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Dec. 28, 2018 - Jimmy Dore Show
01:05:12
20181228_1228_TJDS_Podcast
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Get ready for an outstanding entertainment program.
The Jimmy Dore Show.
Hi, this is Jimmy.
Who's this?
Hey, Jimmy Seasons.
Greetings.
This is Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry.
Oh, hey, Secretary Perry.
Merry Christmas.
Philippe Snobby Dad to you, sir, from Texas.
Aren't you supposed to be in Washington doing Secretary of Energy things?
Well, the government is currently shut down in case you didn't know.
Also, I don't do shit.
Really?
Yeah, I just hang out in Texas.
Wow.
Wow.
Jimmy, I have a question for you.
Okay, shoot.
Jimmy Dore, are you loyal to Israel?
Israel?
Yes, I pronounce it the Christmas Carol way because I'm a Christian.
I don't understand.
It's a simple question, Jimmy.
Are you loyal to the state of Israel?
What does that even mean?
Well, Jimmy, as you may know, certain senators, to it, Schumer and Gillibrand, have been trying for well over a year now to pass a bill that would make it illegal to participate in the BDSM movement against Israel, making it a crime to boycott, divest, or sanction the government of Israel or engage in kinky bondage sex with Israel.
Well, we in Texas have been taking it a step further as we do.
We have been forcing state employees to take a loyalty oath to Israel in order to maintain employment.
Mr. Perry, that is insane, not to mention wholly unconstitutional.
You can't do that.
Oh, but we have.
Just a few weeks ago, a speech pathologist who had been employed by the Phlugerville School District for 18 years and a Muslim refused to take this oath, and she was summarily fired.
What?
Oh, yeah.
And on top of that, hurricane victims have been forced to take this oath in order to receive state relief funds.
This is unbelievable.
I know, isn't it great?
No.
So we've just been going hog wild with this oh shit down in Texas, making everyone take it for everything.
That's why I ask you, Jimmy Dore, in order for me to record phone calls with you, are you loyal to Israel?
I mean, do I have to take an oath to Spain or Japan or the Ukraine?
Of course not.
Just Israel.
What are you dumb?
I don't understand this then.
I mean, if I had to take an oath of some kind, wouldn't it be to the United States, the country that I'm actually from?
Well, that would just seem rather myopic and jingoistic, don't you think?
Oh, my God.
Look, Jimmy, I'm sorry to hear that you are intractable on this particular issue.
What do you mean?
I'd hate to see you get fired for not being loyal to Israel.
Fired?
Fired from what?
The Jimmy Dore show.
Yeah, but I'm Jimmy Dore.
Oh, I get it.
You're loyal to your own name, but not to a foreign power to which you have no ties whatsoever.
Yes, that's correct, Rick.
Well, I'm sorry to hear that you feel that way.
The winds of change are blowing, and they just might blow you over Israel style.
Okay, Rick, thank you, and happy new year.
Happy whatever they celebrate in Israel to you.
I want to be back here.
It's the Jimmy Dore show.
The show for people that are saved.
It's hard to talk on your TV.
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.
Happy holidays.
We'll see you February 1st.
That's a Friday night.
That's the next live Jimmy Door show, February 1st, Friday night in Burbank, California.
Go to JimmyDoorComedy.com for a link for tickets.
Let's get to the jokes before we get to the jokes, shall we?
Hey, you know, this, I want to go ahead and give you my recipe.
I make bourbon cookies every Christmas season.
I love it.
And here's how you, here's a little secret.
I'll give it to you.
You just take three cups of bourbon and pour it into the back of your computer where the browser preferences are.
Hey, you know, James Mattis, he was fired by Trump as the defense secretary.
And, you know, he is a crackpot, a warmonger, and a war criminal.
And if he's the adult in the room, I hope nobody lives past 18.
I mean, only Americans would rehabilitate a warmongering general into a great public servant just because he resigned at the humiliating prospect of having to de-escalate an illegal war.
It's just too irresponsible to just up and leave all these countries we've spent so much time and effort wrecking.
I mean, we still have so much more to destroy, don't we?
Hey, what's coming up on today's show?
We have a special interview with the man himself, Ralph Nader, and his new book, How the Rats Reform Congress.
He's here to tell you how it's possible for me and you to take our government back.
That's Ralph Nader all day today on the Jimmy Door Show.
Plus, phone calls today from Chuck Schumer and Ricky Bobby Perry, plus a lot lot more.
That's today on the Jimmy Door Show.
Hi, everybody.
Welcome to the Jimmy Door Show.
We have a special guest.
It's a big day here at the show.
Ralph Nader's with us.
So he's no stranger to any fan of this show.
He's a political activist, author, lecturer, former presidential nominee.
His activism has been credited with the passage of the Clean Water Act, the Freedom of Information Act, just to name a few.
And his latest book, I have it right here.
It's called How the Rats Reform Congress.
There it is right there.
It's available right now.
Please welcome to the show.
It's Ralph Nader.
Hi, Ralph.
Hi, Jimmy.
It's great to have you.
And, you know, I just want to let people know that if it wasn't for people like you who sometimes run for president, a lot of people wouldn't vote.
Like if so when you ran in 2000, what's amazing to me is that 300,000 Democrats in Florida decided to vote for George Bush because they were so disgusted with the Democratic Party.
But somehow you people still manage to blame you for participating in democracy as if you didn't.
What I say is people like Ralph Nader got a lot of people to the polls who otherwise would not go to the polls.
What do you say?
Yeah, about half our votes.
People wouldn't have gone To the polls.
And I got, I think one exit poll in Florida had 25% of my votes for Bush and 40% for Gore, and the rest would have stayed home.
But as you know, Jimmy, that's not the point.
Everybody has an equal right to run for election in our country, and they all want to take votes from each other.
So they're either all spoilers of each other, or none of them are spoilers.
I mean, just to single out a third party like a Green Party or Libertarians say, oh, you're a spoiler.
That's a politically bigoted word because they never use it to describe the Democrat and Republican spoilers of our government, spoilers of holding big business accountable.
