Jimmy Dore Show - 20200423_TJDS_20200423_Podcast

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April 23, 2020 - Jimmy Dore Show

01:27:14

20200423_TJDS_20200423_Podcast

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	Get ready for an outstanding entertainment program.
	The Jimmy Dore Show.
	Hi, this is Jimmy.
	Who's this?
	Hey!
	Is this Al Pacito?
	I think so.
	Oh, hi, Mr. Pacito.
	How are you today?
	Jimmy, I'm so alone.
	Yeah, I assume you're quarantined like the rest of us, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, you better believe it.
	I got an underlying medical condition.
	Oh, yeah, what's that?
	I don't know what the fuck is going on.
	I see.
	Very dangerous to be out and about under those circumstances without handlers.
	Jimmy, I need my handlers.
	Yes, yes.
	You famously had one assistant whose job it was to remind you to eat.
	Otherwise, you'd accidentally go days without eating.
	Yeah.
	And now my whole team is gone.
	They're at home, sheltering in place.
	I'm the most confused motherfucker alive right now.
	I bet.
	Not only do I not have my meal reminder, guy.
	I gotta make my own food.
	Uh-oh.
	This situation is unprecedented.
	Well, what have you been preparing for yourself?
	What kind of food?
	Well, Jimmy, I'm always hungry.
	So before my staff left to go hunker down, they very kindly made sure that my larder was well stocked.
	But I don't know how any of this works.
	Do you have do you have really complicated kitchen equipment or something?
	Cabinets!
	How do you open them?
	What?
	I asked Siri.
	You know, she was no help at all.
	She's being a little bitch right now.
	I tried to tap on the metal tubes, you know, on the side of the cabinet, and I pulled at him a little bit.
	No dice.
	Nothing doing.
	It's like trying to open a clam.
	Okay, Al.
	You're talking about the hinge of the cabinet.
	That's what you knocked on?
	The what?
	The hinge, that's not the side of...
	You need to pull on the handle, which is on the other side of the cabinet door.
	Wait, what?
	That thing?
	Nah.
	Al is dangerous.
	I'm not touching that.
	Al, just pull on it.
	It's safe.
	I promise you.
	I wouldn't let you hurt yourself.
	How do you know all this anyway?
	Some kind of necromance or something.
	Whoa!
	Open sesame!
	And I see some reasons.
	All right, we're back in business.
	See, I told you.
	Jimmy, I owe you one.
	I didn't want to alarm you, but my blood sugar was getting dangerously low.
	If I hadn't figured out cabinets in the next 15 minutes, I probably would have dropped dead.
	I'm glad we could help you out, Al.
	Yeah.
	Where are your handlers?
	I don't have handlers, Al.
	What?
	But you're Johnny Big Times now.
	Gotta have an authorize, right?
	Handlers.
	Just because I've had some success doesn't mean I don't know how to take care of myself anymore, Al.
	Well, how do you know when to eat?
	I usually eat when I'm hungry, Al.
	Plus, there are three windows of the day that are more or less set aside for mealtimes.
	I got a headache just thinking about what you just said.
	This is like time chemistry.
	Uh-huh.
	Okay.
	Well, I gotta go crack into these raisins so I don't die.
	Hey, do you know how to open a package of raisins?
	No.
	How hard can it be?
	I'll just claw at it until there are raisins.
	That, uh, okay, that'll that'll work.
	Uh, thanks for checking in with us, Al.
	Appreciate it.
	Don't leave me so good luck.
	Bullshit we can't afford, why is fomenting this?
	Whoa, watch and see as it jacks off the medium speeds and jumps the medium and hits them head on.
	It's the Chimitor Show.
	Music Hi, everybody.
	Welcome to this week's Jimmy Door show.
	Hey, here's two words you don't want to ever hear in your obituary.
	Church potluck.
	That's right.
	Church potluck.
	Hey, have you gotten your $1,200 stimulus check yet?
	Didn't think so.
	Right now, Americans are getting enough bridge liquidity to live under one.
	And meanwhile, the Democratic Party is basically telling Americans to go screw themselves with the lesser of two pitchforks.
	You know, I don't know which is a bigger idiocy, that people think Trump inherited a strong economy from Obama or that Trump thinks he can shoot down Iranian boats.
	Iran has flying boats now.
	Mr. President, we cannot allow a flying boat gap.
	You know, any society, and then I mean this from the bottom of my heart, any society that can't see what a horrible person Ella DeGeneres is can never be counted on to vote the right way.
	Hey, what's coming up on today's show?
	Hey, why is Noam Chomsky still pushing a 40-year-old failed voting strategy?
	The answer just may surprise you, or will it?
	And Nancy Pelosi is so out of touch that Donald Trump's campaign ad can lampoon her.
	That's right.
	The Democrats are so out of touch that a guy who shits on a golden toilet can make fun of them.
	Plus, we have a union organizer who has good news for the future and how workers are going to unite before and after the election.
	Plus, we got phone calls today from Al Pacino, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, plus a lot lot more.
	That's today on the Jimmy Door show.
	So during the pandemic, Nancy Pelosi, 100 millionaire, and the leader of the People's Party, the Workers' Party, went on the CBS Late Late Show with James Corden.
	And watch what she did.
	We're here with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and we've asked her to share something from her home for a little late-late show and tell.
	Speaker Pelosi, what have you found?
	What are you going to share with us from your home?
	Chocolate.
	Really?
	Chocolate, chocolate, candy.
	No, just keep in mind, most people in America have no idea how They're going to pay their rent.
	They're losing their health care.
	They don't have, they're in line at food banks.
	There's lines wrapping around stadiums so people can get food right now.
	They passed $4.2 trillion to the richest people in the country, did nothing for you, and now they're on vacation.
	And she thinks it's a good idea.
	This is how tone deaf, out of touch.
	She thinks it's a good idea to go on a late-night talk show and goof around about how she's handling it, the quarantine.
	Oh my God.
	Let's watch.
	Oh, wow.
	And this is something you can get through the mail.
	Okay.
	Run out.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	This is the episode of Cribs.
	I never knew I needed.
	Oh, my.
	Wow.
	Other people in our family go for some other flavors, but people are lined up at food banks.
	This isn't the billionaire Trump doing this.
	This is the leader of the people, the people's house, the worker party.
	So she thinks it's a good idea why people are lined up in mile-long lines to get a $30 grocery bag full of food.
	She goes on national television and shows all the different ice creams, how she's enjoying this quarantine because she's got all these different ice creams in her $12,000 refrigerator.
	And she doesn't have a worry in the world.
	She's not worried about paying her bills or getting health care or getting food or anything, anything.
	They're going back to work or going back to work.
	Chocolate, and then we have some other chocolate here.
	See, I've always felt a connection with you, and now I understand why.
	Because I'm also out of touch celebrity who likes to talk about ice cream when people are starving.
	Anyway, you've been isolating in your house.
	How much of your regular diet do you think is ice cream and candy?
	Well, as much as possible.
	It is, I enjoy it.
	I like it.
	And people have pointed out she has two of these fridges, each one of about 12 grand each.
	She has two fridges with 12 grand each.
	She's got more ice cream than the 7-Eleven does.
	And the reason they're talking to her is because we're in a pandemic and people are losing their livelihoods.
	People don't have money.
	People are scared to death.
	They're in lines trying to get free food.
	And this is what she thinks is a good idea to do after she just screwed you.
	Better than anything else.
	And I don't know why, but it seems to agree with me.
	I have a lot of energy.
	And we just got to restock the ice cream right for Easter Sunday because we were, shall we say, enjoying because you know, well, I'm worth $100 million and we get whatever we want.
	Plus, I have power.
	I don't know what I would have done if ice cream were not invented.
	I just wonder.
	I just wonder what I would have done if ice cream.
	What about if Medicare for All wasn't invented?
	What do you think?
	What about those people?
	How about what would people do if the UBI wasn't invented?
	And oh, there isn't one.
	You blocked it.
	So ice cream is the important thing, not rent subsidies, mortgage freezes, Medicare for all, a UBI.
	The important thing for Nancy Pelosi is ice cream.
	Now, just imagine, just imagine if Trump did this.
	Carl, Rob Reiner and the Pod Save America guys and every dickweed at CNN and MSNBC would be pulling their hair.
	Oh my God.
	Trump sees showing off his ice cream and people are starving.
	They're not doing that now, are they?
	They should be.
	I'm doing it.
	They're not doing it.
	Isn't that interesting?
	They're not doing that.
	Trump knows better than to do this.
	You know who doesn't?
	Nancy, 100 millionaire, made while she was in Congress, Pelosi.
	I agree.
	I don't know who I am without it.
	Well, thank you for that little sneaker peek.
	We'll be right back.
