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Dec. 2, 2017 - Jimmy Dore Show
01:00:29
20171202_1201_TJDS_PODCAST
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Time Text
Get ready for an outstanding entertainment program.
The Jimmy Dore Show.
Hey, this is Jimmy.
Who's this?
Jimmy Dore.
Charlie Rose.
How are you?
I'm fine, Mr. Rose.
How are you?
I'm delighted to finally have the opportunity to sit down with you one-on-one and discuss this inflection point in our society that we've been witnessing.
What are you talking about?
You'd have to be living under a rock to be unaware of the recent firestorm of accusations of sexual harassment or misconduct being leveled at titans of entertainment, the media, and politics.
Yeah, you're right about that.
Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein, Al Franken, Kevin Spacey.
You.
Now Matt Lauer.
Garrison Keiller.
Charlie Sheen.
Yeah, Charlie Rose.
Dustin Hoffman.
George H.W. Bush.
Charlie H.W. Rose.
Roy Moore.
Bill O'Reilly.
Charlie O. Rose.
And, as you have been implying, Jimmy, Bob Packwood.
No, I meant you.
You are one of those people, Charlie Rose.
Why are you bloviating about this of all topics?
Well, this is exactly where I wanted to get your perspective, Jimmy.
Do you feel that this is a genuine cultural shift with regards to this sort of behavior?
Or is it going to eventually be seen as a flash in the pan, as it were?
No, I think we are changing our culture for the better.
Guys like you should be fired.
But to play devil's advocate for a moment, where does this stop exactly?
That is to say, if we reach a formula where a woman comes out of the woodwork and accuses some man of groping her behind, and that man has to be fired and go away forever.
Well, that's a lot of power, isn't it?
If someone wanted a powerful man gone for whatever reason, that seems like that would be pretty easy to arrange.
Women tend to not be lying when they come forward about these sorts of things, though.
Well, what about you, Jimmy Dore?
You have a female co-worker, Stephanie Zamorano.
Now, what would you do if she publicly came forward and accused you of sexual misconduct?
Charlie, Steph is my wife.
That's an interesting point you're making.
It depends on the perspective of the person being accused with regard to the accuser.
No, no, that's not the point I'm making at all.
So if you open the door while completely naked in front of Steph, you wouldn't be fired from the Jimmy Door show.
Lose your job, because that's what happened to me.
I'm assuming this is in our house.
Yeah, no, I think everything would be fine.
And said, who wants sausage and biscuits for breakfast?
Yeah, we'd probably literally be planning breakfast.
Hmm, very interesting.
Do you think we are at a crossroads here in the conversation about sexual harassment whereby we as a polity can I suppose you are correct, as you so often are.
I would like to point out for the record that Tavis Smiley was well known around the PPS offices for whipping it out in front of female staff and saying, this motherfucker right here is called the topic of conversation.
And he still has a job.
And I don't.
Just saying.
Yeah, I don't believe you.
And I don't know what to tell you, Mr. Rose.
You shouldn't have done that stuff that you did.
My guest tonight has been Jimmy Dore.
Mr. Doar, enlightening as always.
Now I'm going to fade into that unexplained black void that is ever in my background, beckoning me to oblivion.
Good night.
Good night.
It's the Jimmy Dore Show.
the show for up-minded, lowly-livered lefties.
The kind of people that are It's the show that makes Anderson Cooper save.
It's hard to talk to you if you guys.
And now, there's a guy who sounds a lot like me.
It's Jimmy Dore.
Everybody, welcome to this week's Jimmy Dore show.
We'll see you Monday night, December 4th in Burbank, California.
We just added Jank Uger to the lineup.
Jake Uger's going to be on the show with the progressive progressive Jimmy Dore.
All right, let's get to the jokes before we get to the jokes.
You know, I used to say those Democrats are really Republicans.
Now I just call them Democrats.
It's kind of a tough joke.
So you hear Rand Paul got crap beaten out of him by his next-door neighbor, right?
And I was going to send Rand Paul a get-well card, but I know he doesn't believe in socialized postal delivery.
Nice, JD.
Hey, you know what's not safe for work?
Most jobs.
How about that?
Hey, did you hear that the DNC has a new slogan for the primaries?
The Democratic primaries rigged for your pleasure.
That's a twist on the condom today.
Did you know I have John McCain's tombstone?
It's going to say Maverick my ass.
Garrison Keeler, he's been accused of sexually harassing a woman, and I would like to be there for the interview with the woman.
So show us on the dolly where the Garrison Keillor bored you.
*laughs*
It's a tough Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer.
Men who host early morning TV shows do more sexually harassing before 9 a.m. than most people do all day.
Based on Matt Lauer's interviewing style, I'm guessing that the women Matt Lauer harassed would describe his genitalia as softballs.
You know, if bad journalism was considered an appropriate behavior, Matt Lauer would have been gone a long time ago.
Hey, Roy Moore, looks like he might get elected.
It's still tough till close race.
Roy Moore, you know, him trying to pick up underage girls at a shopping mall is not as offensive to Mike Pence as a gay couple trying to pick up a wedding cake at a shopping mall.
Did you hear Arby's is buying Buffalo Wild Wings?
This is true.
Arby's is buying Buffalo Wild Wings as part of an effort to diversify and get into the business of selling food.
Good for Arby's, huh?
The loss of net neutrality is one of the most impactful things happening right now.
And CNN and MSNBC are all over this story.
Psych kidding.
They didn't do a story out at all, though.
Hey, what's coming up on today's show?
We're going to talk with Marxist economist Professor Richard Wolf.
He's going to outline what's exactly wrong with capitalism as we're Using it today.
And guess what?
He has an actual solution to the problems that we can implement from the ground up.
