CJ Werleman argues America’s religious right and corporate-driven politics—like Halliburton’s war profits and the Koch brothers’ wealth hoarding—threaten democracy more than Islamist extremism, citing systemic inequality (top 1% owning 37% of income) and failed trickle-down economics. He critiques the New Testament’s late, inconsistent authorship and mocks conservative rhetoric while advocating socialism to fix infrastructure decay and tax avoidance (effective rates as low as 12%). Rogan debates corporate responsibility and government efficiency, but both agree capitalism’s failures risk a dystopian divide like Elysium, where the middle class collapses under stagnant wages and unaffordable living costs. [Automatically generated summary]
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My guest today, CJ Werleman, will definitely ruffle some feathers, ladies and gentlemen.
If you are of the religious inclination, if you are ultra-sensitive, if you have a problem with seeing Uncle Sam crucified on the cover of a book, it says Crucifying America.
And on top of it, he's not even a fucking American.
When you hear him talk, you're going to go, Hey, pal, you're not even from here.
I always tell people when they ask me where do you live, I always say Southern California and I never give the exact address because there is a fatwa put out on me.
And no joke, the Westboro Baptist Church, which we all know very well, when my first book was released in 2009, the title is God Hates You, Hate Him Back.
They saw the title without understanding what the content of the book was and thought that I must have been on their side.
And they thought, hey, we've got somebody who's written a book in pro of our mission.
Once they took a look at my book, they realized how off base that was and I was attacking them for some of their beliefs.
Fred Phelps actually issued a public fatwa to have me killed.
So I want to leave my address to Southern California because I do have kids.
Islam is a very fascinating religion to me in so many different ways, but it's also fascinating in that liberals have, for whatever reason, chosen that as being the one to defend in some weird sort of a way.
Like, anytime someone criticizes Islam, they become Islamophobic.
But you will never hear, like, certain segments of the progressive population shit on someone who is criticizing Christianity.
Yeah, pick on people who are saying the wrong things.
That's the big one.
Saying the wrong things, not actions, not picking on people.
And the Islamophobic one, that to me is a weird one, man.
Like, if you're going to be scared of any religion, in my opinion, it's a good one to pick.
Islam's a good one.
The number one suicide bombers, the number one people, the things that they're doing to women in Islamic countries, the things that you're seeing in the news on a daily basis that are from predominantly Islamic countries, if you're going to be scared of a religion, that seems to be a good one.
Yeah, but my point is that that's happening over there.
If we're going to worry about what's happening here, you're far more likely to be called by a right-wing terrorist than you are by an Islamist terrorist.
Since 1990, there's been 345 Americans killed by American Muslims, whereas there's only been 20 Americans killed by Muslim Americans.
You can't count the 9-11 attackers as Muslim Americans because they're external.
They were foreign fighters fighting for a foreign cause.
So that's why I think the most dangerous threat to American democracy and our secular values is not Islamicism.
It really is, you know, these Christian...
Theological whack jobs that represent what is the Tea Party, which is really a proto-fascist movement.
In this country, yes, you're definitely less likely to be attacked by an Islamic terrorist.
And that's because America's doing its job and keeping us safe over here.
We fight over there so we can keep you safe over here.
I mean, I'm not exactly sure if that is a zero-sum game.
I'm not sure how that is working, or if it's working, or if it's just some massive debt that we're going to have to come back and pay, sort of like the housing crisis.
I mean, we've meddled in the Middle Eastern affairs for so long and we wonder why shit happens.
I mean, you know, if you listen to the conservatives, they'll say that, you know, they want to attack us for our freedoms.
They want to attack us because we like drinking beer or watching porn on the internet.
You know, they have a very, very specific agenda.
They hate the fact that we have our fucking military bases in the middle of the Holy Land.
They hate the fact that we're not willing to operate in a bipartisan manner to solve the Israeli-Palestinian situation.
And so that's why they're angry.
You know, it's got nothing to do really with religion.
And if you actually look at all terrorist attacks over the world, 95% of all suicide bombing attacks have been committed against occupying forces rather than being a religiously motivated event.
What it is, you've got the power structure, whether that's, you know, if you go all the way back to Osama bin Laden, say he's at the top of Al-Qaeda, they have very, very specific political objectives.
Obviously, the fundamentalist Islamic lowest common denominator in society who's starving and doesn't have a job, has no future, they're the ones they recruit to carry out their deeds.
But they're certainly rather politically motivated rather than religiously motivated.
Yeah, I would assume that if you're living in a country and you have a giant, huge empire that has invaded not just your country, but a hundred different countries.
We have military bases in more than a hundred different countries all over the world.
I would feel like you would want to resist that.
That would naturally be something that people would be resisting.
Imagine if JFK Airport was a Saudi national airport and they're flying their fighter jets in and out there and doing loops of New York City all day long.
You've got guys in the South in the Confederate States who'd love to blow up the Capitol because there's a black man in the White House.
Well, I'll tell you what, CJ, with your fancy accent, you tell me how else we're going to keep America safe.
At this point, how can you?
I mean, that is the big question.
I don't know what the real number is, but it's more than 100. More than 100 military bases in more than 100 different countries all over the world.
People talk about the Roman Empire.
Rome doesn't have shit on America.
It's a joke.
It's not even close.
This is the craziest empire.
Fuck Genghis Khan.
Fuck all those other people, those amateurs that came before us.
This is the nuttiest empire that's ever existed.
How could you ever...
How do you pull that back?
Look what's going on in Iraq right now.
This void that is being filled now by these...
These jihadists, once we're pulling out the American troops and the Iraqis are being inundated with these various terrorist groups, this ISIS organization.
It's scary stuff when you see what happens when the predominant power, military power in the area pulls out and then it's left this vacuum and this power struggle.
Well, I mean, you first have to look back at the root cause of it all, and the root cause was we drew up fictitious we, the West, not just the US, but we, the West.
So we drew up fictitious borders, and we said here, basically said the three different people, you know, the Kurds, the Sunnis, the Shias, here's a country, we're going to draw the borders now, coexist and get along in Kumbaya.
What happens, of course, it's those three, you know, three different, you know, sectarian sects can't get along, so you needed a hard man, a dictator, to keep the people suppressed and controlled, so it leaves internal strife out.
Remove him, like we did, and then not replace it with a suitable alternative leaves this massive power vacuum, and that's why we have the situation where we're today, where we have all-out civil war.
So is the solution, do you continue having a hardline dictator like Saddam Hussein, which was obviously a brutal, oppressive guy, or do you just withdraw?
Obviously, there has to be a midpoint where there has to be a political solution, and that's the only way out of this.
A political solution though, but how do you organize a political solution when you're faced with these overwhelming numbers of jihadists and people blowing themselves up and Sunnis versus the Shias is the whole place is just overrun with turmoil.
I mean, how does that ever become a political solution?
That seems like a just a phrase that you can use.
We need a political solution, but what does that really mean?
Figured out a way to weasel his way out of the system.
Got to a position where he runs a company that what they profit off of is Rebuilding things that the military blows up they get these giant corporate these giant contracts to rebuild places that the United States military blows up.
And then he becomes the vice fucking president of the United States and starts blowing shit up.
And then they start making money, and he starts making money from the company that he used to be a part of.
And this is something I write about a lot is, you know, America, what America is today is a corporate totalitarian state.
And how the difference is a great book by, you know, Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon Wallen, who was a Harvard or I think may still be a Harvard professor.
And he says in the classical totalitarian state, something like Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, you have a charismatic figure at the top.
And it's where, in a classical totalitarian state, it's where politics trumps economics.
In inverted totalitarianism, like we have in the United States, economics trumps politics.
Now, everything has been sold to the highest bidder in this country.
So, corporations run anything, and you've touched on such a good point with Halliburton.
Jeremy Scahill, author of Dirty Wars and so forth, I'm a huge fan of, he's spoken at length how at the height of our occupation in Afghanistan, we had a total of 250,000 men on the ground in Afghanistan, only something like 45,000 Americans, 45% of that footprint The rest of us was actual American military force.
The rest are corporate contractors, whether it's for food delivery, whether it's for arms supplying, medical or whatever, or infrastructure rebuilding.
So when you have corporations who profit from war, And you have a political class in Washington who only is totally 100% beholden to these corporations.
We now live in a country where wars are for profit.
And we'll make our decisions based on what's profitable and not in the interest of national security or the American population.
The wars are for profit and also the wars become a business that you can't just end.
You can't just end that business because then you take people out of work.
I've heard that argued about the war on drugs.
It's one of the best arguments about the reason why.
There's so many lobbyists against legalizing marijuana.
When you look at the actual health risks of marijuana being so minimal and the actual medical benefits that you have for people that have cancer and AIDS, there's so many different ways you can use it.