	They're eating ice cream during the apocalypse.
	The leader, our leader, the most powerful Democrat in the country right now.
	She comes back, they come back.
	Welcome back.
	Now they're eating.
	Talking into some ice cream.
	Reggie, she's eating it.
	Do you have a question for our guests this evening?
	Yes, I do.
	Yeah.
	What the fuck did you do in that stimulus?
	Why did you screw America for a generation?
	And when are you going to give people health care, a UBI, and do something?
	Unfortunately, that's not the question.
	That's not the question.
	The guy doesn't even know and put his head a little higher up on the screen.
	It's like they're all first day YouTubers on national television.
	Dude, don't put your head in the middle.
	You put your head at the top of the screen.
	Do you see how this is this is this would be the equivalent of me doing the same thing?
	Okay, let's do the show.
	Oh my god, is that your impression of Stephen Colbert?
	This is my impression.
	And Stephen Colbert and whoever this guy is.
	Look, I'm on TV.
	Look, I can't even get as low as him.
	Look, I can't physically even get that low.
	I'm trying.
	Look, I'm on TV.
	I'm doing a TV show.
	What the fuck?
	Anyway, so his question is, let's hear it.
	I better say that.
	Tonight's question goes to Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.
	Hi, Reggie.
	Hey, how you doing?
	It's an honor.
	It's an honor to see you.
	It's an honor to see you.
	So if you were on a trip to Rhodesia in an ancient passenger airship and an argument erupted between the ship's second officer and a mysterious but charismatic passenger, would you intervene or would you go to your quarters and write about the account in your memoir?
	This is what she's doing while people are freaking out.
	She's on a TV show eating ice cream in front of her $30,000 worth of fridges, giggling about a fake question, playing a game show.
	She's playing a game show.
	Is this the equivalent of playing the violin as Rome burns?
	I think that's what this is.
	This is so bad.
	Trump has made a commercial of this.
	And here's the Trump commercial.
	We turned out of that $350 billion fund to help small businesses and its workers get through the shutdown.
	It will be up to Congress to restock it.
	But Democrats blocking that move this morning.
	They asked for a quarter of a trillion dollars in 48 hours.
	I don't think so.
	They objected.
	And I congratulate the Senate Democrats.
	Speaker Pelosi, what are you going to share with us from your home?
	Chocolate candy.
	Thousands have been forced to wait for hours at food banks all across the country.
	This is chocolate, and then we have some other chocolate here.
	We just got to restock the ice cream.
	You don't want to eat up Eric Day Noah at one time.
	I can't do it much longer.
	I'm trying so hard.
	Do we say enjoying?
	Having to admit that, yeah, we're starving.
	I like it better than anything else.
	Taping this segment, there are 22 million people out of it.
	This specific program is about stopping job losses today.
	This is hurting people bad.
	Other people in our family go for some other flavors, but right now it's survival move.
	You don't know where that next thing else about come from.
	I don't know what I would have done if ice cream were not invented.
	I just wonder.
	The Democratic Party is so corrupt, so unbelievably corrupt and out of touch that a guy who shits on a golden toilet gets to make fun of them for being out of touch elitists.
	And it lands.
	And it lands.
	Do you want to know why you have Donald Trump?
	Because he gets to run against Nancy Pelosi, one of the most corrupt criminals in the history of our government.
	Not only complicit in war crimes, but complicit in the generational screwing of workers and families.
	That's why Trump is elected.
	Not because Bernie Broves are just so petulant.
	It's because of this.
	It's because when the time came to help people, Nancy Pelosi acted like she was Herbert Hoover on purpose and screwed you.
	And AOC, every damn Democrat went along with it, including Bernie Sanders.
	They're worthless.
	They're absolutely worthless.
	Here's what Danny Haifong says at the Black Agenda report.
	He says, Trump understands power.
	Power is the ability to win the public relations battle because your opponent is invested in the same war as you, but you can't say so without losing the capacity to keep the left loyal to corporatism.
	Power is recognizing your opponent's weakness and striking.
	So he's pointing out that Nancy Pelosi is actually playing the same game as Trump.
	She can't say so.
	So she's handcuffed.
	Trump can say the game he's playing.
	She can't.
	If she does, she'll risk losing the left.
	They won't go to loyal corporatism anymore.
	So that's just great.
	That's exactly right.
	So if you want to know why you're getting Trump, it's because of the corruption of the Democratic Party.
	I've been saying this since I read Listen Liberal.
	This isn't even debatable.
	You didn't get Trump because of Jill Stein or Russia.
	You moron on purpose.
	You didn't get Trump because of Susan Sarandon or Jagoff comedians on YouTube.
	You got Trump because of the unbridled and transparent corruption in the Democratic Party.
	As Chris Edges says, they cheat right in front of you.
	They steal right out in the open now.
	They don't even hide it.
	And Bernie goes along with it.
	96 to nothing in the Senate.
	A generational screwing of America.
	Bernie was told to go along with it, and he went along with it.
	So here's the big debate.
	Now, Chomsky back in 2016 said that you have to vote for Hillary Clinton because he does a lesser of two evil voting.
	Chomsky went on with Mehdi Hassan.
	It's unbelievable how he's getting.
	He's not any worse than any of the normal journalists, but he's just as bad.
	He's a horrible hack and he has horrible takes.
	Like you could fill up a book just with this guy's bad hot takes.
	And well, here he is.
	He's interviewing Chomsky.
	He takes some time out to punch left and voter shame and try to bully some people.
	Watch this.
	It's time to get rid of the malignancy in the White House.
	What do you then make of this very boisterous, very online Never Biden movement that we're seeing from some on the left, from some former Bernie people, including his own former national press secretary, some left-wing social media stars?
	What do you make of the Never Biden movement?
	It also brings up some memories.
	The early 30s in Germany, the Communist Party, following the Stalinist line at the time, took the position that everybody but us is a social fascist.
	So there's no difference between the Social Democrats and the Nazis.
	So therefore, we're not going to join with the Social Democrats to stop the Nazi plague.
	We know where that led.
	There are many other cases like that.
	And I think we're seeing a rerun of it.
	So let's take the position, never Biden.
	I'm not going to vote for Biden.
	But there is such a thing.
	There's a thing called arithmetic.
	You can debate a lot of things, but not arithmetic.
	Failure to vote for Biden in this election in a swing state amounts to voting for Trump.
	takes one vote away from the opposition, same as adding one vote to Trump.
	So if you decide...
	For instance, if Jill Stein wasn't on the ballot in 2016, I wouldn't have voted.
	So that's not a vote for the other person.
	You know, the biggest voting block in America are the people who don't vote.
	That's the biggest voting block in America, the people who don't vote.
	So if I go out and I vote third party, that's not a vote for Trump or a vote for someone else.
	I don't know if you know how voting works, but you vote for the person.
	That's the person that gets your vote.
	Now, if you want to change the system and make it a ranked choice voting system, I'm all for that too.
	Guess who's not for that?
	The Democrats.
	Guess who's not for it?
	Joe Biden.
	Guess what he gets then?
	He gets to lose again.
	And I love this, but this whole, I'm going to break down all of his bad logic here in a second, but we'll keep going.
	You want to vote for the destruction of organized human life on earth, for the increase, a sharp increase in threat of nuclear war, for stuffing the judiciary with.
	He's just making the stuff up.
	He's just making that.
	We're going to increase the likelihood of a nuclear war.
	Yeah, you know why?
	Because the Democrats have McCarthy redbaited the president and attacked him from the right nonstop for four straight years.
	It's the Democrats who wanted Trump to be more bellicose and saber-rattling with the Russians, not the Republicans.
	It was the Democrats.
	So this whole logic is just backwards.
	Young lawyers will make it impossible to do anything for a generation and do it openly.
	So Yeah, that's what I want.
	But that's the meaning of Never Biden.
	So, if we're concerned about the rise of Nazism, maybe we should talk about the fact that propping up the two-party duopoly for 40 straight years, doing his non-voting strategy.
	That's what this is.
	This is a non-strategy.
	His idea to do exactly what Hillary Clinton and the Center for American Progress and Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi want you to do, and all their donors want you to do.
	He's doing it.
	He's saying, Yeah, the Pride Piper theory works.
	Trump is so horrible.
	We have to vote for someone who's equally horrible.
	And by the way, Joe Biden is to the right of Donald Trump.
	Just so you know, when it comes to war, Joe Biden's to the right of Donald Trump.
	When it comes to health care, Joe Biden's to the right of Donald Trump.
	So, this idea that voting for Joe Biden is some difference.
	Let's keep doing this failed voting strategy.
	So, every time you do the lesser of two evil, you know, you move a little, the Democratic Party moves to the right, and then it keeps moving to the right.
