month just to run electricity from my neighbors 35 feet away to my pole. | ||
| Larry, we'll get a response from Brian. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, he raises a lot of good points. | |
| And in the U.S. here, we're, as electricity consumers, we're essentially hostage consumers. | ||
| We're a hostage market. | ||
| The utilities essentially have monopolies over electricity distribution in the regions where Americans live. | ||
| And there's a lot of accusations from some consumer advocates that utilities are really building new infrastructure strictly to profit or to pass those costs on to consumers. | ||
| So there is maybe not enough, according to some people, checks and balances on how much electricity prices should rise in any given scenario. | ||
| Utilities often propose rate hikes and they are approved by public services commissions, the caller just mentioned the PUCs. | ||
| But this is an issue. | ||
| Utilities essentially do dictate how much we will be paying for electricity. | ||
| Mark in Massachusetts. | ||
| Good morning, Mark. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Can you hear me? | ||
| Yes, go ahead, Mark. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, we had actually speaking about the infrastructure, just building it for the sake. | |
| There was two huge cooling towers they built at this Brayton plant, which is in southeastern Mass near Fall River. | ||
| And they actually really never used them. | ||
| And I don't know how many tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, but they were going to basically make it into a clean coal plant or something. | ||
| And then I actually watched the demolition myself. | ||
| Also, ironically or unironically enough, just 10 miles up the road is the staging area in New Bedford where they're staging and building currently the largest wind offshore wind turbine. | ||
| I've actually been through it. | ||
| It's the most amazing. | ||
| It's like going to the moon. | ||
| I mean, these wind turbines can each generate 13 megawatts plus a piece, which can power thousands, thousands of houses individually. | ||
| And they're six, eight hundred, you know, 600 feet tall. | ||
| Absolutely amazing. | ||
| Needless to say, you have all these NIMBYs in Nantucket and such where one broken wind turbine, because I mean, these guys are pushing the envelope technology-wise, and everybody's crying. | ||
| Meanwhile, there's shipping containers and boats left to strew all throughout the ocean. | ||
| And people are hitting that left and right. | ||
| So it's just, there's a lot of roadblocks here, you know. | ||
| And it's kind of, I don't know, disappointing. | ||
| Yeah, thanks very much for the question. | ||
| So the caller really hit on the full trajectory of the electricity portfolio transition in this country over recent decades. | ||
| So he talked about coal, and then he mentioned offshore wind. | ||
| So offshore wind was a big priority for the Biden administration. | ||
| It could produce really, really massive amounts of electricity in the future, but it's very costly. | ||
| You need to build all this infrastructure far offshore to really capture the most optimal wind. | ||
| And the Trump administration has discontinued a lot of that support. | ||
| So right now we're not going back to coal in a major way. | ||
| I did mention how coal was ticking up slightly, but I wouldn't expect a revival of king coal anytime soon for many reasons. | ||
| At the same time, I wouldn't expect a massive transition to something like offshore wind in this administration. | ||
| So right now, the key electricity power generation sources in this country are natural gas, nuclear, increasingly wind and solar. | ||
| The U.S. portfolio electricity grid portfolio right now has about 17% wind and solar. | ||
| That's a rise from past years, but it's less than China. | ||
| It's dramatically less than the European Union. | ||
| So we are behind some countries. | ||
| Let's hear from Bill in Albany, New York. | ||
| Good morning, Bill. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yes, I would like to ask, try to keep it in common sense and not to get political, but I'd like an answer to before the election, the number one thing was inflation caused by energy, really, and the executive orders. | ||
| From what I understand, under the Biden administration, when they brought in electric vehicles, there was an executive order putting a pause on drilling. | ||
| And I don't know if it was private land or public lands, but so that pause. | ||
| And I remember President Trump campaigning on he would change that on the first day, get rid of that executive order pause, and start drill, baby, drilling. | ||
| Now, I haven't seen any of that because the cost of gas before he left was $2.10 maybe a gallon. | ||
| And the cost of gas at the pump is still high. | ||
| So I haven't seen anything come down because that supply chain with the gas is what really caused prices at the grocery store, you know, because of trucking to really increase prices in restaurants. | ||
| The prices are still high. | ||
| And it doesn't seem like it's getting the attention from the Trump administration that it should to get the executive order in place so that we can drill. | ||
