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Jan. 13, 2023 - Jimmy Dore Show
01:01:18
20230113_TJDS_20230113_Podcast_-_11223_1.25_PM
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Everybody, we're doing live stand-up comedy in Los Angeles in January and February in Los Angeles.
And then we're going to Tempe, Palm Springs, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Nashville.
Go to JimmyDore.com for a link for all those tickets and become a premier member while you're there.
*Bell rings*
Hey, this is Aaron Matte.
Who's this?
Jimmy's President Joe Biden.
Oh, hello, Mr. President.
Like I said, this is Aaron Matte, not Jimmy Door.
Oh, I'm sorry, wrong number.
I'm sorry to bother you.
No, no, no.
You have the right number, Mr. President.
Jimmy is off for a few weeks.
I'm filling in as host.
The fuck is going on?
I didn't approve this, did I?
With all due respect, sir, I don't think we need your approval here, but whatever you want to discuss with Jimmy, you can discuss with me.
I don't know, man.
I tell Jimmy some pretty top-secret stuff, you know.
You're a new guy to me.
I don't know if I can trust you.
Try me, Mr. President.
Well, okay, Andy.
Aaron.
Sure.
Look, man, I'm getting raked over the coals here.
They found out about my classified documents.
They were just lying around in some office, and now they're comparing me to Donald Trump.
And why shouldn't they?
I know.
It's ridiculous, TV.
Wait, what?
After you spoke out against Trump's classified document fiasco, why shouldn't you face the same scrutiny for yours?
Because it's totally different, man.
How?
All right, wise guy.
First of all, Trump was well aware that those files were at Mar-a-Lago.
He knew.
I, on the other hand, had no idea.
Do I seem like a guy who knows where things are?
My wife has to tell me where my fucking shoes are in the morning.
So your defense here is utter ignorance.
Yes.
Furthermore, Donald Trump hemmed and hawed about his docks.
We, on the other hand, are cooperating fully.
They were immediately delivered to the National Archives and Records Administration as they should have been.
Why was that done so quickly?
In the hopes that the National Archives would turn around and lose them all over again.
Okay.
Have you ever been over there?
It's goddamn bedlam.
They've got every document from American history, like ever.
So we were hoping that maybe one of these absent-minded nerds who works here would accidentally file them behind the Articles of Confederation or some shit.
I suppose that begs the question why you want them lost again, these documents from your vice presidency.
All right, look, Jimmy Dore Jr.
Again, my name is Aaron.
How am I expected to know that?
Look, let's just say there may be some things in there that in retrospect might make me not look so great.
That's all.
Such as what?
Oh, come on, man.
There's no way I'm going to remember.
A bunch of papers from 10 years ago, you have no chance.
Might it have something to do with the Ukraine?
Sean, I have no idea.
Things to do with your son, Hunter?
Come on, man.
Might these documents shed more light on how and why you strong-armed members of the Ukrainian government during the Obama administration, underscoring how U.S. foreign policy views Ukraine as merely a pawn?
Okay, enough.
Put Jimmy back on the line.
Like I said, Mr. President, Jimmy isn't here.
Look, it's just a handful of papers in one location.
It's not some big goddamn deal, Hopskotch.
Actually, they found a second batch today.
Fucking what?
They found a second batch of your classified vice presidential documents in a second location.
What did you have to say about that?
I'm sorry.
What was the question?
Oh, I see.
Is this where your dementia kicks in?
You're really giving Reagan a run for his money with your I Don't Recall act.
How convenient?
Oh, you think it's an act?
That's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me.
And just this morning, my wife Jill said I did a really good big boy job of chewing my scrambled eggs.
Okay, look, I have to go, but I appreciate your commitment to obfuscation and feigned memory loss.
Man, you're just as much of a prick as Jimmy Dore is.
But I appreciate you comparing me to Reagan.
He was like 10 years younger than I am when he was president.
But yeah, okay, the sun is going down anyway.
I gotta go too.
It's time for me to enter slipper mode.
That's when I shuffle around the West Wing forgetting people's names.
Reminds everyone that they need to run interference and cover my ass for me in order to save their own.
It's a well-oiled machine.
So you take care, young man.
And if Jimmy ever tries to come back, you stand your ground.
This is your show now.
23 Skidoo and a phosphate for all the good boys and girls.
Rose bike.
Rose bike.
Establishment media sets of August fighting.
So good luck.
Watch and see as a jackdog comedian who speeds and jumps the medium and hits them head on.
It's the Jimmy Door show.
We have special guests with us right now.
Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, activist, best-selling author of 12 books, including his latest, The Greatest Evil is War.
He previously hosted the Emmy-nominated show on contact for RT America and RT International.
His work can now be found at his substack at chrishedges.substack.com.
Welcome, Chris.
Thanks for coming back to the show.
Thanks, Jimmy.
Thanks for having me.
So you wrote this recently, America's Theater of the Absurd, subtitled The 15 Rounds of Voting It Took to Install Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House is part of the carnival of folly that passes for politics.
And I just want to go through a little bit of it.
Like right here, it opens by saying, our political class does not govern.
It entertains.
It plays its assigned role in our fictitious democracy, howling with outrage to constituents and selling them out.
The squad and the progressive caucus have no more intention of fighting for universal health care, workers' rights, or defying the war machine than the Freedom Caucus fights for freedom.
Chris, why is that?
Because they don't have any power.
They're just window dressing.
We've undergone a corporate coup d'état in slow motion.
All of the levers of power have been seized by corporate forces and their lobbyists.
The courts have been deformed to serve their interests.
The media is largely almost completely controlled by roughly a half dozen corporations, certainly the airwaves.
And it's burlesque.
It's vaudeville.
It's entertainment.
It doesn't The actual centers of power, which are real, are completely hidden.