	And now, the Democratic Party is a full-blown party of war and Wall Street, full-blown, and fossil fuels.
	Barack Obama bragged that they got more fossil fuels out of the earth during his presidency than any other time.
	This idea that there's a difference.
	Barack Obama bombed Muslims for eight straight years, which is why there were Muslim refugees, Arab refugees at our airports.
	This idea, this is just a crazy idea, this idea that somehow this voting for a Republican over Joe Biden is the equivalent of voting for a Nazi over a good person.
	That's not your choice.
	You have a choice of two Nazis.
	Joe Biden is the guy who took away our civil liberties.
	Joe Biden is the guy who helped explode our prison population.
	Joe Biden is the guy who helped deregulate Wall Street.
	Joe Biden is the guy who helped cut the legs out from underneath unions.
	Joe Biden is the guy who made it harder for poor people in dire circumstances in the most vulnerable times in their life to not be able to declare bankruptcy.
	Joe Biden did that.
	Joe Biden kicked 5.1 million families out of their house last time there was a recession.
	So this idea is just made up.
	This is just making it up.
	So what he's saying, if only, if only we would have had an old segregationist with a rape allegation, dementia, and a 40-year history with enough skeletons in his closet to decorate for a Halloween party, then we could have stopped Hitler.
	That's all you needed back then?
	You needed a segregationist with a rape allegation, dementia, and a 40-year history with enough skeletons in his closet to decorate a Halloween party.
	Then you could have stopped Hitler.
	It's nuts.
	You want to see who Joe Biden is?
	Joe Biden, the U.S. is, this is from CNN.com during Joe Biden's term as vice president.
	The U.S. is running out of bombs to drop.
	The U.S. Air Force has fired off more than 20,000 missiles and bombs since the U.S. bombing campaign against ISIS began 15 months ago, and they ran out of bombs.
	That's Joe Biden.
	Joe Biden made the banks bigger.
	Joe Biden took us from two wars to seven.
	Joe Biden opened the Arctic to drilling whenever Shell Oil asked.
	Joe Biden let him put fracking pipes all the way underneath this country after they repealed the legislation that said you can't export fossil fuels.
	Joe Biden did that.
	This is the guy you're saying that's going to stop the Nazis?
	This is the guy.
	Joe Biden is?
	Joe Biden is a terrorist.
	Let me put it a little clearer for you.
	Let me put it a little clearer for you.
	George W. dropped 70,000 bombs in five countries.
	Barack Obama, 100,000 bombs in seven countries.
	He bombed more than George Bush.
	So who's the lesser of two evil?
	Who's the lesser of two evils?
	He kicked 5.1 million people out of their house, dropped 100,000 bombs in seven countries.
	He didn't kick anybody out of their house.
	He dropped 70,000 bombs in five countries.
	Who's the lesser of two evil?
	Donald Trump has dropped at least 73,000 bombs so far.
	So, and of course, Julian Assange's in prison for revealing all their war crimes.
	You want to know about Joe Biden, Noam Chomsky?
	It's just amazing.
	And you know, Meddy's probably wetting himself that there's something he and Chomsky agree on because it probably will never happen again.
	I wonder if Meddy realizes he won't be able to use this for his MSNBC audition reel because they never, they still don't book Chomsky at MSNBC.
	Even when he says vote Biden, they don't book Chomsky at MSNBC.
	I just like, here's my impression of Medi.
	Oh, No Chomsky, it's an honor to speak with you.
	What do you think about people who don't want to pick between alleged rapists?
	Aren't those people awful?
	What do you think about people who won't vote for a rapist?
	Aren't they awful?
	If Joe Biden is a social democrat, then Dick Cheney is a moderate.
	How about that?
	I like how he says, what do you think of the Never Biden movement?
	He says to, let's listen to it.
	Let's listen to it again.
	It's time to get rid of the malignancy in the White House.
	What do you then make of this very boisterous, very online Never Biden movement that we're seeing from some on the left?
	He says it.
	Somebody left.
	What do you think of the Never Boyden moment?
	You know, that's basically what I call anyone who unfollows me on Twitter.
	By the way, Meddy has me blocked because I pointed out he was lying about Assad.
	I busted his ass on Twitter.
	I'm like, oh, really?
	You're saying this?
	You were calling critics of the American policy in Syria.
	You're calling them Assad apologists.
	And now you're upset that somebody's calling you an Assad.
	Isn't that weird?
	And then he blocked me.
	That's Meddy.
	He's as light white as they come, which is why he got a job at the intercept.
	Except for Glenn Greenwell, that intercept is really hurting.
	Really hurting.
	A bunch of soft brains over there.
	A bunch of Russia gating, McCarthy smearing fucking knuckleheads.
	And I love how neoliberals now are pointing to Chomsky.
	Look, listen to Chomsky.
	They never listened to him before.
	But listen to him when he's wrong.
	That's what they'll tell you.
	Neoliberals thinking they understand Chomsky because of this one take are like people who think they know the Beatles because they heard that one song that one time.
	That is correct.
	But look at this.
	You want to know who else Joe Biden is, Noam Chomsky?
	All you need to know, Biden is reportedly weighing billionaire Michael Bloomberg and Jamie Dimon for his cabinet posts.
	You still think there's a difference?
	The establishment wing of the party didn't fall into Line behind Biden, despite the fact that he put Bloomberg and Jamie Dimon in his cabinet.
	They did it because of that.
	This is who they are.
	Want to know who Nancy Pelosi is?
	You know what her big idea is right now?
	You know how people are losing their health care left and right because in America we tie our health care to people's jobs because our government's corrupt.
	And Nancy Pelosi became a hundred millionaire while she was a congressperson and the leader of the Democrats didn't impeach George Bush for war crimes, but impeached Donald Trump for a vote call to the Ukraine.
	Why?
	Because she was complicit in those war crimes.
	Nancy Pelosi is complicit in those war crimes.
	That's why she didn't prosecute them.
	She's prosecuting Donald Trump while she's complicit in war crimes.
	And you know what her big idea is now?
	Here's Nancy Pelosi's big idea.
	You ready?
	Democrats' big coronavirus idea is to subsidize health insurers.
	So instead of them just expanding Medicare, like Trump is doing for coronavirus.
	So if you get sick with coronavirus, you go to the hospital.
	You don't pay anything.
	No out-of-pocket pays, no back end, no nothing.
	They take care of it for you until you're healthy.
	And the government pays the hospital right through the Medicare system.
	Nancy Pelosi's big idea is: no, no, no, when people lose their jobs, we'll pay for their Cobra.
	That's what her idea is.
	Instead of pushing for public health solutions, Democrats want to cover Cobra premiums.
	Can you believe this?
	So, you know, when you lose your job, your employer doesn't pay for part of your health insurance anymore.
	So you get the option of keeping your present health insurance now that you don't have a job and your payment, your part of your payment for your premium goes up about a million percent.
	Like usually somewhere around $1,000 a month or more.
	Just for the insurance.
	That's not your co-pays.
	That's not your out-of-pockets.
	So this is her big idea.
	That's who the Democrats are.
	I love this question.
	Hey, why didn't you ask Chomsky to share his thoughts on Biden's apparent cognitive deterioration?
	Chomsky basically founded modern cognitive science.
	The question should have been a no-brainer, pun intended.
	That's great.
	Hey, why didn't you ask Chomsky to share his thoughts on Biden's apparent cognitive deterioration?
	You got the guy who's the father of modern cognitive science.
	A fun exercise is to look at what Chomsky has said about past Republican candidates.
	Oh, really?
	I wonder what he said.
	Turns out that every one of them is an unprecedented emergency that demands a lesser of two evil votes.
	Romney, for example, was going to start a nuclear war.
	That's what he says.
	He just said it again, nuclear war.
	Even though it was Barack Obama who dedicated a trillion dollars to upgrade our nuclear arsenal in 92, Chomsky said a vote for Bill Clinton because of the Supreme Court threat.
	It goes way back.
	So let me just tell you this.
	And here's another reason why Chomsky's wrong.
	Bill Clinton was not the lesser of two evils.
	Either time he ran.
	Bill Clinton was the greater evil.
	How's that, Jimmy?
	Well, George Bush I wanted to pass.
	This is one example.
	George Bush I wanted to pass NAFTA.
	He couldn't do it.
	Why?
	Because the Democrats, who at that time were still beholden to workers, they still kind of represented workers.
	They couldn't vote for NAFTA because their union voter base would get, knew it was the death of them.
	So then Bill Clinton gets George Bush I. He becomes president.
	They tried to pass NAFTA with George Bush I, couldn't get it done, couldn't get it passed through Congress.
	Bill Clinton does.
	Bill Clinton gives cover to the blue dog Democrats so they can go ahead and vote to screw over unions and vote for NAFTA.