| Because what happened was there were electric vehicles and we didn't have the infrastructure. | ||
| We weren't ready. | ||
| I'm not against that. | ||
| It's just that have it in place before you shut off the natural gas supply. | ||
| So is there going to be, is he going to put an executive order out so that we can get back to drilling and get that pause off the books? | ||
| Yes, thanks a lot for the call. | ||
| So drill, baby, drill is really a mantra in this administration. | ||
| President Trump is a really vehement supporter of fossil fuels. | ||
| He often describes crude oil as liquid gold. | ||
| But right now, the price of crude oil on the global market is lower than it has been in past years. | ||
| It's still relatively near a sweet spot for drilling, but there is less drilling right now in the U.S. than there was a year ago. | ||
| And that's often captured in what people call a rig count. | ||
| These drilling rigs are out there throughout the country. | ||
| And when the number of rigs decreases, it's kind of a reflection of how bullish the industry is on drilling at that time. | ||
| So, you know, the president certainly has made the argument in a full-throated fashion, and there's a lot of like-minded people who make similar arguments, that the U.S. really needs to weaponize both domestically and on the global stage its fossil fuel assets. | ||
| They make the argument that the U.S. uniquely sits atop these just massive fields of oil and gas, and we need to use that to our advantage and not try to play catch up with China, which a generation ago started a concerted effort to build the clean energy economy and has continued unabated. | ||
| They've really engineered an astonishingly efficient clean energy manufacturing economy. | ||
| So, in terms of how drill, baby, drill or fossil fuel drilling can impact energy prices, it's not so much a near-term prospect. | ||
| These, when you open new leases, which the Trump administration has done through a number of executive orders, that's a long-term play for oil and gas developers. | ||
| And even right now, to build a new natural gas power plant, there is a huge backlog for the turbines that you need on site. | ||
| So, that is one reason why wind and solar is, in many cases, most ready to be put onto the electricity grid right now. | ||
| Developers have really rallied around these wind and solar projects. | ||
| And again, this backlog for gas turbines impedes the ability to get new gas generation onto the grid quickly. | ||
| We have one last call for you. | ||
| It is Sandy in Ohio. | ||
| Good morning, Sandy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| I don't know if he will know the answer to this question, but I'm calling for myself and others. | ||
| I live in HUD housing. | ||
| What a blessing. | ||
| And there's 100 people here. | ||
| And electric is included in our rent. | ||
| So I'm wondering, will we be affected by the rising cost of the electricity? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thanks so much for the call. | ||
| If the electricity bill is included in what you are paying for rent, then you likely will not be affected. | ||
| The federal government will be paying those higher bills. | ||
| It is important to note that, as Mark Wolf mentioned in the discussion with you, there are some threats to LotHeap, which is a home energy assistance program. | ||
| And the Trump administration is also slow walking some rebates for home energy assistance. | ||
| And the mega law signing a law on July 4th by President Trump also eliminated a tax credit for new home efficiency projects. | ||
| And the narrative essentially being that if you improve the efficiency of your home through more advanced appliances and heating and cooling systems, then your utility bills will decrease. | ||
| You mentioned at the beginning of this segment the forecast for the demand in energy with all the factors and challenges we talked about when it comes to energy production and transmission. | ||
| Is it possible to know how long energy prices could continue to increase? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's really, as I mentioned earlier, you know, the Trump administration forecasted in this recent report that electricity bills could go up more than 50% over the course of this decade absent new low-cost generation. | |
| It's a major challenge right now to meet the demand forecast for electricity in this country. | ||
| Utilities are making that argument. | ||
| They're asking for loans for the Trump administration. | ||
| The Biden administration did give a couple of loans to utilities. | ||
| But everyone in the policymaking space is aware of this looming likely price hike and the major demand that's coming online soon. | ||
| And grappling with that is a major priority for public policymakers right now. | ||
| Our guest is Brian Dabbs. | ||
| He's an energy reporter for Politico's EE News. | ||
| You can find his work online at eenews.net. | ||
| Brian, thank you so much for being with us today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks so much for having me. | |
| We are wrapping up today's program with Open Form. | ||
| You can start calling in now the lines there on your screen, Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| In a word, Evan Osnos' latest book focuses on the subject of money. | ||
