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Jan. 6, 2023 - Jimmy Dore Show
59:56
20230106_TJDS_20230106_Podcast_-_1523_1.18_AM
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Everybody, we're doing live stand-up comedy in Los Angeles in January and February in Los Angeles.
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Go to JimmyDore.com for a link for all those tickets and become a premium member while you're there.
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So what's going on today?
I'm here with Aaron Matte.
So you know what's happening in Congress right now.
So they can't elect a speaker because there's a handful of right-wing Republicans that have demands and they're asking for something for their vote.
And what they're doing is they're proving this show right.
This show, the idea which came from Malcolm Fleischner, for he was the one who pointed out that the squad, because the victory of the Democrats in Congress was so narrow, so small, that they could demand things and Nancy Pelosi couldn't get elected without their vote.
So then they could demand things from her for their vote.
This is exactly what the Matt Goetz in the right wing is doing right now.
The Freedom Caucus is doing right now to Kevin McCarthy.
And so the Republicans are currently doing what I was told could not be done and was performative.
They are extracting concessions for their vote from Speaker, or as AOC calls it, violence.
Okay.
So watching the force to vote strategy work real time for the Republicans after the squad's excuses for not doing it turned out to be lies.
It's something special.
Now, even MSNBC has noticed this, and they're going to talk about it.
Watch this.
The reality for Kevin McCarthy is Pelosi's nightmare back from 2019, as I'm sure you'll remember.
She was, of course, elected as House Speaker when Democrats took back control.
But progressives, newly elected progressives led by folks like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, were openly skeptical of Pelosi's leadership, whether she should be speaker at that time, whether it was time for generational change, and whether they would vote against her.
AOC actually voted for her at that time and Republicans booed her on the House floor for doing so.
But all of this sort of shows that while Pelosi was elected speaker at a time of these sort of left-wing rebels, that so-called squad never ended up being the threat to the Democratic Party that these right-wing rebels are ending up being to McCarthy and the larger Republican Party.
And we're seeing that play out in real time yesterday with this speaker fight.
And we're going to see this continue as they try to govern through the 118th Congress.
So it looks like the right wing of the Republican Party is going to do exactly what we all thought and expected that the left wing of the Democratic Party would do, meaning the Justice Democrats, the squad, but they never did do it.
And why did we think they would do it?
Why did we think that they would do what the right wing is doing right now?
Well, because they said they would.
So here we go.
Here's AOC when she was trying to get your vote.
We can't even get a floor vote on Medicare for all.
Not even a floor vote that gets voted down.
We can't even get a vote on it.
Oh, I thought we had her in here calling it it stopped a little quick.
We had her calling the Democratic Party a center-right party.
Fuck, we stopped that clip too quickly.
But here she goes.
She says it again here.
What the Bronx and Queens needs is Medicare for all.
We can do it now.
It takes political courage.
Start bringing the ruckus on the Democratic Party.
That is our job.
It's great that everyone thinks these issues are important.
We need to make them urgent.
This country has only ever changed for the better by groups of people that were willing to put everything on the line for a better future.
Now, she revealed she wasn't willing to do that, nor is anybody in the Democratic Party, including Bernie Sanders, who claims he's not in the Democratic Party, but he's the biggest water carrier there is for corporatism and war.
So Brianna Joy Gray watched Bernie Sanders as press secretary when he ran for president last time.
And I think she's seen the light.
And so now she was for forced to vote.
And she's going to explain it in a way that's better than me, right?
Because, you know, I'm a pothead comedian and a C student.
And I'm sure she went to Harvard or something like that.
She's really smarty pants.
And so she's got it together.
And let's just listen to it and we'll stop and start it.
But she really nails it.
Here we go.
Let me explain.
In 2020, the situation was reversed.
Democrats had a small majority in the House, such that a handful of progressives, squad members alone, had enough votes to hold up Nancy Pelosi's nomination to leave the House.
There were plenty of reasons, by the way, to do so.
For one, AOC had previously gestured to the fact that she found it incredible that Pelosi had never faced a real speakership challenge in all her years.
Moreover, we were at the start of a COVID pandemic and at the tail end of a progressive presidential campaign that delivered unprecedented public support for Medicare for all along with other progressive policies.
Did Bernie's loss mean that the movement representing a majority of Americans was supposed to die?
And during the pandemic at that, since Trump was still president, Democrats were still pretending to care about COVID deaths.
And before the vaccines, when even young and healthy people were finding themselves hospitalized or even dying from COVID, there was genuine energy around using the public health crisis as a springboard for improving our public health system, which, by the way, is the most expensive in the world, despite yielding worse results than peer nations.
Disgruntled progressives, who made up a significant part of the Democratic Party base, had dutifully voted for Biden, despite warnings from folks like myself, who said that doing so without establishing some conditions would mean that Biden would ultimately betray most, if not all, of his campaign promises.
And in the weeks after the election, progressive YouTube Politico and comedian Jimmy Doerr voted a simple idea to get something in return for those very progressive voters.
An idea, in fact, that he gleaned from the DSA's own handbook.
That is, you guessed it, force the vote.
Progressive squad members could leverage their speakership vote to extract concessions from Nancy Pelosi.
Now, unlike Republicans now, the left's asks were to be substantive, not just procedural.
One key ask was a vote on Medicare for All, which was intended to keep a fight alive and draw contrast between Democrats' claims that they want to improve healthcare for Americans and the fact that they repeatedly kill Medicare for all legislation as quickly as they receive money from the pharmaceutical industry.
If you want to understand why the vote for Medicare for All was such an important ask, just look at what's happened over the last two years.
Look at how California, with its Democratic supermajority legislature, killed a statewide Medicare for All bill.
Or consider how silent all of the squad members had been about Medicare for All since the end of the Bernie campaign.
Did 68,000 people a year stop dying from lack of health insurance?
Or did it just become uncool to talk about it now that we're outside of the fundraising cycle?