	George Bush couldn't get that done.
	Who could?
	The Democrat, Bill Clinton.
	Bill Clinton could get that done.
	He was the greater evil.
	Bill Clinton deregulated Wall Street.
	At the same time, he exploded the prison population while gutting welfare and cutting the legs off from underneath our workers and our unions by passing NAFTA.
	That was the great George Bush I would not be allowed to do any of those things.
	And then Bill Clinton totally changed the party.
	We became a party that represented workers to a party that represents Wall Street.
	That's what the Democratic Party is right now.
	They don't represent workers.
	And so he's wrong about this.
	And it was Joe Biden who made sure Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas got on the Supreme Court.
	So do you see how wrong Chomsky could be when he's wrong?
	When he's wrong, he doesn't fuck around.
	He's right most of the time.
	But when he's wrong, holy shit, he swings for the fences.
	And here's exactly why Chomsky's wrong.
	Glenn Greenwald is going to tell you why Chomsky's wrong.
	Because Chomsky is advocating for the same failed non-strategy of voting that he's been advocating for since 1992, which is vote the lesser of too evil and cross your fingers.
	So here we go.
	Here's what Glenn Greenwald says.
	And I think what people are starting to realize is two things.
	Number one, when you pledge your unconditional support to politicians, meaning when you say, like Chomsky does, no matter who you pick, no matter how adverse he is to my political ideology and my set of policy preferences, I'm going to vote for you.
	I'm going to support you.
	They start to realize that you have no leverage.
	There's no reason for them to do anything but ignore you with contempt because you're basically in the subservient position you put yourself in where you say, I don't care how much you trample on my values.
	I'm still going to vote for you.
	Why would anybody listen to a group of people who say that and who say, oh, we want concessions?
	Why would I give you concessions if you've already told me that at the end of the day, you're going to vote for me anyway?
	I'm not going to give you concessions.
	I'll give concessions to the people who may not vote for me, meaning centrists or Republicans or disaffected suburbanites or whatever.
	So that's one problem with that strategy is it guarantees your own impotence.
	And Chomsky's advocating for that.
	And Chomsky's idea is we could influence Biden more.
	You want to see Joe Biden telling you how much he cares about influence?
	Because he knows he's in with the donor class and he'll never lose his race in that small state, Delaware.
	Watch this.
	Here's a guy who's telling you how much he responds to pressure from his voters.
	Watch this.
	I don't care if all the American people say he shouldn't be on the court.
	If I thought he should be, I would vote for him on the court and vice versa.
	That's my responsibility, my sworn responsibility.
	That was the guy who helped Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia get on the court.
	That's that guy.
	Chomsky said, you got to vote Clinton because of the Supreme Court in 92.
	I'm sure he said it here today.
	Here's Joe Biden telling you how well that works.
	No shit.
	Nothing would fundamentally Change.
	That's Joe Biden's words.
	I love how this guy says Chomsky also just showed he can't do arithmetic.
	If you vote for Trump, that's plus one for Trump.
	If you vote for Biden, that's plus one for Biden.
	If you vote for any other candidate, that's plus one for that candidate.
	That's all.
	Beyond the Electoral College, there is no 4D logic coming occurring.
	No, there's no logic to what Chomsky's saying.
	This is arithmetic.
	That's the arithmetic.
	He's inventing some new kind of arithmetic that doesn't exist.
	That doesn't exist.
	That's made up.
	That's how we got to this position.
	And I appreciate Meddy never asking Chomsky what he thinks about Joe Biden's dementia.
	Here's what Fiorella Isabella from Convo Couch says.
	She says, to use Latino populations as tokenized votes is something Democrats love to do.
	Joe Biden stood by the Obama administration as the Obama administration built the foundations for cages and as Clinton pushed a coup to oust the Democratically elected leader of Honduras, leading to mass migrations.
	it's it's It's hilarious.
	And here's Kyle Kalinsky.
	He tweeted out, as a left-winger who will not vote for Biden, I want you to know I'm 100% okay with you blaming me if Trump wins a second term.
	I mean it blame me.
	Then get to thinking real hard how you're going to get me to support your candidate the next time.
	Maybe even ask me.
	I'll tell you.
	That's how politics works.
	Just so you know, that's how politics works.
	If you want my vote, you have to come get it.
	That's how politics works.
	But Joe Biden, just like Hillary Clinton, are expected to garner votes without having to campaign for them.
	And of course, here's Meddy.
	Meddy comes by.
	He says, if you're okay with a white nationalist winning a second term, I question your left-wing credentials.
	Hey, you're a Russia-gating warmonger.
	Meddy, you're a russia-gating warmonger.
	You're a McCarthyite-smearing anti-journalist who actually goes after real journalists like Seymour Hirsch, who you're not fit to lick his balls.
	And you somehow wanted to criticize his reporting on Syria when it was correct.
	And of course, you're pushing the CIA line because that aligns up with your beliefs, your crazy, fucked up beliefs.
	He says, if you're okay with the white nationalists winning a second term, I question your left.
	You're going to question someone's left-wing credentials?
	You phony?
	Such a phony lefty.
	And of course, Joy Reed joins him.
	That's the company Meddy keeps, Joy Reed, just so you know.
	And Mike Figuerado says, hey, folks, wish my friend Mehdi Hissan luck.
	He's currently auditioning for a job at MSNBC.
	They noticed him, and I think they like him.
	I'm rooting for you, bud.
	So.
	So Chomsky couldn't be more wrong.
	He was wrong in 2016 when he said this.
	I said he was wrong then, and he's wrong now.
	And, you know, in true Chomsky fashion, he doesn't do anything halfway.
	So when he's right, he's 100% right.
	And when he's wrong, he's 1,000% wrong.
	It doesn't, I mean, I could be drunk and high and out debate him on this one.
	Luckily, I'm not.
	I just have a little coffee in me today.
	Hey, Barack Obama's on the line.
	I hope he has an inspiring message of unity.
	Hello.
	Hey, Jimmy.
	Vote for Joe Biden, you asshole.
	Don't be.
	Don't be irresponsible.
	Hi, Barack.
	You miss my voice, don't you?
	My voice of unity.
	Get on that line.
	I'm a uniter, not a divider.
	Yeah.
	I said that.
	Remember?
	Yeah, I thought George W. Bush said that.
	He calling me a liar?
	I don't steal other folks' jump.
	I'm the adult folk in the room.
	That's why I want you to support Joe Biden.
	Do it, puppet.
	Do it.
	But Joe Biden stole other people's stuff.
	Parallel thinking isn't stealing, Jimmy.
	It's eminent domain for the good of the party.
	But what about the good of the country, Barack?
	You got some fucked up priorities, son.
	If you cared about the future of our party, you'd support the new and exciting voices that embraces, like Joe Biden's.
	How is Joe Biden new and exciting?
	He's about hope.
	He's about change.
	And he's just about unintelligible.
	He's so childlike, it makes me weep with joy and wonder.
	And compassion, Joe's full of it.
	What do you mean, Joe's full of it?
	But how about that Andrew Cuomo?
	Right?
	That guy feels for people.
	Perfect VP material for Joe.
	Who needs a black chick?
	I thought Biden was going to pick a woman for his running mate, Barack.
	Put him in a goddamn dress.
	Juliani did it.
	Why can't Andrew?
	If Democrats believe Joe's mentally fit to be president, they might as well believe Andrew Cuomo's a woman.
	Cuomo's the best woman for the job.
	Her daily news conferences are like mom's apple pie.
	Warm, reassuring, damaging to the kidneys.
	Come to get it.
	That doesn't seem practical to me, honestly.
	Well, what about Michelle then?
	Michelle is the most admired woman in the fucking world.
	Look at her book sales.
	She spagged bigger arenas than Donald Trump.
	You didn't seem to care about that when Bernie Sanders was packing arenas.
	He never wore an American flag lapel pen, you idiot.
	I can't support that.
	It's un-American not to wear a flag pen.
	That's why Bernie lost.
	Michelle always wears her pen.
	Just like I did when I lost both houses of Congress.
	Spot on everybody.
	Yeah.
	You know, the actual jobless rate is now at 20%.
	Do you have any words of encouragement for the unemployed, Barack?
	Yeah.
	I'm the most admired man in the world behind Bill Gates.
	You're doing great work, people.
	Gotta go.
	I got a truckload of toilet paper out front that won't unload itself.
	Put a mask on, Carlos.
	Don't contaminate the Sherman.
	We have special guests.
	She's a scholar, a union organizer, and author of the latest book, No Shortcuts, Organizing for Power.
	And her new book is A Collective Bargain, Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy.
	She's contributed to the New York Times, The Nation, Jacobin, and the In These Times, and much more.
	She's here to talk to us today about how unions and how we can help organize unions during the pandemic.