The idea that this isn't something that someone's decided to like, hey, we can use this for people and people can benefit.
Why isn't it?
Well, one of the big ones is because there's a whole business In arresting people, imprisoning people, making sure that prison guards stay working, making sure that prisons stay filled, making sure that sheriffs, they need a certain amount of sheriffs, need a certain amount of deputies.
There's a whole business behind that, and people have to recognize that when you change a law, Sort of just like what's going on in Iraq right now where there's this giant void when we pulled out of Iraq.
If you just cut the ties on all these laws and say, look, this is all legal now.
All you guys that were arresting people for all this shit, you're going to have to find some new shit to do.
There's going to be a mad scramble and they're going to have to figure out some new way to profit.
Well, that's the situation that we're in right now with war.
The percentage of our economy that's dedicated just to war is substantial.
It's far greater than many, many other things that would be very important.
Inner city restoration, you know, education, public education.
I mean, the amount of money that's being spent on tanks and missiles and fucking just feeding troops and sending people over there and then contractors like Halliburton that are fixed.
This is just amazing amounts of money that's flowing back and forth.
And to cut that off, it's like you've got so much momentum and entropy.
Well, I mean, you've just talked about our incarceration problem or our prison problem in this country.
Again, that's another part of the corporate totalitarian state.
Now, you take a poor person, a poor black guy on the streets.
What is he worth to the corporations?
He has no money.
He's not going to spend his money at Walmart or Macy's or whatever.
He has nothing.
But to put that poor black minority person into a prison, all of a sudden, these private prison organizations will make $50,000 per year out of taxpayer money for him being in prison for a non-violent crime.
So when we're trying to dismantle and find solutions, that's the kind of headwinds that you're running against.
There's too much influence to the corporations over the political structure.
You know, Americans, you know, nowhere in the Western world is the socialism or the S-word more, you know, associated with demagoguery than here.
I mean, you say socialism, an American thinks of Stalinist Russia or East Germany.
When I hear the word socialism, I think of the country I'm from, Australia, I think of Canada to a lesser extent, and I think of all of Western Europe.
Socialism doesn't mean the absence of capitalism.
It means where, you know, basic human rights are catered for in a structure which is paid for by the rich and the corporations.
What we have in America is, you know, you've got corporations paying the lowest tax contribution to the federal government in U.S. history.
Republicans will defend and say, oh, but our corporate tax rate is 35%.
It is that on paper.
The effective rate after all the loopholes, after all the deductions, all the loopholes have actually been written in Washington by these pro-corporate lobbyists.
The effective rate is 12%, which makes it the lowest amongst all OECD countries.
And that's the reason why America doesn't have nice things, like bridges.
I mean, you know, look, America today looks like a third-world country.
I've spent 10 years of my life in Indonesia, the last 10 years before I moved here.
America basically looks like Bangladesh with white people.
It really does.
Nothing works.
Our high schools are falling apart.
Our rail is running off its tracks.
Our bridges are collapsing in the water below them.
Not one US city is ranked in the top 20 most livable cities in the world.
Not one US airport is ranked in the top 100 airports in the world.
Is that true?
Yeah, that is true.
And it's because we've starved the federal government the revenue it needs to build a happy society.
You go to Europe, and I'm always staggered by my hardcore conservative friends, debates I have online or in interviews on radio panels and so forth, and I hear conservatives come back from Europe and go, God, I had a lovely holiday.
It's so nice there.
You just see no poverty.
The public transport works like you can set your watch to it.
And you go, well, you know, you wonder why?
Because they have a state where corporations are paying their fair share.
In Germany, which hit, you know, economic hard times at the same time we did in 08, their economy is booming because they have a good blend of social democracy and capitalism.
They made a law in Germany where if you have a company of more than 50 employees, at least 50% of your board must be represented by the working force.
But the opposite of the American way at the moment is still trickle-down economics.
And you look at Kansas.
Kansas, which is basically a laboratory for Tea Party, hardcore conservative thinking, they put the most aggressive tax cuts on the rich that we've seen in the last 20 or 30 years.
Total Reaganomics in 2010, now got a $338 million budget blowout.
And now they can have to cut education and services to the poor and safety wealth net because they've got this budget hole that they can't explain.
Now, I'll tell you how you fucking explain it.
You just took a massive cut to the rich and corporations and nothing comes back for it.
There is definitely a real problem in America when you were talking about the corporations paying a small amount of taxes and then you look at the infrastructure.
There's some shaky spots in this country, especially New York City.
The Brooklyn Bridge just had a giant collapse recently.
And you and I have to pay for that, or the people in the middle class in New Jersey have to pay for that, and that's because the wealthy aren't paying their share of taxes in the United States.
So the middle class are the ones who get lumped with the tax bill.
Isn't it fascinating that when you start talking about this kind of stuff, you start talking about socialism, that the rich pay their share, The big resistance seems to come from a lot of poor conservative people.
When the big resistance to socialism comes from these people that I don't know if it's like they have this idea in their head that one day they're going to be prosperous so they don't want you mucking it up for their chances.
But I've found this quite fascinating, that one of the big resistances to the ideas of communism or the ideas of socialism, and these are just ideas, just bringing them up, but a knee-jerk reaction comes from the lower middle class or middle class conservative folks.
Everyone in this country thinks we're going to be rich.
That's that individual ruggedism which Americans believe in.
And it's very hard to break that.
You've got the working class in these red belt states.
Which are voting for a party which exclusively is only benefiting the top 1%.
I mean, how does a poor person in, say, Mississippi or Alabama pull the lever for the Republican Party who has blocked the expansion of Medicaid, basically blocked the expansion of universal health care?
One of the biggest predicators of poverty is your access to health care.
If you don't have it, you're destined for poverty.
And they vote against that, only because they say Jesus a few times before they go to the polls, and hallelujah, you just want yourself a vote.
A lot of folks don't realize that that all started with Reagan.
Reagan changed politics in America with his embracing of the religious right and using them as a political base, as a base of people you can guarantee are going to vote for you if you start talking Jesus.
I mean, Reagan morally and financially banked up this country.
Not only did he bank drop this country with trickle-down economics fiscally, but he also banked up this country because he taught Americans, a whole generation of Americans, how to hate the poor.
And that's where we are today.
That's why it's so easy for people on the right to cut veterans' benefits, cut food stamps and so forth, because it comes down to that Christian welfare, prosperity theology.
If you're rich, even though Jesus was a Marxist before Marxism had a name, if it's rich, it means Jesus has bestowed great wealth on you because you're honorable and you're payous.
But if you're poor, it means you must be a sinner.
And therefore, if the blacks and Hispanics are poor, it means Jesus hates them.
The Ayn Rand one is a really interesting one because that's one that the libertarians seem to cling to and the pull them up by your bootstraps, pull themselves up by their bootstraps attitude.
And privatize the education system to hear such a degree.
I mean, if you get a degree in Australia, whether it's Macquarie University or Sydney University or University of New South Wales, an MBA at one of those schools is exactly the same as an MBA at any one of those schools.
Here, you know, not only does an MBA matter, but also then it has to be from the right school.
So an MBA from Harvard or an Ivy League school Is Trump's an MBA from University of San Diego or something like that?
And that shouldn't be the way.
And in fact, what that does, it still keeps propelling that plutocracy because there was a study done that at least for every student at Harvard, each student at Harvard has at least one parent earning at least $400,000 per year.
So we're still, you know, with the capitalization of everything, we're forming a system where we have, you know, the very wealthy at the top and we have everybody struggling at the bottom.
The elitism involved in education is really fascinating to me today, especially because there's so much access to information.
So many books, so much online, so much to read.
You can get so much access to information that would, you know, a long time ago, the difference between going to Harvard and going to San Diego State was pretty gigantic.
But with what you have access to today, the average person has access to the exact same information that they're teaching at any school, anywhere.
But I had a conversation with a friend of mine, and he was wrong about something, and I brought up this woman who had, you know, she went to the University of Mississippi, but she went there and this was her major, like this thing that we were talking about.
And he goes, well, this guy went to Yale.
But he didn't even go to Yale for that!
He went to Yale for something else.
And he's 80. So he went to Yale in the 1960s.
Who knows what the fuck they were teaching back then?
What are you talking about, man?
But his first initial reaction was, look, she went to the University of Mississippi.
And also, not only is it the way we think, but, you know, these kids that are going to MIT or Harvard or Yale, well, it's the networks they take with them.
So when the jobs are available, you know, the only growth area that we have in this country is the technology jobs, but that's such an insular job market where only the networks, the alumni from these prestigious schools get to really apply from it.