So what do you say, what we just saw last week, that actually the squad does have power because the right-wingers led by Matt Goetz in the House used their leverage to extract concessions for their vote for Speaker.
Now, we tried to get the squad to do the exact same thing or the progressives in the House two years ago, and we wanted them to extract something for their vote.
So they actually have power and leverage, and they could have done something similar, but they didn't.
Now, why do you think that is?
Well, they didn't do it because they don't actually have power.
For them to defy Pelosi and the Democratic Party leadership is political suicide, and they know it.
So they won't do it.
It's why they fund the war in Ukraine.
It's why they didn't stand up for railroad or freight railroad workers and they were forced to accept this contract that over 50% of the unionized workers had already rejected.
And then they'll do kind of public relations gimmicks, like propose, as they did in the House, that they get seven days of sick pay when they know it won't pass.
But to actually confront the centers of power would mean that they would be erased.
They'd be destroyed the way the Democratic Party destroyed Dennis Kucinich.
Well, finally, they got rid of Dennis Kucinich by redistricting or gerrymandering his district.
And then when he ran, I guess it was last year for the mayor of Cleveland, they pumped in tons of dark money, especially in the last three weeks, to destroy his candidacy.
So that message isn't lost on AOC or anyone else.
So you're right that they could have stood up, and I think you were one of the leaders of this.
They had the ability to block Pelosi from the speakership to demand concessions, but they certainly have read the power dynamics correctly.
They wouldn't exist within the Democratic Party and they lose their seats.
So you mean that Nancy Pelosi and the corporatists would then funnel money into primaries against them to get them knocked out of their congressional seat.
That's what they're afraid of.
Yeah, well, that's the power of Pelosi and Schumer and McCarthy is that they are the spigot.
The money that comes into the party comes through them and then it's given to anointed candidates.
So number one, they wouldn't get money from the Democratic Party.
And number two, candidates would be funded to bring them down.
And they've been completely domesticated by this center of power, which is largely Wall Street.
I mean, Wall Street, the fossil fuel industry, the arms industry, all these corporate executives, they fund both parties.
So on the one hand, you get the political clowns that speak in vulgar and crude idiom to enrage public, largely enraged white working class.
And then you get the kind of dulcet tones of the Democratic Party to mollify the liberal class.
But the centers of funding and the centers of power are the same.
So why I have a theory on this.
So what you're basically, so let me, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but would you agree with the statement that the reason why Matt Goetz and the old and the far right wing of the Republican Party was able to pull this off was because they were allowed to pull this off, as opposed to the progressives and the squad.
If they try to do the same thing, they wouldn't be like because I'm having a hard time reconciling what you're saying with what I just saw last week.
Well, because the funding sources for the Freedom Caucus will remain, are quite lavish, whereas those self-identified progressives are largely dependent on funding from more traditional sources, and in particular, the Democratic Party.
So those who are backing these kind of retrograde capitalist forces that fund people within the Freedom Caucus are not going to cut off money for standing up to McCarthy, whereas figures like AOC and others are quite vulnerable.
So you talk about, this is a great article that you wrote, and you talk a lot about how, you know, how legislation actually gets done.
And you laid out, and you talk about how the corporations own everything and they own the media, and you just mentioned it again.
And so here's something that I found out when I was doing Force to Vote two years ago, was that there is this establishment media protection racket for politicians.
And it's funny how they all work together hand in hand.
And I found the squad won't get, they won't go to progressive media anymore.
They'll go to MSNBC and CNN, which used to be considered progressives' enemies, but they'll go there for interviews all day long, but they won't go to progressive media.
And the only one they will go to is the Intercept.
And now I figured it out.
Well, the Intercept's, you know, CIA operation.
It's run by a billionaire who's got interests all over the place.
And they are then tasked with protecting politicians.
Now, Ryan Grimm did that with AOC and the squad during Force to Vote.
He's continued to do it.
He ran cover for them when they squashed the strike for the railroad workers.
He ran cover for them and it left Kashama Sawant, who's the socialist city council member of Seattle, to call him a snake oil salesman.
And there's those people there that their all job is to obscure reality.
And so I want to show you what happening again.
So here's Rokana going on an intercept show, Ryan Grimm's show, and watch they do it again.
Let's just watch.
If Democrats take the House back in two years, which seems plausible, it'll probably be by a narrow margin.
Is there any thinking going on in the Progressive Caucus now to say, what are we going to demand when that happens around?
First of all, I think it's funny he laughs.
RoConna laughed when the reporter journalist asks him, what are you going to demand in two years when you win the House back?
He just laughs because he knows they're not going to demand anything.
And he also knows he's not going to ask a follow-up question.
But let's just watch his answer.
Hakeem Jeffries was warned by Kevin McCarthy, right?
He said, I had a unanimous vote two years ago.
Look, I think there are arguments for it, for example, Medicare for All to get hearings on that to get a vote on that.
There are arguments for Medicare for All.
That's our leading argument.
They exist.
I'm not going to make them.
I'm not going to make them.
And I certainly won't make them strongly.
And I certainly won't stick my chin up, but that exists.
They could be made.
Here we go.
But here's the difference.
And I believe the fundamental difference with the Freedom Caucus and the Progressive Caucus.
The Freedom Caucus, by their own definition, just wants to blow things up and cut things.
I mean, that's why they're in Congress.
And I disagree with it.
I'm not questioning their motives.
They're in Congress because they want to reduce spending, cut government.
That's an easier thing to be a no on than saying, okay, we want Medicare for all, which is one of, we have to have legislation drafted.
And just it's a harder thing to do when you have an affirmative agenda.
Somebody should tell RoConner that C. Pelosi has been sitting out of Medicare for all Bill for about five years.
So anyway, that legislation has been dressed.
So you talk about this in your army.
Are you going to write it?
We got to write it.
We got to cut forever.
It takes forever to read it.
Oh, then you got to read it.