Now, some of us, fearful that exactly this would happen, rallied over the holidays in 2020, staffing phone trees and calling progressive Congress members furiously about the plan and even planning rallies.
As left media figures debated the marriage of the plan, people like David Sirota offered constructive additions to the ask, including a suggestion that Pelosi be forced to oust corporate Democrat Richie Neal from the Ways and Means Committee, where he was poised to stop progress on healthcare reform.
And then David Sirota then came on this show and bullshitted that Kevin McCarthy could become speaker and ran interference for the squad.
But anyway.
What should be clear is the specifics of the ask were much less important than the following fact.
Nancy Pelosi was obviously an enemy to the left and should not have been voted for without gaining something significant in return.
After AOC's first notable day in Congress, during which he protested with climate activists in Pelosi's office, the longtime speaker made quick work of bullying the squad members into submission.
An iron fist and a Gucci glove is how Politico described Pelosi once.
And over the course of their first two years in Congress, the squad members largely submitted to said fist.
But here, here was an opportunity to draw attention to the corruption that paid for that proverbial Gucci glove.
The squad members could have demanded important committee assignments, as the current rebel Republicans have done.
They could have forced a vote on banning stock trading by Congress members.
After all, Pelosi's personal wealth has ballooned during her decades in office, widely out of proportion to her congressional salary.
This is the woman who famously defended congressional stock trading despite the clear conflict of interest and insider knowledge Congress members Pizzazz.
This is a woman who just presided over the quiet death of a bill to end congressional stock trading, one that was arguably designed to fail in the first place.
But instead of choosing that moment to fight, to highlight the corruption of the Democratic Party and to lead a genuine populist movement that stood a chance of waking people up to the limitations of the two-party duopoly, something curious happened.
A call seemed to go out to leading figures in the progressive media that they should drop, force the vote.
Although I first heard of the idea from Sam Seder, host of the YouTube show Majority Report, who said he supported Jimmy Dore's idea despite having a long-standing feud with Jimmy.
There's no feud that involves two people.
There's just one guy who's jealous of me who talks about me constantly.
It's not a feud.
Okay.
Changed his tune, alluding to a call he'd received that discouraged this approach, a call from whom.
We could only guess.
The legacy left media all quickly turned against the idea with large accounts like the Young Turks, Majority Report, and others spreading outright misinformation about the risks of what might happen if the squad declined to vote for Nancy Pelosi.
They repeatedly claimed wrongly that Kevin McCarthy would become Speaker of the House by default.
Of course, as we all saw yesterday and today, that was never true.
That was never true.
So let's just recap real quick.
What she just said there is that there was a phone call that went out to people who were previously on board for this.
People with MSNBC contracts, people who take big corporate donor money like at the Young Turks, people like that were on board for this.
And then a phone call went out.
We don't know who made that phone call, said you can't go along with this.
And what were they promised?
What did those people get for going against this thing that everybody agrees is a good idea from AOC to the DSA to everybody for even Nancy Pelosi for a generation ago said that when she got into Congress, she wanted to have a vote for Medicare for all on the floor.
So what was that phone call?
So that's the first thing.
And the second thing is they immediately all started lying in the same way, saying that Kevin McCarthy could become Speaker and that this was a bad strategy and that they could use this tactic of forcing a vote for another thing like $15 minimum wage, which they never did.
So those are the two things I just wanted to point out.
That's very, very big.
There was a phone call.
Who's making the phone call that's that's controlling the quote-unquote progressive YouTube?
And then all the people who follow the Young Turks go along with that, even though they didn't get that phone call and they're not getting anything for it.
Well, one thing this select group has gotten is access.
Right.
So by defending the squad against progressive critics over forced the vote, they've maintained their access.
And that's why the squad only gives, when it speaks to progressive media, only speaks to a very, very, very small number of people.
Ryan Grimm would be pretty much it over at the intercept.
And that's kind of becoming up.
And who never challenged them, for example, on issues like funding the Ukraine proxy world.
That's right.
There's no serious challenge of them over that.
No.
Or this.
Nakeem Jeffries is not magically speaker of the house despite earning more votes in the first count than McCarthy did yesterday.
You get a majority of the house, not just a bare majority, to be speaker.
And yet the lie was so pervasive that Pramila Jayapaw herself lied directly to former rising host Ryan Grimm's face when he asked her during an interview why she voted for Nancy Pelosi without demanding real concessions.
There were some pundits and left-wing media personalities ahead of this vote who were urging you guys, urging the CPC to use the vote for Speaker as leverage to extract a floor vote on Medicare for all.
That would be me.
That would be us here at the Jimmy Door show.
That's who he's referring to.
Why didn't the CPC end up taking that particular route?
And the CPC stands for the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Why didn't you guys do that?
Well, I'm sympathetic, obviously, as the lead sponsor of the bill to people who are frustrated that we have not moved to a single payer system yet.
But the reality is that this is a very slim margin.
The vote for Speaker was between Kevin McCarthy and Nancy Pelosi.
No, it wasn't.
So that's a lie.
So she's lying right there.
And why is she lying right there to a guy who's the DC bureau chief of the intercept?
Why would she think she could get away with that lie?
Because she could, because then that guy, Ryan Grimm, the host of Rising Crystal Ball, Sagar, and Jetty, they hired him.
He's a host at their network because they knew that he wouldn't push back on her lie, even though he knew it was a lie, because they're all together.
Ryan Grimm got that phone call too, and they're all lying together.
That's why, well, she's going to talk about it a little bit.
And throwing the entire chamber into chaos would have been very detrimental for the electoral college vote and everything else.
I later confronted Ryan about his failure to push back against Jaipal's claim on my podcast, and we had a constructive conversation about how things could have been handled differently.
But they did not have a constructive conversation about that.
Ryan lied and she led him off the hook.
But he lied.
He pretended that he didn't really, that word he said, I wasn't ready.
It didn't trigger me that word when she said that, that McCarthy could become Speaker, because he wasn't following that closely.