All the kids working at Google, they all went to these, you know, fancy schools that could be afforded by their wealthy parents.
Yeah, if you made your own business, you didn't build that.
I thought it was a huge blunder because instead of celebrating someone who does innovate and create their own business and get out there and do it, instead of saying this is a great thing and more people can do this and more people can contribute, instead he kind of focused on the negative aspect of it.
Instead of saying something along the lines of...
I think it could have been...
Look, I couldn't imagine what the workload of a guy like Obama is.
How much time does he have to actually consider every chess move that he makes, everything that he says, how it's going to be interpreted, how is it going to be twisted and turned?
The you didn't build it was taken a little bit out of context because the full transcript of that, he muddled the punchline, basically.
He was channeling Elizabeth Warren, who had given a speech earlier on that, and basically saying, you know, the universities which taught those kids, you didn't build that.
The roads which you're taking the trucks on and using transport to deliver your goods to market, you didn't build that.
And the bridges and so forth.
And he messed up the execution of the point, and then it was caught on, basically it meant every entrepreneur in America, you didn't build your business.
But you understand that, Joe, because you're literate on politics, but people like Libertarians and these crazy right-wing Republicans, they don't understand that.
They think these bridges and roads and infrastructure come from thin air.
Actually, Libertarian, they believe the tax rate should be almost zero, and the corporations will provide everything.
My only problem with taxes is that I feel like most people that are in positions of government, I just feel like the system that we have currently set up is so inherently flawed that throwing more money at it is just going to make a larger bureaucracy,
going to make more jobs, more regulations, more people, and that whole system that sort of feeds off of the money Like we were talking about with private prisons or we were talking about with prison guards and keeping drugs illegal in order to feed this machine.
When you make the business of government larger and larger, I don't necessarily think that's the best way to fix the problems that we have.
I don't necessarily think that I've had this argument with friends that are very liberal that, you know, we just need higher tax rates.
And I'm like, no, then you're gonna have more government.
And I don't think more government is the answer.
I don't think more regulations, more people, more things, more forms you have to fill out, more people that are in some strange office somewhere that have to justify their existence.
I don't necessarily think that's the answer.
I think it has to be some sort of a top-down organization, reorganization of the very structure, That this society operates under.
Because right now, it's this foundation of this unfixable bullshit.
It's so flawed that throwing money at it is like putting gum on a breaking dam.
It's like, you need more than that.
You need...
Some sort of a comprehensive philosophy designed to reconstruct this whole situation from the bottom up, from the top down, the whole thing.
And I would argue that the way you rebuilt the economy is the opposite of every conservative politics or economics.
How do you build an economy?
And I'm not an economist, but I listen very intuitively to people like Robert Reich or Jared Bernstein or Paul Krugman.
Guys who are Nobel laureate economists in their own right.
And the reason the American economy isn't growing, despite the fact that we have record numbers on Wall Street, despite the fact that the official unemployment rate is falling, the unemployment rate is falling, but not with jobs that pay well.
It's always these service-paid jobs and so forth.
What's happening is we're not having shared prosperity.
You know, we have the minimum wage level, which is below the 1969 level.
The middle class income has stagnated and has fallen since 1979. So while you have corporations today sitting on record $3 trillion profit, that productivity isn't being shared with the American worker.
And when it isn't being shared with the American worker...
We live in a consumer economy now.
We no longer make stuff.
Our economy is basically financial services and military.
So when it comes to financial services, instead of making products, we make stuff up.
So if we have a consumer economy and we recognize that, then the middle class and the working class needs more to spend.
And the only way you can do that is you lessen the tax burden at the bottom and you increase the tax burden at the top so consumers have more to spend.
And the only reason these corporations, despite their record profits, aren't hiring is because there's no consumer demand.
I mean, these corporations benefit from our airports, our bridges, our roads, our transport, you name it, our rail networks, interstate highway systems, R&D technology, you name it.
Now, if all the group of people all pay taxes, the idea that the corporation itself, this unit, has to pay taxes on top of that, isn't that sort of...
Justifying this notion that a corporation is a person, that a corporation is like an individual, which is one of the things that they've used to justify corporations being able to contribute vast sums of money to political campaigns.
That a corporation, like the Supreme Court has ruled this, that a corporation can sort of act as an individual in that regard.
I mean, we haven't had a liberal judge appointed to the bench since LBJ. Who is the guy that's in the Supreme Court that said that pedophilia, that, no, having sex with a man is just like having sex with a man, no different than having sex with an animal?
I do have a lot of gay friends, and I've been to very gay parties, and I can tell you straight up that not one of my gay friends has said, man, I just pounded some ass, and I can't wait to pound your dog.
The Supreme Court is the highest court in the land, but you've basically got five out of the nine representatives on that bench who appeal to a higher authority, which is the Vatican and the Pope.
So, I mean, remember when JFK... I mean, you and I are probably too young for...
Definitely too young when JFK was elected.
But when JFK's campaign in 1960...
The biggest issue against him was the fact he was a Catholic because Americans were worried that he would have to answer to somebody outside of the United States.
Well, we have that situation today, but no one seems to want to talk about it.
Yeah, I would have been happy if Joseph Smith was convicted for having sex with an animal or stealing something, but he was convicted for fraud, the very thing that he's trying to defraud the American public with, so...
And it's really funny that the Mormon church, the sect of the Mormon church that Romney was involved with was so radical that they moved to Mexico in the 1800s in order to keep having sex with multiple women.
They wanted to have multiple brides.
The United States said, hey, look, you can't marry fucking 20 chicks.
Cut the shit.
And so they go, fuck you, man.
We're going to Mexico.
And they went to Mexico back when it didn't matter.
I actually wrote a piece for Salon on the new Pope, and it wasn't my headline, but the headline Salon put was, The Lesson Atheists Can Learn from Pope Francis.
I mean, he's very progressive.
I like the fact that he's denounced trickle-down economics.
He's called it an abject failure.
He's talked about the poverty this has inflicted upon all countries around the world.
He's talked about the failure of globalization and so forth.
Yeah, I think, you know, we still have to remember that he hasn't, you know, denounced, you know, bigotry against gays.
I mean, you know, and so forth.
He hasn't...
And he's still...
He's just starting on the child rape factor.
But yeah, I mean, there's...
Certainly good points to be spoken about when it comes to Pope Francis.
Certainly better than the former Nazi who moved pedophiles around to different churches because he busted them giving head jobs to boys.
For folks who don't know, Pope Benedict, the guy who was before Pope Francis, was involved in a case where he moved a child molester who would actively target deaf kids.
And then he moved them and the guy molested a hundred more deaf kids after he moved them.
And Pope Benedict, they've kind of cooled down off of what charges people were rallying against him, but they wanted to charge him with crimes against humanity.
The Vatican itself, the way the Vatican works is it's its own state, correct?
There's another great picture, I don't know if you've ever seen it, of him.
He's sitting there on his crazy throne, and they had these gymnastics guys do some sort of crazy gymnastics demonstration in front of him with their little tights on.
And he's sitting there watching this, and I'm like, all the shit that this guy's accused with, you would think that he would want to be as far away from young men in tights as humanly possible.
What I like about the Catholic Church and what you've got to say about this Pope Francis is the fact that it shows you exactly how man-made religion is.
Because, I mean, Pope Francis is basically coming along.
He's trying to adjust religion to modernity.
So he's basically just making the rules up as he goes to adjust it.
I mean, when they're trying to sell circumcision, the Jewish faith too, which was a, you know, Christianity was rebranded in from, you know, Hebrewism.
They go to the Romans, hey, we've got this new religion for you.
The catch is you've got to cut off the tip of your penis.
And the Romans are like, hey, wait, wait, what are you talking about?
It's hard to pay attention to that old shit in the first place because it's so difficult to decipher.
You're going from language to language.
And then on top of it, you got a bunch of people monkeying with the dates to try to bring in other people.
You're messing up the whole thing, man!
It just shows you how ridiculous it is, the idea that someone could have said something in stories and songs for a thousand years before they ever figured out how to write.
And then they started writing things down, and then they translated it from one language to another, back and forth, back and forth, but it's still 100% correct and definitely the Word of God.
And you mean, you know, America's the most Western Christian nation in the world.
And, you know, something like 85% of Americans have no idea of that historical context of the Bible, how it came from Greek, and how it was translated by scribes, you know, and so forth.
And these were stories told in the oral tradition, and where the Gospels came from and who they were, which we don't know.
Americans just think that, you know, the Bible came down in perfect form from, you know, fell from the sky, and that was it.
There was a Barna group study which talked about biblical illiteracy in America, and 25% of Americans believed that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife, and 40% of Americans believed Sod and Gomorrah were a married couple.