Well, it's funny that there's a thing that could get rid of, if it bothers the two-party duopoly so much, the establishment so much, spoiler candidates, they could easily eliminate them by instituting ranked choice voting, yet they won't do that, correct?
Well, the Democratic Party nationally has not really made it an issue.
It occurs now in Maine and some cities where you get your first choice, second choice, third choice.
And it ensures that whoever wins wins the majority of the vote.
But the bigger thing is that Gore won the election.
In most countries, if you win the popular vote, you win the office.
He went up by a half a million votes.
The Electoral College kicked in, threw it into Florida.
And then Jeb Bush and the Secretary of State, Catherine Harris, did the rest of the dirty work.
And what was left to stop the Florida Supreme Court recount, they stopped it by going to Scalia and his boys in the Supreme Court 5-4, a judicial coup d'état, who selected George W. Bush.
He was never really elected.
He was selected.
This is correct.
So that's the whole thing, too.
People forget all about that stuff.
And Catherine Harris and his brother were running the election in Florida.
If that happened in another country, we would make fun of it.
If it wasn't fun of it, we'd say that's not a democracy.
It's corrupt.
Right.
Yeah.
If Saddam Hussein's brother in a state inside Iraq declared the winner, it's just a crazy system.
And what's the big problem with the Electoral College?
It's only decided the outcome 40% of the time in our country.
It's really ridiculous.
And the Democrats have lost two presidential elections in 16 years, 2000 and 2016, where they won the popular vote and they lost the Electoral College vote.
And guess what?
There's a movement, a citizen movement called NationalPopularVote.com, I think, or .org out of San Francisco, which is already halfway to neutralizing the Electoral College.
They've got states like California, New York, Illinois, Maryland, who've passed laws saying when we have enough states to get a majority of electoral college votes, which is 270, then we'll throw our electoral college votes to whoever wins the popular vote.
You think the Democrats, having been dragged into the mud twice in 16 years, would back it.
They're not backing it.
They give lip service to it at best.
So, yes, as my friend Ben Mankowitz likes to point out, 40% of the presidential elections in this century have been decided by the loser, have gone to the loser of the popular vote.
And so I like to say, and I'd like to get your opinion.
If it happened the other way, if Barack Obama lost by 3 million votes, yet he won the Electoral College, do you think half the country would have just accepted it?
No way.
The Republicans just want it more than the Democrats.
They're just bull terriers.
I mean, they, I mean, compare the Tea Party in Congress to the Progressive Caucus.
I mean, five Tea Party tigers will, you know, overwhelm the progressive.
There isn't any energy there.
The Republicans would have put millions of dollars to get the Electoral College neutralized, just the way Steve Silverstein and his little crew of seven people have already gotten over 50%.
Connecticut was the last state that passed it.
They're now 200, they're not 172 electoral college votes.
So you're right.
If the Republicans had lost two presidential elections in 16 years, they'll put a lot of muscle at the state legislative level to neutralize it.
What I find unbelievably interesting and very telling and revealing, but nobody ever talks about this.
Abby Martin made the point that it's amazing that the liberal class, which has ostracized you and demonized you because you dared to participate in democracy and fire a warning shot about corporatism taking over our both parties because you did so the people who are angry at you for doing that and blame you for George Bush because they hated George Bush so much and all of his horribleness, they now, that same class of people, now embrace George Bush.
They love him.
They're giving him medals.
Joe Biden just gave him an award the other day.
They love him.
They wish he was back, yet they still despise you.
So to me, that tells me that the movement to demonize you has a bigger purpose because that can't be real because the person that they're angry at you for giving us, they now love.
It's scapegoating.
They don't want to, the Democratic Party don't want to look at themselves in the mirror and ask, how come they couldn't have landslided this bumbling governor from Texas, George W. Bush, who couldn't put 10 sentences together and had a bad record in Texas against kids, pro-pollution, all that.
Well, of course, you know, it's the Green Party.
It's the Green Party.
It's never the Democratic Party.
And you're right.
The Clintons have embraced George W. Bush.
They've increased his credibility.
This is the war criminal, the butcher of Iraq, among other crimes that he's committed.
And his polls are going up because the Democrat leaders want to contrast him with Donald Trump.
And so they're embracing him and making him look good.
But when you look at his eight years in office, how he went against the workers, the consumers, he was part of these managed corporate trade agreements, tax cuts for the wealthy, pro-Wall Street, pro-war.
Yeah, you know, hated the environment.
They're saying, oh, look how nice he was.
And his daddy was nice.
You have Hillary Clinton embracing Henry Kissinger.
So the Democrats, we call them the corporate Democrats.
Let's hope there's some progressive Democrats that will hold to that progressive policy in the House of Representatives who just were elected.
Let's see if they will connect with the citizen groups around the country to bolster their fight against the corporate Republicans and the corporate Democrats.
We're still waiting and hoping that about 25 of them will form a caucus in the House of Representatives and start elbowing out some of these greasy polls that we call corporate Democrats.
Yeah, well, keep waiting.
That'll be a long time before that happens.
You know, let me just get back to the idea of a third party.
Now, you ran as a green, and people, the polls show that the biggest voting bloc right now, well, is people who don't vote, but people who consider themselves not a member of either party and even the majority of people inside the democratic party want a third party thinks there should be one so why is this not happening well first of all they they want it they'd like to see what is called the viable third party it comes in about 60
percent uh but they want a winner and and when they figure out who they're going to vote for First of all, they never hear or see the third party.
I mean, 80% of the American people knew who I was before I ever ran for president.
But I then realized in the campaigns of 2004 and 2008, I don't think more than 20% knew I was running for president because I didn't get on any networks.
I wasn't in the major papers.
I was a non-person.
And that's what they've made third-party candidates.
So the average voter says, yeah, we'd like more choices on the ballot.
I mean, we'd like different kind of policies and redirections, improvements in our country, but they don't have a chance to win.
Only one of the two parties can win.
And that's why we got to neutralize the Electoral College.
We've got to get the third party candidates on these national debates.