That was a lie.
That's him just lying.
Okay.
Squad members rarely open themselves up to questioning from anyone in progressive media outside of Ryan Graham at the intercept.
That missed opportunity was one that carried the lie that Kevin McCarthy could become speaker of Democrats forced the vote far and wide.
Sam Cedar was one of the most vocal opponents to force the vote after, of course, he supported it.
And following a three-hour debate with me on my podcast, it was incredibly demoralizing to hear that he did not understand the basic facts of how the congressional vote even worked.
I recommend everyone go and listen to that debate at bad faith if you haven't watched it already.
Now, all of this was as obvious as the nose on my face two years ago.
But major left media figures like Sam have been loud and wrong about this for years without any apology.
This issue became the source of a major fissure in left politics.
For years, I've been the subject of personal attacks from opponents of Force the Vote.
Sam for one argued after a debate, which ended on a friendly note that I, quote, yelled at him for three hours while Cheng Uger referred to me as a fake leftist just six months or so ago, in part because of my advocacy for force the vote and my perceived alliance with Jimmy Dore, who shared my support of this particular tactic.
Now, of course, both the left media and mainstream media are perfectly clear on how all this works now, now that there's no pressure on progressives to actually be adversarial to the Democratic Party outside, of course, wearing tax the rich sweatshirts.
Now they get it.
But while Democrats are bending over backward to pretend that the force the vote strategy is emblematic of a Republican Party in disarray, what this moment really shows is how fully controlled by the corporate Democratic Party progressive Democrats really Are.
What the Rogue Republicans are fighting for now is not what I would have asked for.
But the point is that progressives in 2021 could have asked for anything.
And they asked for nothing.
My former colleague Ryan Graham, along with progressives like AOC and Himalaya Dayapal, bragged back then about securing relatively minor procedural changes like PAYCO exemptions.
They lauded these gains so much, you would have thought that PAYGO was Esperanto for student debt cancellation, a $50 minimum wage, or a classic over-card giveaway.
In 2021, these progressives celebrated wins much smaller than the wins already secured by the Republican holdouts this week.
But now they're taking smug selfies from the House floor, as though McCarthy's concessions aren't proof that they gave up an enormous amount of leverage without a fight two years ago.
So that is to me, first of all, she's doing an amazing job here.
She's doing a better job than I could do.
So what that is the most amazing thing to me, that they're pretending that what's happening with the Republican Party makes somehow the right wing of the Republican Party look bad and them look good because they didn't do this.
It's the exact opposite.
What it shows is that there is no difference between the parties, that there is no point in voting for progressives inside the Democratic Party, like Shama Sawant says, and that it's all theater and stupid and that they don't care.
They're laughing in your face.
Jamal Bowman is laughing in your face as he votes for Israel and for Hakeem Jeffries as their leader.
He's laughing in your face.
Okay.
And for what?
What happened after they decided to play the game and face with Mama Bear?
AOC tweeted that she wouldn't be forcing the vote because she was negotiating on the inside for committee appointments and was reserving leverage to fight for a $15 minimum wage.
But how did that go, AOC?
Biden and the corporate Dems killed the $15 minimum wage when Schumer stripped it from must-pass COVID legislation that only needed a bare majority to pass, converting a 51-vote issue until a filibuster-proof vote.
And it was reported that Pramilla Jayapol whipped votes to make sure the progressives didn't threaten to vote down the COVID relief bill in protest.
I guess that sort of move is only allowed if you're Manchin or Cinema fighting for corporations, not progressives fighting for the people.
Moreover, squad members ended up with even worse committee assignments than they had the previous year.
Katie Porter was kicked off the Financial Services Committee, reportedly because her popular whiteboard presentations exposing corporate corruption made it tougher for committee chair Maxine Waters to do the real work of the Financial Services Committee.
That is fundraising from Wall Street.
And this is what is so absolutely disappointing about and they said nothing about it.
When Katie Porter got kicked off that committee, she didn't say a goddamn thing.
Why?
Because she's a good girl and she takes orders from the corporatists inside the Democratic Party.
That's why.
Did you even know about that?
That that happened to her?
No, you didn't.
You know why?
Because she didn't want you to know about it because she is a spineless, nutless wonder on the left who's not really on the left because she is supporting a corrupt corporate party that is pro-war and an enemy of the worker.
That's what she's doing.
And that's why she didn't let you know that.
And that's why she didn't try to get anything for her vote from Nancy Pelosi.
And that's why it's a fool's errand to vote for progressives inside the Democratic Party.
Progressives.
It's why so many people who were once willing to fight with Bernie are no longer willing to engage in electoral politics at all.
It has become clear that as performative and goofy as some of the right posturing is right now, people like Matt Gates are still willing to demonstrate more fight against the establishment of their own party than squad members who once claimed that they'd rather be one-term congress members than forego their principles.
Take a listen.
Take a listen.
Maybe Jim Jordan is the right person for Speaker of the House because he is not beholden to the lobbyists and special interests who have corrupted this place and corrupted this nation under the leadership of both Republicans and Democrats.
Now, Matt Gates was talking about Kevin McCarthy there, but he easily could have been talking about Nancy Pelosi.
The difference is you won't hear a peep out of the squad about Nancy Pelosi's corruption, her unpopularity, or the fact that after a 30-year reign, she's allowed to choose her own successor without any real contest occurring whatsoever, even from the progressive flank.
Nancy Pelosi is less popular than Trump.
Just keep that in mind.
Okay.
And the squad doesn't say shit about her.
We're learning today that forced the vote works.
It comes with media backlash, but it is in fact an effective mechanism that can be used to get a whole range of important concessions and deliver for the people if people choose.
That being the case, every single person who opposed it in 2021 has to answer the question: was bending the knee really worth it?
So I know that's a lot, Robbie, but this is my bugaboo.
And it is really.
It is my bugaboo also.
And she was right.
And I just want to remind people, the people who lied about this and why were they lying?
