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May 10, 2018 - Jimmy Dore Show
01:13:04
20180510_0510_TJDS_PODCAST
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Get ready for an outstanding entertainment program.
The Jimmy Dore Show.
Hey, it looks like we have Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the phone.
BB, how are you?
Please, Jimmy, call me Bibi.
Ah, you're learning.
I like it.
How are you doing, my swift learning friend?
I've been better, Bibi.
You sound like you're in a great mood.
You can say that again, Jimmy.
A few weeks ago, I was a soon-to-be-disgraced politician marred by countless scandals.
But today, we are at war with Iran, and nobody remembers any of that shit.
God is great, Jimmy.
Yeah, you really came out ahead on that one.
That is the beauty of the Israeli state, my friend.
It is an American-style democracy in the Middle East.
And by that, I mean whenever the head of state starts getting in trouble, he can always just blow things up in other countries.
Never fails.
No, it does not.
Boom!
No more scandal.
And this one is a doozy, too.
I mean, it could lead to war between your allies.
Great work, Bibi.
Jimmy, Israel has the right to defend itself.
Iran launched a barrage of rockets at us from Syria, Jimmy.
What do you expect us to do?
None of those rockets really did any damage at all, and they are a response to an Israeli rocket launched into Syria first, which people don't seem to be talking about.
Jimmy, we could squabble about who started what all day.
But what is important is that Israel defends itself, and that means keeping Iran from having a nuclear bomb.
I bet you're happy about Trump backing out of that Iran deal.
He's a good boy, that Donnie.
Does what we say?
And yes, that was a rotten deal we had with Iran.
We may as well have delivered a nuclear bomb to them in a fruit basket.
Here you go, courtesy of spineless Western leaders.
It's really Israel and the U.S. versus the world on this one.
You realize that, right?
It's important to make people think that if Iran gets a nuke, they will blow up everybody in the world.
Jimmy, that kind of hysteria is most easily planted in America and Israel.
And in those great countries, the idea that persistently trying to starve the Iranian people is good diplomacy takes purchase.
I see.
It is disheartening to me to see so many other Western countries in Europe and elsewhere lacking the spine to be irrationally terrified of brown people when we tell them to be.
Right.
Such anti-Semitism.
Shameful.
We still have so far to go.
All we ask is for a reversal of years of diplomacy and a return to a policy of sanctions, each more crippling for the Iranian population than the last.
And to see resistance to this?
Jimmy, as long as I live, I will never understand the hate in people's hearts.
But for now, we are at war.
Resistance humbles in war.
War unites people under their leader.
During war, it is good to be king.
Do you have any idea how far this will escalate?
Well, right now, we're thinking it might just stay what it is, the sort of typical situation where Israel responds to an impotent and ineffective aggression with devastating reprisals that kill civilians and, you know, leave it at that.
Right.
But who knows?
If these goody tushus here at home keep gunning for me like they have been, we may need to bring out the big guns, attack Iranian targets overseas, strong-arm the U.S. into doing something rash, maybe drag Russia in.
I don't know.
We'll see.
Depends on how long it takes for my scandals to go away.
So we do just an oh yeah.
Okay, Bibi.
Well, thanks for talking with us.
And yeah, you're an incredibly dangerous man and a threat to the world.
Good to talk to you too, Jimmy, and I hope you will join us in praying for peace.
Thank you.
It's the Jimmy Dore Show.
The show for blackbeasts.
The kind of people that are comments, maybe on tearing down our nation.
It's the show that makes Anderson Cooper save.
It's our farm here, T-Day.
And now, here's a guy who sounds a lot like me.
It's Jimmy Dore.
Hey, everybody, welcome to this week's Jimmy Dore Show.
July 1st is our next live show in Portland, Oregon.
Go to JimmyDoreCountry.com for all dates.
We're going to add one in Chicago too in July, so we'll see you.
Let's get to some of the jokes before we get to the joke, Shall.
You know, I don't know about you, but I'm hoping that that treasure trove of information the CIA took from Bin Laden reveals why I paid taxes last year and GE didn't.
Not that funny.
Not that funny.
Hey, you know that California officially the world's fifth largest economy?
Yeah, I think it's time to attack Britain again.
How about that?
I'm losing control of my narrative.
Those are the last words of hipster douchebag Hitler.
Speaking of Hitler, Jeff Bezos, Whole Foods just bailed out a $100 million deal, driving an organic supplier into bankruptcy.
Hey, with any luck, he'll bankrupt the CIA too.
You know, if Jeff Bezos ever had a good twin brother, I bet he ended up at the bottom of an abandoned well decades ago.
Sure, Nancy Pelosi's against universal health care, but she's not against everything universal, like, you know, being universally disliked.
You know, in the past, Oliver North sold arms to terrorist organizations.
And now as president of the NRA, he gets to run a terrorist organization.
Ah, the circle of death.
Hey, what's coming up on today's show?
We're going to take a dive into our interviews.
We had a couple of really important interviews on the show recently.
Professor Richard Wolf, the Marxian economist, author of Democracy at Work, and the host of the YouTube show, Economic Update.
Plus, we check in with Jesse Ventura, everybody's favorite.
He talks about his new book, Jesse Ventura's Marijuana Manifesto.
Plus, we got phone calls today from B.B. Netanyahu, Mitt Romney, and Bill O'Reilly's drunk, leaving me messages again, plus a lot more.
That's today on the Jimmy Dore Show.
Hi, everybody.
Welcome to the Jimmy Dore Show.
We have a special guest with us today on the line.
He is the former governor of Minnesota, former mayor, and a former Navy SEAL.
His latest book is Jesse Ventura's Marijuana Manifesto.
It's now out in paperback.
Please welcome our guest, Jesse Ventura.
Hey, Jesse.
Hi, Jimmy.
Great to be here today.
Hey, tell me about the book and what made you write it and what's in it.
Well, it's a book where we did the research and we really wanted to give an honest book to the people of the United States of America on cannabis or marijuana.
You know, they prefer to use the term cannabis now, and so I refer to it as cannabis, but it's a new industry that is just now being legalized, and it has the potential of being a $45 billion industry, American-grown, American-used, American jobs, nothing outside the United States of America.
And when we're looking, I mean, the state of Colorado now, since they lifted prohibition of cannabis, has added 18,000.
Let me repeat that, 18,000 new jobs in the state of Colorado.
And so I wanted to really try to educate the public that this is a remarkable plant.
In fact, I made the statement when I spoke at the Jacob Javits Center a year ago at the convention, the National Cannabis Convention.
I said, in my opinion, the people that outlawed this plant, they should be the ones being put in jail.
Because this plant is so remarkable, and I'll just give you my personal end of it.