	Jane, thanks for being on the show.
	My pleasure.
	We're seeing who really generates the profits in America right now, right?
	We're seeing who has actually all the power, who's actually essential and who's not essential, right?
	So it turns out a UPS driver and a grocery store worker Are essential and a truck driver are essential and a delivery person is essential.
	a trader on Wall Street is not.
	So it would seem-Definitely not.
	But if all the grocery store workers went away, it would really affect our life.
	So what should we be, what should we be doing now?
	Because it seems like there's been a robbery that took place in the stimulus bill.
	So they gave $4 trillion to the richest people in the country while they gave workers nothing and families nothing, right?
	So there's going to be an even bigger consolidation of corporate power happening because of this.
	How can workers fight back?
	Yeah.
	First of all, it was slightly more than robbery.
	It was like practically mass murder in that legislation.
	Seriously, right?
	It was, you know, and the one that they're doing today, by the way, is equally bad, if not frankly, worse.
	So what can workers do?
	I think the thing that workers can do is the same thing that we have had as an option for a very long time.
	And it's almost like the union busting industry has been so successful that people almost forget there's this thing called unions.
	So I think what workers need to do, quite frankly, is form unions and form really strong unions, not weak unions, strong unions.
	Form good unions, form democratic unions, and form them as fast as humanly possible.
	And by the way, it's a hell of a lot harder than that wishful thinking that I just spit out sounds because it's really hard to form unions in the United States of America.
	We are exceptional in not having universal health care.
	We're exceptional in not having income supports that actually take care of workers when they have things like a pandemic breaking out.
	But we're particularly exceptional in one category, which is how easy it is for union busting companies like Jeff Bezos's, Amazon and Whole Foods to actually shatter the lives of workers when they attempt to do something simple in a democracy, which is called form a union.
	So what workers need to do is form a union.
	What they need to do is hold on to their confidence and realize everything that you just said, which is that they matter far more than Wall Street traders.
	They matter far more, frankly, than shareholders.
	I mean, I think every CEO could like float away on their yacht right now and we wouldn't notice a damn thing except it'd be better for us if they did.
	So workers need to figure out how to build to 90% unity is what I argue in the current book and like what I do in real life is like teaching workers how to build the kind of solidarity that I call unbreakable solidarity because unbreakable solidarity is crucial to actually having success in both a union organizing drive and in a strike.
	And right now, because of how ridiculous the National Liberal Relations Board is under the evil genius in the White House, it's very hard to form a union.
	In fact, they suspended all union elections last month in the name of the COVID crisis.
	Then they put them back on.
	This is all true.
	You don't even know what, you know, like there's so many evil things going on each day.
	It's hard to keep track of it.
	So functionally and technically, the National Liberal Relations Board, which is the board that certifies unions, like when workers form a new union, which is what I've spent most of my life doing, is helping workers form new unions.
	It's the National Relations Board that certifies the union.
	There's one of two ways to do it, which I'm happy to get into both options because I think one is the only possible one right now.
	But either way, the National Liberal Relations Board is who certifies sort of the creation of a new union officially.
	So that's extraordinary because they essentially closed the agency down, declaring that they were too busy under COVID.
	Meanwhile, this is the same people whose Supreme Court kept people online in the pouring rain in Wisconsin against their better interest to go hold a goddamn immoral election, right?
	So I want to get into what the problems are right now in union organizing, what has taken place since the 70s, which is an exact contrast to what the conservative movement has been doing.
	They've been organizing and the left has been unorganizing.
	So like we see how essential Amazon workers are, UPS workers and grocery store workers and mail delivery.
	So what can we do?
	What can the workers do to fight back against what's happening legislatively right now, where they're being fleeced?
	Their future, the future generation is being fleeced and income inequality is being cemented.
	Because the only thing we have are workers' unions, right?
	What can they do now?
	So there's a handful of things.
	There's a handful of like really important sort of set of methods, like methods, like how do we actually do it?
	Like how do you produce a show?
	There's a way that we actually can produce a strike.
	So the way that you produce a strike is you have to build really high levels of unity and really high levels of structure.
	Now those two things, by the way, are specific and they are not rocket science, but they do take a little bit of practice and it's smart to get some advice on how to do it.
	So the first thing that if I'm working with a group of workers and they call up and they say, hey, we want to form a union, what do we do?
	There's a series of steps that we coach workers to take.
	The first one is get together with some other folks and come to a meeting, right?
	So the first thing that we're trying to do is help understand both who are these workers, what's the spread they have.
	So it was an Amazon warehouse for sake of argument.
	Like do they have each, do they have a worker in each part of the facility or are they all concentrated in one area?
	So the first thing is try and build a cross-section of workers across your entire workplace.
	Like that's going to be key.
	You can't just be like if you're in a hospital, it can't just be that the emergency room nurses want a union and no one else.
	So if the emergency room nurses were to call and say, which I've taken that call many times in my life, calling to say, hey, conditions are hell, really hell now, but conditions are generally hell.
	We want to form a union.
	The first thing we're going to say is see if you can grab a cross-section of workers from all the departments in the hospital before the first meeting.
	And that's going to help people begin to realize they got to talk to a bunch of their coworkers and they got to talk to people carefully.
	What you don't want to do is trigger the boss if you can avoid it, right, early in the campaign.
	So you want to talk to coworkers that you know and that you trust about getting together in a meeting to form a union.
	That's step one.
	And look for a spread across departments.
	Step two, try not to try not to prematurely like out the campaign by talking to the wrong persons.
	You want to talk to safe people, people who people have had conversations with and that you've had a pretty strong indication that they feel like the conditions are really, really, really bad.
	And then you want to start figuring out who among you are the workers who have the most trust among your colleagues.
	Now, this is the part that is least intuitive and in some ways most fundamental.
	Like every campaign I've ever run and won and taught workers how to win, which are always like hell campaigns in terms of the tactics by the union busting.
	I mean, they're like, they come in suits and they come, they come in two kinds of suits, right?
	Like formal suits, and you don't really notice them when they're walking around the hospital or the facility or the Amazon warehouse.
	And then they come in like uniforms, meaning like the hired security guards.
	So, but either way, we say to people, the most important thing is that there's going to be fear used in the campaign.
	The employer's main weapon is fear and doubt.
	Usually it's doubt, then fear.
	And then if doubt doesn't work in fear, they try it all over again, right?
	And they up the stakes as they go.
	As we saw, Amazon fired several workers just in the last few weeks, right, standing up for themselves.
	So the thing you need to do Is you have to build what we call an organizing committee like small O, small C. The most effective organizing committee is going to be made up of workers who already have high trust from their colleagues.
	And those kind of workers are essential to actually both winning the campaign and being able to strike successfully, at least in the United States.
	I mean, I do a lot of work in Europe now.
	Two conditions there are quite different.
	But if you're in the United States of America and you are watching this, one, if you don't have a union, start trying to form one.
	Two, if you have one, if it's good, God bless you.
	If it's not, start making it better.
	But three, if you want to form a union right now in the United States, I'm going to argue the main, the main way that you're going to do it is by being able to actually unite the majority of workers and walk off the job and do something called striking for union recognition.
	And this is largely because there's two ways to form a union.
	One is you can petition to have an election at the National Relations Board.
	The other is called voluntary recognition.
	It's always been true since 1935 in the United States that workers had two ways they could form a union.
	I was trained by old school and brilliant people.
	So let me just say that I'm not, I'm not telling you anything that I made up.
	You know what I mean?
	This goes way back to the 1930s.
	So I was trained by really brilliant mentors.
	I didn't realize it at the time.
	Every day that goes by, I realize it.
	And in the union I came out of, we were actually taught to prepare workers to strike for recognition.
	That's a rare union these days that's still teaching people the skill of actually walking off the job en masse and saying we're not going to walk back in until you get the employer to certify that there's a union.
	That's a strike for legal recognition.
	I'm going to argue that's the best option available right now.
	And in order to do it, what would really help workers right now, seriously help them besides identifying the most trusted colleagues among their coworkers, because you need your most trusted colleagues when the fear starts.
	Let me just say why it's so important.
	When the boss comes in and says, we're going to fire the first worker, or when the boss starts calling mandatory, what's called captive audience meetings, which they're legally allowed to do in the United States, unlike most countries, which means they bring all the workers in on paid time and start, you know, showing like grainy footage from the 1930s and someone being murdered by a mobster or something, and then they tell you that's what unions are.
	And when they start to do that, if the worker who, if you don't have a worker who isn't well-liked and well-trusted by their coworkers, standing up in a meeting to challenge the employer, they're going to have far less success than a worker who's actually well-trusted by their colleagues.
	So this is where the trust factor comes in.