They were lying to you, the activist, the person who wants Medicare, the person that they want you to vote for.
He was lying to them.
He was telling you that McCarthy could become Speaker.
And he can't even become Speaker now when they control a goddamn Congress.
If he was right, then Hakeem Jeffries would be Speaker right now.
Right now, he'd be Speaker.
Right now.
You think anyone's going to at least acknowledge that they were wrong on that?
These people never acknowledged it.
No, they would have never acknowledged that they were wrong on Russia Gate.
They never acknowledged they were wrong on Syria.
They never acknowledged they were wrong when McCarthy smeared you.
They never acknowledged that they did a fake hashtag me too against me.
They're never going to acknowledge that they're clowns.
But I want to make sure people know it.
Reminder that the right gets fighters and the left gets gaslighters for the establishment like Jenk Uger.
It's hilarious to watch Crystal Ball.
Oh, so Crystal Ball and I guess Sagar did a segment on this yesterday, and somehow they didn't bring up the force to vote as if they'd never heard of it.
I didn't know that.
But it makes sense now because, you know, they're anyway, it doesn't matter.
All these internet DS.
So everybody's trying the DSA, the people at the DSA, which is a completely corrupt organization.
Now, not the members, the members join in good faith, but the people who lead that organization are 100% corrupt.
100%.
They're not who you think they are.
They're getting paid by somebody.
They got a phone call because they're not even doing the thing that they put in their own goddamn handbook.
It's in their own handbook.
It's right here.
It says the House Pressure Campaign Guide.
And what does it say?
It says we need to now, now.
This is 2019.
We need now to fight back against the assault in an unshakable working class movement capable of forcing politicians to reject lobbyists' influence.
Now is the time to be clear about our demands and pressure politicians to get on board.
Pushing a floor vote in the House not only tests the political strength of the movement to make that happen, it also sends the bill to the Senate, calling the Question there.
Though we know Medicare for All will not become a reality under the Trump administration, a House floor vote is the best.
Which side are you on political opportunity in 2019?
And it sets the stage to make Medicare for All the decisive issue of 2020.
They then pretended they didn't write that, the DSA.
And their leadership was MIA during Force the Vote, except where they would come on Twitter to shit on Force the Vote, the thing that's in their own handbook.
So now you know what's happening the left.
The corporate America has completely co-opted left organizations, which is why you haven't heard shit about Medicare for All the whole time Joe Biden has been president, and you haven't even heard anything about the public option.
Nothing.
They're not doing a fucking thing at the DSA except gaslighting you and taking your revolutionary progressive energy and sticking it right in the ass of a fucking corporation and a party.
That's what the DSA is there to do.
And I'm there to disabuse you of the idea that they're there to help you.
Go ahead.
Go ahead and talk about what you'd like to say.
Well, let's remember, Jimmy, when all this was happening, this was during the height of the pandemic, right?
So what better time to have a vote for Medicare for all?
And the argument against it was that, well, it's not going to pass anyway.
We don't have the votes.
Well, but the counterargument to that, and Breonna Joy Gray said this a lot, was that politically, that's still a powerful message.
If you have all these lawmakers who are going to go on the record during a pandemic voting against giving everybody health care.
So this would have been a huge opportunity, even if it would have lost.
It would have at least helped.
I mean, you can't say this wouldn't have helped create some momentum for Medicare for all.
Of course it would have been a lot.
We had lawmakers voting it down.
I mean, at a time when activism is so dormant in this country, something like this could have been a real spark, but they didn't want it.
Imagine.
So right now, the Republicans are doing exactly what the squad should have been doing the last time that we had a speaker election.
And you see what the media is doing?
The media is totally focused on it.
They had full coverage today on ABC, not only CNN and MSNBC, not only cable, but on regular television they were covering it.
Could you imagine if we were talking for three days in a row about Medicare for all in the middle of a deadly pandemic?
By the way, 70% of the country's on board for it.
You imagine what that would have done?
That would have been unbelievable.
That would have been the most helpful thing that you could possibly think of for Medicare for All.
And they said it was the exact opposite.
They lied.
Ryan Grimm lied.
Jank Uger lied.
MSNB's people with MSNBC contracts lied and are still lying to this day.
One of the demands, apparently, by these Republicans is to remove food stamps from a farm bill, right?
So if these Republicans can use their leverage to demand a cut to social assistance, why can't progressives use their leverage to demand an increase in social assistance?
That's what we're supposed to be at that time as progressives, but they denied that opportunity to themselves.
And they all voted for war.
They're all war pigs, and I won't stop saying it.
And that's an insult to pigs because pigs are nice people.
This week, I presented my amendments to remove barriers to research on therapeutic potential of psychedelic substances.
The first time I offered it, members laughed at me on the House floor.
I got 91 votes.
This time, more understood.
Support surge to 140.
We won't give up.
That's how it works.
Everybody knows.
They're all pretending they don't know how anything works.
Just like when David Sirota came on a show and pretended that Kevin McCarthy could become speaker.
They're all pretending.
They're all pretending because they all got the phone call.
And I wonder if the phone call came from her or a donor high up in the Democratic Party who also funds the Young Turks.
I wonder.
But here's Kim Iverson who used to be at the Hill.
And she said it's amazing to see a handful of conservatives hold Kevin McCarthy's speakership dreams hostage the way progressives like AOC refused to with Pelosi.
And one more, remember when the full left assured the force to vote was bad strategy and the left using their leverage would never work?
Then the next two years, they spent more time bitching about Jimmy Doerr than their elected politicians.
Think they'll ever apologize?
No, they won't.
In fact, they're getting worse.
Anything you'd like to say to close out this segment?
And I just want to say it actually made me sad today when I realized that.
Like, look at all, I was, I'm watching the TV in my house and I'm like, shit, this is on channel seven.
This is ABC regular ABC television.
They broke in from the view to talk about congressional insider politics.
And I thought about, oh my God, the squad could have been doing this for two straight years.