Cannabis saved my life.
How so?
Not me directly, but someone very close to me developed an epileptic seizure condition.
And this person, if you've ever dealt with seizures, you know how helpless you are.
You have to just ride them out.
I don't have it, but you have to ride them out, make sure the person keeps breathing, comfort them until the seizure subsides.
And sometimes they can go for seconds or they can go for 15 minutes.
Who knows?
And this person went to regular doctors and was given four different pharmaceutical medicines, one after the other after the other.
None of them worked.
In fact, many of them had bad side effects.
In desperation, we took the person to Colorado.
It started when the person got there, even had a seizure the night before in the hotel.
And when the person got there, it started with three drops under the tongue of a clear liquid.
Well, now the person's got it pill form, and medical marijuana is now legal in Minnesota.
And so this person takes one pill in the morning, one at night.
That was three or four years ago, and this person has been completely seizure-free from being able to use cannabis.
So when I tell you it saved my life, it did.
Because my life as I knew it was gone.
And like I said, if you've ever dealt with seizures, even if you're not the one getting them, it disrupts and can destroy an entire multiple lives.
Now, Jesse, this is another situation where the legislature is way behind the people.
So the people have been out in front on legalizing medical marijuana and just recreational marijuana.
Why do you think?
You know, let's throw that out, Jimmy, for a second.
One of my best friends is Tommy Chong.
Okay.
And who the hell knows more about cannabis than Tommy Chong?
Right.
And Tommy has said clearly there should be no difference between they should not be making medical marijuana and so-called recreational marijuana.
As Tommy says, the entire plant is medical.
Those that smoke it for the euphoric feeling or to get high, they're doing it for mental health.
Oh, I never looked at it like that.
Yes, you're right.
Absolutely.
That's for mental health to keep you.
This world's crazy enough that we live in.
I would rather have people smoking pot than taking Prozac.
Yes, I would too, right?
Why do you think that the legislature is so far behind the people when it comes to marijuana?
Well, because, again, follow the money.
Anytime you're dealing with anything dealing with government, money will be what it doesn't.
Money will legalize cannabis, just as money kept cannabis illegal.
You've got the tobacco industry, the alcohol industry, and big pharma who do not want cannabis legal.
Why?
Simple.
Follow the money.
Technically, if they legalize it across the board, poor people could then use it for free because why?
They could grow it in their backyard.
Oh, so again, yeah, so that's what I've always done.
And so then there'd be no taxes collected on it because if you grew it, like my mother, when I grew up in the heart of the city of Minneapolis when I was a kid, every year my mom in our small little backyard had a tomato patch where she'd grow fresh tomatoes and we'd eat tomatoes all summer grown in the backyard.
Well, you could do the same thing with a cannabis plant, and therefore you wouldn't have to buy it commercially.
Poor people could use it as freely as they wanted to if they grew it on their own.
And that's the reason they won't leave.
The government, hey, if the government could charge you for the air you breathe, they would tax you for that if they could.
If they could put a meter on it.
Yes.
Yep.
I'm with you.
I'm with you on that.
So again, it's exactly, I remember Patrick Kennedy was going around a few years ago against, you know, he was in rehab and drug addict, and he was coming out and he was advocating against medical marijuana and it was all because we're afraid for the kids.
And then, of course, it turns out he's got ties to the pharmaceutical industries, of course, right?
Of course.
Not only that, but come on.
Nobody's saying you'll give it to kids.
And let's face it, if kids want cannabis, they can get it.
I know.
You know, that's absurd.
They can't.
You know, you treat it like you do alcohol.
Treat it like you do tobacco.
That's all you got to do.
Treat it like it does.
And you know how you stop kids from using cannabis?
It's called parenting.
It's a new concept.
It's called parenting.
Do your job as a parent.
Many children have alcohol problems.
Many children now have opiate problems because they've stolen pills out of the cabinet at home.
Yep.
You know, if you want to look at a problem, look at the opiate problem.
And isn't that interesting, Jimmy, that for years and years they told us cannabis was a stepping stone to heroin when the reality is it's not.
It gets you off it.
Every state, every state where they've legalized cannabis, the opiate use has dropped.
And those are statistics that can't be argued.
Now, I filled in for you.
I was grateful that you offered to fill in for your show while you're on vacation.
Now, your show is on RT.
Now, there's a Russia hysteria take that has taken over the country.
And my theory is it's just that the establishment didn't want to examine the system that brought us Donald Trump.
So it was easier to blame another country when everybody knows the people manipulating our elections are right here in the United States.
We have a completely captured government captured by corporations, meaning Wall Street, the military industrial complex, big pharma, healthcare, and fossil fuel companies.
Those are the people manipulating our elections.
Now, what do you make of all this Russian?
Jimmy, Take a look back.
Look what's gotten lost in the shuffle of all this.
The most important thing of this whole thing got lost in the shuffle here, and you don't hear a word about it.
And that was this.
Those documents that leaked out of the Democrat supposedly were hijacked out of the Democratic Party.
Yes.
They showed that the thing was fixed.
That Bernie Sanders didn't have a chance, that Hillary was going to get it no matter what, and the whole thing was a fraud and a fix.
And that's been lost.
Nobody talks about the result.
I came out and said if the Russians expose that, we should thank them.
I couldn't agree with you more.
Because that's the real news story that's been lost in all this: the fact that the Democratic election process was completely fixed.
Hillary and her money was behind the whole Democratic Party, and she had them in the bag.
It did not matter what Bernie did.
It didn't matter how many votes Bernie got.
Hillary was getting the nomination.
And they want us to believe today, they're trying to sell us that if Russia hadn't interfered, Hillary'd be the president now.
I'm with you 100%.
I try to remind people that this is all a distraction from the biggest election fraud in the history of our country, which was a Democratic primary in 2016.
I mean, they have fraud built into their process, Jesse.
You know, superdelegates.
That sounds like.
Oh, absolutely.
Well, look at my home state, Jimmy, my home state of Minnesota.
Yes.
Voters, it went overwhelmingly for Bernie Sanders, but it ended up a wash.
You know why?
The two superdelegates were Frankton and Klobucher.
They both voted for Hillary, and that washed away the people's choice, which was Bernie Sanders.
Which when Al Franken, when he went away, I did not shed a tear for that very reason.
He is willing to go against the will of his people very happily to prop up a warmongering oligarch over someone who was favored by the people.
So that tells you all you need to know about Al Franken.
Did you know Al Franken personally?
You're both from Minnesota.
Yeah, well, I knew him, and my biggest criticism was Al.
I like Al because Al's always showed me a great deal of respect, which I appreciate that as an independent.
But my problem with Al Franken's whole candidacy was he hadn't lived in Minnesota for probably 15 or 20 years.