	In No Shortcuts, in my second book, actually in all three of my books, I talk about this person, the organic leader.
	They're super important.
	So in order to build to like a 90% out strike, which is what we need a lot of in the United States right now, and by the way, not just a lot of them now, we need a serious amount of strikes before whatever the election is that's coming, after the election that's coming.
	Like we're going to need a hell of a lot of strikes in this country.
	So people getting good at it is going to matter.
	So what kind of, so Cole, let's go back to that.
	You say with the election coming up.
	So that was great.
	You broke it down how you have to organize a union.
	And you go into it in your book, and it's great how you talk about how do you find trusted leaders and you have to trust the workers.
	And the reason why workers are voting against their own interests, like for people like Scott Walker in Wisconsin, is because the leaders don't trust the workers.
	And so, but tell me, what kind of strikes would you recommend?
	Like, what do you mean when you say there has to be a lot of strikes before the election?
	What kind of strikes and what effect and what demands should the strikers make?
	Yeah, I think a few different kinds.
	One is I say, I say in pretty much all my books that there's three strategic sectors right now in the United States.
	One is logistics.
	Two is healthcare.
	Three is education.
	Fascinatingly, two of those three are heavily women and women of color professions in the United States.
	And two of those, actually all three of them can't be offshored, right?
	You can't have a UPS driver deliver your package to your home from China.
	So this is one reason why the logistics sector is so strategic.
	Same with healthcare and same with education.
	Education is in every single part of the United States.
	And the right-wing knows this.
	The Democrats don't.
	Or maybe they do and they're just idiots committing suicide.
	I haven't figured it out.
	But, you know, schools are so important because they're everywhere, right?
	So if you're building a powerful teachers union or a powerful education union, you have a reach into every part of the United States of America, which I do think the Koch brothers understand, which is why they've been trying to dismantle the public education system for my entire adult life.
	So those three sectors matter.
	That's one.
	Two, I mean, I think we're going to see a hell of a lot more strikes.
	I think that when the pandemic calms down, like when it calms down, and healthcare workers in particular, who were asking to commit suicide along with transit workers and grocery store workers, when this pandemic calms down, I think that you're going to see nurses and healthcare workers,
	hospital workers, and nursing home workers, like burning tires in the streets in a pretty serious way because what they have been asked and what they are doing is commensurate to a firefighter every day running into a burning building that they know is going to collapse on them, right?
	It's like it's complete insanity.
	But by the way, the pay scale between those two looks nothing like each other.
	I'm just saying.
	So, you know, so, yeah, so we're going to need a lot of strikes before and after.
	And it doesn't, to me, it doesn't matter who wins.
	Like at this point, the Supreme Court is taken.
	It's gone.
	Like for the rest of my lifetime, the Supreme Court is a done right-wing deal.
	The general federal judiciary is gone.
	The electoral system is on life support.
	I mean, it's hard to imagine that we're going to have anything resembling a fair election in November.
	Let's just agree we're not going to have a fair election in November.
	So the role of strikes before, and then in particular, the role of strikes after, and it's going to take a while to build the kind of strike power that we saw in Chicago this fall and also in 2012 in West Virginia, in Los Angeles, in Oakland, and the big strikes that we've seen recently at the Marriott strike.
	To build to that kind of strike effectiveness takes practice and takes some work.
	So people need to get on it right now.
	And I think that workers, I think once workers get exposed to understanding here's the basics, here's what you have to do, I think we're going to see a lot more of it.
	And I think we're going to need to have the already organized workers who are in unions and good unions leading the entire working class out on strike as soon as we can come back out again into the streets.
	And, you know, even if it was Bernie Sanders, God bless the moment when we all thought that was briefly possible.
	But like, even if it had been Sanders, in fact, especially if it was Sanders, I would say to people, no matter what, we're going to have to strike the crap out of this country by 2022 because there's nothing left.
	Like they're taking every single thing away.
	And the electoral system is a mess.
	The Supreme Court's a mess.
	So where are we going to go?
	We're going to walk off the job.
	Like that's pretty much the option that capitalism is leaving for workers in this country.
	And what demand, what demand do the workers make at that point?
	What are they demanding?
	Because we have zero representation.
	You know, you talk about Bernie Sanders.
	Bernie Sanders went along with the screwing of America.
	He bent the knee to the party.
	So there's, it's just never going to come from the same thing with every justice democratic.
	There's no hero.
	There's no heroes.
	Everyone's a bad guy.
	The heroes are the ordinary people.
	Yes, exactly right.
	So what do what kind of demand can we extract from?
	Go ahead.
	Yeah.
	Well, no.
	I mean, feel free, but I think the, I mean, there's a bunch of conversations going on about that right now.
	I'm going to be in one in about an hour and a half on a Zoom call.
	So I know that a set of people are advocating for universal health care.
	Done.
	Like, finish.
	Stop.
	I mean, I heard your discussion.
	Idiot.
	Oh, my God.
	Don't make me going about like extending COBRA.
	That's the stupidest thing I ever heard.
	It's insulting to people.
	So anyway, I think the strike has to be for income supports.
	The strike has to be for a Green New Deal.
	The strike has to be, but the first leg of it, I think, is around demanding universal health care because I think that it really resonates with people in a way it didn't 17 million layoffs ago.
	You know what I mean?
	Like I think that people are actually starting to understand 17 million people just lost their job.
	And whatever idiocy Pelosi is putting out in the last couple of days about extending COBRA and covering portions of CORA is like continuing to like literally just line the pockets of the super rich private insurance companies.
	I mean, so strike number one.
	So the idea, just the idea was what Nancy Pelosi, instead of extending Medicare to cover everybody, which is what Trump's doing for coronavirus, if you get coronavirus, you go to the hospital.
	They take care of you from start to finish until you're all well.
	And the government says a payment to that hospital through the Medicare channels.
	And that's what they say.
	And that's it.
	It's all over.
	So what Nancy Pelosi wants to do is instead of the government paying, the government sends that money instead of to the hospital to another person.
	And then he decides how much money to send to that hospital, how much he's going to keep for himself so he can go buy a new car and a new house and take a vacation.
	That's the system she wants to cement in place.
	That the government takes money, takes a third of the profit, gives it to a third party, then that third party then pays the hospital.
	It makes absolutely no sense, but that's called corporate capture of our government.
	And that's why Nancy Pelosi is no different than Donald Trump in this moment.
	In fact, she's a little bit worse.
	In fact, and so right now we had less than half of LA County residents still have a job.
	That's in LA County.
	Half the people don't only have a job.
	So half of 30 million people in one region, right?
	Yeah.
	It's total.
	I mean, it's complete.
	I mean, the 17 million figure is just the figure of people eligible to apply for unemployment.
	That's right.
	Which leaves out half of Los Angeles, by the way.
	And it leaves out half the workers who are actually delivering our food to us right now, cooking our food, making the food, keeping us well fed, delivering crap from Jeff Bezos' platform.
	But, you know, I want to go back to one thing about this insurance thing, which I think people, I think that people fail to understand a little bit of the system you just explained, but it's even sicker than that.
	So Bill Frist, I don't know if you remember the name Bill Frist.
	He was the Senate majority leader, right, for many years under like Bush 1, Bush 2, Bush, you know, the dynasties.
	So for years, he was the head of the U.S. Senate before Harry Reid and before McConnell.
	And the Frist family, who largely engineered the remake of some of the way that the financing happens to the healthcare system in this country, the Frist family, so literally the guy who ran the United States Senate and made the decisions about Medicare, Medicaid, and healthcare, is the owner, the founding family, and the largest shareholder in the largest for-profit hospital chain in the United States of America, which by the way, which means it's the largest for-profit healthcare chain in the world because we're the only idiots with this huge private system.
	So it's called HCA.
	And HCA is literally the family business of the Frist family.
	So so fleecing are they of the system that they're deciding how much to give to themselves.
	Then they're in the shareholder seat, how much they're going to keep from it, and then how much they're going to pay to the workers and pay a patient who's getting, you know, whatever.
	So the system is fundamentally broken.
	I think that the first strikes, I think the re-I think if we can get to, like, let me say one thing, when people say like general strike, it's a cute idea.
	We're not close to it.
	So let's get a little realistic.
	What we could credibly get close to, and it would be as big as 33 and 34, meaning 1933 and 1934, which are two years I'm obsessed about right now, given the parallels in our history.
	In 1933 and 1934, before there was a National Labor Relations Act, in fact, the strikes that put the pressure on FDR to give us the National Labor Relations Act and to give us what I call 12 years of kind of freedom in the U.S., which is all we had until Taft Hartley in 1947, right?
	But the strikes that went down in 1933 and 1934 were illegal and they were done in concentrated cities.