No kidding, it's already working in other places around the world.
Professor Richard Wolf, an amazing interview today.
I hope you enjoy it.
That's coming up next.
Plus, they took away the unions in Wisconsin from the teachers.
And now they did a study, so the test results are in.
Did it work?
What are the results of making it less attractive for people to be teachers?
Also, there's two ways to save net neutrality.
Just how can you do it?
The answer just may surprise you.
Or will it?
Plus, we got phone calls today from Charlie Rose, Jeb Bush, and former White House Communications Director Scarabucci.
Great.
Plus, a lot lot more.
That's today of the Jimmy Dore Show.
Hi, everybody.
Welcome to the Jimmy Door Show.
We have a special guest today.
He's an American Marxian economist, well known for his work on Marxian economics.
He's an economic methodology and class analysis.
Professor Emeritus of an Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is currently a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs of the New York School University in New York.
And he's the author of Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism.
I bet you a lot of people didn't know capitalism even needed medicine.
But here he is to tell us all about it.
It's Professor Richard Wolfus here.
How are you?
Thanks for making time for our show.
Oh, it's my pleasure.
I'm really glad to finally meet you and be doing something together.
Now, I like to say this on my show over and over, and it's good to have someone who can explain it.
I say that, what do you call a system that takes the richest country the face of the earth has ever seen and renders half of its population poor or low income?
I call that a failed system.
So, how did we get to this point?
Well, I couldn't agree with you more.
It seems to me that a society like ours has to face a colossal failure in moving the world forward.
I mean, if you look, just to give you an example, this last week, a citizen of the United States named Jeff Bezos had wealth in his own personal name go over $100 billion.
In other words, he can write a check for $100 billion.
Now, let's take a look at what that means.
Out of the 50 states in the United States, there are 14 states who, in an entire year, all of their citizens producing goods and services don't add up to $100 billion.
So, this man by himself has the economic clout bigger than 14 out of the 50 states.
Let me give you another example.
Africa is a continent that has 54 countries.
Out of the 54 countries, only four of them have an annual output of goods and services more than $100 billion.
Mr. Bezos is richer than 50 out of the 54 countries in Africa.
I mean, you'd have to go back to ancient Egypt and the Pharaoh to get this kind of obscene wealth concentrated in the hands of a tiny number of people.
While, as you put it correctly, half of this country can't really put their kids through college without enormous debts, have trouble meeting their expenses.
In other words, we haven't made progress in this country.
We've gone backwards to the kinds of society we thought we had left behind.
And I think it's a very important part of our history and of our economic system to face up to that.
So, when we got in these kinds of pickles before, a layman like me remembers that Teddy Roosevelt came along and broke up the big monopolies.
And then, a couple decades later, FDR came along and he fixed that income inequality.
He didn't fix it, but he helped make it work better, the economy for everybody.
So, he gave old people a pension so they didn't have to die penniless, right?
And he sold security.
He gave people, he gave the jobless, he gave them work so they had dignity.
So, we don't do that anymore in America.
Barack Obama never had a jobs program.
There was never a grand idea.
It was all this incrementalism.
What do you think happened to our political system that we no longer can do big things like the Roosevelts did?
Well, let me give you the answer that I would give in two parts.
There was a famous French economist named Thomas Piquetti, wrote a famous book two or three years ago.
I think it was 2014.
Yeah.
And it was called Capital in the 21st Century.
Mr. Piketti's book looks at the history of capitalism for the last 300 years.
And here's what he shows: wherever capitalism has settled in, it has shown itself to be a system which, if you leave it alone over time, divides the society where it exists into a very small number of people who have enormous wealth and a vast number of people who can barely get by.
In other words, the notion of the 1% is the way capitalism works.
He looked at it in every continent and he looked at it across the last three centuries.
And wherever he looked, it's what he found.
His second point goes to your question about Roosevelt.
He said the only time the widening inequality is stopped, or at least for a while stopped, or sometimes even reversed, is when people rise up and say they will not tolerate it.
Look, in the 1930s, you're absolutely right.
Franklin Roosevelt changed the distribution of wealth and income.
Here's how he did it.
He was confronted by the biggest unionization drive in American history.
In the middle of the Great Depression, the AFL-CIO organized millions of American workers into unions.
These were people who had never been in a union before.
Their parents hadn't been in a union.
They just figured that they could get through the Great Depression of the 1930s better in a union than not.
They went to Mr. Roosevelt, these unions, and the millions of members that they got, and they said to Mr. Roosevelt, look, you've got to do something for us, because if you don't, we're not going to vote for you and you won't be president really long.
And there may be a revolution in America because the vast majority of people have had it.
They won't take it anymore.
And Mr. Roosevelt, a smart politician, knew they weren't bluffing, knew that he was taking a chance if he ignored them.
So he went back to the people he came from.
You know, the Roosevelts were not your corner poor people.
They were very rich, well-connected people.
And they went back to the rich and the corporations, and he told them that the meeting he had with these unions and with socialists and communists and others that were working with the unions, he told the corporations he knew that they weren't kidding.
And he basically said to them, you have to give me the money to take care of the American people, because if you don't, you won't have any money to give anybody.
And he got about half of them to go with it.
The other half, the people whose descendants we now know as the Koch brothers, the other half never bought this argument, but half of them did.
And so Mr. Roosevelt, under pressure from the unions and the socialists and the communists and the angry American people, what did he do?
It's really amazing what he did.
And it's also amazing how little Americans know their own history.
Let me review.
1934, he goes on the radio.
There was no TV then, and he says, okay, we are going to institute a social security system.
We never had that in America.
We're going to give every citizen, 65 years of age or older, enough money, a check every month, so that they can live in dignity, that they don't have to borrow or beg from their relatives or from the local community.