Right.
And then he moves back here, gets an apartment back here, and runs for Senate.
Right.
Well, excuse me, you know, shouldn't you be, you know, I've lived in Minnesota my entire life, basically, other than the few forays out in the pro-wrestling world in the territory days where you had to go live in New York and you had to go live in a couple other places.
But I've always maintained a Minnesota driver's license, and my home residence has always been Minnesota.
Al Franken hadn't lived in Minnesota for 20 to 25 years, and then all of a sudden he comes back and becomes the senator.
I was, you know, I had problems with his bend towards neoliberalism and his support of the system.
I was hoping he would be like a real comedian, an outsider who was going to shake up the system.
And it turned out that was not his plan.
His plan was to have.
Jimmy, you got to learn something.
Anyone that joins the two parties is not going to shake up the system.
So let me ask you, that's a...
Donald Trump is not an independent.
He's a Republican.
He joined the Republican Party.
That's why I would never, ever consider endorsing him in any way, shape, or form.
Because once you join the party, you're part of that gang.
You're part of that machinery.
I'll plug another one of my books shamelessly.
I wrote the book Democrats and Replicans, No More Gangs in Government.
And I actually apologize at the start of the book to the Crips and the Bloods for using their name in that manner.
That's funny.
So what do you think about?
I've been saying pretty much the same thing you've been saying, Jesse, is that how much longer is it going to take for people to realize that the Democratic Party not only does not represent progressives, but they actively work against them.
And someone like Bernie Sanders, who keeps what I call sheepdogging progressives into a party he's not even a member of.
Why do you think that's happening?
Well, because Bernie really is a Democrat.
He masks himself as an independent so that he can have an eye by his name.
But Bernie's actually, he's a Democrat.
He ran in the Democratic primary.
And I knew from the get-go that Bernie's whole campaign was going to end up a joke and a fraud in a way because early on he came to Minneapolis and I went down to meet with him and I was actually considering endorsing him.
Well, first of all, he wouldn't give me the time of day.
He met with me for 30 seconds to a minute in the hallway.
But I was able to ask him a question early on.
I said, Bernie, Senator, if you lose the Democratic primary, will you support another independent or will you run yourself as an independent?
He looked me right in the eye, and this was way before.
And he said, oh, no, absolutely not.
I will endorse the Democratic nominee.
Yeah, that's so dead.
And so when Bernie, when, no, I walked out of the building that day knowing, I said, I'm not endorsing Bernie Sanders because Bernie's going to get wasted out of this thing.
And then he's going to tell all his people to vote for Hillary.
I certainly didn't vote for the Democrat.
I was a Bernie supporter who ended up supporting the Green Party.
I voted for Jill Stein because I could not support warmongers anymore.
That's just how I am.
And so I voted my conscience.
You know, people forget that Hillary Clinton, right before the election, she tweeted out, vote your conscience.
No, of course she didn't mean that.
That was another lie.
What she meant was, if you're a Republican, don't vote for Trump.
That's what she meant by that, right?
See, to me, Hillary, Hillary, I could never support her because she admitted the most important vote she ever took as a U.S. senator, she got wrong.
The Iraq War?
The Iraq War.
Well, then why would I want her as president when the most important vote, by her own admission, that she did as a senator, was wrong?
Excuse me, that's the most important vote you ever did and you got it wrong.
And now you think I should elect you president?
Are you kidding me?
So, you know, that ended it for Hillary.
You know, there was no way I was going to support her at all because, as I said, she got the most important vote wrong.
And so what do you make of people who blame people like you for Donald Trump because you wouldn't vote for Hillary Clinton?
What do you say to those people?
Well, it's simple.
You vote for the person you most want to be president.
And the Democrats are great at that.
They're great at, they never accept blame that Hillary ran a lousy campaign she took for granted, thought she'd win for sure, and she got knocked on her Ass.
But they blame something else.
So they blame the Russians.
Well, back in 2000, who did they blame for when the same scenario took place?
Al Gore beat George W. Bush in the popular vote, but George W. Bush won the Electoral College.
Who did they blame?
My friend Ralph Nader.
Then it was Ralph's fault because all the people that voted for Ralph should have voted for Al Gore.
See, that's the way Democrats think.
And the point of all of this is when you go to vote, you haven't wasted your vote if you vote your conscience and you vote for the person you most want to be president.
And the proof that they don't even believe that garbage themselves, when people say that it was your fault or my fault or Susan Sarandon or Jill Stein's fault, if they really thought that we had that kind of power, they would try to reach out to us and they would try to woo us, which is what politicians are supposed to do.
Politicians, they're incumbent upon them to get people to vote for you.
And if people don't vote for you, it's your fault.
You don't blame the voters, which is exactly what the Democrats and their minions are doing.
That would be like if the Chicago Bears lost a football game and they blame the fans.
Exactly.
But that's the way it works.
The Dems are good at that.
They never accept their own shortfalls.
They never accept the fact that they got beat again because they really don't stand for that.
And truthfully, these two parties, they stand together on the things that are most important to them and to the world.
You notice both parties.
Here's the thing that angers me, Jimmy.
You just had Donald Trump shoot rockets in Syria again.
Yeah.
Now, it happened a year ago when I left.
I thought I was reliving my deja vu, my life over again.
I come back and I hear the same thing I heard a year ago.
Now, here's my question.
Syria is not a terrorist group.
Syria is a legitimate country with a legitimate government.
Now, it just so happens we don't seem to like them.
But what gives us the right to pump weapons of war rockets into Syria without a declaration of war?
Nothing gives us that right.
In fact, it's an illegal war act is what we're doing.
Exactly.
We are breaking the law.
Donald Trump should be arrested for doing that, for violating the very thing he took an oath.
When you're in the military, you take an oath to protect the Constitution and Bill of Rights from all enemies, foreign and domestic.
Well, then I took an oath to defend myself against Donald Trump because Donald Trump is violating the Constitution by going to war without Congress's permission.
And I don't give a crap about these lawyers' opinions that they bring in who try to whitewash it around and look for openings in it.
It's very clear.
You don't go to war unless Congress votes for it.
Our founding fathers were very clear on that.
I'll give you another little tip that people forget about, 9-11.
Dick Cheney had no right to be in charge in that little bunker in 9-11.
The Constitution, they violated it there.
The Constitution's very clear.
It says unless the president is dead or incapacitated, the president was on Air Force One, which is fully equipped to run the country.
Why was Cheney calling the shots, which was completely protocol illegal?
The vice president has never, ever been given that power before.
You know, there's so many unanswered questions, and we're never going to get answers to any of those questions because you can't question anything, even the investigation by the 9-11 Commission.