	So what we could actually think is possible in the current moment is that we look at a handful of strategic geographies, like a handful of key cities, Los Angeles, case in point, Seattle, an Oakland, a Portland, a New York City, a Boston.
	Like you start at Chicago.
	You start going through the list of the places where labor actually has some progressive left-wing leadership, where they have some unions that are high-functioning, generally because of what I just said, and where we could actually strike enough of the city, like enough strategic sectors in enough cities, that we begin to create like mini general strikes in key geographies.
	So if you take the three sectors that I outlined, logistics broadly speaking, healthcare, and education, and you start there, and then you start to do a map of like, where do we have strategic capacity, which cities?
	That's all we did in 33 and 34 to create the shitstorm that actually made them pass the National Labor Relations Act, the Social Security Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and like most of what we know, it's still hanging on by a thread, but most of the laws that are that we are still hanging on, like yeah, by a tattering thread, were all passed because of the power of strikes that happened illegally in key cities in 1933 and 1934.
	Again, most of them illegal, most of them masses of workers walking off the job, understanding that they were fighting for a bigger future than just tomorrow's paycheck.
	And okay, that's cool.
	That's great to know.
	So this is, so what do you think the chances of that happening?
	So not a general strike, but a kind of a coordinated strike where the workers have a demand.
	Like you say, they have a demand.
	So are you saying something like, let's say we somehow get, let's say, Amazon workers to walk off the job and they're demanding, or maybe nurses.
	I don't know.
	Nurses are for Medicare for All.
	I know that.
	I know that for sure, but I don't know if that's true.
	Yeah.
	So are you talking about coordinating different unions to go on strike to affect Medicare for all and then go on to our other demands?
	What are you saying?
	Okay.
	To be honest, again, the capacity, the capacity is a little bit challenged, but two sets of workers have shown really high capacity to strike in the last decade against all odds, and that's been nurses and hospital workers and the teachers, right?
	The educators.
	And both of them, both of those largely female, largely women of color-led professions, which I think is really fascinating in terms of the new labor movement that we're building out of the ashes of what we have.
	Most of them have a handful of assets that are different than the brothers from 100 years ago.
	It doesn't make them better, it just makes them different, and it's really important right now, which is that they are tethered to their community in a different way.
	So they're not going off to a big factory, shutting the doors, and building something that no one sees.
	They're actually working with their hands, their head, their heart, and they're working very closely, like fist and glove, with patients, families, students, and they engage the community in a way that we're desperate for in the U.S. labor movement.
	Like we're desperate to like overcome, you know, you could say it's 40, 50.
	I say in the book, it's basically an 80-year war in American workers, public relations war, and other forms of it.
	But there's been a really pronounced public relations war since Reagan, basically, right?
	Unions are horrible, unions are awful, unions are self-interested, none of which is true.
	Okay, a handful of idiots, of course, right?
	Every institution has a few of them.
	Look at the mainstream media, for God's sakes.
	Anyway, so, or the House of Faith, or people who, you know, pre whatever, right?
	So all institutions have a little bit of a problem.
	But the destruction of the image of the union is going to be best rebuilt by a bunch of registered nurses and hospital workers and technicians who've been hooking up people to ventilators, walking out on the streets when they can come out again and saying, hey, we in fact were on the front lines of the war that we were just thrown into, and now we have a demand.
	And the demand is we never want to face that situation again.
	We want universal health care and we want it, damn it, now.
	Because, you know, most of my life was helping registered nurses and hospital workers.
	So it's like it's a particularly painful time when I jump on the phone with any number of former people who I helped form unions or organizers who are still doing it because the conditions are extraordinary.
	So no nurse is going to walk off the job right now.
	No tech, no healthcare worker.
	Their mission is to save patients.
	And that's what they're going to do right now.
	It's like a firefighter going into a burning building.
	But I think there's going to be hell to pay when they can come out again and when things start to appear normal.
	The question is, when's that going to be?
	That, I think, is still up in the air, right?
	If you're a Kemp and you're an idiot in Georgia, like that governor is, who stole his own election, okay, you know, they're apparently going to come out starting tomorrow and just kill a bunch more people.
	I mean, the ruthlessness with which the corporate elite have revealed how absolute little they give a shit about ordinary workers in this crisis is, I think, unparalleled in my lifetime.
	Like we've known it, but now you really see it.
	So I'm hoping that the parallel is that a whole lot more workers are going to say, you know, it was sort of scary when I tried to form a union last time.
	They kind of threatened to fire me, but hey, now they're just killing me.
	So why not walk off the job, right?
	I mean, it's a different calculus when they're telling you you have to come to work, you get no sick leave in this country, we're not going to give you any health care, and we're going to expect that you're going to die to come to work and deliver some food to someone.
	It's total insanity.
	So I think if workers hang on to the accolades they're getting right now and get some basic methods down and start walking off the job in serious numbers, we stand a chance at taking back control of the country.
	That's the first positive news I've heard in a month.
	That's the first positive outlook that, no, this is great because you know what you're doing.
	You've been organizing, you've been an organizer your whole life, not only inside with workers, but you've also organized for environments, environmental causes, and things like that.
	So you know what it's all about.
	I mean, and can you talk, can you explain to people the difference between organizing and mobilizing, which is what the left does now.
	The left does mobilizing, not really organizing.
	Can you explain the difference?
	Yeah.
	I mean, in summary, the way I summarize it in no shortcuts in the second book is mobilizing is when we are focused on talking to people who agree with us all the time.
	Like we wake up in the morning and we like run to our Twitter feed, we run to our Facebook account, and there's a bunch of people who agree with us and that's who we talk to.
	That's mobilizing.
	And then we confuse that getting them out to a protest we think is organizing because we got them to do something.
	That's still mobilizing.
	Organizing is this very different, frankly, much harder.
	And I think the most beautiful process, which is why I've been running my head like a buzz saw at it my whole life, organizing is when you wake up in the morning realizing that the people who you most need to talk to to take back control of the country are never coming to your meetings.
	They're not in your Facebook feed.
	They're not in your Twitter feed.
	And if you're trying to form a union, the first thing I say to people is that's why they have to go find them.
	Because if you put up a, you know, the old age, you put up whatever flyer.
	Good organizers never put up a flyer, but let's just say the notification goes out to people that there's going to be a meeting.
	The very first rule of thumb is that the workers that we need the most in order for the workers to be successful forming a union in their workplace are the workers who are never coming to the meetings because they have a sense of their own power.
	These are these organic leaders.
	They have a sense of their own power.
	And they're usually what we call undecided on a good day because they've got a decent relationship with their manager.
	They're well trusted by their coworkers.
	They're usually like a highly skilled, really good at their job worker.
	And for them, it's less obvious in the immediate sense, like why they should show up and get a union because they usually have things going like okay more or less because they're really strategic workers and the employers know who they are.
	Like the employers take better care of them.
	The analogy I make is, you know, if you're a teacher and you're an organic leader or what we call a natural leader, you probably have blinds that open and close.
	Your heater works, your air conditioner works in the summer, like all the stuff in your room works because the principal understands that you actually are a teacher that they're scared of getting on your bad side.
	So those kind of teachers are not the first ones to come to the union meeting.
	So the first rule of organizing, different than mobilizing, organizing is about going to figure out who is that teacher who, when she shows up with the union button on, the rest of the entire school is going to put a union button on versus mobilizing where every happy activist who already agrees with us comes to the meeting, shows up, and they're like, yeah, we want a union.
	And it's generally one-third.
	Like it's basically, I always say to people, about one, you know, in a workplace organizing campaign, you can fairly easily get about one-third of the workers on your side.
	The problem becomes right there.
	And if you don't follow the sort of methods that I'm outlining, it's hard to punch into the second third, let alone to the top third, right?
	So the strategy has to be a little bit slow and patient in the beginning to figure out those key workers that you need to actually punch up into the super majority context, which is what you need in the U.S. And I didn't say one other thing that I should say, Jimmy, that really matters right now, which is the systematic building of the relationship with the community.
	Let's take a grocery store right now.
	Most patrons have, like most consumers in America, have like realized a whole new relationship of respect, right?
	For like the cashier at the grocery store, the baggage person, the person delivering them.
	I think that the mistake we make is one, we do mobilizing.
	So we get comfortable talking to the one-third of our coworkers who agree with us right away.
	We don't do the more deliberate patient work of finding the next one-third of the workers who actually are not predisposed right away to come join us, right?
	That's what mobilizing versus organizing is.
	But the second piece of this is that for workers to win in America today, they've got to have their community standing with them and Standing behind them because there's going to be thugs.
	Like that's just what Amazon is doing right now, and they're firing workers, right?
	So instead of having, like in all the organizing campaigns that I've run, we prioritize understanding each worker's relationship to their own community and charting the relationships that the rank-and-file workers themselves have.