That's what we're going to do.
By the way, he offered this cost billions of dollars at a time when the government had no money because we had the Great Depression.
The government wasn't getting any taxes.
But before even people could digest what he had just done, he did this second thing.
He said, I want people to have unemployment insurance.
I want them, if they lose their job, to have a check from the government every week for a year or two to get them back on their feet to take care of them.
This was at a time when tens of millions of Americans were unemployed.
That cost billions of dollars.
And then the third, the big one, he said, you know, millions of Americans right now just want a job.
And if the private sector of our capitalist economy is either unwilling or unable to give them a job, then I'm going to do it as president.
So he created a federal jobs program.
Between 1934, 1941, he gave work to 15 million American citizens.
Those people didn't default on their mortgages.
Those people didn't feel bad about themselves.
Those people could take care of their families.
Well, you might ask, and you'd be, where did he get the money?
Because the government wasn't taking in any taxes.
It was a depressed economy.
He got the money by going to the rich in America, the corporations and the top 1%.
And he raised their taxes big time.
That's where he got the money.
So when you hear today, politicians, and unfortunately, you hear it from Democrats as well as Republicans, that they couldn't possibly tax corporations and the rich.
I'm here to remind them of the history they've conveniently forgotten.
We've done that.
We've been there.
Roosevelt got that money.
So guess what?
And I love this part the best.
The president who was forced from below to tax the rich and use the money to give average Americans Social Security, unemployment insurance, and a government job, that president was reelected three times.
He's the most popular president in the history of the United States.
So a politician who tells you he can't do it or she can't do it, that's not true.
The answer is if the American people want to have a less unequal society, they're going to have to rise up and force it because the people who run this society never have and never will do it out of the kindness of their hearts.
I don't know if you feel comfortable talking on this, but if you do, can you tell me what do you think the ramifications of having the wealthiest predatory capitalist Jeff Bezos owning the paper of note, the Washington Post?
It's an amazing thing to allow that in this society.
That's what I mean.
It's Trump time here in America.
You're rich by the newspaper, buy the politician.
The American people, every poll of the American people indicates that they would like there to be less inequality in our economic system.
And the Congress is about to pass a tax reform.
And you use the word reform here as an amazing hustle, but let's leave it.
They're about to do something that's going to make us more unequal.
How do you explain that the elected representatives do the opposite of what the mass of people show they want?
The answer is the people at the top have the money.
Look, if you were one of the 1%, you'd understand.
In a society, particularly like the United States, which used to pride itself on having a big middle class, if you are screwing the mass of the middle class, which we all know is being done, and you're the people at the top with all the money, you know that sooner or later, the mass of people are going to figure out we're getting screwed economically.
But as long as we have the vote, we can use the vote, because we're the majority, to correct, to undo the inequality of the economic system.
The rich people figured that out.
So the way to stop that is to buy the political system, which they've done.
And to help that process, it's good to buy the newspaper and Time magazine and the TV too.
We have to face, that's the lay of the land, use the internet, use person-to-person communication, use comedy, use it all to try to open up the space.
Some would argue also.
And this is true for me in the work that I do.
I have my own radio and television show, which is called Economic Update.
Big fan of the economic update.
It's amazing all the news that really affects us that's not being reported.
And you find it and you report it.
It's an amazing show.
You know, I was born many years ago in a city called Youngstown in Ohio, a city devastated by capitalism, which has basically abandoned that part of Ohio and much of that so-called Rust Belt area around there.
I have seen, therefore, very clearly what capitalism is capable of.
And I have tried to explain basically that America can and should do better than capitalism.
I've had a hard time doing that for most of my life.
In the last five years, everything has changed.
I have given more public speeches in the last five years than in the previous 40.
I have been asked to write articles for magazines that would never before have published what I have to say.
My radio program through the free speech TV network now reaches over 45 billion Americans.
I mean, the opening is enormous in a peculiar way.
Mr. Trump is the best organizer I could have.
Wow.
Well, it sounds like you've been listening to this show for saying something like that because we predicted that Trump would rip the pretty mask off the horrible stuff our government has been doing for this, I don't know, since 1980, roughly, right?
So we had a guy like when you have a guy like Barack Obama, who's, you know, he makes everybody feel good when he talks, but he's doing this nefarious shit at the behest of Wall Street, the military industrial complex, and Big Pharma and the health and care, and by the way, fossil fuels and Silicon Valley.
So when you then take that pretty face off of it from Barack Obama and you put Trump's face on, they're doing a lot of the same things, except now people are actually upset about them.
So that's a good thing.
If Hillary Clinton was president, you would have another election where half the people stayed home.
You would have a solidification, by the way, in Congress, in the House and the Senate of the right wing.
It would be even more powerful than it would.
So right now, the left, or what we consider to be the left, the Democratic Party, which I don't consider them left, they're about to take over the Congress again.
They're positioned, even in a bad election time, where they have more seats vulnerable than the Republicans.
It still looks like they're going to take it ever a really real chance to take over the House and the Senate.
And they have no platform, by the way.
That's how bad the Republicans are.
The Democrats have no plan to help people, yet they still might win.
So that's what I keep telling people: is that when we get rid of Donald Trump, we have to replace him with something.
And right now, we don't have anything to replace him with.
We have just Donald Trump light.
We have corporatism from the left.
So what do you think is, I'm trying to tell people to organize third parties.
Do you think that the salvation is through the electoral process, or is it a mixture of social activism and the electoral process?
What do you prescribe?
In the time that I have left, it's the middle one you just said.
I don't know what the best way is.
I don't believe anybody does.
For me, what we need to do is to use every available way.
Contest the election?
Of course.
Develop mass movements that can talk to people directly?
Of course.