Jimmy, you got to keep asking them, though, or they win.
The big conspiracy that no one talks about are these wars, right?
So the first Gulf War was a conspiracy.
That was also based on a pack of lies.
The Second Gulf War, also Iraq war, also a conspiracy based on a pack of lies.
Libya, Syria, these are all conspiracies by our government.
And yet when you try to call them out and investigate them, they smear you with that.
It's just a deal on the Middle East.
And it's really simplified.
All the countries we're attacking, be it Iran, maybe, Syria, who we've already attacked, Libya, we destroyed, and Iraq we destroyed.
Here's why.
Every one of those countries was going to go off the dollar.
Yes.
What you've got, we are going to war at the behest of the banking community, the bankers, the big money men.
And they don't want these countries going off the dollar.
And do you think that's just coincidence that every single country that we've waged war on in the last 20 years has been because they threatened to get rid of the dollar.
And so people don't realize how much the petrol dollar actually plays into this, right?
Now, we have a deal since we went off the gold standard under Nixon that Saudi Arabia, whenever they sold oil around the world, whoever was buying it from them, they would have to first convert their currency into U.S. dollars and then buy the oil.
And then Saudi Arabia would take some of those dollars and buy our bonds back here in the United States.
And that's how they're propping up our economy.
So if we don't go to war over the petrodollar, our economy will collapse.
And that's why if you look at every country we're attacking are the countries that are threatening to leave the dollar.
So Qaddafi was threatening to get an African currency, right?
He was going to start monetizing the oil on the dinar, correct?
I think so, yeah.
I'm not an expert.
I just know, yeah, Gaddafi was going to go to Africa.
Who is it was going to Europe?
They were going to do the Euro.
Uh-huh.
One of them.
But they're all going to get away from the dollar.
And you notice that the minute they start threatening to do that, the United States finds an excuse to attack them militarily and destroy their country in hopes of putting in a pro-American dollar government.
You want the ultimate thing that no one talks about that could dismiss the entire Russian investigation?
What?
Is this simple fact?
We don't elect our president.
The Electoral College does, and they're not bound by anything.
Yeah, they could have done whatever they wanted.
Unless the Russians got to the Electoral College, how could they interfere in our election?
That's a great point.
Nobody ever brings that up.
I thought you were going to say.
Yeah, of course they don't.
And how come the Democrats aren't yelling to get rid of the Electoral College?
I've been saying that all over.
You think that she would be campaigning to get rid of the Electoral College because it seems...
I have been.
I think the thing's ridiculous.
It's an elitist system designed to where...
Vladimir Putin's interview with Oliver Stone.
When they accuse Vladimir points out, in our assembly, we have four different parties represented.
You have only two.
And Putin says, when I win the presidency, I win by the popular vote.
The people don't even elect your president.
Yeah, people Are so ignorant about this kind of stuff in the United States, and it's because the press never talks about this.
That's why shows like yours is important because it actually talks about stuff like this.
You saw what happened just now at the White House correspondence dinner, where the comedian actually told the truth about what's happening in Washington, that the press is actually making a lot of money off of Donald Trump, and they all love Donald Trump for all the money he's bringing them.
And then she said, you know, Flint still doesn't have clean water.
None of those things were mentioned in their critiques.
They all talked about the most superficial thing in the world that she might have insulted a warmongere's feelings.
Who cares?
Exactly.
I'll tell you this to all the people that listen to your show, and I'm probably speaking to the choir.
That's the problem.
But unless we derail this war machine, this military-industrial complex that has taken over our country that Eisenhower warned us about, unless we stop them and stop them fast, we are going to fall.
Because empires that rely on war, when they fail, they fall quick and they fall hard.
And this country and its citizens are going to be sitting there when all this falls apart because military cannot support an economy.
And our economy is now totally dominated by military because we've let all the jobs, the manufacturing, and all that leave.
So the only thing we produce now basically is military weapons.
And when that runs out, our economy is going to go to shambles.
China's going to take over completely.
And we're going to be a destitute country.
And all these people here are going to look around and say, gee, how did this happen?
So, how do we fight back against the military-industrial complex?
Stop electing people, Democrats and Republicans, who both could take you to war.
Your example is Hillary Clinton.
She says the worst vote she ever did as a senator was voting for the Iraq war.
And all the other Democrats joined her.
Yes, I know.
Do you see them ever going the one budget that can't be cut defense?
Which they should call it war because it's not defense, it's offense.
So people don't really can't be cut.
People don't really.
You can't run today.
You cannot run for office and say you're going to cut spending like all these people that are telling Jesse Ventura to run.
Well, I would come out and say I'm going to cut defense spending.
Well, then the press would hammer that America's going to be unsafe because Jesse Ventura is going to cut defense spending when we spend more money on defense than the other 23 biggest nations in the world do combined.
So people don't realize that we're spending 40% more now in our military than we were at the height of the Iraq war.
We were spending $500 billion on our military at the height of the Iraq war.
Now we're spending $700 billion a year.
That's a 40% increase.
That could have paid for Bernie's free college.
That could end student debt.
That could do an infrastructure, a job plan.
It could have done a million things that people are actually crying for in America.
Instead, we put it in bombs and we're going to kill other people and create more terrorists with it.
That's our plan.
And the economy here is going to destruct and destroy because of it.
I agree with you.
So when it all collapses, go look at George Bush and Dick Cheney and thank them.
Because they were the two.
Like I've said publicly, George W. Bush is the worst president in my lifetime.
Now, Trump may be getting close, but he still ain't as bad as George W. Bush because George W. Bush invaded a country on lies, overthrew that country, occupied it, and destroyed it.
That's what the Nazis did.
That's what the communists did in the old days.
And now George Bush and Dick Cheney do it.
And here's two guys that wouldn't even serve.
Cheney had five deferments from the military.
And yet, he'll send your kids to war.
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Jimmy Dore.
Know why I don't go to parties?
Because I'm not a snob.
And all this.
You get all that?
It's not because I don't get invited much or at all.
Anyway, two large margarita pizzas.
Gluten-free crust this time, fellas, all right?
My bowels can't take it.
My bowels can't take it.
Sweet Jesus.
Bowels can't take it.
Talking to none other than Sarah Huckabee Sanders the other day at a party.
And I says to her, I just want to get my big hands around Jim Acosta's neck.
You know, just like I did with the wife.
Why, you ask?
Because I don't like being laughed at during sex.
And I could easily see Jim Acosta doing that.
Rights itself.
What kind of man am I in bed, you ask?
I'm a man who likes to improvise.
I like to do it live.
No spin air.
I'm very gentle in bed.
Matter of fact, I'm so gentle, I commonly fall asleep before paying.