I went to every state in 2004 and 2008, Jimmy.
And in 2004, huge crowds, Madison Square Garden, Boston Garden, Target Center, filmed it bigger than any of the two major candidates, you know, John Kerry and George Bush in 2004.
But I didn't reach as many people as I would have reached in just a fraction of one national debate on the stage with Bush and Kerry.
So that's why people say, well, I don't want to throw my voter away.
Well, that's why they're stuck with a two-party corporate indentured duopoly that is getting more and more the same, weak on corporate crime enforcement, big, luscious corporate welfare, crony capitalism, warmongering, stifling the voters, voter suppression by the Republicans, lack of voter motivations by the Democrats.
But, you know, I've got this book out, Jimmy, that you've just mentioned, because I think the people can grab hold of Congress.
They can make the 535 men and women who put their shoes on every day like you and I listen to them, the senators and representatives.
And I've always said it never takes more than 1% of the people organized in each congressional district, reflecting majority opinion on living wage, full Medicare for all, free choice of doctor and hospital, cracking down on corporate crime, a decent tax system that isn't skewed to the rich and powerful, control, waging peace over boomeranging wars abroad, on and on.
That has left-right support.
Doesn't take more than 1%.
That's about 2.5 million people organized like a Congress watchdog hobby.
And that's what this book is all about.
I had to make it humorous.
I had to make people laugh themselves seriously to get organized and feel their power.
You want citizen power, people?
You want a powerful citizen tool to grab Congress by the neck and say, we've given you too much power under our Constitution and we want it back.
That's what we have to say.
And it's a lot easier than you think.
So I got this in here.
You'll see it.
It's also backed up by a great website on how to actually organize these Congressional Rat Watchers group, as what I say.
And on the back is the most concise indictment of Congress and how it's jumped on your back and driven this country into the ground on behalf of Wall Street and the corporate supremacists and the crony corporists who are bleeding your tax dollars and depriving you and your family of the pursuit of happiness and a decent livelihood.
This is the book, RatsReformCongress.org.
It's simple.
RatsreformCongress.org.
By the way, there's a rat infestation, Jimmy, in Congress.
It comes up from the catacombs.
So it ends up in the toilet bowl.
Some rats looking for food and water.
I don't give them human attributes.
They just do what rats do.
They go into the toilet bowl.
And guess what?
The first toilet bowl was that of the Speaker of the House.
And, you know, huge derision.
People start saying, hey, look at these guys.
They're trying to suppress the riots.
They can't even suppress the rat.
How are they going to suppress the corporate crooks and the warmongers?
And then some activists move in and we have a dramatic movement all over the country.
And the movement cannot, you can't, can't be stopped.
So what reading the book, and it's like things are happening very fast.
And I'm like, I'm like, well, this is obviously fiction because that's not how long stuff takes.
Stuff takes a long time and you have to be serious and you have to build coalitions and you can't be a petulant child and think things are going to happen overnight.
And then as I'm reading this book, I see what's happening in France.
And it happened very quickly.
It happened in four weeks, right?
And so talk a little bit about the yellow vests and how it parallels to what's happened in this book.
Yeah, well, the French hit the streets.
And, you know, there's trucking strikes and the French can't get through the traffic, but they still support the truckers years ago, for example.
They have an esprit decor.
And this one, they weren't getting adequate wages.
They were being threatened with cuts by Prime Minister Macron, cuts and pensions, cuts here, cuts there.
Then they got a diesel fuel increase and that was like snapped.
And so they put their yellow vests on and they went to the streets and Macron is now backing off because, you know, France has got a much better social safety net and we have great child care, full Medicare for all, et cetera.
However, they're concentrating more and more wealth in fewer hands with the multinational corporations coming in like they have in countries all over the world.
So, yeah, you say, what would it take in this country?
Well, you don't know what it would take, but you make a good point.
Don't wait for 10 years, five years, three years.
Action starts and gets to success fast before the corporate opponents can learn how to delay it and game the system.
President Truman proposed universal health care in the 1940s.
We're still waiting for it.
You got to get it fast.
We got auto safety regulation that saved three and a half million lives in this country.
Unsafe needs to speed came out in November 1965.
The first congressional hearings is March 1966.
We got a pass signed by Lyndon Johnson.
I was at the White House September 1966.
The auto industry didn't know it hit them because it was fast.
But if it was delayed, they would hire the lobbyists and throw money at the candidates or at the incumbents.
You're right.
It's got to go fast.
And this goes really fast.
And there's a lot of fun in this.
Rats Reform Congress.
Yeah, it's a great read.
And I don't really appreciate you trying to do comedy.
You don't need to muscle in on my.
That's very funny.
It's great dialogue.
And there's even scatological humor in this, which was also very amusing.
I really want to ask you, because this is all about how we can take Congress back and how it happens very quickly.
And how, you know, in your last book, you talked about a liberal and a conservative alliance.
And, you know, I love that you make the point that the liberals and conservatives need to come together on the ground level because politically they're together.
Liberals and conservatives come together to serve Wall Street, to serve the military industrial complex, the big fossil fuel companies.
And people don't realize that we need to come together also left right at the ground level, right?
Exactly.
When you go down to where people work, live, and raise their families, that so-called red state conservative liberal divide dissipates.
The public is subjected to massive divide and rule.
It's been going on for over 2,000 years.
That's what the rulers do.
They divide and rule.
And where there are differences, they rub them raw and they crowd out the similarities.
So in this book, which I call unstoppable, the left-right alliance to dismantle the corporate state, I have 24 areas of convergence by people who go to work every day, people who live at the grassroot in the community, town, city, rural areas of the country.
They bleed the same way when there's dangerous products and toxic chemicals.
They get ripped off the same way by the banks and insurance companies.
They get disrespected, excluded, underinsured, underpaid.
The minimum wage frozen is seven and a quarter federal.
It doesn't matter whether it's a conservative liberal worker at all.
They're all getting driven into the ground.
And this idea of divide and rule, we got to be very, very alert not to allow that to manipulate us and to divide us in the huge changes in this country that are long overdue to make the corporations our servants, not our masters.