	Again, in the theory that there's no hero and that you got to stand up for yourselves, you've got to understand your relationship to your co-workers, and then you've got to tap into the relationships you have in your community.
	Your faith leaders, your, you know, your imam, your rabbi, your pastor, whoever it is, there's a ton of people in the broader community that are ready and willing to support workers, but they don't know how to do it.
	So we have to actually teach consumers and the general public how to support workers who are about to go on strike.
	And that really matters too right now.
	How do we teach them?
	Well, I made a silly little video about a year and a half ago called What's Strike Support?
	Which I think is a good thing to rerun all the time.
	But literally, how do we support them?
	The minute you see a worker leafleting, holding up a picket sign, doing anything like that, you stop, you pull over, you actually put, like if you're in a car, okay, LA, you got to stop the car, literally, and walk up to the worker and say, what's happening here?
	What do I need to know?
	And then you actually have to say to that person, we need you to go call every person that you know and get down here.
	Strike support means showing up physically on picket lines and supporting workers.
	When we can do that again, strike support means calling up the local newspaper and all the mainstream media and saying, What the hell is going on down at grocery store X, Y, and Z, because I'm standing with those people who delivered me food and kept me alive during the COVID pandemic.
	It means calling up every religious leader in the area that you have access to.
	It means calling up every politician.
	It means taking votes by congregations saying we're going to stand with every worker in this country, demanding their rights as up against the most ruthless regime, you know, certainly in my lifetime, right?
	So strike support needs to be active, not passive.
	And as members, like this is a really important thing too.
	In 1906, 1905, 1906, 1907, in the turn of the last century, the two unions in very difficult times that succeeded were like moderately skilled workers like cigar makers and then the international ladies garment workers like women in the factories, teenagers usually.
	Those two sectors of workers, long before the National Labor Relations Act, were able to form strong unions by relying on building a strong, really strong consumer movement, which we have gutted.
	Like it doesn't functionally exist right now.
	And by the way, on the to-do list of things to do, it's like, hello, could someone get on that?
	Because it really matters.
	Like the idea in 1905, 1906, 1907, the idea that you looked for the union label on everything that you purchased is such a, it's such an oddly weird old idea, and it'd be so much easier to do right now.
	And to me, it's a bit of a reflection of the kind of failure of lack of imagination on the part of like a lot of the national trade unions right now is that no one has figured out the central importance of rebuilding a really radically powerful consumer movement to back up the workers so we're seeing so i have i don't understand so explain what is the problem in organizing walmart workers and amazon workers what is the problem problem is they
	fire people really quickly.
	So there's two big problems.
	One is that it's hard to get folks together right now.
	And in a lot of the places where Walmart exists, yeah, there's like a lack of understanding of what unions are.
	I mean, we are at 6% in the private sector.
	And after this aftermath, we're probably up to 5% of people in the private sector actually knowing what a union is.
	And we're several generations from unions being like common knowledge in this country, which is why I wrote the new book.
	It's like a really basic primer on like what a union is, how do you get one, and what do you do once you have one.
	So that's one problem is the ferocious media attack on the image of the unions.
	Now, what we know is that despite the ferocious media attack, a vast majority of Americans actually say in poll after poll right now that they would have a union if they wanted one.
	So the crisis comes in with the union busting industry, which I outlined began in earnest, like in earnest in the early 1970s.
	It started for real, literally at Sears and Roebuck in 1937.
	They hired this one guy in 1937 at the Sears headquarters in Chicago.
	He actually, I tell this whole story in the new book, he actually goes out and gets the behavioral psychologist department at the university, at the university of Chicago back in the 1930s and says, I want you to come in and figure out for me how to figure out which workers want to form a union so I can get fired them before they can form a union.
	And they start running very sophisticated quality control surveys where they made the workers at Sears and Roebuck in 1937 believe as they still do today.
	Like they believe they were filling in like, how do you feel about your manager today?
	Do you feel like you're getting the support you need?
	And like workers began, this is 1937.
	They start perfecting employee surveys that look pro-employee that are about gathering information to do what the business insider said today Amazon is literally doing, which is forming a heat map, Amazon calls it, at the Whole Foods stores to figure out which ones are likely to unionize.
	And then they send in a team to bust up the whole operation.
	Like this shit's been going on since 1937.
	So now it looks like it's got some high technology veneer to it.
	It is as old as the National Revelations Act.
	And it literally begins at Sears and Roebuck with the University of Chicago.
	So the union busting industry begins at Sears and Roebuck's.
	I tell a bit of a story of how he goes, it's one key, crazy, brilliant, evil genius, starts the first serious union busting professional union busting firm.
	There aren't a lot of them.
	There's only about 20,000 of them up until about 20,000 literally individuals sort of doing that work until about the early 1970s.
	Doing, doing, doing, you mean doing union busting?
	The union, union busters.
	Yeah.
	Professional union busters.
	And by the early 1970s, they decide that they're going to like explode in number because they decide that they're not.
	So there's, there's three phases to who killed America's unions, I argue in the book.
	And the first phase, it's Taft-Hartley, right?
	So they come in, there's this legislation called Taft-Hartley 1947, and they repeal the most important parts of the 1935 National Liberal Relations Act.
	The key parts being solidarity strikes, like that the employers cannot campaign against you.
	The two key things that they overturned in 1947 from the National Relations Act are solidarity strikes.
	And then the most important thing, which is that, well, arguably, they're both most important things.
	And they made it legal, legal again, for employers to campaign against the union using illegal methods up and down the wazoo.
	So that gets, that gets re-legalized in 1947.
	That's wave one.
	I called it containment.
	The second wave of it comes in the early 1970s, where the economy is starting to shift from manufacturing because they're exporting all the good jobs right out of the United States.
	So the second wave comes in the early 1970s, where they decide, oh, we're moving to a service economy.
	we're going to move the united states into a service economy and we're not going to let unions take a foothold in the new economy that's wave two and that's where the union busting industry is born and raised and there is i grabbed something i want to read this if i can i grabbed the whatever the gal is all I'm walking around with my old book.
	There's a quote in the beginning of the chapter called Who Killed the Unions.
	And I just want to read this because this is just what Jeff Bezos and Amazon is doing right now.
	And here they did this to this guy, Chris Malls, right?
	A worker they fired a couple weeks ago.
	Yeah, we had to do it.
	So if you followed that story, I want to read you a quote from Martin J. Levitt, the only sort of well-known union buster who ever like quit and then went public with what they do.
	It's from his book, which is old now called Confessions of a Union Buster.
	And this is literally what he says.
	He says, The enemy was the collective spirit.
	I got a hold of that spirit.
	And while it was a seedling, I poisoned it, choked it, bludgeoned it if I had to.
	Anything to be short would never blossom into a united workforce.
	Likewise, as the consultants go about the business of destroying unions, they invade people's lives, demolish their friendships, crush their will, and shatter their families.
	This is a rough industry, and that is what they're still doing today.
	So the methods I talked about when we first started matter for that reason.
	Like having some sense of the strategy of what the union busters will do requires to beat them, requires that you actually understand what a union buster does, and you have to get ahead of them.
	And that's where having some experience and people like me and like many thousands of organizers who know how to win hard campaigns.
	Like that's what we do: we come in and we say to the workers, okay, you're super smart.
	We know that.
	Like you got that.
	If you're saving people's lives, you're pretty smart.
	But what you don't know is the playbook the union busters are about to unfold inside of your factory, warehouse, hospital, fill in the blank.
	And what you need to know is the tactics and strategies that the union busters will use so that you can actually stand a chance to beat them.
	And by the way, you know, I mean, many, many, many, many workers are winning union elections despite these odds.
	They're generally doing it when they've got coaching from someone who actually knows how to teach them strategy of how to beat the union busters.
	It's fundamental.
	The country's unfair.
	The whole place is unfair.
	But the truth is, we got to, we, like I said, Supreme Court's done.
	Electoral system is on fire.
	It's a mess.
	And last I looked, the fastest route to taking back control of this country is going to be a shit ton of strikes, and it's going to take a hell of a lot of work to get there.
	It's not wishful thinking, but it's realistic thinking.
	And we are desperate to do it in this country.
	Wow.
	Well, Jane, it's been really a pleasure to talk to you.
	I hope you come back on as we go forward through this pandemic.
	And here's the book: Collective Bargain: Unions Organizing and the Fight for Democracy.
	Jane McLevy, thank you so much for being on.
	And it was really, it's nice to have some positive news.
	Like, it's nice to know that there's somebody who knows what they're doing and that there actually is going to be some kind of direct action by the workers going forward.
	That's good to know because I have been talking to union leaders that have been very discouraging.
	So it's good to talk to you.
	Front lines, talk to the workers.
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