Tip of the day.
Heads would have rolled if I had been at the White House correspondents dinner.
And I want to strangle Jim Acosta with my big hands just to scare him.
It's just to be funny.
And it would be funny.
I know all about comedy.
Here's a joke.
Hey, Jimmy, what's the secret to comedy?
I don't know, Bill.
What's the secret to comedy?
Here's the answer.
Time.
Me, you ruined my joke.
Or was that the joke?
Deep.
I don't want to hurt Jim Acosta.
Just want to scare him with my big hands.
There's a significant difference between scaring someone and hurting them.
The former leaves much less evidence, whereas the latter requires marriage.
And yes, I have big hands.
You're welcome.
I do not say this as an insult to our president.
But if you're going to strangle something, you need big hands.
However, I do have the feet of a delicate angel.
We heard how people are outraged over my threat to strangle Jim Acosta when journalism would be far better off if we both fell over a cliff in one of those Star Trek death holds.
And who gives a crap, right?
I often stand next to the little lady with my big hands.
What's the problem?
Because I'm not a snob.
My overgrown booze head and big clown-sized hands say nothing about my personality.
As you know, I have a very successful series of killing books.
But no accusatory chicks are going to ruin my career.
Make no mistake, this will not stand.
This ends here.
I will be back.
I shall return.
Mission will be accomplished.
So don't worry about me.
I always manage in the last act to pull it out.
Oops.
And what's this about DJ Collin refusing to eat pussy?
Hi, everybody.
Welcome to the Jimmy Door Show.
We have a very special guest in studio.
He's a friend of the show.
You've seen him on the show before.
It's Dr. Richard Wolf, and he is a Marxian economist, best known for his work on Marxian economics, economic methodology, and class analysis.
He's a professor emeritus at UMass Amherst, and he's a host of a weekly radio show on Pacifica Economic Update, which is also on YouTube.
Please welcome back to the show Richard Wolfe.
Thanks for being here.
Thank you for inviting me.
Now, please, for a dumb guy like me, please explain what that means, Marxian economics.
Okay, good.
I'm glad you asked.
Marxian theory, Marxian economics, is a criticism of capitalism.
It makes a whole lot of arguments about why capitalism ain't so good and we could do better.
Given the situation of the world today, it seems to me a reasonable thing to at least read this stuff.
And that's all I ever did as I read it.
And so what is Marx, what are some of his prescriptions to fix capitalism that we could implement?
Well, his point of view is a little different.
His point of view is we've tried to fix it.
We've tried over and over to fix it.
We've had all good efforts to fix it.
You can't fix it.
It's busted.
It's a little bit, for Marxian economics, it's a little bit like having that meeting with the refrigerator repairman comes to your house.
He's been to your house now more and more frequently.
This time it's the condenser, next time it's the motor, next time it's the this.
And then there comes that sad moment when he comes to you and he says, look, I could take another couple of hundred bucks and fix it, but you're throwing money away.
It's time to get a new refrigerator.
And you don't want to hear it, but you kind of know, since he's a straight guy, that he's giving it to you honestly.
And you might as well save the $200.
Marx's argument is you need a different system.
You can't.
We've tried, for example, to have less inequality in our world.
We have more than we've ever had.
We have inequality now that takes you back to ancient Egypt.
You know, Jeff Bezos has $129 billion.
I mean, it's obscene, basically.
You have millions of people, can't pay their kids college, can't do the most basic things a society wants to do.
And so Marx would say, hey, this system produces inequality.
It always has.
And it keeps doing that until people rise up and say, we've had it.
And then it stops for a while, and then it starts up again.
So you kind of ought to learn the lesson.
The system's busted.
Let's try something else.
And what do you say we should try?
Marx's argument's very elementary in this area because he didn't spend a lot of time.
He didn't believe in looking into the future and guessing how things would.
He didn't believe in that.
He made a joke once.
If you want that, go to the county fair, give money to the lady who tells you your future.
It's fun, it's amusing, but you don't take that seriously.
She doesn't really know what's going to happen to you next month.
So he didn't do much.
So you have to kind of read between the lines and tease it out.
And this is what it would look like.
His argument is we have an economic system, this capitalist system, that puts a very small number of us in the driver's seat.
If you look at the percentage of people who own shares of stock in America, you get a very quick understanding.
1% of shareholders own two-thirds of all the stock.
So if you're looking at who owns American business, it's a tiny, it's the 1% that everybody's talking about.
And they're the ones who elect every year, that's how it works, the board of directors of every corporation.
You get on the board of directors by being elected by the shareholders.
If 1% of the people own two-thirds of the shares, that's who elects the boards of directors, not grandma who has 10 shares of something, or not Uncle Harry, who got three shares on his last birthday, but the people, the big bankers and the big wealthy folks who have it.
So the argument is we have an economic system where all the basic decisions are made by the shareholders who own the company and the boards of directors they elect.
They're the ones who decide what the company produces, what technology it uses, where the production takes place, and what to do with the profits.
At the Christmas party, they thank everybody in the company for helping to make the profits.
But everybody may have helped to produce them, but everybody doesn't get any say at all in what's done with them.
That's in the hands of the board of directors and the shareholders.
So here then, Marx makes a grin and says, do we really expect anything different?
If you let the people in charge be a tiny minority, they're going to make the system work for them.
They're not going to make the system work for the people who've been excluded.
So his answer is, don't exclude them.
And if you want the simple English, worker co-ops.
Make business organize in a radically different way.
All the people in a business live with the decisions that are made there.
And if they all have to live with the decisions, they should all participate.
It's the same logic as it runs our communities.
We say a mayor can't make those important decisions that a mayor or a city council or a president for that matter makes without our having some say in voting.
Well then, the same logic, if you apply it to the workplace, would be how can you let two or three or four or six or 12 members of the board of directors make a decision, close a plant, move it to China, or any one of the other decisions they make, impacting everybody else, and everybody else has no say at all.
That's not democracy.
And if, you know, I push it as follows.
If we believe in democracy as a nation, which we claim so often we do, then the first place we should have put it is where we work.
Five out of seven days, the adult human being in America, most of us, go to work.
If democracy is valuable, put it to bet, put it into play.
Where we work, it's at least as important as where we live.
Where we live, we supposedly have it.
We don't have it where we work.
And my guess is our economy would work a lot different if the people were in charge, rather than having it being in the hands of a very small number of people who, if I'm noticing correctly, I'm a professor of economics.
I'm supposed to know this.
The system is working really well for them.
Yes.
Right?
It's going great for the people who own stock.
For the owner class, it's going very good.
So I have two things to say.
So it seems like capitalism's working in Denmark.
Right?