That's what they originally charted to do in the early 19th century by state legislatures who were very worried.
They held them on a short leech.
They had to renew their charters because they wanted the corporations, which are artificial entities, not a human being, doesn't send its kids to Iraq or Afghanistan.
They wanted to be our servant.
Well, they've become our masters.
And there are all kinds of things in this book on how to improve your daily life and get these changes fast.
Living wage, full health care, all kinds of things, good public transit, rebuilding the public services, the schools, the drinking water, sewage systems, bridges, highways.
All the things create jobs can't be exported to China.
So it's only going to happen with you.
Just remember, if you are a cynic and you say PAX on all these politicians' houses, you know what you've become?
You've become a slave.
They love cynics, right, Jimmy?
They love cynics who withdraw and turn their back on the power they've given to the Congress that's being used against them and their families and their grandkids.
Wake up.
You're 100% right.
I mean, that's why we still vote on a Tuesday.
They love people to not participate.
They love people to not be interested.
The American elections are designed to suppress the vote.
Let me just ask you this.
How much heat have you caught for this idea of the left right needing to come together to work together?
Because when it's been suggested recently, people who have suggesting it have been me, I'm one of them.
People have said, oh, you want to work with white nationalists and racists and that you're a racist.
You're an enabler of racists.
And I'm like, no, no, there's principled conservatives, you know, like Ron Paul and libertarians.
And people have, you know, a lot of people voted for Trump because he was to the left of Hillary Clinton on trade.
He was to the left of Hillary Clinton on healthcare.
So there's a left and right.
There's a lot of populist ideas.
Yeah, well, that's what I call the yuck factor by liberals.
I don't want to deal with this guy.
He's on my side against corporate welfare handouts, giveaways, bailouts, et cetera.
But he's bad on, you know, he's bad on immigration, let's say, or he's bad on abortion.
Well, you know, as they say, husband and wife, they don't agree on anything in a family all over America.
The point is, we won't get the politically unstoppable force unless we collaborate together.
And I don't mean splitting the difference.
Like instead of 10 aircraft carriers, how about five?
No.
I mean where they are on the same page on 15 bucks an hour.
They're on the same page of full Medicare for all.
They're on the same page of we're not going to use our tax dollars to build stadiums and arenas and other theme parks and the rest for big business.
If they want to be capitalists, they don't behave as capitalists, fund their own investments.
So that's the way you have to talk.
But once you get down to where people live, work, and raise their family, that's a different dialogue because they have to face reality every day.
In Washington, I can get right-wingers agreeing with me to banish corporate welfare.
But then they're getting their money from fat cats that hire their own staff on other issues that I don't agree with.
So although verbally we can agree, we haven't yet done it in Washington the way it can be done at the grassroots.
And that's what this book is all about.
This book's about you at the grassroots.
Yeah, you know, we have a lot of conservatives who tune into this show also.
We have a left-right alliance here at this show, right?
Progressives and principles.
Gerald says there was a lot of conservatives who said they would vote for Bernie Sanders.
They like the fact that he stood up to corporations and he wasn't bought and he was going to offer them health care, which, by the way, the majority of Republicans are for.
Yet we still ain't going to get it.
Even though we had a quote-unquote blue wave, we're going to have to fight that blue wave to get what they have in France.
And it is the right and the left.
It was actually started by, I think, right-wingers.
But if you look at their list of demands in France, the yellow jackets, they're all populist things.
They seem lefty ideas, but they're just populists.
You know, Trump ran on Medicare for all.
He said the government's going to pay for it.
He's not doing it.
He also campaigned on ending the wars.
He's not doing that either.
But I'm just saying the people on the left and right actually do want the same things.
And how do we actually work together, Ralph, and break through the naysayers who want to divide us?
Well, we start at the grassroots where I have developed this called a citizen summons, where for 500 names on a petition, clear, legible, what's your occupation, email, address, you get a senator coming to your own town meeting.
For about 300, you'll get a representative.
So you announce the town meetings.
You summon the senators and representatives to your town meeting, your agenda, say in the town hall or school auditorium on a certain day, and they listen to you.
And then you expect them to answer.
You can tell them ahead of time, you better do your homework on this subject or that, because we don't want glassy stairs.
We want you to come informed about what we're asking so we can send you back to Washington.
But there is a success story right now, and it's the left right in Congress after years of struggle.
And there's a provision in the farm bill to let farmers of America grow industrial hemp, which has 5,000 uses going back to ancient China.
And it's legal to import it for food, for energy, for auto parts.
It's a fantastic plant.
But it was illegal to grow it in this country because it was on the marijuana list, which is crazy because it has one-third of 1% THC.
It says you can't get high on smoking industrial hemp.
And why did it get through?
Because Senator McConnell, one of the worst senators ever, was good on this, and he connected with Democrats, and it went through the House and the Senate.
The last time something like this happened was 1986, the False Claims Act, which has returned billions of dollars in corporate fraud on government, like military contracts and Medicare and so on.
And that was led in the Senate by Republican Charles Grassley of Iowa and led in the House by Democrat, Congressman Howard Berman from the Los Angeles area, and it passed.
And we had a whistleblower rights bill that passed with left-right support about four years ago in Congress.
So we have a predicate here.
The next left-right coalition in Congress is to put all government contracts, all the contracts online.
The actual letter of the contract.
Now it's only summary.
You got $500 billion full of waste going out to vendors and corporations, and we can't see the contract that we pay for.
So there's left-right support, but there needs to be this kind of energy.
You talk about in the book, how the rats reformed the Congress.
You talk about the beginning of the American Revolution, and you mentioned a book, The First American Revolution, and it was about the farmers.
Well, why don't you go ahead and talk about how that happened?
And it happened before Paul Revere.
Amazing, Jimmy, a talk show host that's actually read a book.
Yeah, you see, we're taught about Lexington Concord, Paul Revere, Midnight, you know, sounds the alert on a horse from Boston.
That was 1775.
But the revolution really started, and it was a peaceful one in central and western Massachusetts by the farmers.