So that you talk a little bit about that, like how they're working coordination, how the corporation owns both those people.
And that's kind of how it works.
I'm learning this now.
I mean, I've been a comedian for 30 years.
I've been in this space for about five or six years.
It is remarkable to see how this works.
It was remarkable to see how the corporation protected the Democratic Party when they crushed a railroad worker strike.
Go ahead, speak to it if you'd like.
Yeah, there's complete collusion between, let's remember who owns MSNBC.
These figures in the Intercept, Glenn Greenwald, I think, has given a pretty prescient critique of what happened to the Intercept.
I know a lot of the people, of course, who run it and work there.
And Glenn points out, I think, correctly, that they all want to, of course, they're pulling down these ridiculously large salaries, but they all want to be invited to dinner with the editors of the New Yorker and the New York Times.
And I think that's exactly right.
They want to be feted by the establishment.
Well, if you are feted by the establishment, you have to play by the rules of the establishment.
And that's precisely what organizations like the Intercept are doing, which is, of course, a complete reversal of the goals that Glenn set when they founded the organization.
So, yeah, I mean, that's nothing new.
That's really, you know, that's why we'll call it the establishment of the legacy media exists.
I mean, I worked at the New York Times for 15 years.
I watched them destroy all sorts of people on radicals or people that were outside the mainstream or people that questioned the dominant narrative.
Just list after list with Ray Bonner, Sidney Shanberg, I knew, worked with Ray in Central America.
I knew Sidney Shanberg.
As soon as he started defying or writing about the developers who were eviscerating the middle class and the working class in Manhattan and destroying rent control and everything else, he was out.
He ended up working, of course, for the Village Voice and the later Newsday.
So yeah, this is a very long history.
You know, Gary Webb was destroyed, we forget, by the Post, New York Post, and the Washington Post and the New York Times, who sent reporters down to the Pentagon to sort of get their version of what actually happened in Nicaragua and then used it to discredit Webb, who ended up committing suicide.
So there's a long, long history of, and that's why these quote-unquote liberal news organizations are allowed to exist.
They posit themselves as kind of the moral arbiters of society.
Chomsky writes about this quite well with Herman and manufacturing consent.
But the moment you cross and begin to examine or question the motives behind the power elite, then you're immediately pushed out.
It's an old story.
But of course, it's worse in some ways now because these news organizations are far more anemic in that they're not pulling the advertising revenue that they used to pull.
And so they've become even more obsequious to the centers of power.
This kind of sounds how you just said the Democrats get funded.
They got to suck up the, they get the same kind of funding as from the DNC.
That's right.
So you go on to say these political hacks are, which people were talking about, the squad and the these political hacks are modern versions of Sinclair Lewis's slit con artist Elmer Gantry, cynically betraying a gullible public to amass personal power and wealth.
I saw it happen right in front of my eyes.
It's the craziest thing I've ever seen.
This moral vacuity provides the spectacle, as H.G. Wells wrote, of a great material civilization halted, paralyzed.
It happened in ancient Rome.
It happened in Weimar, Germany.
It's happening here.
Can you explain what that means?
A dumb guy like me has no idea what that means.
Well, it means the centers of all the institutions and all the mechanisms by which the citizenry might have had at least some kind of a voice, a partial voice, are seized and redirected to the consolidation of wealth and power of a tiny cabal, in our case, an oligarchic corporate elite.
And when government seizes up, when it becomes paralyzed and is no longer able to respond, even in the most minimal way to the suffering of the wider public, then you create these political monstrosities like Trump or DeSantis or Pompeo or the Freedom Caucus and all the others.
I saw that in Yugoslavia.
That's what happened in Weimar Germany with the rise of fascism.
That's what happened in ancient Rome.
And we also have to acknowledge that part of the disease of late empire is unchecked, unregulated, uncontrolled militarism.
And you go back to the quote-unquote liberals, the progressive caucus, they have approved, what, $100 billion to the Ukraine.
We spend more, we've given more money to Ukraine than the annual budget of the State Department.
And meanwhile, we have a homeless epidemic within the country.
Our infrastructure is disintegrating.
Families are struggling under the onslaught of inflation.
Half the country is living in poverty or near poverty, but you don't respond to, and those distortions, which happened in Weimar or happen at the end of Ancient Rome and everything else, has very frightening political consequences.
So that, you know, as I've long said, and I think you agree, Trump wasn't the problem.
You know, Trump was the symptom.
Trump was what was caused by a decayed and corrupt and dysfunctional political system.
And it's only getting worse.
I mean, the rhetoric is different.
Biden is, doesn't he call himself a pro-labor president?
Well, I mean, the rhetoric is different, but the actions are the same.
I mean, the freight railroad unions were one of the few unions that retained the right of collective bargaining.
Remember, when Biden ran for president, he promised along with the Democrats to strengthen collective bargaining power and all that.
And of course, he destroyed it.
He shoved this Substandard contract, which most people had already rejected within the union down their throats by judicial fiat, legislative fiat.
So you go on to say, H.G. Wells called the old guard the good liberals, the ones who speak in measured.
Let me, before I read it, let me just ask you this question.
So when you say they send a, so I saw it happen.
I think I quote you.
I think you said that they lie and cheat and steal and they do it right out in the open.
And that's what they're doing now.
And they pay fealty to democracy.
They know all the words to it.
And then they send $100 billion to the most corrupt country in Ukraine right in your face at the snap of a finger while they can't send $100 billion to San Diego, San Francisco, Houston, Dallas, Miami, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, so we can fix our homeless people with it.
They do it right in your face now.
And so my question is: what do they get out of that?
Like, if you're going to send $100 billion, which you're just inventing anyway, right?
That's not real tax revenue.
That's just invented money.
So why don't they just invent $100 billion and send it to America at the same time?
So people, I don't get what they get out of not doing that.
Do you?