They could have been doing this for two straight years.
They could have been making progressive policy ideas front and center.
They could have been defunding the war machine.
They could have been doing a million things.
They did nothing except gaslight you and lie about activists like me.
That's what the squad did.
And that's what their minions did in the press.
And that's what Breonna Joy Gray just revealed.
And that's Bernie Sanders, ex-press secretary.
Go ahead.
Yeah, Jimmy, listen, you took a lot of heat for advocating force to vote and for being uncompromising in that stance.
And I'm hoping you're feeling validated today on that.
100%.
Not as if you needed the validation, but to see to see lawmakers actually using their leverage to extract concessions.
The point of this, at least for me, is not to praise Republicans.
It's to show what opportunities progressives abandoned, how they basically neutered themselves and they attacked people who dared to ask them to use their power to push for something positive.
We're asking for a floor vote for Medicare for all, which is the majority of the country supports, vast majority, all progressives support that.
What could go wrong?
And the fact that people could get attacked for daring to ask that elected lawmakers do what they campaigned on, which is use their power to challenge the establishment of the party.
It speaks to where we're at.
And hopefully, if there's a silver lining here that progressives can learn from today, it's too bad they had to learn from right-wing Republicans how to use their own power and how to actually be effective progressive lawmakers, but that's where we're at.
They're not going to learn that, by the way.
And the people who apologize for them, like the Young Turks and people with MSNBC contracts and Ryan Grimm at the intercept, they're not going to stop.
They're still doing it.
Ah, fuck, I forgot to put together the segment making fun of Ryan Grimm because he's still pretending that he's not a complete tool and that everybody doesn't see through him.
But now he's got a great job over at the, what's it called, breaking points with Crystal and Sager.
Those are the type of people they want to surround themselves with now because I guess they just want to be shit libs.
I don't know what it is.
I'm not a psychiatrist.
What's Crystal Ball and Sager's core wound that makes them want to hang around with such a fucking obvious, transparent corporate shill who lies about activists while taking billionaire money?
What does he take?
Three checks from billionaires.
I think it's down to two checks from billionaires now.
I'm not sure, but that's Ryan Grimm's.
That's where it comes from.
And that's what's happening over at Breaking Point.
So I say, thank fucking God.
They make me look so good.
They make me look great on this.
They make me look great on the coverage of Ukraine.
There's such a huge lane that people, that's why this show does so much better than those other shows.
And I say thank you to the audience for unable to see through all those other things.
And you appreciate authenticity, which is what we strive to give you at this show.
Any last words on this?
Hey, listen, I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes.
So as we're broadcasting, McCarthy's lost, I think, six votes.
Six.
So, this is going to be exciting.
We'll probably have more of this later in the week.
Yeah.
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Hey, everybody, it's the Jimmy Dore show.
I'm Aaron Matte sitting in for Jimmy and here with Misha Pollen, who's sitting in for Steph.
Hey, Misha.
Hey, hey, Aaron.
How's it going?
It's going.
It's a great thing we started a little late because right before we went to air, I had a massive sneeze attack.
If we'd started that way, it would have been horrible.
It would have been a terrible way to kick off this show.
But we're here now, and we're very excited to be joined by our first guest, Anya Parrampil, is my colleague at the Gray Zone.
She has reported and produced for several documentaries, including on-the-ground reports from the Korean Peninsula, Palestine, Venezuela, and Honduras.
Her forthcoming book, Corporate Coup, is available now for pre-order.
Anya, how are you doing?
It's good to see you.
Good to see you too, Aaron.
And I can definitely say that the sneeze attack was real.
It happened.
I heard it all.
The sneeze attack was real.
All right.
Well, so let's get into it.
So, remember back when Trump was the president and he tried to install a new president of Venezuela.
This is what he said.
Remember this?
Here this evening, a very brave man who carries with him the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of all Venezuelans.
Joining us in the gallery is the true and legitimate president of Venezuela, Juan Guaido.
Mr. President, please take this message back to your so
there you have it, the standing ovation for Juan Guaido, who Trump was trying to install as the new president of Venezuela.
This was back in 2019, and this set off this prolonged coup campaign where the U.S. imposed these harsh sanctions that aimed to destroy Venezuela's economy until basically the people suffered enough so that they would turn against their actual president, Nicolas Maduro, and overthrow him and install this U.S.-backed puppet, Juan Guaido.
And so the U.S. tried very hard to make this happen.
This is back from 2021.
Biden, and when Biden came in, he continued the Trump policy.
This is the headline from Reuters.
Biden will recognize Guaido as Venezuela's leader.
As we saw from that clip, Nancy Pelosi was joining Trump and giving Guaido a standing ovation.
So this was very bipartisan.
But then the Ukraine proxy war happened and things started to change.
So this is a headline from March 2022.
White House reaches out to Venezuela, a longtime foe amid Russia crisis.
Because guess what?
The U.S. tried to cut off Russian oil from the rest of the world, leaving them empty-handed when their allies needed energy.
And after years of trying to overthrow Nicolas Maduro, the U.S. had imposed sanctions that had left Venezuela's oil industry in very, very rough shape.
So now all of a sudden, the Ukraine crisis changed that.
And then we had in June 2022, we had this.
There was a summit of the Americas held by, hosted by the U.S. here in Los Angeles.
But guess what?
Biden extends support, but not some invitation to Venezuela's Guaido, the same guy who Biden was pretending was the president of Venezuela.
And it got to the point where we saw in that clip earlier that Nancy Pelosi, who had applauded Juan Guaido and gave him a standing ovation in Congress, now she doesn't even remember who he is.
Yeah.
So someone's asking, I have a question about Venezuela.
Migrants.
But the person that you recognize as the leader of Democratic leader in Venezuela is not here.
What do you think about the absence of Juan Juan Guaido here?
By whom?
Juan Guaido, the interim president of Venezuela that you recognize.
But I want to talk about who is here.
Who is here as the president of the United States?