The oldest version of the Bible is the Dead Sea Scrolls.
And there was a guy named John Marco Allegro who was a...
I forget where he went to school, Cambridge or Yale, whatever it was.
He was a well-respected scholar, and he was one of the members that was deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls.
And he was the only one out of the whole group that was an agnostic.
And it was because he was an ordained minister, but during his studies of religion, he realized that it's kind of horseshit.
So he became agnostic, but because he was an ordained minister, he was still allowed to be on this.
He wasn't a vocal agnostic.
Studied the Dead Sea Scrolls for over 14 years, and it was his conclusion after 14 years of translations that the entire Bible was a huge misunderstanding.
The Christian religion was a huge misunderstanding.
And it was really all about religious ceremonies that were based on the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms and fertility rituals.
And that all these ancient customs were hidden in parables to cover them up and hide them from the Romans.
When they were captured and when they were imprisoned and killed, they would cover up their ancient traditions of these consumptions of psychedelic mushrooms and the religious ecstasy they would achieve from eating these mushrooms.
Well, I guess that lends to, like I say, the book of Revelation is a cryptology book that's written in code to protect it from being interpreted by the Romans.
He studied Hebrew dialects, and he was a scholar of ancient languages.
And he wrote this book, and it was very quickly bought up by the Catholic Church.
The only way to get this book is you've got to get an old copy of it.
But in the 1970s, when the book came out, it was very, very controversial.
Now, a guy named Jan Ervin has republished it through his family.
He got permission to do it.
Fascinating, fascinating book.
There's also another book that he wrote that he wrote a second book because the first book got bought out.
The second book was The Dead Sea Scrolls and The Christian Myth.
And it was very, very controversial because of the fact that this guy was extremely educated and agnostic, very intelligent, very well respected, and rock-solid credentials.
You couldn't deny the things that he was saying.
The people that read his work, a lot of his strange conclusions were...
Undeniably bizarre in the context of religion.
Like, he traced back the word Christ to an ancient Sumerian word that meant a mushroom covered in God's semen.
And that they believed that when it rained, this is, you know, you're talking six, ten thousand years ago, when it rained, that was God coming on the earth.
And that these mushrooms that would appear out of nowhere underneath...
These mushrooms have a mycorrhizal relationship with carniferous trees, so you would find them underneath pine trees, which is where people always have pine trees as these Christmas trees, fir trees, whatever.
And these red and white mushrooms look like Santa Claus.
And all the ancient images of Christmas, cards, old Christmas cards.
Jamie, see if you can find some old Christmas cards.
They all used to have pictures of these mushrooms.
There was elves and these mushrooms.
And by the way, take mushrooms, see elves.
It does happen.
It's fascinating that these mushrooms are connected to...
And also, the colors of the mushrooms are exactly the colors of Santa Claus, the red and white.
The fact that you hang these stockings by the fireplace.
Why do you have red and white stockings?
What the fuck is that?
Because that's how they dry out these mushrooms.
The way they would dry out these mushrooms is by hanging them over the fire.
So these red and white mushrooms were representative.
Look at this.
These photos, see them up there?
Those are all ancient Christmas cards.
See the Amanita muscaria mushroom appears over and over and over again and all of these...
It's kind of been lost.
The symbology has been lost.
But that is the same mushroom that's on the cover of the sacred mushroom and the cross.
If you pull that up, Jamie, the book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, the John Marco Allegro book, it's all about this psychedelic mushroom, the Amanita muscaria, which is a very confusing mushroom because it apparently varies geographically, it varies genetically.
That's the book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, same mushroom.
There's very many translations for the word apple, but one of them is red, the color red, and the idea of the eating of the red, meaning the eating of this mushroom, this red mushroom.
They were all tripping balls and trying to write things down.
And then along the way, it got, keep my children away from the gays!
And what is it that kept them from the original message?
Well, most likely is the absence of these psychedelic experiences, these ego-dissolving experiences.
Which are just forbidden from, you know, I mean, if you look at the modern Christians, I mean, what's the one thing that they keep the children away from the drugs, the drugs, the evil marijuana, and all the things that are ruining our youth?
No, what's ruining your youth is ignorance as to what you're teaching in the very first place.
Like, what are the roots of what you're actually saying?
And that always blows Christians away when you speak to them.
And they believe that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were eyewitnesses to Jesus' life.
But Mark was the first gospel to write.
And he wrote a good 40 to 50 years after Jesus had passed away.
Matthew and Luke copied from Mark but used their own respective external sources 70 years after Jesus had passed away.
And John wrote his gospel 100 years after the death of Jesus.
So, you know, these stories were campfire stories passed down.
And when you, it's interesting, one of my books, Jesus Lied, He Was Only Human.
I take the New Testament.
And normally when you read the New Testament, you'll read, you know, Matthew, you read Mark, and you read Matthew, and then you read Luke, and then you read John.
And if you hear what each of the gospels has to write about each of the key moments in Jesus' life, whether it's his birth, His baptism, you know, his ministry, his trial, his execution, they kind of sound almost the same.
But if you just focus on one story in Matthew, let's say it's his baptism, and then one story, and then on baptism in Luke, and then baptism in Mark, and so forth, you see how wildly these stories differ, you know, which almost have no resemblance at all when it comes to the facts and so forth.
The idea that you're going to take anything from 2,000 years ago and it's going to make any sense whatsoever in 2014, just piecing it together, the idea that that's the foundation of the very...
Structure of your society.
That's the foundation of your your ideology That's the foundation of your morals.
It's all based on this 2,000 plus year old garbled shit and not based on what we know today the Experiences that we have today what we know today about values and ethics and communication and the blowback of negative behavior That we're not trying to formulate our own new guidelines for life that we're all basing this on Don't eat clams and don't get tattooed and don't fuck guys.
Like all this crazy shit that's old as fuck and that was based on nonsense.
You know, it's quite amazing the hold that it has today.
And I think one of the best examples of...
One of the major problems that we have as a culture, and that's our fear.
Our fear of the unknown, our fear of death, our fear of, you know, that we're not living our lives the wrong way.
So if we have one particular ideology that we follow, anybody that follows another ideology is immediately attacked.
And that goes for the people that are religious.
Also, it goes to the people that are on the left that attack.
Without doubt, anything that's on the right.
It goes for the people that are on the right that attack anything that's on the left.
It goes for fucking Yankees fans that hate the Dodgers.
Well, the immigration thing is one of the best examples of how this country is fucking crazy and insane is because it's a country that was founded by immigrants.
So this idea that we're going to keep all the immigrants out of a country that was founded by immigrants is holy shit crazy.
I mean, not only that, it's evil.
You got a bunch of people that are living below you in the South that are in a third world country that's connected.
It's an artificial boundary created by man.
It's not like it's across an ocean, like you have to get in a plane to get to Australia.
That's separate from America.
And you guys are closer to us than Mexico.
We're more concerned with the Australians than we are with the Mexicans.
I mean, Mexicans are involved in some brutal fucking drug wars.
They have terrible crime.
They have terrible corruption.
Mexico City is one of the most polluted cities on the planet as far as air pollution.
It's terrifying that this is all right next to us and these people are trying to flee to get out of this to get a better life.
And what gets me is the lack of introspection or navel-gazing when it comes to this.
It's our policies which have caused...
These are refugees.
They're not immigrants.
These are refugees fleeing intolerable violent circumstances inflicted upon by policies, not only our draconian drug wars, But also, you know, free trade.
NAFTA, again signed into law by Bill Clinton, displays three to four million Mexican farmers alone by allowing American agribusiness to go down there, build up their monstrosity industrial farming complexes, able to oversupply the market because of economy able to oversupply the market because of economy scales with cheap food and cheap fruit and produce, sends these Mexicans off their farms, sends them into the urban areas, and then the only profitable business is drug running.
And then with America's appetite for drugs like cocaine, which come from South America at a historical low, they're fighting over a smaller and smaller bit of market share.
And that's why they've become more violent and more tolerant trying to defend their smaller market share and turf in these places.
So we've created the circumstances down there.
And anyone who says we shouldn't take a kid who travels that far through the desert on their own, they're the people you want.
And we're not talking big numbers.
We're talking 40,000.
We've got a population of 350 million.
If we can't take 40,000 kids who bust their nut to get across this...
In, you know, inhospitable terrain to make it in this country, well, give me them any day over, somebody, you know, somewhat Confederate in the Deep South.
Well, we lived in Bali, Indonesia for a decade, and when you drive around Bali, you see all these Hindu temples everywhere with a swastika, but it's actually in reverse.
Right.
But yeah, I mean, everything is...
Mythologies are always borrowed, and ideologies are always borrowed from elsewhere, and yeah...