Well, because they're sustaining Raytheon and Boeing and all of these arms contractors who fund the party.
Right.
And so what they get out of it is they're serving their masters.
They're serving those corporations that give them political power.
I mean, if you took away this money, they wouldn't have political power.
Pelosi, Schumer, who would put these people in power?
So it's not even a pyramid.
It's just a circle.
They exist and they are not about to, you know, all these petitions to get money out of politics, mailing them into your representatives misses the fact that all of these, most, almost all of these people wouldn't be there without this system.
And that is their power.
And so they're serving their centers of power, which is why, what, these stocks have gone up, I think, 35% or something since the war in Ukraine?
Yes, they're the only stocks that are going up.
Every other stock's going down.
Right, right.
Why don't I trade stocks?
We know where the money is.
I know.
Why didn't I just buy Wraith?
I don't know what I was thinking.
So, okay, boy, Bitcoin.
God, Jesus.
Anyway, so yeah, I understand why they do that.
Like, I understand why they fund $100 billion to Ukraine because that's for their donors and that's their doing.
But why not at the same time send $100 billion to America?
That's what I've been saying.
And the reason I come up with is that the government, the United States, people think that our government is just regular corrupt.
They have no idea that it's 100% totally corrupt and completely purchased by corporations.
So the gears of the government only work in the direction of corruption.
You've got to have money to grease those wheels to get it going.
There's got to be corruption.
And so it just doesn't work the other way.
Like you say, the levers of government have seized up.
It just doesn't work to help people.
Is that right?
Am I right?
Close?
Yeah, but it's even worse than that.
I mean, because now you have the Fed and the central banking system to curb inflation.
What are the two objectives?
It's to create more unemployment and reduce wages.
Yes.
That's how we're going to get.
But they're open about it.
They want more unemployment.
Yeah, they say Larry Summers was sitting in the Bahamas at a response.
He looked great, by the way.
He looked great, had a great tattoo.
And he's talking about how we got to get people out of work.
Yeah.
That's why.
So you say H.G. Wells called the old guard, the good liberals, the ones who speak in measured words and embrace reason, the inexplicit men.
They say the right things and do nothing.
That's what we have now in the Democratic Party.
They are as vital to the rise of tyranny as are the Christian fascists, a few of whom held the House hostage last week by blocking 14 rounds of voting to prevent Kevin McCarthy from becoming Speaker.
By the time McCarthy was elected on the 15th round, he had caved on nearly every demand made by the obstructionists, including permitting any one of the 435 members of the House to force a vote for his removal at any time, thus guaranteeing political paralysis.
Now, is that A, true?
And B, I guess you think it is, you wrote it, but B, why would he allow that, McCarthy?
Or, but correct me if I'm wrong.
Wasn't this the way it always was?
And then Nancy Pelosi changed that rule?
So correct me if I'm wrong.
Yeah, no, that is true.
However, it does appear that these figures within the Freedom Caucus intend, just like they got rid of Boehner, remember, they intend to hold McCarthy hostage.
I mean, there's a real, I think there's an intent to hold him hostage to push through their agenda.
But, you know, the idea that McCarthy, you know, like Liz Cheney, somehow respects democratic institutions is just wrong.
This isn't a battle.
It's a battle for power.
It's not a battle for over ideology.
I mean, McCarthy, who was backed by Marjorie Taylor Greene, he's as morally bankrupt as they are.
He joined the majority in this Texas lawsuit to try and void the 2020 election results in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, in Georgia.
He advocates, there's not, there's no McCarthy, it's all about power.
I mean, he's an empty suit.
He's the male Nancy Pelosi.
It's all about power and money.
Yeah.
And so tax cuts for the wealthy, further deregulation of corporations, war on immigrants.
There's really very little daylight between him and the Freedom Caucus.
Right.
Or him and Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
Yeah, well, the difference is rhetorical.
Yes.
But yeah, in terms of policy, no.
No, in terms of policy, no.
As we learned with Donald Trump, right?
When Donald Trump became president, he didn't legislate, he didn't govern any differently than any of the other people.
In fact, he deported less Hispanics than Barack Obama and he started less wars than Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
So it was the exact opposite of what Chomsky always says, which he's wrong every four years.
I just want to let people know.
Every four years, you're going to roll Chomsky out on a dolly so he could tell you to go vote for the Democrat, even though the Democrat is not the lesser of too evil, as was proven by Bill Clinton and George Bush I. Isn't the lesser of too evil, by the way, supposed to be like, oh, I don't want to do this.
I got no choice.
And not smugly and self-righteously.
Oh, I chose the lesser evil.
I chose democracy.
The irony of everybody saying that that midterm was about democracy.
And the first thing they did when they got elected was commit fascism against the railroad workers was hilarious.
Okay.
So then you talk about this junk politics.
You say this political vacuum.
So there's a bit of political vacuum created, right?
Because nobody in government actually represents the people.
They only represent their corporate interests, which means it's completely controlled and it's not really A democracy, which I've been trying to tell people, you didn't lose your democracy on January 6th.
That didn't undermine democracy.
Your democracy was stolen from you decades ago.
It's adorable that people think that somehow a bunch of Yahoo's and pajama bottoms and buffalo helmets were going to overthrow the military-industrial complex that is the United States.
That is a joke.
We almost lost the whole thing, Jimmy.
So you talk about this.
You say the political vacuum that has been spawned, which gave us Donald Trump, has spawned a thing you say anti-politics or what the writer Benjamin Demott called junk politics, which personalizes and moralizes issues and interests instead of clarifying them.
Junk politics maximizes threats from abroad while miniaturizing large, complex problems at home.
We're living.
So this is what we've been screaming about at this show: is that we have a thousand military bases.
They say only 800, but you know, there's a thousand military bases around the world draining our treasury the same way every empire ends.
And then we have still half the country's poor, low income.
80% of workers live paycheck to paycheck.