And has been said four years ago, the president did not attend.
Who is he?
So that's Nancy Pelosi.
Who?
Who?
Who is that guy?
The same guy that she gave a standing ovation to and claimed was the president of Venezuela.
She leapt out of her seat.
Leapt out of her seat.
Oh, yes.
You beat Mike Pence.
But moving ahead, you know, moving ahead to the present day, check out what just happened.
Juan Guaido is voted out as leader of Venezuela's opposition.
This is the New York Times.
The opposition legislature in Venezuela voted on Friday to terminate its interim government, ending the leadership of Juan Guaido, who for years had served as the face of resistance to the country's authoritarian government.
The vote was a blow to the U.S., which had steadfastly backed Mr. Guaido.
It was the second and final vote this month to determine the fate of the interim government, whose influence has waned in recent years as President Nicolas Maduro has held on to power.
Mr. Guaido failed to cement his popular support, and the opposition fractured.
Let me bring in Anya Parrampil.
Anya, you've been covering this story for a long time now.
You've been on the ground in Venezuela several times, and it's the topic of your forthcoming book called The Corporate Coup.
What happened here?
What happened to Juan Guaido and why is he now on the outs?
There are so many layers to this story, and Venezuelans would say it's entirely Venezuelan because you can't get it out of reading necessarily the mainstream media reports.
You get some allusion to what actually took place because one important fact to highlight that isn't really made in many of the or prominent in many of these mainstream reports is that this National Assembly is completely defunct.
Not only has the legislature was the 2015 legislature declared defunct by the country's Supreme Court due to allegations of fraud that were never resolved.
That's a history that I get into into my book.
But this vote took place, and they'll never say this in the New York Times.
I don't think they did, from what I remember reading the article, that this vote took place on Zoom, first of all, because they don't even, they haven't been meeting as the National Assembly in the halls of the National Assembly since 2020, when, in fact, Guaido was already voted out by the Venezuelan opposition, much of the Venezuelan opposition as president of the National Assembly.
In fact, so he came, he was elected in his term began in 2019 as president of the National Assembly, which again was already declared defunct by the state, but they were operating without major impairment from Venezuelan authorities.
So they still met, carried out their duties as far as they could.
And Guaido announces his self-declared presidency.
We get a year of an obvious failed attempt at regime change.
And so by 2020, by January 2020, when his first term, constitutionally only got one-year term as president of the National Assembly, was up, Venezuela's opposition, much of it, actually voted to replace him already.
You might remember that video actually that keeps popping up on screen, I believe, was when Guaido was being, he was trying to enter the National Assembly for the vote with some of these legislators who were declared incommunicado.
And through that, they remember the iconic photo of him trying to climb over the fence and get in, and everybody's like, oh, Juan Guaido was blocked from entering the National Assembly.
It was really a staged photo op for him to make it seem as though he'd been denied entry because what was happening inside was that the opposition legislature legislators were voting for Luis Para, a separate candidate to actually represent the opposition and lead the National Assembly as president.
So Guaido at that point was already voted out.
And that same night, Guaido's allies decided to band together and go down the street to one of the national newspapers, right-wing opposite pro-opposition national newspapers in Venezuela and hold a shadow vote where they created a shadow National Assembly, which wasn't even based on the main members of the National Assembly.
And in Venezuela, they have actually alternate candidates, like kind of a shadow representative who comes in to vote if the main representative can't carry out their duties.
And in order to save Guaido, some of these shadow representatives got together and had a separate election where they appointed him head of their imaginary, imaginary National Assembly.
So there have already been so many layers to this where Guaido was clearly his legitimacy within the opposition was so it had already been called into question and pretty much he lost that vote in quite clear terms.
But now what we're seeing is the four remaining parties, they're called the G4, they're the block of the opposition within Venezuela that is the most radical and has the closest relationship with the United States.
I will get into those details in my book explaining particularly.
So you're talking about Volentad Popular, Juan Guaido's party, Unuevo Tiempo, Acción Democrática, and Primero Justicia.
These are the three or the four parties that make up the most radical wing of the opposition bloc.
Some people, I was speaking to one friend who joked, this group doesn't even so much as breathe without consulting the United States.
They are the group that is so radical, they even denied themselves their own right to participate in the last elections for the legislature in 2020, which I observed that vote.
I was there in Venezuela at the time.
These four parties didn't allow their candidates to participate in the election because, well, they claim because they don't believe that it's a free and fair system.
But I would argue they do it because the United States and this group wants to delegitimize the system and say that, look, we are not allowed to participate and our lack of participation is proof that this is a dictatorship.
And they went so far as even they would smear members of the opposition, people who hate Chavez, people who hate Maduro, who ran for office, they smear them as agents of the government.
In fact, the United States sanctioned Luis Para for particip for having challenged Juan Guaido's legitimacy within the opposition of the National Assembly.
So that's what we're seeing now is that this extreme bloc has decided for whatever reason that Guaido is a project they can no longer support.
Guaido's party is pretty upset about this, but I still think it only represents a change in strategy from the part of the U.S. and then the opposition bloc that it controls.
Well, let's show that video.
This is Juan Guaido.
And this was a pretty common occurrence where he would show up at these public events and then people would assault him.
Oh.
Oh.
So that's fake President Guaido being greeted by some of his constituents.
I was thinking of a different video.
But talk to us about, I mean, what his actions, that of him and his clique meant for the people of Venezuela, the money and the resources, like the Venezuelan resources that they were basically stole, that basically the U.S. stole on their behalf, and what the impact was on their country, what the impact was of these sanctions that Guaido cheered on.
Well, the most obvious effect of the sanctions, the barring of there were multiple, the U.S. had already really under Obama by declaring Venezuela to be a national security threat, that led to a huge jump in rates of shipping to Venezuela.
It created a crisis of import, export because companies simply didn't want to do business with Venezuela and because they see it costs too much.
And there's a risk if the United States is saying that Venezuela is a national security threat, maybe there's going to be a war.