Well, they hedge it about with levels of controls and limits that Americans would find very strange.
I would argue with you, it's working better than it works here.
But I think it has serious problems there, too.
You have a gap between rich and poor.
It's not like it is here in the United States, but you have it.
You don't see it because they have a basic social welfare program.
All your medical care is taken care of.
There's a national health service.
Basically, the university going to school is free or close to free, heavily subsidized, and on and on and on.
So they make sure that the really rough edges of capitalism are softened.
But my argument would still be: you have the inequalities, not like you have in the United States, but you have serious inequalities.
And I don't see the justification for them.
And if I knew more about Danish society, my guess is I'd be able to show you that that has consequences, making inequality like that.
But you're right.
It is certainly not the kind of capitalism we have in the United States.
And by the way, that's true across Europe.
The Europeans don't permit it.
The mass of people in Europe don't permit their governments and their businesses to function the way we do.
One example.
In Germany, there's a law.
The German word is mitt bestimung.
It means participating in the decision.
Here's what the law in Germany says.
The law was passed in 1976, so this is not new.
If you're an enterprise in Germany with more than 2,000 workers, one-half the members of the board of directors in that company have to be elected by the workers.
It's the law.
That's unthinkable.
That is unthinkable in the United States.
It's a law.
If you have less than 2,000 workers, I think it's 50 to 2,000, one-third of the members of the board of directors have to be elected by the workers.
And Germany is an example of a country that's been doing real well in recent economics.
So putting the workers on the board there didn't end the system, didn't erupt the system, didn't collapse.
None of it.
They did better than we did for most of the last decade since the crash.
So I would argue that many in Europe have figured out ways to limit the damage that capitalism has done.
And of course, for us here in America, that's an attractive alternative to letting the thing run the way we let it run.
So a lot of people would say what we're taught or what we're brainwashed with in the United States is that the kind of economic system we're talking about, and say in Denmark, that they would look at that as socialism, even though it's not socialism.
And they say that that economic system makes everyone equally poor.
What do you say when people say that?
Well, the easiest answer is take a trip someday to Copenhagen, and it'll take you exactly five minutes to understand that's nonsense.
The standard of living of most workers in Europe, particularly in Northern Europe that we're talking about, is as high or higher than that of the United States in terms of the quantity and quality of the goods and services that they get.
So, I mean, it just isn't the case.
You don't have to have everybody poor in order to be fair.
It's the oldest argument in the book of people who don't want to distribute things equally, that if we did that, either the world would fall apart or we'd all be very poor.
I mean, that's a kind of thin effort to shut that conversation down.
Jeff Bezos has $129 billion.
If we took away half of his wealth, he'd be left with $65 billion.
Guess what?
That would make him one of the 10 richest people on the planet if we took half of it away.
And imagine what we could do with that $65 billion.
We could solve the problem of all the college educations in the United States more than once over.
We could transform the continent of Africa in radical ways that would make them our friends for the next 150 years.
There's no excuse for a society that produces that kind of inequality and then lets it sit there.
I know.
It's staggering.
Well, what I've said about Jeff Bezos is that it's been estimated that to end homelessness in the United States, it would cost $20 billion.
To end world hunger, it would cost $30 billion.
So he could end world hunger and homelessness in the United States and still have around $70 billion left over.
You've earned him one of the 10, you know, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and him.
And yet he doesn't do it.
No.
Yet he doesn't do it.
And I always say, what kind of a person amasses more wealth than any human in history while the people who generate that income for him are poor and on food stamps?
A megalomaniac.
That's who does that.
Oh, and it's even worse.
Amazon, which is the company that made him rich.
Yes.
An enormous percentage.
The estimates vary, but somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of Amazon's workers are paid so little they qualify for food stamps.
That's what we're doing.
Which means the rest of us, you, me, the people listening and watching, those people, we all pay taxes to subsidize the low wages that this billionaire, I mean, you have to scratch your head in disbelief that the American people allow that level of behavior.
It's anti-social behavior.
They probably have you on CNN and MSNBC every week talking about this.
Every week, man, they can't get enough of me.
So that's just, these ideas are not going to get out in the establishment press, right?
Not in the establishment press, but in programs like yours that are open to them.
The program we try to do, economic update, the talks I give around the country.
I'm here in LA on the way to do that.
I've never seen audiences as large as this.
And even more, the quality, the enthusiasm, the excitement.
It's as if, I don't want to push this metaphor, it's as if America is kind of waking up after a long period of sleepiness.
They're waking up, wow, and they're realizing we got a lot of history to catch up on.
We haven't been paying attention.
And as we look, our temperature is rising as we realize we've got big things to change to make a decent society out of this.
We can do it if those who understand it get together and move.
Yes, the American public has been put to sleep, and it was put to sleep by the dulcet tones of Barack Obama's speeches because he really papered over a lot of the problems in America because we thought he was in control and he's going to do the right thing as he opened the Arctic to drilling twice, when he made the banks bigger, when he took us from two wars to seven, when he gave a health care plan that was nothing but a giveaway to the health insurance with no cost controls.
So it was his speeches and his niceness that papered over that.
And now Donald Trump is president and that's all gone.
So that pretty face has been ripped off the horrible stuff that our system has been producing since I got to go back to 1980.
So because worker productivity and their participation in the profits have been decoupled since I would say right around 1980.
I could be wrong on that number.
No, that's what the numbers say.
That's exactly what the numbers say.
So you say that Marx would prescribe worker co-ops.
Do you have any statistics on I remember Nancy Pelosi being asked at a town hall meeting by a millennial, and he was saying that a lot of the young kids are into socialism, and she just dismissed it and said we're capitalists, and that's that.
Do you know, has there been research done on the popularity of what people consider socialism with millennials and young people?
Yes.
The most popular one that's referred to these days is a study in 2016 at Harvard, which did a big, long poll and followed up with other polls.
They did many polls because they couldn't believe their initial polls.
Their initial polls indicated that something on the order, depending on which one you read, something on the order of 40% of young people in the United States prefer socialism to capitalism.
And that over 50%, I think it was 51%, don't like capitalism and are a little hedgy about saying socialism, but they don't want capitalism.
I think the numbers are stunning.
I think they do tell us of a C-shift.
But I think it's also, and I don't mean to demean these folks at all, but I think we have to face the fact that for 50 years in this country, we haven't had an intelligent conversation about capitalism and socialism, the pluses and minuses of both of them.
We haven't had.
That's an adult conversation.
We have instead had their bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, we're good, good, good, good, good.
But if you do that for 50 years, you make a population that really doesn't know what these words mean.
So I interpret those polls as being a very clear sign that millennials, especially, but everybody in America sees that this economic system, whatever its benefits, it's not helping me.