50% of wage earners earn $30,000 or less.
That's a failed state that we live in.
People get sick, they go bankrupt.
People living under, and they minimize all that.
We're living in that, right?
This is what's so now we have junk politics.
Could you talk a little bit more about that?
Yeah, well, this is DeMont's term, and he wrote a good book on it.
It's this ceaseless flood of patriotic, religious, macho, therapeutic positions to essentially uncouple issues from reasoned foundations, to use his words.
And it infantilizes, infantilizes the public.
It's with these year-round upbeat Christmas tales.
But the function is essentially to solidify the status quo and protect the interests of the billionaire class.
You know, there is no, the forms of control, the social bonds that are used to keep people in check are a massive prison system, the largest in the world.
And we have about 20, 25% of the world's prison population.
We're less than 5% of the world's population.
And of course, these rapacious militarized police forces, especially in post-industrial areas where they function as internal armies of occupation, there's no, in fact, Biden was one of the major architects of all of this with the 1994 omnibus crime bill.
But there's no difference, the wholesale surveillance of the public.
And when your government watches you 24 hours a day, you can't use the word liberty.
That's the relationship of a master and a slave.
When you look at the actual fundamental policies, trade deals, austerity, deindustrialization, stripping away of civil liberties under the Patriot Act, and the two parties are completely in lockstep.
They will argue about tangential cultural issues.
I'm not minimizing a woman's right to control her body and abortion in any way, but on these fundamental structural issues, which is why corporations fund both parties.
So that's another thing people don't realize.
So this is this speaks exactly to what I've been saying, not only on the show, but in my stand-up back, that people, I have friends, because I stopped being a Democrat when the Democrats cheated Bernie Sanders, right?
And then Bernie Sanders decided he'll never stop rolling over for the machine in the Democratic Party.
And as I put it, you got to soak the blue cock.
Redcocks are corrupt.
Blue cocks are full of liberty.
And so that's what he's going to do.
So I still have friends who say that the Democrats, if they just would fight a little harder, if they were just a little bit better at their jobs, and I have to remind them, they are performing their job perfectly.
If you ever go to a Harlem Globetrotters game, you know that they need the Washington Generals.
And that's exactly what the Democrats are there to do, is to pretend that they're actually fighting for you.
But they always are going to lose, and the corporation's always going to win.
And what people need to realize is that the same guy who pays the Harlem Globetrotters is the same guy who pays the Washington Generals, just like the same guy who paid Barack Obama is the same guy who paid Mitt Romney, George Bush, the same thing.
And now, go ahead.
You want to say that?
FTX kid point blank in that recording?
Say, I also fund the Republicans, but I have to do it dark money so the press isn't mad.
Did he say that?
Yeah.
Yeah, he was funding both parties.
He was just giving more.
Whoever's the winner, you need a little more to.
And so you go on to say, and I've said this, that, you know, the reason why they didn't like Donald Trump wasn't for the reasons they said.
They didn't like Donald Trump because he was lying in Washington, D.C. That's not why.
They never.
Oh, my God.
Did you hear there's lying?
They didn't like him because he would accidentally tell the truth every once in a while.
Like, for instance, when they asked him, why are you keeping the soldiers in Syria?
And he said, for the oil.
They're like, you can't.
He's like, no, for the Tara oil and we're taking it.
They're like, get this guy out of here.
You can't give the game away like that.
And that's exactly.
And plus, he puts an ugly face on our face of empire, as Aaron Matei has pointed out many times.
But Joe Biden doesn't.
And so you say the billionaire class, for the most part, prefers the mask of Joe Biden as opposed to the mask of Donald Trump, who definitely broke the freight railway unions to prevent.
Could you imagine how people go crazy if Donald Trump, a billionaire asshole like he is, crushed a railroad strike union?
They needed a guy like Joe Biden, you know, Pennsylvania Joe, blue collar.
I'm the beta.
He's the greatest pro-union president in the history of our country.
That might be true, but he's still an enemy of the workers, who definitely broke the freight railroad unions to prevent a strike and forced them to accept a contract the majority of union members had rejected.
But the billionaire class also knows that the goons and con artists of the far right will not interfere in their disemboweling of the nation.
Indeed, they will be more robust in thwarting the attempts of workers to organize for decent wages and working conditions.
So that's what people don't realize is that Joe Biden has got the same agenda as those guys, as these right-wing, crazy right-wingers, as you refer to them, because they have the same agenda as the billionaire class.
And take it wherever you'd like.
That was really interesting that that's what made me think like the reason why Matt Goetz and they were allowed to do what they're doing, because all the things they got, except for the cut in military spending, I think that the billionaire class is okay with.
Whereas if the squad asked for Medicare for all or a $15 minimum wage, they could not cave on that.
What do you say, Chris?
Yeah.
So, you know, this is the point that about the kind of facade.
So you're right about Trump.
He was kind Of gauche and impulsive and not very bright and would insult NATO allies.
And what did he call when he ran for president?
He called Iraq a big fat mistake or something, which of course it was.
I mean, this is just, and so they love that veneer that Biden presents.
He's completely managed.
One doesn't really know how sentient Biden actually is.
But he's prodded out and cleaned up and like Reagan at the end.
So, yeah, so it's about the presentation.
But these corporate forces, you know, remember after January 6th, all these corporations wouldn't fund election deniers.
Well, they're all back to funding all of these people again.
Democracy is not a democratic force.
Democracy works quite well, in fact, in undemocratic or authoritarian systems.
You saw it, and I don't want to draw too many parallels to Weimar, Germany, and the Nazis, but it was much the same.
The German industrialists and all the good bourgeois politicians didn't want all the buffoons of the Nazi Party.
Hitler, who wasn't even German, was Austrian, didn't speak very good German.
They didn't want him in power.
But once he was in power, they were quite happy.