Have there be voices that are not hooked into the political system so that they're free to say what they really believe without having to worry each day whether 10 voters will not like them tomorrow because of what?
Yeah, we need all of it so that the many different ways of being critical and the many different ways of offering alternatives begin to develop the mass of people without which I don't think change will come.
When you cross the threshold from the street into your workplace, you're entering a place where you will be told what to do, how to do it, where to do it, when to do it.
And at the end of your work time, you are told go home because whatever you help to produce, you have no say over.
It immediately belongs to somebody else.
You're done.
In other words, you have no control over that job.
You have no control over the decisions that affect your life, including the decision of whether or not you have a job, whether or not you have income, whether or not you can take care of your family.
It's an amazing system.
But here's the word that does not apply to the workplace.
It is not democratic.
Democratic means if you're affected by a decision, you have the right to participate in making it.
That's why we elect our mayor, our congressperson, our senator, our president.
They make decisions that affect us.
We have to have power over them.
But when we go to work, we don't ask for it.
We don't get it.
The decisions are made by people over whom we have no control at all.
In other words, the workplace is undemocratic.
And now here comes the punchline.
Why is anybody surprised that if a tiny number of people are in the position to make all the decisions, that the decisions they make are good for them, but not for the rest of us?
Is that a surprise?
Is that something that you should go, oh my goodness, I never thought of it?
Everything I'm saying now, the American people know.
They don't need me to tell them.
They know this.
But you have to draw the conclusion, which frankly, I think they're scared to do.
We are not living in a democracy.
Because if we did, the first place where democratic rule would apply is the workplace.
And you know why?
Because that's where adults spend most of their lives.
Five out of seven days, all of your adult life until you retire, you go to work.
If you believed in democracy, that's the first place it would have been instituted.
But instead, we've never had it.
So when I hear a politician say, we are going to Iraq or Afghanistan to bring them democracy, I smile to myself.
You can't bring what you don't have.
We haven't done that in our country in the place where we spend most of our lives.
And let me bring it to a conclusion this way.
Imagine with me, just for a minute, that we had democracy at the workplace.
Everybody who goes to work in the faculty office of the store, one person, one vote.
Now let's ask certain questions and see what happens.
Here's a question.
Should we close the factory here in Wisconsin or in Pennsylvania or in Idaho and move to China?
Everybody in favor of losing your job and having it go to China, raise your hand.
Deafening silence.
You want to stop the loss of jobs?
There it is.
Let me give you another example.
Here's a new technology we could have in our workplace.
It will make the profits go up by 10%.
It has an unfortunate side effect.
It pollutes the air that everybody breathes here.
Oh, the board of directors decides we want the profit because we're the ones who get it.
So we're going to have it.
And they say to their workers, we're really sorry about the bad air.
If it's hard for you, why don't you get a job someplace else?
Oh, goodness.
Now, let's suppose the workers made the decision democratically.
On the one hand, they'd weigh the fact that the profits went up.
But on the other hand, they'd weigh the fact that they don't want to get sick.
They don't want their family and their relatives and their neighbors to get sick.
They would weigh the ecological damage in a way that the corporate boards of directors who live in gated communities and breathe clean air anyway never would.
So if you want to do something, well, let me give you one last concrete example.
In a democratic workplace, the workers would together decide who gets paid how much money.
Do you think they would, if it was democratically decided, give the executives at the top $20 million while the average other person can't pay for the cost of sending their kid to college?
It would never happen.
They might pay the people at the top a bit more, but they're not going to do what capitalism Does because they're looking out for themselves and for people like them.
And so, if you want to do something about the inequality that obsesses this country, democratize the workplace, it's the surest, best way to collapse the inequality back down.
And it doesn't rely on a president to do it in a way with laws that can be undone because it changes the way business is organized.
And that is a much more structural, profound way to get at that problem.
Here's a great way to help support the Jimmy Door show.
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Go to jimmydoorcomedy.com, click on our Amazon link, and when you buy something, they send us money.
It's just that easy.
Help fight back and support the show at the same time.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
He's going to answer this time.
I know it.
Come on.
Come on, come on.
Hello.
My dad is the oldest living president of the history of presidents in the whole world ever.
Who is this again?
Oh, come on.
You know who this is.
It's me, Jeff Bush.
And which president are you talking about?
My dad, George Herbert Walker Bush, silly.
Well, I don't give a shit.
What?
Yeah, sorry, but there are a lot more important things going on in the news, like the crisis in Yemen, anti-Russian hysteria, healthcare, North Korea.
But dad's old for crime's sake.
Come on, that's something, right?
Nobody gives a shit.
But he beat Gerald Ford.
Ford made it to 93 years and 165 days before kicking the bucket.
Dad just made it to 166 days past 93.
Fuck you, Ford, right?
Big deal.
And he also left Ronald Reagan eating his dust, loser.
This is important.
It's another thing you journalists can write about.
I'm not really, I'm not really a journalist.
You know, it's hard for me to say the word scoop without looking like I have indigestion.
Your dad's age isn't anything.
Give me something I can bite into, or I'm going to have to end this call.
Oh, come on, Jimmy.
Come on, Jimmy.
Bye-bye.
Wait!
This week I'm hosting a reform summit at my Foundation for Excellence in Education.
Boring, gotta go.
With Betsy DeVos.
Who?
You heard me.
My old friend, Betsy DeVos.
She's a genius when it comes to destroying what's left of her educational system.
And as you know, destruction is the only way towards real reform.
I'm a big fan.
She's the best advocate I know for school vouchers and market-based education.
But charter schools have been called out for their poor performance and low attendance rates.
And support for charter schools by both Democrats and Republicans has dropped sharply.
My dad's the oldest fucking ex-president ever.
We already went through this.