It started because King George III issued an edict which stripped them of control over their local government and local courts.
They used the courts a lot and local sheriffs.
And they said, that's not going to happen.
So every Tory that was in these towns representing King George had a home.
They would bring out four or five hundred, sometimes a thousand farmers.
You couldn't do that today from invasion, from Mars, for heaven's sake.
They brought them up and they surrounded the house and they delegated their spokesperson, knock on the door.
You know, we know you.
You're our neighbor.
You're representing a tyrant.
And we are going to stop selling you anything, stop supplying you for anything until you recant.
Here is the door.
You can walk out and recant.
And we're on both sides of the little pathway.
And they did it again and again.
And a lot of the Tories said, let me out of here.
They ran back to Boston where there's a red coat garrison for protection.
But others did recant.
And that was the basis.
They did it in Worcester, Mass.
They did it in Springfield, Mass, Sheffield, Mass.
That was the beginning of the basis.
And then the people in Virginia said, hey, what's going on here?
You started the committees of correspondence, the Continental Congress.
All started with the silent protest, very determined, no violence, by the farmers of central and western Massachusetts who lost control of their local government.
So we had Occupy Wall Street in America.
Now, how did that fail?
I think it failed because, A, there was no leaders, and B, they didn't shut down capitalism.
They were just kind of annoying capitalism.
And as with the yellow vests in France, they actually shut down traffic, got in the streets, which is not what Occupy did.
What's your assessment?
Well, it was a good faith by a lot of young people who've lost their future and the Wall Street crash and everything else.
But they didn't like politicians.
They didn't care about Congress.
And they didn't care about anybody over 30, hardly.
They worked a little bit with some labor unions who supplied them with help when they took control of the Zakati Park and some other public spots around the country.
I think there was several hundred at one time.
They had the eye of the media.
Oh, priceless mass media for several weeks in that fall, but they didn't have an agenda.
They just focused inequality, inequality, inequality.
So I had a conference call with 300 of them.
And I said, look, your agenda is simple.
A majority of the people want the frozen minimum wage to go up at that time to 11, 12 bucks an hour.
And you have the majority of people and go down to Congress, surround the Congress, occupy Congress.
Wall Street isn't going to make the decision.
It's your 535 senators and representatives.
They say, that's a great idea, Ralph.
But what you don't understand about us is we don't know how to organize anything.
We just know how to protest.
And unfortunately, the citizen community that did know how to organize didn't get the right connections with them at the time.
You know, it was pretty tough overnight.
They had the police all around them.
Homeless people joined them for protection.
They had a tough time.
We should take our hats off.
The civic community should have picked up on there and taken that bottle to Congress because there wasn't a single member of Congress who was worried at all about Occupy Wall Street because it didn't have the laser beam focus on Congress.
And that's what would have worried Wall Street.
So tell people in some concrete ways, how do we do what happened in this book and what's happening in France?
And you say it takes 1% of the people in each congressional district to make a real change.
In fact, I've heard you say you did it with less.
Concretely, what could we do?
You start with 10 or 20 people and you picket the local office of your representative and senator.
Everybody knows their addresses.
They're usually in a federal building.
And if you can get 10 or 20 people with signs, and then you say, we want to go up the elevator and we want to sit and we want to meet with the senator representative.
They may say yes.
They may say no.
You try to get a little press.
You go on social media with your signs and it gets the attention back up on Capitol Hill.
Then you print, you have a letter with good printing, and you start collecting signatures for the civic summons.
The civic summons like a sheriff.
We're summoning you, senators, representatives, to a town meeting of our making on issues of our making.
And we have majoritarian support for a lot of these.
Republicans and Democrats are going to be in the audience, and you better show up.
As I say, so few people show up at the town meetings choreographed by the politicians that a mere 500 legible email address, occupation, teacher, mechanic, lawyer, whatever, will get a senator to your town meeting.
That means you're eyeball to eyeball.
You're not trying to Email some void in Congress.
You're not trying to deal with a flak or a PR guy representing members of Congress.
It's eyeball to eyeball.
The most powerful lobbyists in the country do not engage in marches and demonstrations.
They eyeball every one of those 535 members, laser beam.
They know everything about them.
Who are their friends?
Who they play golf with?
Who gives them campaign money?
Who is their doctor?
Who's their accountant?
What teachers do they go to?
Who are their friends of friends who get their ear?
And the two most powerful individual lobbies in this country do it not by marches or demonstrations, by eyeball to eyeball, personal lobbying on the 530.
And they are the NRA and APAC.
And they get their way year after year after year.
And there isn't more than a few hundred thousand activists.
Never mind two and a half million, which is 1% of the adults in this country.
We can do it on 100.
We can do it on a million.
In every congressional district, they agree to spend $300 to $500 a year.
That's what a hobby takes, right?
You collect stamps, collect coins, cars, whatever.
You spend $300 to $500 a year, and you raise maybe $200 to $300 for your expenses as a hobby.
So this is a Congress watchdog hobby.
I had to call a Congress Rat Watcher's hobby to get people's attention.
But this is for real.
This is your tool of democracy.
This is the tool for what you want your country to be for you and your descendants.
So I live in California, and we have a supermajority Democrats with Jerry Brown as our governor.
And we're the fifth largest economy in the world.
And yet we don't have Medicare for all, although the majority of the people want it.
We don't have free college.
The majority of people want it.
We don't even have a ban on fracking, which is what the majority of people want.
And we have a supermajority Democrat in California and Jerry Brown, who when I was growing up, used to be called a hippie.
And now he's in bed with the fossil fuel and the frackers.
The answer to your question, and I've had the same comment when I talked to him on the phone.
I see you've got two-thirds of the legislature in Sacramento.
You got your background.
What are you waiting for?
The reason is that Sacramento is not surrounded by people.
It's surrounded by lobbyists.
And the second reason is the Democrats have safe districts.
Sometimes they don't even have an opponent for the Assembly or the state senate.
So there's no competitive democracy in California.
So they coast.
They take it easy, right?
They don't have to worry about reelection.