The big industries, Krupps and everybody else, to bankroll him and the Nazi Party and to work with him.
And that's exactly the same here.
So Trump was a kind of embarrassment to the empire, but Trump didn't in any way threaten the empire.
And should the political system devolve into a series of Trump-like political leaders, they will work quite happily with them.
And in fact, of course, these people are even more aggressive against labor unions than the Democratic Party in the sense that they're willing to take even more draconian forms to crush them.
So finally, my last slide from your article is I watched fringe politicians in Yugoslavia, Radovan Karatezic.
Is that how you say his name?
Slobodan Milosevic.
Radovan Karadich.
Heritage, okay, Slobodan Milosevic and Franjo Tujman.
I don't know if that's right.
Dismisses by political and educated elites as buffoons.
They wrote an anti-liberal wave to power in the wake of widespread economic misery.
Walmart, Amazon, Apple, Citibank, Raytheon, Exxon, Mobile Alphabet, and Goldman Sachs will easily adapt because capitalism functions very efficiently without democracy.
Well, it has been in my whole lifetime.
We haven't had democracy in my whole life.
I think we're afraid of China.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
So this is what we've been trying to tell people.
And people aren't waking up to it.
So it's over.
And I think our country's over, as your book proved.
But what we're trying to say is that Trump was a cartoon version of the real fascist that's on his way.
And the same conditions that gave us Donald Trump wasn't racism.
That wasn't what gave us Donald Trump.
It wasn't racism.
What gave us Donald Trump?
We had just elected a black guy president two times in a row, overwhelmingly.
And a lot of those people who voted for him voted for Trump.
And it wasn't because of racism, because that's what people want you to think.
Is Trump racist?
Is there racism in America?
Yes.
That's not what gave us Trump.
What gave us Trump is people desperate economically because a class war has been waged against workers in this country since 1980 and it's been won by the billionaire class.
That's why.
That's why after black people in Milwaukee voted for Barack Obama twice, their lives got worse.
And then they wouldn't go out and vote for Hillary Clinton.
Not because black people are racist, but because black people got let down by the Democratic Party and the establishment time and time and time again.
And the game is over now.
They're willing to vote for a cartoon game show host.
That's how bad it's gotten.
And what you're saying here is we've seen this game before, and it's going to get even worse.
you're going to get a real strong man who, who actually does have dictatorial, uh, of ideas.
Trump didn't have the guy.
Anyway, we're getting off in the weeds.
But anyway, so go ahead and if you'd like to just comment on that last slide.
Yeah, that's an important point.
So in my book, America the Farewell Tour, I go out to Anderson, Indiana, which is where GM used to have all its plants.
25,000 unionized workers once worked in those plants with decent wages, up to $50 an hour benefits.
Well, courtesy of Bill Clinton and NAFTA, those plants were literally transported to Monterey, Mexico.
They're now these gigantic vacant lots surrounded by cyclone fencing.
Anderson, Indiana went into the tailspin of all post-industrial cities with the opioid crisis and suicides.
And I talked to the old UAW leadership in the city, and they said during the primaries, these guys all voted for Sanders, but they were never going to vote for Hillary Clinton.
And so the UAW didn't even try and tell them not to vote for Trump.
They said, okay, vote for Trump, but then vote for the Democratic slate in the state.
It didn't work.
And that's just a disconnect.
You have to remember, part of the problem is that the commercial or establishment press has rendered all these people invisible.
Or if we see them, they're figures of brief figures of ridicule.
And why are they invisible?
Well, because advertisers don't want you seeing them.
That's not how they make their money.
I mean, look at all the special sections in the New York Times where I used to work.
It's like, what's the living section about?
It's about, oh, the struggles of maintaining the second house in the Hamptons or whatever it is.
I mean, it's not your lifestyle.
It's not my lifestyle, but it's the lifestyle of people they're catering to.
And so, yeah, we have seen it before.
I saw it in myself in Yugoslavia.
It's not go back and read Aristotle.
I mean, he writes about it in politics.
What was that?
5,000 years ago.
He said that when there's that kind of imbalance and an aristocracy seizes control, then the only two options are revolution or tyranny.
And unfortunately, there's been a quite effective war against the old left that kept this country straight, including the Communist Party that's been erased from American history.
But the old labor unions, the old CIO, the Wobblies, the IWW, everybody else, they have just been in a relentless campaign, eviscerated.
And voices like mine are, and I love Noam.
I do disagree with him on the election stuff, but he's an important figure.
It'd have been very important to me.
You know, what happened in Noam?
Noam's completely, I mean, you could make a strong argument that he's our most important intellectual.
We don't agree on BDS, which I support, and a few other things.
But nevertheless, he's an important intellectual.
He's better known in France than he is in the United States.
So that form of control over information And those forms of control on popular radical movements that kept a rapacious oligarchic capitalist system at least in check somewhat.
And remember, the New Deal was courtesy of massive numbers of strikes in the 1930s.
And Roosevelt was astute enough to realize that either concessions were made.
He writes about this in his private correspondence to his brother.
Either we make those concessions or we endure a revolution.
They were all haunted by 1917 in Russia, thinking that it would happen here.
But that counterweight is gone.
And that's extremely dangerous.
And I fear where we're headed.
There's just no rational response to the very serious suffering and misery and frustration and despair that is gripping the country.
But even the most tepid campaign promises made by Biden have been jettisoned.
$15 an hour.
Where's that?
You know, where's child care?
I mean, all the stuff that he promised.
It just went up in smoke.
He may not remember it, but I mean, somebody in the Democratic Party has to remember it.
And so when I'm told to be more polite to politicians, it's because, in my mind, because those people who are saying that don't understand the gravity of the situation that we're in.
And they think that, you know, all those people have health care.
All those people have comfortable lives, quote unquote, and they don't really see what's coming.
They don't understand that we are a failed state and that it demands a revolution.