And he fondled a binder full of women.
I've seen it.
Decades of it.
At the bowling alley, at the Thai place, on the beach.
At my wedding.
Ow, ow.
Hello?
Let go of my ear, mom.
I'll be good.
I'll be good.
Not the holes.
The fetus in the chart thing was real.
I regret nothing.
*music*
So right now we're talking about net neutrality.
And this is from the New York Times.
Why the courts will have to save net so the courts.
So you know they're going to Ajit Pai, who was appointed by Barack Obama, enemy of net neutrality, Barack Obama, he got him that job.
Wasn't that nice?
And now he's overturning net neutrality.
And so what does that mean for you?
It means income inequality is going to get worse.
Your ability to influence the electoral process will be less.
You will have less connection with your government.
And anything that's going to help you will be harder to find on the internet.
So here's the article.
Here's what they say.
On Tuesday, the FCC chairman Ajit Pai announced plans to eliminate even the most basic net neutrality protections, including the ban on blocking, replacing them with the transparency regime enforced by the Federal Trade Commission.
Transparency, of course, is a euphemism for doing nothing.
What is blocking?
Well, they're going to like blocking, like there's a ban on blocking.
What is that ban?
A ban on blocking.
Well, net neutrality protections.
You can't just block certain content that you don't like if you're an ISP.
You can't just throttle certain content that you don't like based on fast lanes and slow lanes.
So let's say, for instance, you get your internet through Verizon.
Verizon owns Yahoo as a search engine, and so they just block Google.
Right.
Something like that.
So now neutrality assures that can't happen.
So right now, the way the laws are now, you can't just do that.
But he wants to switch it to a way where you can do that.
You can do that as long as you're quote-unquote transparent.
And another type of sort of like a pseudo-blocking would be kind of making the internet look like cable television 2.0.
You know, you're seeing all these memes coming out now where it's just like, oh, do you want the social package that includes Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube?
Bill, that's $24.99 extra on top of whatever else.
That hasn't happened yet, but it's very possible that that would be exactly what happens if we lose net neutrality because that's why the ISPs want it.
That's gone.
That's right.
Because not because they're going to make less money.
Allowing such censorship is anathema to the internet and America's founding spirit.
And by going this far, the FCC may have also overplayed its legal hand.
What?
So this is good news in a sense.
Oh, I got to hope this guy's right.
He says the problem for Mr. Pai is that government agencies are not free to abruptly reverse long-standing rules on which many have relied without a good reason, such as a change in factual circumstances.
So he's saying that there's precedent that you can't just change rules that people have come to.
You just can't upset society without a compelling reason to do so.
And that's what it sounds like he's saying.
And especially if the way the society has been organized for decades has been one way, and now you want to switch it.
And you have to show a compelling reason for why you want to do that.
And the compelling reason can't be, I want to make 1% of the 1% richer.
I mean, I guess that can be, but I wonder if that would win the day.
Yeah, internet commerce has been going up significantly, not down.
And like virtually 99.9% of it benefits from a net neutrality system.
The groups that don't, the only groups that don't are the ISPs themselves.
So that would be like Comcast.
They're a big ISP also.
ATT.
And Time Warner.
And they're still making plenty of money.
Their organized duopolies are working just fine for them.
We pay more than most other countries already.
They're doing justice.
Shittier service.
Spectrum.
That's who does our internet spectrum.
Used to be called Charter.
Now they're called Spectrum.
Given that the net neutrality rules have been a huge success by most measures, the justification For killing them would have to be very strong.
So the justification for changing the rules would have to be very strong.
Compelling reasons why you want to upset the apple cart of the way we've been doing business with the internet for decades.
Why do you want to upset it?
It'd have to be very strong, but it isn't.
In fact, according to this guy, it's very weak.
But Mr. Pai faces a more serious legal problem because he is killing net neutrality outright, not merely weakening it.
He will have to explain to a court not just the shift from 2015, but also his reasoning for destroying the basic bans on blocking and throttling, which have been in effect since 2005 and have been relied on extensively by the entire internet ecosystem.
Yeah, this is a really important part in this piece and why I thought this was like such an important piece to be part of the net neutrality conversation.
You know, one of the things net neutrality opponents will try to be like, well, we didn't have these rules until 2015.
And that's a very misleading sentiment to add because in reality, the idea of net neutrality came around since 2005.
And the FCC favored the idea of it.
It was in all the verbiage.
And then what, you know, free press and organizations like that were pushing for was the actual Title II classification.
Because while technically we had net neutrality, it couldn't be enforced because the internet wasn't a designated Title II.
So when, you know, when the cable companies took the FCC to court, the FCC lost, but the court basically said, if you just make the internet a Title II, you're good.
And net neutrality is back.
So this whole idea that, like, well, net neutrality, we never had it before.
We were totally fine.
Like, no, technically, we did have it.
We needed to solidify it, which we did in 2015 after the people twisted Barack Obama's and Tom Wheeler's arms to do so.
The FCC didn't want to do it.
We made them do it.
And now AG Pie wants to go backwards, not just from 2015 on.
That's what they want, you think.
He wants to go backwards pretty much to reinstate the internet as we know it, because we've basically always been playing by net neutrality rules until the companies try to divert from them.
So him having to explain all that stuff, according to the New York Times, will be a difficult task.
What has changed since 2004 that now makes the blocking or throttling of competitors not a problem?
The evidence points strongly in the opposite direction.
There is a long history of anti-competitive throttling and blocking, often concealed, that the FCC has had to stop to preserve the health of the internet economy.
Yeah, I mean, it's been tried before, and they've had.
So the FCC has a history of having to fight for net neutrality, for the goodness of the internet economy.
You know, I did not know that that's already happened, I didn't know that had already happened, that they'd already done the throttling stuff.