They don't upset the insurance and the medical lobby, oil, gas, fracking lobby, whatever.
They take it easy.
What this does, it basically says: look, the Constitution starts with we the people.
It doesn't start we the corporation, we the Congress, we the people.
The word corporation doesn't even exist in the Constitution.
The word company doesn't exist in the Constitution.
The words political parties don't exist in the Constitution.
How come they control us?
Because we're laid back.
We're not grabbing the reins of we the power that we've delegated to Congress, which has turned it and given it to the Wall Street types.
We want it back and we've got the votes and the corporations don't have the votes and the corporations have the money, but that doesn't mean anything if we have the votes because the members of Congress want the money to get the votes and to intimidate any opponents.
Just remember, Congress is the smallest branch of government, as you learned from your high school civics, smallest branch of government, the most powerful branch, war making tax, appropriation, investigation, confirmation of the three branches of government.
And we know their names.
They're not faceless bureaucrats.
So morale goes up.
We get a dynamism here.
And if you want to know how, because I get people, yeah, we want to do this.
We don't know how, Ralph.
Well, there's a great website where you called ratsreformcongress.org.
You'll get how to do a summons, how to put forth the proposed legislation, how to do petitions, how to dig into the background and campaign contributions of a member of Congress.
All there.
It's very clear and simple, and it gives you references if it doesn't have the material to overload the website.
But if you want to get the book, you get it, and I'll autograph it for you.
You know, I'll leave an autograph for you.
If you like, give it to your grown-up children or your high school students, your local library, which needs it.
Just go to ratsreformcongress.org and stay in touch with us with that website.
We're not going to go away after we send you the book.
So it seems to me that, you know, I like the idea.
That's such an interesting idea of if you get three to 500 people together and give a summons to your elected representative.
But, you know, what they've been pretty good at still denying us, even when we are eye to eye with them.
And it seems like this thing in France really is inspiring me.
Well, it leads, Jimmy.
It leads to marches and demonstrations, of course.
The important thing is it isn't just three to 500 any people.
It's three to 500 people who are informed, who know exactly how to argue the case, who can make a fool out of a senator representative on the facts.
They go back and they say to their staff on Capitol Hill, you know, I've never met people like this before.
They're not going away.
They told me you're going to be a thousand next time.
They told me if we want a petition with 3,000, just give them a couple weeks.
They're not going to go away.
And we better have public hearings.
The next step, once you do the summons, you say, we want public hearings and we want citizen witnesses from back home.
We don't want these choreographed closed public hearings like for Supreme Court justice and so forth, blocking out people who may know something adverse about them because they want to ram the judicial nomination through.
So one step leads to another.
And I'll tell you, a lot of people don't want to step forward because they think they'll be alone.
But when there are three, 500 people and they're well-informed and they've got the goods on these guys.
They know who owns them.
It's a completely different esprit de corps, to use the French phrase.
But in this book, the people roar into Washington.
They surround the Congress in relays, night and day, with huge bullhorns saying, we want our agenda.
We've earned it.
Otherwise, resign, resign, resign.
Here are these people inside the Senate chambers.
They're hearing this.
Resign, resign, resign.
And there's a lot of other specific things for the citizens to do.
This is the first national television program where I'm featuring this brand new book.
And isn't it interesting that it's Jimmy Doerr?
It doesn't fool you.
It doesn't flatter you.
And it doesn't flummox you.
That's what these politicians do to win these elections.
They fool you, they flummox you, and they flatter you.
And if you don't do your homework, it's in here and on the website, ratsreformcongress.org, they'll do it again and again.
They're really good at it.
So, you know, what this is talking about is the pressuring people, even making the elected officials fear the people.
And a lot of people say that, well, right now, like Maxine Waters is telling people who are opposed to Trump administration to confront them publicly.
Do you have a position on that?
Do you think that that is helpful?
Well, you know, it can be abrupt and crude, and that backfires.
You don't need to do that.
That's a sign of weakness.
You do it at these town meetings.
You do it by going to their offices with conservative and liberal people.
That really scares them.
By the way, the members of Congress are still afraid of the people.
You know, they may be in the pockets of the corporations, but let me tell you, they put their finger to the wind.
I've seen situations where, remember Obama asked the Congress about sending troops to Syria.
But instead of doing it unilaterally, he said to the Congress, we want you to decide.
95% of millions of emails and letters and calls said no.
And both Republicans and Democrats said to Obama, are you kidding?
No.
You see?
So they are, they're still afraid of the people, but they're more afraid of people who come back and come back and come back.
I mean, there's got to be stamina behind the enthusiasm.
I mean, do people know how to write a letter to their senator?
Do they know how to put CC and put the names of their opponents, the names of the media, all interested parties, so that the senator knows that this letter is not just going to go to her or his office, going to go all over the country?
Do they know how to ask three or four factual questions that will make the member of Congress go to the library of Congress and get research, and it comes back, and he or she and the staff have to read it and get educated and send it back to you?
There are all kinds of techniques.
You can make them respect you.
When they respect you, they will properly fear you if they don't do the right thing.
We got a lot of right things that need to be done that are long overdue.
Well, they don't teach civics anymore in schools.
I don't know if you know that.
So that's why people don't know anything is they don't teach civics anymore.
And, you know, you make the point in the book, we need to have people demonstrating back home while we have people pouring into D.C. And then you get full-time people that emerge out of that movement to then set up shop in Washington, D.C. and do all the work.
How do we get people demonstrating, though?
It seems like in America, they don't embrace the demonstrations and the protests like they do in Europe or France.
It seems in America, people get, they seem to get annoyed and kind of dismiss them.
Well, there's several things.
If you do one in a congressional district, it can go all over the country on social media.
So it's not like the old days.
You have to use postage stamps and phones and so on.
So that's good.
That's one.
The second is we have some great musicians and artists.
The cover here is by Mr. Fish.
He's a genius.
I mean, just look at how clever this cover is, the people and so on.
So we have musicians that brought a lot of people out in the 1960s and 1970s, the anti-war civil rights movement.
The third thing is, and this is very important, is do not give up on your local television radio stations.