It's hurting me.
My kids can't go to school.
They have debts that make them cry at night.
The job prospects are really crappy.
The government programs are being cut to ribbons.
I mean, you don't have to be a genius to see that whatever this system is, it isn't working well.
And that's what these polls show.
This system is no longer the greatest thing since sliced bread, the way it was made out to be.
Well, there's, you know, I remember as a kid, you're told we're the greatest country in the world.
We have the greatest economic mobility in the world.
And it turns out that is no longer true, that there is greater economic mobility in Europe, right?
And so that idea that if you come to the United States and anybody can work hard enough and make it, well, there's lots of people working three jobs right now, and I don't think they're making it.
No.
So that's a so you say that the pluses and minuses of capitalism.
We know the minuses of capitalism.
People are living it right now.
63% of Americans can't afford a $1,000 emergency in the richest country in the world.
50% of all wage earners earn $30,000 or less in the richest country in the world.
50% of everyone in the United States is poor or low income.
That's a, what do you call a system that takes the richest country in the world and renders half of its population?
I say you call that a failed system.
And do you think we'll ever get to a place in America where we can actually have an honest conversation about this because our politicians are so afraid of it and they're so bought by the capitalists.
I think they're going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming into that conversation.
But I don't want to be impolite.
I think you're doing it.
I think I'm trying to do it.
And I think there's more and more people like us that are in fact trying to have that conversation.
And I am overjoyed to tell you that at least in my experience, and I know enough about how enthusiastic people are about your program, there's a lot of people that appreciate that this conversation is beginning to happen.
And I just think we have to stay with it.
We have to insist on it and it'll spread like wildfire.
And at a certain point, we're all going to be sitting here and saying to ourselves, my God, it's going so fast.
It kind of have a new set of problems of what happens when an idea goes so quickly that kind of half-baked versions of it start sprouting up.
But that's a good problem to have.
I think we're on the way right now.
I didn't think that three years ago.
So it's not something I've always thought.
I've always been very cautious and skeptical.
But the last few years have really shifted me around as I see the response to what it is we're trying to do.
So we need people like you in politics.
I know that you had meetings about running for mayor of New York, and there are a lot of people behind you in that effort.
Why didn't you run?
Well, let me tell you a story.
I did run for mayor of the city of New Haven, Connecticut, where I lived for 30 years.
Back in the middle 1980s, we created the New Haven Green Party, and I ran as the mayoral candidate.
There had never been the Green Party in New Haven.
New Haven is a very Democratic city.
The last Republican mayor in New Haven was in 1953 to this day.
So this is a Democratic place.
I ran in 1985.
I got 10% of the vote first time I ran.
Two years later, I ran for city council.
It's called the Board of Aldermen in our town.
And I got 47% of the vote.
And it taught me a fundamental lesson.
If you go door to door to the American people and you tell them that this system isn't working and it's time for change, you will be amazed at how many people will sit and talk to you and have a good conversation.
And a significant number of them will do something they never thought they would do because they come from families where everybody either voted Democratic or voted Republican.
That's all they know.
That's all they ever heard of.
You are asking them to do something fairly big by stepping out of that tradition.
So we're asking something big, and that 10% did it the first time they ever met me and just had back and forth with me.
And then 47%, if I had stayed in New Haven, I'd be an elected official there.
And that's despite the fact that I'm very critical, and I have the word Marxian attached to my name and stuff like that.
If a person like that can do it in the city of New Haven, Connecticut, which isn't that different from a lot of other American cities, then believe me, it can be done.
And I think you're seeing now, there was a story the other day in the New York Times about candidates around the country who accept the label socialist, kind of the way Bernie did, being able to get all kinds of people's supports and making real inroads and running for little offices at the local municipal level all the way up.
I'm finding this, I think you're seeing a massive shift in the American population.
It's certainly coming up in my experience.
Which is why they need to throttle shows like this so that that doesn't happen.
So why didn't you run for mayor of New York?
In order to do that properly, it was clear to me, having done it before, you need a Certain minimum amount of support.
You need a certain minimum amount of money because you cannot reach populations in the time you.
I mean, it's no accident that money is crucial.
That's one of the ways you keep a system like this going.
If you need a lot of money to be able to do it, then only the people who either have it or can get it are in a position to run.
And I explicitly found that, that there was a lot of interest, but I would need four or five years to work on that to get to the point.
I think people are doing that now, and I take my hat off to them.
But we were faced with that decision in a matter of months, and it just wasn't feasible.
Speaking, just take stand politics for a second.
Cynthia Nixon is now challenging Andrew Cuomo from the left.
Do you think she's the real deal?
Because I'm skeptical, and I know the money people are going to come after her now, meaning the, I'm sure, the consultant class, and she will be co-opted if she isn't already.
What do you think?
I don't know much about her, but you're absolutely right.
She has sort of staked out positions clearly to the left of Andrew Cuomo.
On the other hand, positions to the left of Andrew Cuomo are not difficult to stake out since he is awful.
I mean, there's no nice, I can't.
I mean, I actually knew his father, Mario Cuomo, because he worked with my father years ago.
And the son isn't the father.
No.
And the father who made his compromises still had a kind of core old New Deal kind of solidity that you could see and that would come out.
This is, his son is a hustler.
He's a political hustler.
He travels right down the middle.
He makes deals with the wealthiest of Americans who live in New York State, heaven knows.
He thwarts the will of the people.
Yeah, he has nothing to do.
He's running for president.
He's the imagination.
He's going to do that.
So it created a vacuum.
We had a woman unknown, Cynthia Nixon, because of sex in the city and all of that is very well known.
We had a woman, Zephyr Teacher, who did extraordinarily well against him for an unknown person who came in at the last minute.
I think it's a testimony to the fact that he has alienated an enormous number of people.
We have a third party in New York City, the working people, working families party, and they've endorsed Cynthia Nixon now, which is unusual for them to break from the normal endorsing of the Democrat.
I think all of these are straws in the wind, however well she does, that the dissatisfaction with conventional politics, left, right, Republican, Democrat, running very, very deep.
And not just here, in Europe, you know, suddenly you have basically the Bernie Sanders of England, Jeremy Corbyn, walking away.
I mean, he's the most popular politician the way Bernie is here, because he oozes less phoniness than all the others do.
And you see in Italy the comedian who's a big success there.
And that's not so much because he's all that good.
It's because people have had it with the conventional Republican and Democrats mouthing their thin civics class kind of rhetoric.
Nobody wants this anymore.
And everybody holds them responsible for the mess we're in.
Why would you want more of them?
That's one of the reasons Trump is in there.
Because people looked at Clinton and said, oh my God, not more of that.