Did you?
Well, it's been tried on smaller levels.
I mean, there's been some instances of ATT doing some stuff and other companies like that.
And, you know, I mean, the whole reason it went to court in the first place a couple of years ago was because they wanted to do that type of stuff.
And that's how, you know, the conversation heightened in the first place.
But yeah, I mean, it's not the greatest thing in the world that we're having to rely on the courts, but it's like the important thing here is that, like, no, this is really changing the face of the internet as we know it.
Yes.
You know what I like, Jimmy?
I actually like the way the Democrats have come out so forcefully.
Oh, wait a minute.
I hardly hear a thing from them about net neutrality.
It's like, it seems as if it's like a grassroots kind of movement that people have to come together and scream and shout about maintaining neutrality for us and access.
I guess ultimately it's a protection.
It's very much so a protection.
And to be totally fair, you know, there have been some, I mean, Kamala Harris has been saying some stuff for it.
So people have been speaking.
And one of the people that really was good on net neutrality didn't agree with him on everything, but on net neutrality was actually Franken.
Al Franken was pretty good on the net neutrality thing.
And, you know, he's a little busier with other things these days.
Yes.
But he was one of the bigger people at the top that was harping on net neutrality.
But don't you think it's so weird that they're not making it a priority since it really is about access?
Yeah.
Well, no, I mean, it's huge.
And yeah, you're not hearing much about it.
And I think that's even more a fault of the corporate media because look at who owns MSNBC Comcast, which we've talked about.
I mean, we've done stories on this show about them playing dumb about net neutrality, which is, you know, it is a very complicated web, but it's not like when you strip it down, it's not that complicated of an idea to reach the conclusion of, yeah, we need net neutrality, but yet they'll play dumb on it.
CNN, Fox News.
I mean, the stories are basically non-existent on net neutrality.
So they're doing this national day of protest about this, which is I'm glad we can tell you about it.
It's VerizonProtests.com.
That's the VerizonProtests.com.
Don't kill net neutrality.
It says the new chairman of the FCC was a top lawyer at Verizon, and now he's calling for a vote to kill net neutrality.
We're protesting at retail stores across the U.S. to demand that Congress stop Verizon's puppet FCC from destroying the internet as we know it.
Join the protest.
So you might wonder, why Verizon?
Yeah.
This is what they say.
The new chairman of the FCC is Ajid Pai.
He's a former top lawyer for Verizon.
And the company has been spending millions on lobbying and lawsuits to kill net neutrality so they can gouge us all for more money.
By protesting at Verizon stores, we're shining light on the corruption and demanding that our local do something about it.
Only Congress has the power to stop Verizon's puppet FCC.
So at the protests, we'll be calling and tweeting at legislators.
And in cities where it's possible, we'll march from Verizon stores to lawmakers' offices.
The December 7th protests representing growing grassroots backlash to the FCC's plan, which polls show is wildly unpopular with people from across the political.
So December 7th is the day.
The events are supported by a group called Team Internet, a grassroots network of nearly a half a million volunteer activists, spearheaded by Demand Progress, Fight for the Future, and Free Press Action Fund.
Three of the groups behind the massive July 12th net neutrality day of action that drove millions of comments, emails, and phone calls to the FCC and Congress.
So that's who's doing this, Team Internet, along with Demand Progress, Fight for the Future, and Free Press Action Fund.
Over recent months, those groups behind the protests have organized thousands of constituents to attend more than 600 town halls and meetings with lawmakers to demand their support for net neutrality.
A phone call campaign through battleforthenet.com has generated nearly a quarter million phone calls to legislators' offices.
So go, here's the place again.
Well, let me just show you this.
Dave Anthony says this.
He's a friend of the show from the Dollop podcast.
He says, nationalize the internet.
We paid to develop it.
We dropped $400 billion for infrastructure that the company's never completed and just kept.
Why the fuck should private companies restrict it?
Fuck them.
Nationalize it.
He's absolutely right.
And, you know, let's keep in mind in the long run, which, you know, obviously the fight for net neutrality in the short term is incredibly important.
But in the long run, we're going to need municipal internet solutions like what a lot of other countries have that have faster internet service and better internet access than we do.
Of course, it's another one of those things.
We have the resources to pay for it a million times over.
Right.
But, you know, it's not a priority.
Maybe someday we'll have the same internet speed as Latvia.
Right.
So there it is again.
Go to VerizonProtest.com and they have a map there and you can find out where the protests are in your town.
I found my Verizon store already.
And if there's not a protest already scheduled to happen in your town, you can host one and they'll help you.
Ah, that's go to VerizonProtest.com to get all the information about how to protest net neutrality being taken away by this administration.
So go to VerizonProtest.com.
That'll help.
Now we're going to talk about teachers.
So I don't know if you remember, but a few years ago in Wisconsin, they decided to take the union away from the teachers because, you know, when the economy crashes, you know whose fault it is.
It's the goddamn teachers.
You know, the teachers keep bankrupting us.
Barack Obama was at all the protests, though, right?
Wasn't he there?
Oh, no.
Barack Obama, who promised to put on a soft shoe and march on a picket line if unions needed him, wouldn't even mention that the teachers were getting their union taken away in Wisconsin.
And you wonder why we got Trump?
They literally shit on teachers in Wisconsin.
That's who they came after, not the bankers, not the people who hooked up lead to the people in Flint and Michigan.
They came in Wisconsin.
They go after the goddamn teachers.
I think they figuratively shit on the teachers, Jimmy.
Yes, that's right.
Figuratively.
I meant figuratively.
So what if they did it?
So now the Center for American Progress, which is the John Podesta-founded group, right?
And Naira Tandon runs it now.
So those are corporate Democrats.