They have so excluded the public and the citizen.
They've cut the number of reporters, the number of everything, time for the people.
They often are in a building, a building with the antennas, right?
The local TV.
Just surround it an hour before the evening news and then see whether the evening news said, you know, we've got 500 people here.
They want us to cover the local neighborhoods better.
They want us to cover a protest about some land scam.
They want us to cover a hazard in our foods.
So just don't give up because you own the public airways.
They don't own the public.
We're the landlords.
And the people are not charging anything for 24-hour use by the radio and TV stations.
As you know, Jimmy, it's free.
Compliments of Congress and the FCC.
So we're the landlords.
They're the tenants.
And they don't let us on.
They decide who gets on and who doesn't.
And they get it free and laugh all the way to the bank.
Why should we allow this?
It's our property.
We should have our own networks, our own radio and TV stations, so we can have freedom of the press, the truth coming out.
Well, so.
So don't give the local TV any slack here.
They know they're excluding a lot of news locally, and they're giving you a lot of fluff in endless weather.
You know, the late evening news, Jimmy, I figured out once.
It's on 30 minutes.
So listen to this.
It's nine minutes advertisement.
It's two minutes real news, two, three minutes real news.
It's nine minutes sports.
The weather, three segments, you know, they come on early and they say, hey, you want to know what's on the weekend?
Stick around.
We'll be back.
And they start with some weather storm in Bemidji, Minnesota coming with the maps, you know.
It's crazy.
They don't cover the local area and it's just 30 minutes.
The rest is comedy and so on and late night TV.
We got to raise our expectation levels.
If we don't, they control us.
They control us just by lowering our expectation level.
Well, that's the big problem with social media.
It was supposed to be the antidote to the corporate media.
But now they've learned how to, well, they just purged Facebook just per, you know, they say 70% of Americans get their news from Google or Facebook.
And Facebook just purged 800 pages.
Some of them were just cop watch pages that all they did was record police brutality.
And I say, well, you know, if you're going to be, if we need a revolution in this country and people need to get in the streets, which is what needs to happen, the cops are going to be cracking heads extra hard.
And if you get rid of those cop watch pages or those people who monitor the police, well, then there'll be nobody there.
So it seems like, and everyone seems to be falling asleep to this.
No one seems to be screaming about this.
You know, for convenience, convenience can destroy a democracy.
Excessive.
For the convenience of Facebook and Google, we have allowed them with our personal information and all that free, not only to make a lot of money, but to become the major censors, the major censors of dissidents and of criticism.
The mother of all assent in our country's history started with dissent.
The mother of all assent started with dissent.
Remember that.
In terms of our Bill of Rights started with dissent to create assent and give us all these rights in our Constitution.
We've allowed them increasingly to become more and more censors because they're under pressure themselves.
You didn't do this neo-Nazi group, you know, and then pretty soon it's not just the neo-Nazi.
Pretty soon it's something else.
It's not something else.
There are a lot of good national citizen groups.
It's public citizen, which I started, Common Cause, People for the American Way, National Center for Science and the Public Interest, Pension Rights Center, Center for Auto Safety.
They would love these summons.
They would love these town meetings to give them the support from back home.
And you back home should love their expertise.
They've been at it for 40, 50 years, not a whiff of scandal.
These are citizen groups that are supported by people like you.
You send in 20, 25 bucks.
They lobby Congress for safer cars and cleaner water, cleaner air.
So don't forget, you've got allies here, but they need you more than even you need them.
Yes, we're big fans of public citizen here, and we've done benefit shows for them.
And yeah, they do great work.
And, you know, I really appreciate you spending this much time with us.
Before I let you go, I just want to ask you a few more questions about third parties because Bernie Sanders, his whole career, was saying that we need to have a rainbow coalition in this country, and it has to happen outside the Democratic Party.
And as soon as he became a viable candidate, he seemed to turn his back on what he said for 30 years and now seems to be encouraging progressives to join a party to be revolutionaries.
That is a counter-revolutionary party.
That's the cruel trap of an electoral college indentured duopoly.
Because he has said to people, I don't want to be another nader, meaning nader, Green Party, 2000 campaign.
And so he knows that he's not going to get media with a third party.
If he's on the Democratic primary debates, he's going to get media.
If he gets media, he can start raising money in small denominations.
In 2016, they averaged 27 bucks.
He raised 225 million.
He thought he was going to raise 10 million when he started at the best.
So that's the trap.
And I don't blame him for that.
Now, if we see good people like Bernie having to fall into this trap, either you play within the arena of the two parties, Republican, Democrat, or you're oblivion.
You're going to be ignored by the press.
You're not going to get polled.
You're not going to raise money.
People aren't even going to know you're running.
Then we have to break open the two-party duopoly.
I've written books on how to do that.
So have other people.
Who knows?
I mean, part of this Ratz Reform Congress is there's some enlightened billionaires who provided funding for a lot of these rallies.
And let me tell you, 99% of the billionaires could care less about a progressive America.
All you need is two or three.
There's a lot more than that.
So you have the three billionaires who fund this uprising.
Now, the billionaires that are considered on the left in our culture now, they seem to fund neoliberalism, not actually progressivism.
Would you agree?
Yeah.
So are we going to have to, even are we going to have to rely?
Even someone like Nick, no, I'm blinking on his last name.
Hauner, how do you say his name?
Anyway, he was the billionaire who did that TED talk that got banned.
You know, like he's good on stuff like the minimum wage, but he seems to be a neoliberal overall.
So are we really going to need billionaires to fund us?
Well, not if we go social media and we get some mass attention.
The way to break through press censorship is to demonstrate you got power.
So like if 10 people show up in front of Congress, they're not going to cover it.
If 1,000 people, you're going to get coverage.
If 50,000 people, you're going to get evening news network.
So it's all a matter of saying to the media, you've been ignoring us one by one.
You're not going to ignore us anymore because we're in the tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands.
And then you'll get a lot of media.
But there are a lot of closet radical multimillionaires.
They don't want to go first, but you can get a few of them together.