So really the humanitarian crisis was at its height in 2015, 2016, 2017.
There was a lot of street violence.
There was a lot of, there were multiple Guarimba moments.
Those are like the riots that took place that were framed as opposition protests.
But really, I mean, they were just, they would set up blockades in the street all around the country.
They prevented basic goods from getting around.
And that was all a result of the humanitarian crisis that came from the sanctions.
And then also the U.S. was funding a lot of these student groups.
Again, things that I explained in the book.
But that was, I think, the height of the humanitarian crisis and the political crisis in Venezuela that came along with it.
The problem is from the perspective of U.S. policy, where they, if their goal was regime change, by introducing Guaido to the picture in January of 2019, they were declaring a féticompli Before the actual regime change had taken place.
So it actually pulled any momentum out from the opposition that they did have in the streets at that time.
Because if the point is regime change, well, if you're now declaring the regime change has already taken place, then the opposition, it really lost a lot of its energy in the streets because from their perspective, well, yeah, Juan Guaido is already president.
But so in terms of like achieving the physical regime change on the ground in Caracas, and also in terms of having a legitimate political opposition, I think Juan Guaido was actually the worst thing that ever happened to the Venezuelan opposition.
I described him, I gave a comment, I think it was to Sputnik News is saying that he was essentially, and I'm just observing, even if you're pro-opposition, he's like a tapeworm.
He really poisoned them because he took away any, not only does he attack and hit his group, do they attack any other blocs within the opposition who oppose sanctions or who want to participate in the democratic process?
And that has been more damaging to the Venezuelan opposition than anything I think the Maduro government could have done to delegitimize the opposition.
And so.
And what about the plunder of the resources, like the seizing of the Venezuelan state assets and giving them over to Guaido's cronies?
This is the key.
And that's why I called my book Corporate Coup.
That explanation I was giving you was to lead up to the point that maybe physical regime change on the ground in Caracas.
Perhaps there were some in the Venezuelan opposition and in the U.S. administration who thought appointing Juan Guaido was the best way to achieve that.
But in reality, I think there were also others who said maybe that's never going to happen.
The best thing that we can do if we recognize this shadow parallel government is now we have the pretext to, in London, for example, the Bank of England froze $3 billion, maybe $4 billion worth of Venezuelan gold assets, which by the way, we're talking about gold, not cash, like literal just gold assets that the Venezuelans were storing there.
President Maduro had begun the process of attempting to repatriate that gold in the fall of 2018.
So just months before the United States recognized Juan Guaido as president, Maduro was attempting to bring that money, bring that gold back to Venezuela.
So this recognition of Guaido was the perfect cover to say, okay, we cannot figure out actually where this gold should go.
We don't know who's president of Venezuela.
So it just has to stay indefinitely in the vaults of the Bank of England while we try to decide in the courts where we actually would send this gold.
Of course, there's no question who controls the central bank of Venezuela.
Guaido never had any control of any institution there.
You could very easily.
Well, he did have an office.
He did have an office in some building, right?
With like a Venezuelan flag on the wall.
No one's quite sure where it was.
And there were some points that I think he was living inside the French embassy after his failed military when he actually tried to incite a military rebellion.
So he had this little set, I think, that he dragged around that basically like you could put a flag right there where you're in.
You could say, like, I'm the president of Venezuela.
But, and then in the United States, not only do you have assets stored in Venezuelan bank accounts that were frozen and turned over to the interim government, basically meaning that the United States has its hands on those assets now and it stays in the banks, the U.S. banks, and it can never be taken out and sent to Russian Chinese bank as Venezuela is actually working towards building a multipolar world where they're not storing their assets in the West anymore.
That's a huge threat to the transatlantic establishment that we know is so the heart of the empire.
And so, but the largest internationally stored asset belonging to the Venezuelan government is Sitco Petroleum, which is, it is a subsidiary of Petevesa, the Venezuelan state oil company.
And Sitco, for Americans, it's a gas station, but it's actually a lot more.
If you take the train from New York to DC or vice versa, you can actually see huge oil, Citco's, and I'm just totally losing the word right now, but where they actually store the oil in refineries, it's refineries, it's oil pipelines.
It's a whole network that comes out of that is part of Sitco.
It's not just gas stations.
And so it's even hard to value how much, but it's billion.
It's over the value of what's in the Bank of England in the gold assets.
And so that not only were those assets frozen and turned over to the opposition interim government, but as I really explain in my book, the main characters involved with Guaido's shadow government, his U.S.-based representatives.
And I'm talking particularly about his ambassador, his representative here, Carlos Vecchio, and his former attorney general, Jose Ignacio Hernandez.
Carlos Vecchio himself was a former functionary of the foreign control of the foreign oil industry in Venezuela before the revolution.
Even during and after the revolution, as Chavez came and was restructuring the industry, Carlos Vecchio was a top lawyer for ExxonMobil while it was battling the socialization process of Venezuela's oil reserves.
And when they lost that fight, that's when ultimately Carlos Vecchio turned to politics and ended up coming to the United States.
And so that's the interest that someone like Vecchio represents.
And then working in tandem with Jose Ignacio Hernandez, the attorney general is what we can call him in the U.S. sense, they actually oversaw a legal process that now has resulted in Sitco is on the verge of complete liquidation.
And it's a complicated case.
We don't necessarily have to get into the details now.
But what I would just explain is that there are several companies that were suing Venezuela's government for, for example, in this case, Crystal X was the most main one that people may have heard or people were talking about quite a bit in 2019.
It's a company, a mining company that had a gold mine in Venezuela.
They had the rights to it.
And Venezuela's government decided they didn't want to actually give it up.
They were going to nationalize it and mine it themselves.
So Crystal X turns to the international courts, U.S. and U.S. courts to say that they are owed a debt.
Venezuela's government owes them money because of this mine.
And the only way that they had to collect on that debt once the arbitration court, the International Arbitration Court, which is part of the World Bank, Ruled in its favor was to turn and look at the assets that are in the United States.