The South has never gotten over losing the Civil War.
They're the worst runners-up in the history of sports.
They'll never get over.
If you look at the Republican Party today, because the Republican Party is so monolithic, such as a monolithic control of the South, That affords the Southern representation of the Republican Party of the most senior positions.
You know, Eric Cantor is from Virginia.
You know, Marco Rubio, you know, Mitch McConnell, you go down the line.
They're all Southerners.
And, you know, the whole policy of blocking Obama is built around obstruction, nullification, and, you know, and that drives, you know, the thrust and parry of who they are as far as a reactionary party.
This moment is the best moment human beings have ever achieved.
I believe right now this is the greatest time to be alive the world has ever known.
Yeah, it's fraught with peril and all fucked up and economically...
Completely out of whack, but I still think this is the best time ever because information is being exchanged at a freer pace.
It's being exchanged at a faster pace.
It's being exchanged amongst people that have never been able to communicate before by translation software, by just the fact that you have this internet that's allowing people to send messages and exchange information and ideas and communicate back and forth and influence each other in a way that's never been available before.
before to anyone ever in the history of the human race.
And if there's one thing that has separated us from the other animals in the world, it's our ability to communicate with each other.
Well, our ability to communicate has never been better than it is right now.
And I think there's also a change that I've seen in my lifetime where people are moving towards more progressive ideas.
I think a lot of this resistance that you're getting from this conservative party is this battening down the hatches and trying to avoid this inevitable change.
And I think this change, a lot of it comes from that, from this exchange of information, from understanding each other better.
The browning of America by 2050, the whites will be a minority in this country.
In 2012, actually, that was the first year where white babies were outnumbered by black and brown babies.
As we become browner, This white minority politic, this reactionary movement is going to become more aggressive, more frustrated because they don't feel like they have representation.
And where terrorism starts, terrorism is a reactionary response to political weakness or political impotency.
And we saw the shooters in Las Vegas, those two white extremists who shot those two police officers and the Walmart worker.
If you read their manifesto, that's what the Tea Party manifesto...
Yeah, we're going to take it out on cops and a Walmart worker and end up shooting themselves.
But we're going to see more and more of this.
And actually, the New York Times had a great piece on it, the rise of hate or the data of hate.
And the explosion of right-wing militia groups in this country is threatening.
And the more they feel that they're the minority, and the more they start losing national elections.
Let's face it, the Republican Party is not going to win a presidential election for the next 20 years.
In every demographic in America, the Democrats are gaining market share.
In every demographic in America which is shrinking, the Republicans are gaining market share.
So they're not going to win present elections, and that's why they focus on gerrymandering these districts, voter suppression, so trying to win at the state level.
Well, look, I'm critical of Obama because he's governed like a Clinton.
He hasn't governed as a liberal at all.
Name a liberal policy he's implemented.
Obamacare, that was far from a liberal policy.
A liberal policy, when they had unilateral control of the Senate and Congress, should have been universal health care.
But he didn't even fight for universal health care, even though he campaigned for it.
I would argue we haven't had a liberal president since Nixon.
And Nixon didn't implement liberal policies because he was liberal or had a conscience or was moral.
He was the last US president to be scared by liberals.
And there's a great story with Nixon when he's at the height of the anti-war movement.
And he's in the Oval Office and he has Henry Kissinger standing next to him.
And it's on the Nixon tapes.
And he turns to Henry Kissinger and says...
And all the White House is lined up with all these yellow buses of all the anti-war protesters.
And Nixon turns to Kissinger and says, Holy fuck, man, they're really going to storm the White House and drag me out there.
He really believed that.
And that's what you want the White House to feel like.
You want the White House to feel like they're afraid of the people.
You want politics and politicians in Washington to feel like they're afraid.
And the problem is they're not afraid of the liberal class anymore.
Liberal class is dead.
And to underscore that point is the popularity of Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Clinton's just a brand.
She stands for nothing.
In 2008, she ran on no platform other than she was Hillary Clinton.
She's going to run on the same platform because they believe they're not going to be against a once-in-a-lifetime candidate like they had in Barack Obama.
So she's not going to stand for progressive liberalism.
Liberalism, there's no such thing in liberalism in America.
There's no one fighting for universal health care.
There's no one fighting for free education or anything like that or higher taxes on corporations than the rich.
I mean, this is...
We live in an area where conservative politics trumps.
Is there also a bottleneck in the two-party system, which is essentially what we have?
You could say that there's a Green Party, you could say that there's a Libertarian Party, all you want, but the reality is they don't get included into the debates as soon as the debates get heavy.
What they did to marginalize Ron Paul, who is a Republican, shows you what they do to anybody who doesn't play ball.
I mean, what you saw, you would see him placing in polls like second and third and they would ignore him and concentrate on who was fourth and fifth.
I mean, that was what they did in the media to marginalize that guy, effectively to do so.
Isn't that the bottleneck?
The bottleneck is that corporations are sponsoring these people.
Corporations are sponsoring their campaigns, paying for their campaigns.
I don't see the problem as being the two-party system.
I mean, in most Western democracies, you have a two-party system.
Australia, the UK, and so forth.
The problem is, but in Australia and the UK, you have public financing of elections.
Here, it's the opposite.
So our voices don't get heard.
Politicians don't come out to visit you and I. They come and visit and do these $30,000 per plate dinners, and they listen to the 50-odd thousand lobbyists which are in Washington and are paying their campaign finance.
You know, there was 32,000, only a mere 32,000 donors in the 2012 elections represented more than 99% of all political donations in that campaign cycle.
So 0.01% of the population is donating 99% of the campaign finance studies to political parties.
Until you get rid of that, you're going to have two political parties which represent the interests of corporations and not of the working or the middle class.
If Hillary Clinton had not voted for Iraq, she would have been the nominee and she would be the president right now.
The referendum and the Democratic primary selection in this cycle will be income inequality.
On that, she will lose to Elizabeth Warren because of her associations to Wall Street, her husband's record in not being a progressive.
Elizabeth Warren is a champion for the middle class, a champion for the working class.
She wants to dismantle Wall Street.
She wants to dismantle these financial debt products which have wreaked havoc on the American population.
And these laws and regulations haven't been changed since we had the crash in 08. We now stand on the precipice of repeating what happened on 08. Nothing has changed.
And she wants to fight for these causes which will, you know, end the rigging of the game, so to speak.
Bernie Sanders, I like him as well, but he has no chance in a national electorate.
Elizabeth Warren could win the DNC nomination and also become president.
Yeah, and Sanders, well, Sanders is too much of an open-shirted socialist, identifies him as socialist, and so I think the media and the Republican Party will be too easy for them to slay him with the S-word, whereas Elizabeth Warren has never mentioned the S-word and is more of a populist Than a socialist.
I mean, is it possible that what you were talking about before, that if you look at what's happening in Europe and you look at the benefits of socialism as far as Canada and some other countries, Australia, socialized medicine, socialized education, is it possible that that can be discussed in some sort of a way that's not going to knee-jerk turn people off in America?
Well, the World Happiness Index is measured on some metrics such as pollution, access to healthcare, access to education, gender equality, income inequality, pollution, crime rates, teen pregnancy, and so forth.
Why is it that America produces so much, like, as far as creativity, so much innovation, so much technological innovation, so much creativity, so many good things come out of this place as well?
I think, you know, the U.S. has produced a litany of good things.
Its contribution to the world culturally is, you know...
You can't argue against it.
But my point is that it benefits so few.
And if you look at the new economy, inverted economy, as far as the technology, you know, these Facebook producers and these, you know, what was that?
WhatsApp just sold for how many billions of dollars?
$15 billion?
They've got a workforce of like 25 people.
25 people benefit out of the sale of that.
So in the things that we're producing now, no longer have any social capital.
We're not producing great products which can be exported to the world.
Our technology has been bought out by the military industrial complex.
Most of the R&D and technological research done in this country is to the benefit of figuring out how we can kill people better, you know, in other countries.
It's the bridge thing, but it's the whole culture of intimidation, that whole New Jersey Soprano-like atmosphere which turns off women and independent and minority voters, so...
Man, look, if you're a family of four and you've got husband and wife on a minimum wage, let's call it, you're netting $400 a week, you've still got to pay rent, you've still got to pay the car, you can either go to Trader Joe's and buy a $15 pun of broccoli and some potatoes, or you go to Wendy's and you feed the whole family for four.
It's just that there is a certain reality to being morbidly obese that I don't think you're helping people with this idea, this notion of fat acceptance.
And I think this is the broad end of the spectrum when it comes to these New ideas that I think, where people are becoming more progressive and more sensitive and more open-minded, I think there's great things to that.