You know, it's even creepy, dude.
You're not to be, you know, be polite to politicians.
They don't mean like you see them in person and you yell at them.
On your show, just observing my actions is what you're supposed to do.
That's supposed to be nice.
So I think there's no left in America.
In America, the left is not connected to workers.
The left is connected to middle class ass wipes who care more about gender pronouns than they do about working class problems.
And I think that's the do you.
Now, Christian Smalls and Staten Island organized.
So that's the thing.
We got to organize along class lines.
And when people say that, they don't realize what they're saying.
They're saying you have to organize with Trumpers, right?
With people who voted for Trump, which is what Christian Smalls did at Amazon and Staten Island.
Do you think we're going to, why don't we see more of that?
Do you think we will?
And do you think there'll ever be a real revolution?
Because if there is, I would love to be in part of it.
Right.
I think it will only come through that kind of organizing.
And you're dead right.
You know, Ralph Nader's been saying this for a long time.
We have to organize around common economic interests, large corporations, Walmart, which Amazon, I think, is the largest employer.
Walmart's the second.
Those two organizations have to be unionized.
But of course, as soon as you create a union, as Smalls did, Amazon has lots of way, which they're doing now, to essentially chip away at that union's power, getting rid of people within the Amazon plant who, you know, thinking up a reason to get rid of them.
The war against any kind of unionized activity, because strikes are the one weapon that the working class has, the only weapon.
Yes.
Which is why Biden and his administration stepped in to prevent a rail strike because they know you go back to the last rail strikes, 1922 and others, you can really shut down the country.
You can do serious economic damage.
And that's the only mechanism we have to fight back.
It's not in the political arena.
It's not through the Democratic Party.
It's through, but we're almost starting from scratch.
About 10, I think it's 10% or something of the American workforce is unionized.
A lot of those are public employees who don't care, the right to strike can be taken from them.
We're almost having to start from ground zero.
And if you look at the economic crisis of the 1930s, thank God we had strong radical, popular labor movements because those were the movements that prevented fascism.
Remember that there was a they loved Mussolini and Hitler, Ford and all these figures.
And they got Smedley Butler, the former Marine Corps general.
They flirted with him to try and actually carry out a coup d'etat.
So those popular forces that represent the militant forces that defend the interests of the working class, once they're gone, there's no bulwark left against tyranny.
And so we're scrambling.
And then we've got all these Taft-Hartley Act 1947 and all these anti-union laws, right to work laws, everything else.
The oligarchs have been quite methodical in destroying the capacity of workers to organize and protect themselves.
And that's why they're pushing unemployment.
And they don't even hide it.
I mean, and there's no kind of moral calculus.
Nobody's sitting around asking, well, if we're pushing unemployment, what happens to these people?
What happens to their families?
What happens to their children?
Well, that's just the price of bringing down inflation.
And the Republicans and the Democrats are both completely on board with it.
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Okay, so Sean Penn, as you know, is the biggest tool of the CIA and imperialism.
And he thinks he's cool.
He's not.
And so he came out of the Golden Globes.
Again, something that everyone hates in America, the Golden Globes.
he did this.
Why did he take such a long pause, Kurt?
Hitler would have done that.
Is that what that?
What is he doing?
I think he's expecting a bigger round of applause.
Oh, yeah.
Can we start from the beginning?
I want to see.
Maybe you're right.
Is that it?
Those nominated films are proof that regardless of language spoken, cinema at its best is an art form that can speak to all the aspirations to generosity, to integrity, to empathy, to love, and to courage.
I'm privileged to be here tonight and proud that the leadership of the Hollywood Foreign Press has seen fit to encourage that those highest aspirations of film should share this stage tonight with a very real world example, that which inspires film's creation from the otherworldly courage of young Iranians rising up.
The otherworldly courage, like they burn their hijabs, but they still wore a mask.
I mean, it's not otherworldly.
You still got the mask on.
The otherworldly.
Yeah.
I mean, you don't have to be hyperbolic about it.
He literally thinks it's another planet anyway.
I think he would notice the countries he's going to run through.
Yes.
Are All official enemies.
All official enemies.
That's right.
Iran.
To the ever-persevering women's movement of Afghanistan.
Afghanistan.
We are reminded.
Was there also a movement to maybe get us the fuck out of there for 20 years?
Why don't you recognize that movement?
Just the women's movement?
That's all you recognize?
Not how we fucking murdered, slaughtered people for 20 years, but they're bad.
They're still worse than us somehow.
The people in Afghanistan are still worse.
Well, that was before.
So remember, Iraq, he was way against Iraq.
In fact, they made fun of him in Team America Workplace because he said he went there and they didn't want to have a war and they mocked him.
He was right for saying that.
He was right for that.
But he didn't have an NGO.
CA got him after that.
And that's because a Republican was in office doing it.
And then Obama came along and continued pretty much the exact same foreign policy.
And everybody in the circle got on board.
Everybody.
In no uncertain terms, that the freedom to dream is not simply a human luxury, but rather a human need that must be fought and sacrificed for.
If the freedom to dream were a spear, I proudly present a human being who tonight represents that spear's most hung tip.
Ladies and gentlemen.
What is he dreaming about?
I don't have his spear.
What is that symbol on your shirt?
The Decepticons from Transformation.
Looks like a New York Yankees symbol.
But anyway, no, I don't have to talk about it.
Oh, the tip of the spear of freedom himself.
What's that?
I just can't get over this garbage.
He thinks, oh, I'm going to come out.
I'm a righteous fighter for people and freedoms and liberties and things of other worlds.
The human essence of spirit.
That's what I'm about.
Only I bet him and John Cusack, you could have a real douchebag.
A real douchebag off with John Cusack and Sean Battle.
Wow.
Write about the bravery of yourself, right?
Let him go to it.
How could John Cusack write that movie Gross Point Blank?
Did he write it?