| His book is titled The Haves and the Have Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultra Rich. | ||
| There are 10 essays which originally appeared in his home publication, The New Yorker. | ||
| The oldest one, Survival of the Richest, ran in 2017. | ||
| The newest, titled Land of Make-Believe, was published in 2024. | ||
| In his introduction, Evan Osnos writes that, quote, reporting in the enclaves of the very rich, Monte Carlo, Palm Beach, Palo Alto, and Hollywood is complicated. | ||
| It's not a world that relishes scrutiny. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Author Evan Osnos with his book, The Haves and the Have Yachts, Dispatches on the Ultra Rich. | |
| on this episode of BookNotes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb. | ||
| BookNotes Plus is available wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| As Mike said before, I happened to listen to him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He was on C-SPAN 1. | |
| That's a big upgrade, right? | ||
| But I've read about it in the history books. | ||
| I've seen the C-SPAN footage. | ||
| If it's a really good idea, present it in public view on C-SPAN. | ||
| Every single time I tuned in on TikTok or C-SPAN or YouTube or anything, there were tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people watching. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I went home after the speech and I turned on C-SPAN. | |
| I was on C-SPAN just this week. | ||
| To the American people, now is the time to tune in to C-SPAN. | ||
| They had something $2.50 a gallon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I saw on television a little while ago in between my watching my great friends on C-SPAN. | |
| C-SPAN is televising this right now live. | ||
| So we are not just speaking to Los Angeles, we are speaking to the country. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| We are in open forum for the duration of today's program. | ||
| If there is a public policy issue you'd like to highlight, you can give us a call. | ||
| We'll start with Carolyn in Vincent, Ohio Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Carolyn. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I will leave my number one choice, what I wanted to call about, because I think the caller said it best at the top of your program about the children in Gaza. | ||
| They said it better than I ever could. | ||
| But I do want to broach the topic of the victims of Epstein. | ||
| I want to personally thank Maria Farmer. | ||
| She's been on all types of shows and she's offering to talk to anybody in the FBI, CIA, so on and so forth. | ||
| And she's already contacted or was contacted by them twice. | ||
| But wow, did she help me? | ||
| I mean, I had an incident that didn't even compare to what they were went through in the fifth grade, but she gave me the courage because I saw her bravery to face what happened in the fifth grade. | ||
| And I just really, really hope that all the people in Congress talk to the victims. | ||
| I don't even understand why they're not talking to them instead of that Gilan, whatever her name is. | ||
| But anyway, that's what I think is an important topic for the week. | ||
| That was Caroline in Ohio. | ||
| Jason, also in Ohio line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Jason. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| First-time caller, long-time listener. | ||
| This is amazing. | ||
| I just want to say, like, I think we should bring God back to school. | ||
| Jason, do you have kids in school? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I do not. | |
| I just think we need to get back to the basics. | ||
| Ten Commandments. | ||
| That was Jason in Ohio. | ||
| Charles in Fraser, Michigan, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Charles. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| What I'm calling about is what you just showed about producing power, coal, energy. | ||
| And I've worked in that for years and years. | ||
| Back in the 80s, I was painting some of the facilities that produce oil, including power plants, substations, everything, high-tenured wires. | ||
| And I don't think enough people understand what happens, what, you know, how this is all done. | ||
| The things that they have to do to coal in order to make it burnable. | ||
| I once painted a coal pile because there was dust coming off of it and it was polluting the environment. | ||
| And we painted it to keep it down. | ||
| Charles, what are your thoughts on the power industry today? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think that we're still going to need oil, no matter what happens. | |
| Oil is a basic necessity for all industry. | ||
| It has to be maintained. | ||
| But I think that in the future, we're going to have to go to other things like solar and wind. | ||
| But it also takes oil to make that happen. | ||
| So, where do you go? | ||
| They have to develop technology to make solar and wind power more efficient and less costly to produce. | ||
| And that was Charles in Michigan. | ||
| Rick in Golden, Colorado, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Rick. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yeah, I was an engineer in the power industry for 40 years, so I got a kind of a different perspective. | ||