Because Venezuela's government, you can't force them to pay up this money to the company.
But if there's Venezuelan assets in the United States that this company can now come to a U.S. court and say, hey, the World Bank says that I'm owed this money by Venezuela.
Can we go after some part of Sitgo to get that money back?
And that's what happened.
That's how they took it over, yeah.
They took it over, but it was all through the work of Guaido's Attorney General, Jose Ignacio Hernandez, who was actually working for that company, Crystalex, but multiple companies that were suing Venezuela's government and asking for money back.
And as a result of his failure to protect those assets, and he made very specific movements that showed even when he was claiming to represent Venezuela's interest as on behalf of the interim government in U.S. courts, he was still making decisions that benefited Crystalx and these other corporations that had previously paid him as an expert witness in their cases against the Venezuelan government.
And now Sitco, it's going through this long-drawn out legal process where one day a judge will just auction off much of Sitco's assets and it will end up in the pockets of these transnational corporations that employed the very people that Guaido claims are his representatives here in the United States.
Hence why your book is called The Corporate Coup.
And, you know, going back to that line I read from the New York Times where they, you know, and this is how the Venezuelan government is always described.
It's always described as an authoritarian government, at least if you read, you know, state media here in the U.S., like the New York Times.
But, you know, just thinking about what you're describing, like the plunder of a country's assets, like trying to install a puppet president who was selected not by the Venezuelan people, but by Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton.
There's nothing more authoritarian than what the U.S. tried to do to Venezuela.
But yet the U.S. constantly accuses Venezuela of being authoritarian.
Nobody in Venezuela voted for any of these policies.
And accordingly, they've suffered the impact.
And just to, as we wrap up, this is John Bolton speaking last year on CNN, where he bragged about his role in organizing the coup in Venezuela.
And he did so in the context of speaking about January 6th, which he pointed out wasn't a coup attempt, at least of the kind that he's used to organizing.
I agree with you, to be fair, with all due respect.
One doesn't have to be brilliant to attempt a coup.
I disagree with that.
As somebody who has helped plan coup d'état, not here, but other places, it takes a lot of work.
And that's not what he did.
I do want to ask a follow-up when we were talking about what is capable or what you need to do to be able to plan a coup.
And you cited your expertise having planned coups.
I'm not going to get into the specifics, but successful coups.
Well, I wrote about Venezuela in the book, and it turned out not to be successful.
Not that we had all that much to do with it, but I saw what it took.
So, you know, Anya, I was curious your thoughts on that.
Bolton's claiming we didn't have very much to do with the coup in Venezuela.
He's trying to actually, he's taking credit for it, but also distancing himself from it.
So your comments on that.
Any final words for us as we wrap any parting words for fake President Guaido?
He's pretty much not really worth acknowledging in some ways, which is like, for example, I mean, you were saying that, and I'll get back to Bolton in a minute, but you were saying that they always claim Venezuela's government's authoritarian.
And yet everything we've described and even more of what we haven't described, what the opposition has done in Venezuela, you could never get away with.
I mean, they put the QAnon shaman to shame in terms of the violence and the level of actual treasonous activity that I mean, they were calling, he was running around trying to set up a parallel government.
If you tried to do that in the United States, I don't think you'd be running around on the streets the way Juan Guaido has been all these years.
And I even put that question to the former foreign minister, Jorge Ariasa, during an interview that was published on the gray zone.
Why did the government make that decision?
And it is tricky because I've heard people challenging them and saying, hey, we have rules, we have laws.
Juan Guaido is running around breaking them.
Why isn't he in jail?
Well, it's a political calculation.
I think they realized he was so ineffectual that in some ways arresting him would have given the U.S. what they wanted.
It would have turned him into a martyr and actually made it look like the government was a dictatorship, which is what the U.S. wants, which is how the U.S. wants it to appear.
As for Bolton, I mean, I read his book in order to do mine.
I read all of the memoirs that came out of the Trump administration concerning on Venezuela policy.
And he makes it very clear that he was the main architect of this policy in his book.
I mean, he was agitating across the board.
In fact, there's one interesting part that I think now people would find especially significant where Bolton writes about lobbying Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to go for these extreme sanctions, which were banning the sale of Venezuelan oil in U.S. markets, because Mnuchin was uncomfortable with that.
He said it could lead to high oil prices.
And in the future, if there was an unstable oil market, it would hurt the United States to actually be not allowed.
Why would you ban yourself from buying something?
Like they can go sell their oil to India or to Russia, which is what they did.
But that just means that we don't get the oil.
And interestingly enough, Russian oil came and filled the exact void in the market.
Like when we lost all of our Venezuelan oil, Russia came and sold.
And then we banned ourselves.
We banned the sale of Russian oil too.
So I mean, it's like our leaders are shooting themselves in the foot.
That's another main thesis of my book.
And that it's forcing the rest of the world, Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, Venezuela, to form an alternative block to say, look, we are done with the London, Brussels, New York axis, particularly not just when it comes to politics, but in terms of the financial world and the financial system.
And so, yeah, that's something else that I focus on in the book because it's something that I think you and I are going to be seeing come to life in the next few years, something that we've never experienced as the historic West, that there's an alternative to our monopoly on the global financial network.
Well, Juan Guaido, I think, will have time to read more on this from his exile in Miami, which is where I expect him to go.
I don't know.
Any predictions for where he's going to end up?
I mean, I don't know.
Leo Col de Lopez is in Spain.
Miami, I guess I might choose Miami over Madrid.
Bolsonaro just got there.
So, you know, maybe Juan Guaido can join him.
Anya Parrampal, journalist with the Gray Zone, her book on the crisis in Venezuela, the attempted and failed U.S. coup there is called Corporate Coup.
It's available now for pre-order.
Anya, thanks so much for joining us.
Thanks, Aaron.
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That's it for this week.
You be the best you can be and I'll keep being me.
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