They will bankroll.
Because after all, all these changes, a lot of these changes, Jimmy, have been in Canada and Western Europe for a long time, for heaven's sake.
Full Medicare for all, for example, a higher medium wage, you know, paid vacation, paid families, sick care, paid pensions that are better than the U.S. and so on and so forth.
So it's not radical stuff.
It's long overdue democracy stuff, human rights stuff, decent living stuff, fair play stuff, justice and access to justice stuff when you're aggrieved and wrongfully injured under the tort law that we have that's being crushed by these wrongdoers, these corporations who want to sell us hazardous products and not be held responsible for their lethal effects.
So I think people just have to give themselves a chance.
Don't give up on yourself.
The minute you give up on yourself and you say, oh, whatever will be with me, who am I?
I am a nobody.
You're playing the game of the plutocrats and the oligarchs.
So that's the come roaring back.
Well, as Chomsky taught us, that's what they want you to think that you are.
No one else is thinking the thoughts you're thinking because your thoughts are never reflected back to you in the media, which is the success of this show, is that we reflect back to people what they're actually thinking and feeling and their wants and desires, unlike the corporate media.
You know, these problems aren't local.
This isn't just the United States.
So this is going on worldwide with capitalism and neoliberalism.
You know, look at Greece, Italy, Spain, France right now.
So do you think that workers worldwide are going to have to come together to get this done?
Well, because we're a world of nation states, it can sort of provide a global aura like the demonstrations in 1968 start spreading out of the Sorbonne in Paris.
But it really has to be done nation-state by nation-state.
I mean, that's the principle, whether we like it or not, protector against global capitalism, which people call neoliberalism.
Jimmy, whatever you do, drop neoliberalism.
The average person doesn't have a clue what that is.
It's global corporatism that you're really talking about.
It's just like people talk about climate change.
When I was growing up in New England, that meant winter, winter, spring, summer, autumn.
Climate change, it should be climate devastation, climate crisis.
Right.
Climate violence, whatever, climate.
I mean, something that reflects the floods, the hurricanes, the fires, the melting of the Arctic ice and the permafrost and the increasing extinction of animal species, et cetera.
So let's call it for what it really is.
You know, as Confucius said many centuries ago in ancient China, how you use your language is very, very important.
Well, Mr. Ralph Nader, I really appreciate you spending time with us.
Is there a question that I forgot to ask you that you wish I would have asked you?
Yeah, because the history of third parties in this country, all these people who are against the Greens and against the libertarian, whatever, they're very glad that some people in 1840 spun off from the Whigs and the Democrat Party and voted for the Liberty Anti-Slavery Party, or they spun off and voted for the Women's Right to Vote Party, or they spun off and they voted for empowering labor and farmers against the great power, the railroads and the banks.
They're very happy about that, aren't you?
But when it happens now, suddenly you call them a spoiler.
Don't use that bigoted word, please.
Well, what I tell people is there will be a third party in America, and it will happen if Bernie Sanders wins the presidency.
I guarantee you, the next day, the corporatist Democrats will start a third party, and they will try to ice the progressives out once again.
That's how we're going to get a third party in America that's viable.
That's what I think.
Why do you think the Greens aren't viable?
Because everybody who says they look at their programs and say, look, majoritarian support for the Green Party agenda.
How come it isn't moving?
Well, because it's excluded from the national debates and the local debates.
So they can't get media exposure.
They can't raise money from the fat cats.
They do need more energy.
They have to field more local and state candidates to build the support for their congressional and presidential candidates.
They have their own problems.
They bicker and fight.
But the interesting thing, if you look, a lot of their agenda was my agenda.
And I left open this website, votenador.org, for the 2008 election.
If you want to go to votenador.org, you will see a lot of the green agenda.
And just ask yourself, this is a majoritarian agenda, Jimmy.
I know.
I mean, this is how many suppressive, obstructive, restrictive hurdles there are in our so-called democracy that blocks a majoritarian agenda from even reaching the visibility of the American voter.
Are you optimistic on the future?
Yeah, because pessimism has no function.
I learned that as a sophomore in university.
I was a little upset with the state of the world, the nuclear arms race, and that was a time they put you under the desks in elementary school for mock defense maneuvers and so on.
And I studied all the pessimists, including Schopenhauer, the German philosopher of pessimism, and they didn't convince me.
So there's no alternative to Adelante.
Ralph Nader's new book, How the Rats Reform the Congress, and a great website.
Go to ratsreformcongress.org, ratsreformcongress.org, for lots of information on how you can get involved, get in the streets, hold your leaders accountable, how we can take back Congress, right?
Because that's the important thing.
We need to take back Congress.
And, well, Mr. Ralph Nader, it's been truly an honor to have you.
It's always great to hear you talk.
You're welcome whenever you want.
If you ever need us to help you publicize something, let us know.
We'll do it right away.
I'll remember that, Jimmy.
RatsreformCongress.org.
Thank you.
Oh, Chuck Schumer's on the line.
Hello.
I am so mad, I tell you, mister.
Can you hear that?
Hear that?
Not really.
Hear what?
Me hitting my pillow.
Wow, what's the matter, Chuck?
I hate to say it, but regrettably, America has now entered a Trump shutdown, hound, hound.
Ha ha ha ha ha!
But you're not really mad, are you?
I don't have much of a game face, do I?
Okay, you beat it out of me.
I'm overjoyed beyond belief.
This is the best thing that's happened to me since something else that was the best thing to happen to me.
Did you see how I cornered him, Trump?
I made him say he'd be proud to shut the government down.
And then he actually did it.
May I just say one word, Jimmy?
Go ahead.
Winning.
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?
You got to become a premium member.
Go to JimmyDorkComedy.com, sign up.
It's the most affordable premium program in the business.
Today's show was written.
That's right.
It was written by Frank Connop, Jim Earl, Ron Placone, Steph Semarano, and Mark Van Landowick.
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 getting it.
Don't don't you don't don't bring out do not freak.
Don't freak out.
Do not do not freak out.
Do not freak.
Do not freak out.
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