He co-wrote it and then became a Russian Gator.
He knew the game.
If you watch Gross Point Claim, he knew the game.
They all think it's cool.
That's part of those movies.
That's what's so crazy about.
How could you investigate the CIA?
But at the same time, they're all making movies.
Like, we all know they go.
They probably imagine even more bleat and shit than they actually do.
So you like it.
It's cool.
It's like an anti-hero.
You know what's funny about the Golden Globes?
You mentioned Jimmy.
Everybody hates the Golden Globes.
Even the host of the Golden Globes last night, Gerard Carmichael, came out and said, yeah, they're racist, and I'm only doing this because they're paying me.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Well, that was their big problem, right?
Last year, they got in trouble for being racist.
Because they didn't have one black member of their board.
And he said, I'm here this year because I'm black.
You know, it was a good monologue.
Wow.
Well, that's.
Everybody's going to make it.
I bet that white crowd came so hard.
Oh, I knew.
So bad.
Oh, give it to us.
Everybody, we're doing live stand-up comedy in Los Angeles in January and February in Los Angeles.
And then we're going to Tempe, Palm Springs, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Nashville.
Go to JimmyDoor.com for a link for all those tickets and become a premium member while you're there.
Beep.
Hello, this is Aaron Matte sitting in for Jimmy Doerr.
Who's this?
Hey, this is Vince Vaughn calling.
Oh, hello.
Just to reiterate, I am not Jimmy Doar.
I'm filling in for Jimmy, who is on vacation.
This has led to some confusion.
Yeah, yeah, no, no.
I get it perfectly.
And to be clear, this is actually Vince Vaughan.
The actor?
Okay.
Why are you calling into the Jimmy Door show?
Aaron, I'm going to level with you.
I've never really fully understood it myself, but people, including Jimmy, seem to enjoy it.
So that's why it keeps happening.
I see.
Fair enough.
So you're like literally there in Jimmy's studio, sitting in his chair and everything?
Temporarily, yes.
Wild.
That's absolutely wild.
That must feel absolutely crazy.
What's it like?
Are you intimidated?
No, not really.
No.
Well, you're doing great.
I've been watching the live streams and you've got the goods, kid.
Well, thank you, Vince Vaughan.
Or should I call you Double V?
Actually, I would prefer you wouldn't if that's okay.
Double V is a special nickname that only Jimmy Door gets to call me, but you're like I said, you're doing great.
A little too great, to be honest.
I'm sorry, what do you mean?
I'm getting serious Jay Leto vibes here, like when Jay Leno would sub for Johnny Carson on the tonight show and absolutely kill it.
And then next thing you know, Jay Leto's host of the tonight show.
That's not what is happening here.
Okay, right, yeah, but like, how can I be sure?
Look, Vince, I'm not angling to replace Jimmy permanently.
First of all, it's called the Jimmy Doer show.
It would be somewhat difficult to replace him.
But also, I have my own career as a journalist and my own online presence, including my own show.
I don't need to replace anybody.
Okay, all right.
I guess I feel a little better about all this.
It's just that this has never happened before, is all.
You know, I value my Jimmy time.
That's all I'm saying.
And I'm not trying to take that away from you, Vince.
Okay, okay, good to know.
Good to know.
All right.
Now that that's settled, are there any news items you want to talk about?
This is a news, an analysis show, after all.
Not really.
I'm sort of disconnected at the moment, you know, kind of hovering above the fray news-wise, sort of a mental health break sort of thing.
Okay, well, what do you want to...
Excuse me?
Does he leave like a musk behind, a strong scent, like a territorial thing?
What?
No.
Okay, fine.
I'm just asking.
I mean, I don't think it was that crazy of a question.
It just seems to me it's possible that Jimmy Dore would leave behind a very strong, very masculine scent that would linger in his absence, even for weeks.
So what does it smell like in there?
Okay, look, I'm not a psychologist, but it seems to me you may have developed a low-key obsession with Jimmy Dore.
What?
That's absolutely absurd.
Jimmy Door, usurper Aaron Matte.
Jimmy and I are just pals, and I frequently called into his live stream for absolutely no reason other than to hear the sweet, dulcet tones of his righteously indignant voice.
A voice for the people.
Well, all right then.
So it's just a little jarring that he's not there today.
That's all.
Well, I can see how it might be a little disorienting.
I'm having trouble breathing.
Vince, I'm going to need you to calm down, take deep breaths, and try to relax.
Okay.
I'll try.
Okay, good.
Now repeat after me.
Jimmy will be back.
Okay, good job.
Do you feel better?
A little.
I'm just seeing how much people are enjoying your segments, and I'm getting a little nervous.
Again, nothing to worry about.
Jimmy will be back next week, no matter how much people are enjoying my guest hosting duties.
Do you promise?
Do you swear on the Bible or on a hardback copy of Manufacturing Consent or wherever you fucking lefties do?
I swear, Vince.
All right, I feel much better, but I think I'm going to go now.
I feel like I allowed myself to be a little too vulnerable during this live stream and perhaps may have embarrassed myself somewhat a little, maybe actually a lot.
And I would appreciate it if this conversation were not made available in video form, as a matter of fact.
Aaron Mate, you are a mensch, and I wish you all the best starting the moment you vacate Jimmy Door's throne.
Goodbye, and God bless.
Okay, well, that was surreal.
Thanks for calling, Vince Vaughan, I guess.
Everybody, we're doing live stand-up comedy in Los Angeles in January and February in Los Angeles.
And then we're going to Tempe, Palm Springs, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Nashville.
go to JimmyDore.com for a link for all those tickets and become a premium member while you're there music music Hey, become a premium member.
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Sign up.
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Freak out.
Freak out.
Don't freak out.
All the voices performed today are by the one and only the inimitable Mike McRae.
He can be found at MikeMcRae.com.
That's it for this week.
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