But I think there's also things like fat acceptance, where it gets to a point where, like, listen, stop.
Listen, that feeling of shame, this idea of fat shaming, people don't like that, but that feeling of shame, the negative feeling, is a feeling of social failure.
And that feeling of social failure, that ostracized feeling...
The only benefit of that, it's not good to be cruel, but the only benefit of that to the person who receives it is that it will motivate them to lose weight.
That's just a fact.
And fat acceptance, that means you're happy the way you are, you're good the way you are.
How much of this is involved in our food and our diet?
It's amazing.
It's in our bread.
They have corn syrup in people's fucking sodas and their this and their that.
There was a thing about...
It was a lawsuit about Mexico...
I'm trying to force out corn syrup, because they were trying to force them to use corn syrup in their production of Coca-Cola, and so they resisted it, and then they were sued.
The whole thing is just, corn is a wacky fucking plant, man.
But for anybody who wants, I mean, I'm not going to go into depth about it because we've talked about this before, but please watch the documentary King Corn if you get a chance.
I've taken a lot of heat about this subject of minimum wage by a bunch of people that think that folks who work in fast food or folks who work in entry-level jobs should not get paid $15 an hour.
That's the number that I always throw around.
I'm like, you can't live off of less than $15 an hour, man.
You just can't.
$15 an hour, you can pay your rent, you can get something to eat, and it's still not a lot of money.
And if you run a company that can't afford to pay your workers $15 an hour, it means you're making too much.
Either you personally are making too much money, you're not giving the workers enough, Or something's happening.
You're not profitable.
You need less workers.
Your system is not efficient.
There's got to be some way that you can pay.
If someone works for you all day and they get paid less than a survival wage, you essentially have slaves.
Well, this is what the problem is, and I keep coming back to this point.
In America, we have socialism for the corporations, but we have capitalism for the rest of us.
So, you take Walmart or Bank of America, they pay their workers so little that we have to subsidize them with food assistance, housing assistance, and so forth.
Every Walmart, the four Walmart heirs own more than the combined bottom 42% of Americans.
Yet, are allowed to pay their workers so little that the average taxpayer, the average Walmart employee costs the average taxpayer in this country $1,300 per year in Texas.
So you and I are funding the workforce for a ridiculously fucking wealthy bunch of individuals that can afford to pay their employees more.
Melissa McCarthy, she fucking gets a mouthful of donuts, she gets a good sugar rush, and she runs out and kidnaps the wall, and she lets them see the errors of their ways.
And they wind up working, and at the end of the movie, they're happy, and they're working in Costa Rica, fucking saving people from hurricanes or some shit.
Because you're still working from the same number.
So the combined wealth of the Koch brothers is more than the bottom, roughly 50% of the nation, but the combined wealth of the Walmart is, so you're working from a fixed number.
If you add them both together, it's not like the six of them own 92%.
Not only am I not an economist, I'm not good at counting shit.
So, if you think about that though, just the fact that the four people from Walmart and the two Koch brothers, just those six people, what is the total money, the total amount of money that those guys have?
Well, you'd have to end all speculation, but Robert Reich, who speaks about this extensively, is you have a trading tax.
At the moment, these guys can trade minor pips, every pip of a screen, to the three decimal places, whether it's on currency, whether it's on gas.
When you're moving tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, one pip is a ton of money.
But there should be a trading tax on each one of these trades, because this volume of trade, this volume of money benefits society in no measurable mean.
These are the numbers that Jamie just threw up here.
The collective wealth of the six richest Waltons rose from $73 billion to $90 billion while the wealth of the average American declined from $126,000 to $77,000.
There's a recent article that I brought up yesterday's podcast that Michael Shermer wrote in Scientific American that was torn apart about the myth of financial inequality.
It's like one of the dumbest articles I've ever written.
The way I know whether something's dumb is if I think it's dumb.
I can see the logical fallacies in your argument about finance.
But what is that coming from?
Everything's fine.
This everything's fine thing where people want to sort of manipulate statistics and look at things from sort of a rose-colored glasses point of view.
And the area I live in is, I'm going to guess, 90% white and moderately wealthy to wealthy.
And they have no clue what's happening in these Rust Belt states.
You know, through the Northwest, which are particularly the basis of manufacturing.
I mean, these are economies which have been absolutely destroyed through globalization.
There is no economic recovery.
You know, despite, and you spoke with us before, despite the Dow at record highs and despite the unemployment number happening, we're not going to get these jobs back because we now have the Walmart business model is the model that the rest of the corporate world in this country emulates.
In the 18th century, it was the Pennsylvania Railroad country.
In the 20th century, it was IBM. Today, it's Walmart.
So what Walmart does is it makes cities bid against each other to get tax breaks to move.
So they can say, hey, we're going to put a store in your place.
They get two cities that bid against it.
So it becomes a race to the bottom as far as corporate subsidies and welfare.
Every time a Walmart store opens, every time Walmart employs a new employee, 1.4 American workers is displaced.
Now, their control of the American economy, the retail economy, is so dominant that they have such control over their suppliers.
Procurement at Walmart, they demand a 5% reduction of their suppliers every year.
If you can't reduce your costs to Walmart by 5% every year, then we'll fuck off goodbye.
So after about five years of doing this, where you've cut 5%, 5%, eventually Walmart says to their suppliers, well, you need to move to China.
And if you move to China, we'll help you set up.
If you don't move to China, we do no business no longer.
And that has happened with countless number of companies.
Companies like Rubbermaid, a great American company, which had a workforce in the hundreds of thousands of people in the 70s and the 80s.
You know, almost no longer exists in that form anymore because they couldn't, you know...
Initially, they didn't move to China, but they have now.
So for every one person they employ, more than one.
That kind of makes sense.
And the mom-and-pop store, the death of the mom-and-pop store, has been really criticized, both by people that are against Walmart, but also people that they're saying, you know, why don't you...
Shop and vote with your dollar.
If you appreciate mom and pop stores and they cost five more dollars when you go in there, just go.
Pay them the five more dollars.
Do you understand how Walmart is making things so cheap?
Do you understand that the people that work there, with the number that you threw around, that for every Walmart worker we pay, what was the amount of money that every person has to pay in tax dollars for $1,300?
If those things were just made more clear and people voted with their dollar more, do you think it's possible that something like Walmart can slowly die away?
That these monolithic corporations that have this massive control over economies...
But Walmart destroys communities to such an extent that people in these communities can only afford to shop at Walmart.
It becomes this vicious cycle.
Unless you put in policies which regulate trade and protect the working class, protecting the class, you're not going to solve the problem.
And another great sort of hypocrisy is how, for example, the Republican Party presents itself as the party of small business, because it's a nice nostalgic picture that's painted in people's mind.
They picture a ma and pa, small business operation, you know, on Main Street in middle America.
But name a single policy that the Republican Party have helped small businesses with.
Has the Republican Party protected the mar and par operation from these monopolies, these oligopolies?
Do they give the same tax breaks that they do, these corporate subsidies that they do to these big organizations to drown the business out?
No, they haven't.
You know, the Republican Party hasn't looked after small businesses at all in this country.
No, and that comes to political ignorance, and political ignorance born from either our education system or the fact that the mainstream media only reports titillating issues.
We're still talking about flight missing MH370 or Anna Nicole Smith's death.
It's a focus on celebrity and trivia rather than on real issues.
Do you get chills down your spine when you see things like what's going on with Edward Snowden, when you see what's going on with Julian Assange, when people do expose...
Some really horrific things that our government's involved with.
The underpinnings of our society itself.
The mechanism involved in what's turning the wheels of the military-industrial complex.
When that gets exposed, and you see some court just upheld the arrest warrant against Julian Assange.
For what?
For having sex with a woman, supposedly?
Or whatever the fuck?
One of the most...
Dubious and questionable charges of all time that's involved in an international incident.
Yeah, the circumstances which I've read are so fishy and dubious, as you've said, but...
You know, one of the most frustrating things is we would be more, the American population certainly would be more angry about the NSA overreach if there was a Republican in office.
The fact that it's Obama in office has placated, you know, Democrats and the liberal class.
They just think, oh, well, if Obama's happy with it, it must mean it's okay.
There is that thing, though, that if it was a Republican that was in office and you were dealing with this NSA leak where you find out that they're downloading every fucking email you have, every phone call you make is being recorded, people would be up in arms.
But because of the fact that it's a Democrat, the very same people who would be up in arms are sort of letting it slide in a way.
And that's how, you know, coming back to what I said earlier, you know, we're living in the most polarised moment in American history and we only see things and issues through the lens of our political parties.
You know, we're deeply entrenched in our own camps and we only listen to the talking heads who feed red meat to our respective camps.