And even though he looked really scary, she was for sure not the real deal.
And he might be, and it turns out he isn't, but he might have been, at least for some people.
So you don't put most of the blame for Trump.
You don't put most of that on Susan Saranda and Jill Stein or the Russians.
No.
I'm afraid that Mr. Trump is half right when he says this is a lame excuse for having lost an election, whatever the Russians may or may not have done, which my guess is we'll never know anyway, in the nature of that kind of thing that goes on.
But I think what you're seeing here is a very sad.
Look, let me give an example that may not offend anyone.
Britain.
The British working class has really been savage since 2008.
They've been treated worse than the Americans.
Their real income has dropped by about 10 to 12 percent.
Really?
It's staggering what has happened to the British working class.
So when they went to vote this last time on Brexit, on whether the British stay in Europe or they go out, they didn't care about in or out of Europe.
They don't know about it.
They don't care about it.
They were so angry at what had been done to them for 10 years that the minute they saw the ruling folks in the Conservative Party and also the Labour Party saying, yes, we must stay in Europe, they all said, oh, no.
And they gave the collective finger.
That's what they did.
Now, it made no sense.
They're not going to be helped by this.
They're learning now that it's going to, the rich are going to try to make money out of this and they're going to get screwed again.
This is the reality because that's not the problem in or out of Europe.
They have to face what the real problem is, that they have a ruling class that's squeezing them to save itself.
And if they can learn that in England, which they are slowly doing, then my feeling is we'll learn it here too.
And that's what Mr. Trump is.
A mistake.
You may have given your finger to this system, but you put into place a person who's going to do it right back to you.
You didn't solve your problem.
You didn't understand what your problem was.
So you took a dead end and you're going to see that it's a dead end.
So if the answers to our problems involves the political class and taking back control of our government from corporations, what I've been telling people is that there is no way Wall Street, fossil fuels, and the military-industrial complex are ever going to allow one of the major parties to represent the people.
That isn't going to happen.
So what do you think should happen?
I think that Bernie Sanders is missing his moment.
And he's the most popular politician by far.
He's way more popular than the Democrats and Republicans will ever be.
And if he started another party, it would immediately become the most popular party in the country.
Yet he won't do it.
Now, William Binney, who is an NSA codebreaker on my show, he said it's because they have we live in a surveillance state and they control everyone that way.
Why do you think he won't do it?
I'm not 100% sure he won't.
That is, I think it's always in the back of his mind, partly because he's been the outsider type all his life.
I actually knew him a little bit when he was a young man many years ago.
And he's always been, you know, ornery and different and not going to go along and not going to be persuaded that his career would be better off if he toned it down.
He really does believe the things he said.
This is not a convenience of his position.
And I think if they make it impossible in just the way you suggest, if they really close it all down, he will do it because he will rather finish his life being the daring one who tried than being the who went along because, you know, he doesn't have that much more time.
I don't mean to be macabre, but what's he saving it up for?
I don't know.
But I also think, I guess maybe I disagree with you a little bit, Jimmy.
The British didn't expect Brexit.
Americans never expected Trump.
Things are happening that were not in the script, were not planned.
Things are spinning out of control.
And I don't think they can put that genie back in the bottle all that quick.
It's underway.
Yeah, they don't want it, and they will go to extraordinary lengths, and that's scary, to stop it.
But I'm not sure they can do it.
After all, remember, every other horrible empire, emperor, czar, king, who never wanted to be overthrown, it happened anyway.
You know, we used to describe the Soviet Union member as a surveillance state in the KGB.
And a lot of that was true.
But when the time was up for the Soviet Union, all of that didn't help him.
It disappeared.
It imploded.
I don't see any reason to imagine that that can't happen here.
Do you think it will require another economic collapse?
And do you think another economic collapse is coming?
Most of the people I know on Wall Street, and I live fairly close to Wall Street, and because I went to the fanciest universities in the United States, a lot of my friends and classmates are big shots.
I like to tell people that one of my classmates at Yale, where I got my PhD, was Janet Yellen, who became the head of the Federal Reserve.
Oh, okay.
Things like that.
I know these, they know me, and I know them.
The general opinion is the following.
Everywhere the capitalist system has ever come over the last 300 years, it has shown itself to be an unstable system.
It has an economic downturn or a business cycle, whatever you want to call it.
And on average, they happen every four to seven years.
Okay, on average, that doesn't mean it's always four to seven, but on average.
It's been in a 10-year expansion.
Right.
The last major down was 2008, 2009.
So you do the arithmetic, and everybody is saying we're due for one.
That doesn't mean you know what's going to happen in 2018 or 2019.
But if you want to ask on Wall Street, is an economic downturn coming and could it be a doozy?
The answer is at least 40% of the economists of all persuasions believe that that is coming.
And that's why you've had warnings in the last several weeks.
The IMF has put out a warning.
The World Bank has put out a warning.
Here's the warning.
We are due for one.
And if it comes, it risks being a real bad one.
Not a little mild one for 18 months with two or three percentage point unemployment, but something more along the lines of what happened in 2008 and 2009.
Why?
Because we haven't learned any of the lessons of 2008 and 2009.
We are now lending money to people who can't afford a house.
We're lending money to people who can't afford a car.
Banks are making cash disbursements because they can rake in enough to make that a profitable gambit in the way that it was before.
They're creating special securities that mingle these things together the way they did before.
Because the low interest rates of the last few years, consumers and companies and governments have borrowed more money than ever before in human history.
If things go down, they can't pay those loans back, and that's going to upset this system on a scale we haven't seen before.
Will this all happen?
Nobody knows that.
But could it?
Oh, for sure.
And could it be really bad?
Yeah.
And if that happens, on top of the trouble most Americans are still in left over from the last one, then I think there's no limit to what could happen.
Mitt Romney's on the line again.
I hope he doesn't want to talk about DJ Khaled refusing to eat pussy.
Hello.
Oh, hi, Jimmy.
Say, what's all this I hear about DJ Khaled refusing to eat pussy?
What?
I've never done it myself, seeing as how it's not described in detail in the Bible.
Why would that be described in detail in the Bible?
Hey, you know there's a lot more to that phone call, but we don't have time in today's podcast.
How do you hear the entire phone call?
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Today's show was written.
That's right.
It was written by Frank Connip, Jim Earl, Ron Placone, Steph Semerano, and Mark Van Landowitz.
Special thanks to our guests this week, Professor Richard Wolf, Jesse Ventura.
All the voices today performed by the one and the only the inimitable Mike McRae who can be found at MikeMcRae.com.
That's it for this week.
You be the best you can be, and I'll keep being me.
Don't freak out!
Don't freak out.
I'm not in it.
Don't don't.
Don't come for me.
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