| Number one, when you start with the renewables, I think at the present time we make up maybe 17% of power generation in the United States. | ||
| And of course, the number one problem with counting on renewables is that, you know, when wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine for that period, they're not producing. | ||
| So they have to be backed up with some type of fossil fuel ore plant or with batteries. | ||
| And battery technology is nowhere near to the point where it's feasible to do it. | ||
| So the bottom line to all that is that you have to have fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. | ||
| And the reason the energy prices are rising so much is for that very, one of them is for that very reason is you're having to have dual investments. | ||
| In other words, you're investing, putting money in equipment for renewables. | ||
| At the same time, you're having to maintain fossil to back up so that you have a steady source of power. | ||
| And then when you look at the United States, they've reduced, they have reduced their CO2 by, I don't know, something. | ||
| I think we're back to 1990 levels to where we are today. | ||
| But the problem with it is, even if the United States took away 100%, in other words, they went down and we went to zero, you got to ask yourself, what difference would that make in the overall reduction of CO2 in the world? | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it's hardly anything. | |
| We're not the biggest producer. | ||
| So in other words, we wouldn't make any change to the so-called problem. | ||
| So unless you have a worldwide agreement on reducing, you know, what the United States does doesn't matter. | ||
| And so why should we rise, you know, in other words, rise or make our costs go so high just for the sake of change, you know, just to reduce. | ||
| So we have to, part of the reason is we forced these changes before the technology was really ready to produce it. | ||
| And, you know, your guy had on there talking from Mosey from Politico. | ||
| He was pretty disingenuous. | ||
| When you start talking about wind power from ocean out in the ocean, let's say, you're talking about, you know, small amounts of power that are going to be produced for small areas of the country. | ||
| So even to talk about that really is not an overall solution to anything for the country as a whole. | ||
| Rick, you said that you worked for 40 years as an energy engineer. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| What did you do? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I worked in the supporting the power plants, basically solving problems. | |
| You know, we had failures. | ||
| And so my job is to determine what failure was and try to prevent it from occurring in the future. | ||
| And also Working on building of new plants, you know, developing peculiar misspecifications and monitoring construction, that type of thing. | ||
| That was Rick in Colorado. | ||
| Several callers this morning bringing up the situation in Gaza. | ||
| This is a headline from the Washington Post. | ||
| It says, Amid starvation scenes in Gaza, Trump administration hardens tone on Hamas. | ||
| The subheadline headline is: Militants didn't want to make a deal, Trump said, after the U.S. Israel ceasefire negotiations pulled back from talks. | ||
| It was yesterday that President Trump was asked about the U.S. removing themselves. | ||
| Here is a clip of that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, Gaza, they pulled out of Gaza. | |
| They pulled out in terms of negotiating. | ||
| It was too bad. | ||
| Hamas didn't really want to make a deal. | ||
| I think they want to die. | ||
| And it's very, very bad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Are you jealous? | |
| And it got to be to a point where you're going to have to finish the job. | ||
| They really, they asked the thing. | ||
| Don't forget, we got a lot of hostages out. | ||
| So now we're down to the final hostages. | ||
| And they know what happens after you get the final hostages. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And basically, because of that, they really didn't want to make a deal. | |
| I saw that. | ||
| So they pulled out, and they're going to have to fight, and they're going to have to clean it up. | ||
| You're going to have to get rid of them. | ||
| More from the Washington Post. | ||
| It says roughly a third of the Gaza population is going multiple days without eating, according to the United Nations. | ||
| It says already overwhelmed hospitals have been reporting rising deaths from starvation and a lack of medical supplies and fuel, with increasingly shocking images of human suffering emerging daily. | ||
| Just a few minutes left in today's program. | ||
| Let's talk with David in Flemington, New Jersey, Line for Independence. | ||
| Hi, David. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| If it's okay, I'd like to make a comment about Gaza and connections to the sanctions against our universities. | ||
| What a lot of people don't realize about the current administration of Israel is that the approach to the Middle East and Israel arose from a rabbi named Meyer Kahan. | ||
| Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gavir, other hardliners around Prime Minister Netanyahu are kahanist. | ||
| They're following the approach of a Brooklyn rabbi who in the 70s formed the Jewish Defense League, which was kind of like Curtis Sliwa's guardian angels in making a neighborhood watch to protect Jewish neighborhoods from a lot of the assaults that were going on. | ||
| As far as Columbia goes, we have a very good friend who went to Barnard and is now a security guard in one of the dorms at Barnard. | ||
| And she had an incident where students just randomly approached her and said, you're Jewish, aren't you? | ||
| And a group formed around her to the point that Columbia and Barnard Security had to be called to protect her from students who were just randomly attacking her because they believed she's Jewish, which she is Jewish, but she has suffered as a staff member. | ||
| We also had at Raritan Valley Community College near Flemington a very talented professor of music who was singled out because she was Jewish. | ||
| And I appealed to Congressman Tom Kaine's office, who looked into it and a number of other officials to try to protect this music professor from anti-Semitic attacks. | ||
| But the university, the junior college, ended up dismissing her. | ||
| But I think the real danger, and thank you again. | ||
| I'm sorry if I'm long-winded. | ||
| I think the real danger with anti-Netanyahu, anti-Kahanist, is that as we know in America, by the rate of anti-Semitic hate crimes, we have a significant population that is anti-Semitic. | ||
| And there's also a significant population that isn't and is able to separate the Israeli government from the overall issue of being Jewish. | ||
| And they are very separate. | ||
| Being Jewish and being pro the government of Israel are completely separate things. | ||
| But anti-Semites at our universities and on C-SPAN have used the actions of a horrible government in Israel now as an excuse publicly on C-SPAN and their universities to let out their anti-Semitism. | ||
| And this is the danger. | ||
| You have to be discerning between Netanyahu and being Jewish. | ||
| Those are different issues. | ||
| And I really very much thank you for letting me express myself. | ||
| That was David in New Jersey. | ||
| Melinda in Arizona, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Melinda. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'd like to address four things. | ||
| The first thing is the problem in Gaza. | ||
| I am Jewish. | ||
| I am Palestinian, and I am Irish. | ||
| And I would like to know when somebody is going to get off their dufts and bring charges against Netanyahu and Donald Trump for crimes against humanity. | ||
| Those children in Gaza are human beings. | ||
| They are not fighting the war. | ||
| And all Jewish people do not agree with Netanyahu. | ||
| The other thing I'd like to address is information, please, about this thing in Georgia and Trump denying them funds from FEMA to rebuild from the floods. | ||
| I would like to learn more about that. | ||
| And secondly, thirdly, excuse me, the thing with Epstein, the lawyer and the justice lawyer went to talk to, where was the third party, the third party that took it down that isn't biased or stands with Donald Trump. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Bye. | ||
| That was Melinda in Arizona. | ||
| And our last call for today's program is RJ in Oklahoma on the line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, RJ. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I just wanted to bring up about the homeless, about what Trump was trying to do. | ||
| I was an Ivy drug user for 30 years, and then I quit, went to prison, then I went homeless. | ||
| I was homeless for three years. | ||
| Then I went back to college and got my master's degree, and I was a therapist for the last 20 years. | ||
| I just retired. | ||
| The deal is with homeless, they want to be homeless, a lot of them. | ||
| 90% of them have some kind of bad addiction. | ||
| It's either alcohol or some kind of drugs. | ||
| And they don't like society. | ||
| They hate the government. | ||
| So you can't just put them in a nice place and live. | ||
| They'll tear it up. | ||
| He's going to have to build a lot of stuff to help all these people in the street if he thinks he's going to make a dent in it. | ||
| But that's all I got. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| That was RJ in Oklahoma, our last caller for today's Washington Journal. | ||
| We appreciate you joining us. | ||
| We'll be back tomorrow morning with another edition at 7 a.m. Eastern and 4 a.m. Pacific. | ||
| Until then, enjoy your afternoon. | ||
|
unidentified
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C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington and across the country. | |
| Coming up Sunday morning, former Trump Pence 2020 Campaign Communications Director and host of Newsmax Wake Up America, Mark Lauder, on the Trump presidency and political news of the day. | ||
| And Greg Sargent, staff writer for The New Republic, discusses the Trump presidency and Democrats' agenda and messaging. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal. |