So they funded a study and after 10, they called it.
So Act 10 was the act that took away collective bargaining rights from teachers, meaning no union.
No protections.
You lose your protections.
Right.
And so what do you think would be the effect of that would be?
What do you think the effect of that would be if you make it less attractive for smart people who are qualified, quality people to go into teaching?
Because if you want to attract quality people in any other part of the economy, you raise the pay and then you attract better quality people.
That's why everybody at the top of their class, everybody goes to Wall Street, right?
Because that's where the money is, right?
So they can attract the smartest people to come work for them because they so, but they don't do that with teaching.
Isn't that weird?
Teachers are supposed to be like, you know, charity workers.
The result was the teachers are now paid less, have fewer benefits and less experience than before Act 10 was passed.
So the teachers have less experience, they have fewer benefits, and they're paid less.
So if you pay people less and you give them fewer benefits, what happens?
Quality people go elsewhere.
So all the worst wounds in America are self-inflicted.
So here's the people of Wisconsin electing a right-wing government that immediately attacks their educational system.
So now they have shittier education in Wisconsin.
They did it to themselves.
The people went out and voted for this.
Wisconsin teachers saw a median compensation decrease of 8.2% in just the 2011-22 school year, just according to the Capitol Times.
The average teacher salary decreased by over $1,200 between 2010 and 2011 and 2011 and 2012 school years, while retirement and healthcare benefits dropped nearly $6,000.
That's who they're balancing the budget on in Wisconsin.
They're taking it from the teachers, not to the people who all the gains of the recovery has gone to, which is the upper 1%.
Remember, corporations are sitting on record profits.
Wall Street's at record highs.
Lots of people have tons of dough from this economy.
And remember who bailed out Wall Street?
It was you.
Your tax money bailed out Wall Street, did not bail you out.
Now those people are making all the money.
And who do we get?
Who are we going to squeeze money from?
Teachers.
Yeah.
And all this nickel and diming in education.
Like it's such a drop in the bucket compared to what we need, but it's hurting the people.
It's hurting the teachers.
That's a lot of money to a teacher.
Just like what's going on, what they're doing to graduate students.
That's a lot to do to a grad student who's living on a stipend that's literally meant to be a living stipend.
So they're living paycheck to paycheck, trying to get their degree.
And now they're going to be taxed on their tuition.
This is not helping our deficit at the federal level.
This is class warfare.
This is class warfare by the rich, by the millionaires and billionaires on everyone else.
Yeah, and it's making education solely for the elite, which is fascism 101.
It's as if they want us to be dumb and have no access.
Because if you're informed, you're educated, you're going to want a revolution.
And if you're poor, you don't have access.
This is awful.
This is disturbing as a teacher.
I know that I got paid a 10-month contract.
Two months I wasn't paid.
So you have to like figure that out and find your balance for those two months.
You know, you either work summer school and you're working with kids that are, you know, you typically like they haven't been that successful.
And so it's a longer day for them.
And that's hard.
But, you know, when you see that this kind of inequality is happening for educators, let's not pretend for one second America cares about kids.
Let's not pretend for one second you care about education or you care about our military.
You know, this is the fastest way to destroy the middle class and it's through education.
And look what they're doing.
Yeah.
Well, and this has like ancient times written all over it.
You know, the times where it was, it was illegal to teach people to think critically.
It was legal to, you know, like make sure they can be of service somehow, but it was illegal to like make them think critically or anything like that.
And that's how, you know, the elite are going after education now in a way that that is unheard of.
I never would have imagined this would happen.
I never would imagine something like, oh, you're going to, you're going to tax someone's tuition remission.
That's amazing.
Or I'm going to be, man, glad I went to grad school and I did.
I couldn't go now.
I mean, it's insane.
Well, the Center for American Progress's analysis showed that in the 2015-2016 school year, Wisconsin teachers' median combined salaries and benefits were almost $11,000 less than they were before Act 10 passed.
So you're taking almost 11 grand in compensation away from your average teacher in Wisconsin.
And why do you think that is?
What do you think the results of lowering pay is?
Well, the report said lower salaries were driven in part by the decrease in experience levels among teachers in Wisconsin.
Why is that?
Because as soon as they screwed over the teachers in Wisconsin, the people who were close to retirement quit and the people who wanted to have a career in teaching went to other states.
Well, the year immediately following Act 10's passage saw a spike in teacher over teachers over 55 who retired.
You know, right when they figured out teaching, after they've had about 20 years in the classroom and they figured out they've been confronted with almost every problem and they figured out how to get their election, their lesson plans over and into kids' heads, they figured out the best way to do all that stuff.
Now they're leaving.
As soon as they get good at what they're doing, as soon as they become an expert teacher, they leave because you're effing them over.
I'm sitting here and I'm looking at the disparity in the loss of wealth and the loss of retirement income.
And I just Thought, well, how many of these people are women as educators?
According to Women in Power in Wisconsin, it says 80% of teachers nationally and in Wisconsin were female, and 90% at the elementary level were women.
So if you don't think this is also an attack on women and their ability to care for the family, so when women do well, your country will do well, right?
You'll become well-doers.
So before they took the union away from teachers, 15% of people, teachers over 55 would retire.
After they took the union away, 35% of teachers over 55 retired.
So you're getting rid of your most qualified, most experienced, most best teachers.
The report also highlighted the falling numbers of students enrolling in teacher preparation programs, both in Wisconsin and across the country.
So we're making it less attractive for people to become teachers, especially the best and sprightest people from becoming teachers.
What could go wrong?
What could there possibly be a negative ramification of dismantling our education system?
What could possibly go wrong?
We should be doing the exact opposite.