Well, and it's also, too, I like to say that, you know, the South, you travel down to the Southern states, and individually, they're the nicest people on the planet.
You know, Southern hospitality is a real thing.
But put them all in the room together, and you're talking about the biggest bunch of bigoted assholes, you know, you've ever met.
And it's fed upon by this right-wing echo chamber, which constantly keeps them fear of the external enemy, whether that's liberals, whether that's Muslims, whether it's, you know...
But in the left, echo chamber facts aren't made up.
Whereas in that right-wing echo chamber, there's a total disregard for facts.
Even Romney's head pollster, Neil, and I can't remember his last name, and I guess it doesn't matter, but he even said on camera, you know, facts don't matter, you know, in his campaign.
I think there's a big wing in the establishment wing of the Republican Party that wants him to run.
I don't think he will, but the establishment is desperate for a candidate because at the moment, Rand Paul is going to be the nomination, and he scares the life out of establishment Republicans because he's not a neocon.
That's why Dick Cheney's in the media at the moment, trying to water down this isolationist, libertarian wing of the Republican Party, because as it stands today, he would be the nominee.
It also means they can allow gay marriage, they can allow people to smoke marijuana, they can allow people to do a lot of things that the federal government does not allow.
So it's not entirely a negative thing, like the idea of states' rights.
You know, how many old dudes stay alive, and especially in the world of politics, get to be that old and just don't have utter disdain for the established system?
Yeah, I mean, there's this whole thing that we've been doing from the beginning of time, of profiting off of sending young men to death for things that they don't understand, sending over them to fight in foreign lands for some cause that they don't know what they're doing.
They're too young.
They're too young to see the hustle.
I mean, that's the oldest trick in the book, as far as, like...
The military.
And that was one that Ron Paul stood very firmly against.
And he was one of the few people that was doing it, right or left.
Yeah, and I'm with Ron Paul and Rand Paul when it comes to military, and I'm with both of them when it comes to ending the drug war.
But, you know, thinking that Ron Paul or Rand Paul is good for America because they're anti-drug and anti-war is like thinking a Big Mac is good for you because it has lettuce and a pickle.
What is good for America is what has already worked in the past, and what has worked in the past was FDR's New Deal, and that is socialism.
America came out of the Gilded Age.
We went into the biggest economic crisis America has ever seen.
We implemented social reforms, economic reforms, political reforms, and from the end of World War II to 1980, we built the great American middle class, where we built the most prosperous middle class the world has ever seen.
We put a man on the moon, we built the interstate highway systems, we had the GI Bill, we had free education, we had access to education, we established Medicaid with the Great Society.
My dad lived in America for 10 years during the 60s.
His generation during that time, just the husband, just your dad worked.
And you still had enough to afford a mortgage and have two cars.
Now, both husband and dad and mother have to work.
They can barely keep their head above water.
They're saddled with debt.
We have no way out.
And that's the world we live in.
We have to go back to that area, and we have to put in social, economic, and political reforms, which redistribute the wealth from the top back to the middle.
Say, if someone came to you, you have all these radical ideas, you've written books about it, if someone was running for president, be it Elizabeth Warren, or whoever it is that reads your stuff, What would you implement?
I mean, how would you fix this in a reasonable way that makes sense?
Well, first of all, is you're building an infrastructure.
I mean, infrastructure is falling apart in this country.
Spending money goes back to Keynesian economics, which has worked in the past and will work again.
We have to build bridges.
We have to build highway systems.
We have to build higher-speed railways.
That creates jobs, and that creates markets in new economies.
We have to then build up the middle class and the working class with better labour reforms.
We've gone from, you know, from the moment Reagan destroyed the union's world that was sacked the air traffic controllers in 1981, we've gone from America protected by collective bargaining went from something like 35% to 7% today.
In every social democratic country like Australia and Scandinavia and Western Europe, Upwards of 85% of their populations are covered by collective bargaining.
So the workers have a say or a shared prosperity.
From 1954 to 1979, their productivity gains were shared equally between corporations and the working class.
Today, only 12% of the gains are shared to the working class and middle class.
That comes through the tax code, it comes through labor reform, access to healthcare and education and so forth.
Do you trust the federal government to do the appropriate thing with the new taxes?
Like, say if we did reform the tax code and say if we did change the contributions that corporations are forced to make, do you really trust the government as it's in place right now with all of its glorious incompetence to redistribute that money and do a good job with it?
Well, you know, people will say, well, you know, government always does a shitty job.
Corporations, 90% of corporations fail in their first five years.
So government is not a perfect solution or a perfect be-all to end-all, but there has to be a balance where, you know, and we have that in other countries, where there's capital investment but also public investment.
Public investment or liberalism, liberalism was never meant to be a left-wing thing.
Liberalism was always meant to be a countervailing power to capitalism.
Where capitalism falls short, liberalism was supposed to pick up the slack and protect the downtrodden, the people that capitalism leaves behind.
And you need public investment to fund those initiatives.
There's always going to be waste.
That's just part of the part.
For every Solyndra that you have, you're going to have Tesla.
And people in the Republican wing like to bash government spending on the failure of Solyndra, but they also forget that government funding has made Tesla an enormous success.
Do you think that a part of what's going on now with the internet, that this access to information would also deter at least a certain percentage of waste because people would be more responsible for it?
Because it would be more transparent than ever before?
And it was Clinton who deregulated Wall Street with Glass-Steagall, and that led to the chain of events which collapsed the entire fucking universe in 2008. Dirty Clinton.
Yeah.
And we haven't had one except for Dodd-Frank, which is a pissy effort to regulate Wall Street.
We're back to the same place we were leading up to the days of the crash in 08. What do you think the people that thought that they should let the banks fail?
Well, you know, in my uninformed opinion, there's this great book called The Confidence Men.
And it's really an insider's account of the Obama White House in the first four years.
And obviously, as he came into office, he was dealing with the biggest economic catastrophe America's seen since the Great Depression.
And he was listening to all the ideas going forward.
There was Team A and Team B. Team B was the likes of Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner and Paul Rubin, who was a Clintonite.
And Team A was Paul Volcker and so forth.
Paul Volcker and Team A believed in letting him fail, totally get rid of this debt leverage vehicles that have created this fictitious wealth and fictitious products.
In the end, Obama went with Team B to Larry Summers, who were there to protect the status quo of Wall Street.
And you have these Wall Street bankers like the CEO of Bank of America saying, thank God Team B was chosen.
We'd never be back to where we were.
If we had to let Wall Street fail, I don't know enough to be able to give a quantified opinion on what...
Like the arguments that you hear, well, we had to, you know, prop them up to avoid an even bigger catastrophe seem valid as well.
Freakonomics makes a, you know, correlation doesn't prove causation, but they make a very strong argument that the only reason that violent crime has fallen in this country is because of Roe v.
Wade.
Roe v.
Wade, abortion, you know, basically destroyed a whole generation of potential criminals.
You know, because of poor communities, you know, don't have access to abortion.
That's so crazy.
I mean, yeah, it's got racist underpinnings, that finding.
What future is there in America where education becomes unaffordable, where those who graduate are saddled with debt that they can never get out of, and where housing becomes unaffordable, and where there's no well-paying jobs, where you have stagnant wages, where you have a country where income has been totally redistributed to the world, where the share of income is...
The top 1% used to get 12% of the income, now the top 1% gets something like...
37% of the income in this country, you know, you're creating this massive underclass with no way out.
Well, it's also one that women, rightly so, take umbrage with men being able to decide what they can and can't do with their body.
I'm not trying to decide, and I most certainly am pro-choice as far as how I vote, but when I look at the reality of what an abortion is, It disturbs me that because of ideology and because of the stance that they take left or right, that people will argue against the reality of what an abortion is.
And I think when you do that, you do a disservice to the topic.
I wish there was a way that you could immediately, you know, there was really, I have a joke about this, that it should be a better way to make people than sex.
I mean, at one point in time, maybe that's what the aliens are all about.
They probably got to a certain point in time and they realized, listen, we're not going to evolve unless we get rid of these animal instincts to breed and conquer and dominate.
And the only way we're going to move to this really utopian society concept that everybody has, you know, the gradations, the steps away from being an animal, from being a violent predator to being some enlightened being.
Somewhere along the line, you're going to have to get rid of sex.
I'm saying reproduce through genetic manipulation, reproduce through cloning.
I mean, we're already doing that.
If we could all become eunuchs, I think the world would be a better place.
I'm not saying that sex is bad.
Sex is awesome.
The sexual differences between men and women are a fascinating dynamic that I think fuels passion and poetry and light.
Not poetry.
I never fucking read poetry.
I don't know what I'm talking about.
Art.
There's a lot of good to that struggle.