The Center for American Progress Studies cited a recent report from the Wisconsin Budget Project detailing the extreme applicant shortages, extreme applicant shortages many districts are facing.
Extreme applicant shortages, meaning there aren't people signing up to be teachers in Wisconsin.
It's an all-time low.
Extreme shortage of teachers, particularly in math and science.
And DPI's increased use of emergency licenses to fill vacancies.
Well, at least it's not in the important subjects, you know, just math and science.
No big deal.
Yeah.
So I'm going to guess that an emergency license to fill vacancies means they take someone who isn't credentialed as a teacher and they go, you're now a teacher.
Oh, yeah, there's been reports they're using like just temp service to get teachers.
That's amazing.
It's a teaching jobs.
And it's not like just, oh, you're subbing in for a day or something.
It's like actual like until.
This is how our empire ends.
We're doing it to ourselves.
This is what happens when corporations run your government.
This is what they dismantle education.
They wreck the country.
Again, remember, 63% of the country can't afford a $1,000 emergency.
This is what we're left with.
So a revolution is going to happen.
Brexit happened in England.
It scared the shit out of everybody.
And now, actually, the socialist is going to take over.
It looks like Jeremy Corbyn because they didn't rig their elections like we did here in the United States.
They don't have the Electoral College in England.
They don't have the Democratic National Committee screwing over the progressive like we had it here.
So we actually had a remedy for our problem.
It was called Bernie Sanders' progressivism.
And guess what?
The corporation got in the way of that.
That's not happening here.
They weren't able to stop them in England.
So things are worse than you think.
This is a direct result of the Democrats getting in bed with Wall Street, military industrial complex, big pharma, and the fossil fuel companies.
This is exactly the result of the Democrats turning their back on workers.
This is the result.
This is the world we live in now, where we have the government working against you right out in the open, and the corporate media doesn't report it.
How is this not the headline story on every newscast?
Hey, by the way, our government's fucking over our workers.
They're dismantling our education.
How does that not the top story?
But I'm sure Rachel Maddow is going to do about 45 minutes on Russia.
Guess what?
Teachers in Wisconsin are down $10,000 a year in pay, not because of Russia, but because of the corporations that pay Rachel Maddow.
But what if we told them that Russia bots hacked into the systems and that's why their pay's down?
Maybe then they would at least talk about it.
Maybe we could, if, oh, maybe we should tell people that Russia hacked into Wisconsin's unions and now the teachers are making $11,000 less a year.
Maybe they will talk about it on MSNBC then.
Maybe Chris Hayes will talk about it then.
That's, yeah.
Hmm.
Isn't that interesting?
So we will talk about it on this show.
We actually have a woman of color who's a teacher, a union leader on this show.
That's me.
Where do they have union leaders on?
What television news shows do they have union leaders on?
Which ones?
I don't know.
They brought on Randy Weingarten.
She was the teachers' union leader.
They brought her around when she was going to prop up Hillary Clinton.
That's when they brought her on.
They didn't bring on union leaders who propped up Bernie Sanders.
We'll tell you the truth about it.
Anthony Scarabucci's on the line.
He's always a pleasant hello.
Hello.
Jimmy, how you doing?
Hey, I don't got a lot of time, so we're going to make this quick, all right?
I think Sarah Huckabee Sanders is a wonderful girl, and I think she's doing a fine job.
Look, we come into this business thinking we're going to bone everybody in the ass, and they're going to like it, right?
I really don't know what you mean by that.
Call me Tony.
I really don't know what you mean by that, Tony.
Here's the score, okay?
You're born and you die.
And in between, you try to fuck over as many people as possible.
It's that simple.
That's the business we're in.
And if you can't handle it, then go make velvet cupcakes or some shit like that because you're not made out for this business.
That's why Sarah's doing a great job.
By what measure?
Well, she's got a great personality for one.
How's that for a measurement?
Speaking of measurements, what's yours?
Hey, somebody break out a ruler.
Let's see your dick, Jimmy.
Come on, show us your dick.
No.
Ah, kidding.
Just kidding.
Lighten up, Jim Bob.
Had you for a moment there, right?
Call me Tony.
Do you think she tells the truth?
I think she's got a wonderful personality.
Okay, let's try it this way.
What do you think of her personality?
I think she does the best of her ability to tell the truth, but also to protect the president.
Jimmy wasn't your ordinary shitbag interviewer.
You see, he knew the best way to make you squeal was to ask the unexpected, simple question.
He had me and he knew it.
I was caught lying about a lie.
I felt like I was in a house of cards and I was Kevin Spacey's intern.
I was pinned against the wall and could smell Jimmy's cologne all over the back of my neck like sour honeydew.
I had to change the subject.
I'm going to sue some Brad at Tufts University for writing an unflattering editorial about me.
You know, there's a lot more to that phone call.
We don't have time on today's podcast.
Of course, we have time, but we have to save stuff for our premium members.
It's a great way to help support the show.
Our audio premium is only $5 a month.
If you'd like video premium, that's $10 a month.
It's a great way to help support the show because nobody else is except you.
That's who we're answering to, our listeners.
Thanks so much for your support.
We'll see you Monday night, December 4th at Flappers Comedy Club in Burbank, California.
Special guest just added to the show, Jank Uger.
Go to jimmydoorcomedy.com for a link for tickets.
All right, thanks to our special guest, Professor Richard Wolf.
Today's show was written, that's right, it was written by Ron Placone, Jim Earl, Frank Cottiff, Steph Zamarano, and Mike McRae.
All the voices today performed by the one and the only, the inimitable, Mike McRae, who can be found at mikemcray.com.
Today's show produced by the one and the only Brian Gradillo.
Okay, that's it for this week.
Until next week, this is Jimmy Dorr saying you be the best you can be, and I'll keep being me.
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