There's a lot of great things that come out of struggle.
But there's also the reality that if you had to extrapolate from here forth, from where we are to what we used to be, if you believe in evolution, if you're one of them, if you want to go back to the times where we were fucking living in caves and fighting off T-Rex or whatever the hell was going on, and extrapolate that a thousand years in the future, ten thousand years in the future, at some point in time, the elimination of sexual urges might be imperative.
I'm pessimistic until the liberal class in this country becomes a force again, because there is no countervailing power to capital in this country at the moment.
You know, free market capitalism hasn't worked in this country.
We know a trickle-down economics hasn't worked.
Again, Kansas, if the need...
George Bush came into power.
Bill Clinton raised taxes on the rich three times, created 23 million jobs.
George Bush, you know, came into power, put in the biggest tax cuts on the wealthy since World War II, and had a net loss of one-man jobs, not including, even if taking out the years of the Great Recession and the Great Crash out of consideration.
We see it happening in Kansas.
That free market capitalism, trickle-down economics mantra just has been of abject value wherever it's been tried.
So, is liberalism going to be the perfect answer?
No, but there has to be some measure where the corporate state is put in control.
Well, the idea of the military solution is the suppression.
If we're not solving it, at least we're suppressing the power from gathering steam and forcing, you know, some situation where they could collectively form some large threatening group.
We're dissipating that in some sense by our military presence in these countries.
Our foot on their neck is what's keeping them from growing large.
Fighting over there, so we don't have to fight over here, so we're going to have freedom over here.
I mean, you look at all the geopolitical issues which have come up in the last few years, everything from Syria to Libya to Russia to now Iraq.
The Republicans have pleaded Obama to get military involved in all four of his situations.
Three of those situations aren't even in the news anymore, and we would have had a military force there.
So, you know, I think the Obama doctrine, for lack of...
I know he doesn't like calling Obama doctrine.
It's working.
It's, you know...
Stand on the sidelines.
Use proxies.
Don't put boots on the ground.
Look for political avenues, whether it's through sanctions or pressure on currencies and so forth.
These things work.
The reason Russia is withdrawing from there The eastern borders of Ukraine is because these sanctions have crippled the oligarchs in Russia, and they're, in turn, putting pressure on Putin to withdraw.
There's a lot of people that argue it hasn't, and that Obama's policies have been disastrous.
I mean, there was an article in Politico recently, I don't know if you read it, it was the man who broke the Middle East.
It was this figure, this picture of a pensive Obama, like, looking old as fuck.
But if anybody's hit the wall, like, aged while they've been in office, that poor bastard, Who knows what kind of pressure and stress they must be under to be in that position?
I mean, I can't even imagine why anybody would want that.
But this guy, Elliott Abrams, wrote this article about the policies and what it's done to the Middle East and how fucked up things are now.
A lot of people don't think that the policies work, and they think that they've created more problems than they've solved.
I mean, the Republicans like to be revisionist at the moment and say that things were all rosy when we withdrew in 2008, or is it 09?
There was a civil war raging there still.
You know, last year there was an, on average, 800 to 1,000 Iraqis killed in terrorist attacks each month in that place.
The civil war has been raging.
Putting military intervention doesn't solve that.
We have to either put pressure on the Iraqi government or Maliki to be more inclusive.
I mean, we fucked the pooch when the day...
You know, I got friends who worked as security contractors, friends who worked for Global Corp who were in charge of monitoring the green zone during the early days of the occupation in Iraq.
And they said, after the sidearm statue fell in Baghdad, you could walk freely without a sidearm even anywhere in Baghdad in those early days.
But the minute that Bremner and co.
debathicised or, you know, sacked the bathers out of the police force and the military, that created a civil war from that point on.
Now, we put Maliki in power, or we endorse Maliki in power, and he's just perpetuated that policy of, you know, she is only, and soon he's become the underclass.
So, it doesn't matter how many people we put there, it's not going to solve the problem.
And these intellectual conversations always end up circular like that.
I mean, if you're going to ask me to be a prick for a minute, I would say the solution is we put in another heavy autocratic regime that suppresses large segments of the population.
Now, Muslims are going to be sending me death threats now.
But that's what America has done.
If you want peace in the Middle East, then we need to prop up autocratic regimes.
Because they're not countries in the way that we think of them as countries.
These are artificial countries.
It's the same reason that Yugoslavia blew up.
Because we told the Bosnians and the Croatians and the Serbs here, Here's your country, pretend to like each other, get along in governance as a single country, but they're different people.
Iraq is three different countries under one, but we're telling them with British borders to get along nicely and to treat each other equally under a democratic government, when in these countries I don't even know what democracy is.
Well, I mean, if you want to end violence here, you just draw a big circle and say, that's Shia-stan, and you draw another big circle and you say, that's Sunni-stan now.
Get in your corners and stay the fuck there, and that's the end of it.
We've got so much money and wealth, we don't want to share it with anyone else.
And the Iranians are going to go, well, we have so much money and wealth, we're not going to share it with these poor Shia populations like Syria and, you know, in the south of Iraq.
Yeah, and the only answer is us to stay the fuck out of there and just put, you know, our ally there is one of the most oppressive autocratic regimes in the world, Saudi Arabia.
You know, if we don't support them, the price of oil will have oil shock.
The American economy will be doomed even more.
I mean, we're sitting on such a precipice of potential disaster, it's ridiculous.
If the price of oil skyrockets, Japan is fucked.
Japan is so dependent on us, America, keeping the price of oil down, because they have no oil of their own.
I mean, oil goes skirting through the roof.
I mean, not only are we going to have problems in the Middle East, we're going to have a worldwide catastrophe.
Do you get any hope at all when you see a situation like what happened with Syria, where the United States at a press conference, Obama got on television, military...
Action against Syria was inevitable.
Everybody just said, fuck this.
The whole country, collectively, right and left, was like, get the fuck out of here with this.
And then it went away.
It went away.
I mean, do you remember that speech?
That speech seemed like we were on the verge of war.
Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, you've got deaf squads, you know, going door to door again now, knocking on doors in the Sunni neighborhoods, dragging people on the street and executing them right now.
I mean...
Unless you give these separate sects of Islam their own countries, unless they can be formed, you're never going to solve the problem.
They did that in Laguna Beach, just finished writing a great book, The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and how Laguna Beach was the, not that I live there, but that was the center point for all the best Afghan hash into America.
Yeah, and they had this big concert, I think it was in 67, out in the canyon of Laguna Beach, I don't know where that is, but...
They dropped this cargo plane, flew over this crowd, 20,000 people, you know, it's like a Grateful Dead concert, and dropped acid all over the crowd, and it became like a five-day concert.
I never knew this history of the city I don't live in.
I've got an 18-year-old son and, you know, obviously him growing up in Indonesia, which has the lowest tolerance of drug use probably anywhere in the world.
He's got a friend, actually, who went to jail for, you know, six months.
He was 16 at the time for just having one joint.
You can have one joint.
You can be in jail for 10 years if you're an adult.
And so all his friends in Indonesia, he went out and got his medical marijuana card.
You know, one of us, the green doctor in Venice Beach, got his card and he puts it on Facebook and...
Well, what propelled me into writing about religion was I sort of witnessed the 05 terrorist attack in Bali.
Twin suicide bombs on Jim Brown Beach.
We were right there that night.
And that made me, from a journalistic point of view, really wanted to delve into what's in these religious texts, which would make somebody strap C4 to themselves and blow themselves a smithereen in front of a crowded...
Well, within a crowded restaurant, taking women and children with them.
I mean, it really is all about the mechanisms of the human mind, right?
That ideologies can allow people or give people the motivation to do some crazy shit.
Including things of their own selves, and not just ideologies that are accepted, established ideologies like Islam or Christianity, but like those Heaven's Gate guys who cut their balls off and fucking wore purple Nikes and waited for the spaceship behind the comet.
There's something about the human mind that is so easily influenced by An alpha, or an idea, or a message from a higher power, whatever it is.
There's something about the human mind that's so easily influenced.
I think if we could see the stars on a daily basis, I think we would be a different attitude.
Slowly but surely, I think people would establish a different attitude.
Just the sheer humility that comes with looking at the stars, just gazing up at that thing.
You know, and just, if you want to look for a greater power, you want to look for a greater thing than us, just the vastness of the infinity that you're looking at is enough.
Because when it's just black, it's too easy to ignore.
You look up, you see a couple dots, yeah, well the moon's out tonight.
You know, you get back to your house and you watch fucking Cardiacians and fall asleep with your socks on like a fucking idiot.
I mean, it's too easy to do that.
It's too easy to fall into these traps.
I think people that are looking for something larger than life itself, it's right above us.
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