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Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the new jobs report and why it appears workers don't want to work, getting into the actual benefits the government provided (mostly designed by the Trump administration), and the real motivations behind it. They also talk about the situation in Israel and how that could lead to crises across the globe.
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Our economic plan is working.
I never said, and no serious analyst ever suggested, that climbing out of the deep, deep hole our economy was in would be simple, easy, immediate, or perfectly studied.
It's impossible for this party to move forward without President Trump being its leader, because the people who are conservative have chosen him as their leader.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the McCraig Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Sexton.
Here, as always, with Nick Halseman, the best co-host in the business.
Hands down, done.
Don't even argue about it.
A little bit different this week.
Nick, I know that you know, I'm going to go ahead and pass on to the people who maybe weren't listening to my bourbon talk yesterday.
I drove up to Indiana with my vaccinations, with my vaccination card, just in case anybody wanted to know.
I drove up to the homeland, the Hoosier state of Indiana, to surprise my mother.
For the first time in a very long time for Mother's Day.
It was joyful.
It was tearful.
It was beautiful.
And now I am in a hotel where the Wi-Fi is spotty to nonexistent.
And here we are.
Well, I'm glad that you were able to do that and surprise her.
She had no idea.
She had no idea, and I have to tell you, I did it really underhandedly.
I have to be honest.
I told her that a package was going to arrive, and I needed to make sure that she would be there to sign for it, just to make sure that the surprise would happen.
But it ended up lots of tears, lots of good times, lots of reunions.
That's really awesome.
You didn't film it, did you?
No!
And, you know, here's the thing.
I knew that I had a surefire viral video on my hands, but I also didn't want to cheapen it.
I didn't want to mess around with it.
But again, we do what we can do.
I was very happy to do it.
And here I am in a hotel.
But I have to report to the Muckrate community that I saw some weird shit out in the highways and byways of the United States of America.
Really?
I'm afraid to tell.
Yeah, so Nick, I don't know how you've been handling this pandemic.
I get the wild feeling that you've been pretty buttoned down.
You've been pretty safe.
Oh yeah, didn't do anything, didn't go anywhere for a year.
Yeah, I just got out.
I had a familial emergency that I got out of town for like a couple of days.
And that was that was harrowing.
I ended up in a hotel.
I didn't enjoy it.
I haven't been out to eat.
I haven't like really seen my friends, any of that stuff.
But I have to tell you, the world has changed.
I feel like I came out of my my nuclear fallout bunker and I found a United States of America that had changed.
I have to tell you, Nick, along the highways and byways, I saw a lot of QAnon stickers.
I saw a lot of signs out and about.
Homemade Trump signs.
Homemade come and take my guns.
See what happens if you come and take my guns.
I saw homemade QAnon signs everywhere.
But the thing that was the most discouraging, and sure that was all discouraging, Uh, I saw an America that has been really hard hit by the pandemic, like towns that, uh, like I, you know, I've made that trip many times.
I've seen what these towns are like.
I saw a lot of businesses shut down.
I saw a lot of shuttered places.
Uh, I, I saw a lot of damage from the pandemic.
Well, you know, that's, that's occurs everywhere.
Like you drive around LA and, uh, what I wanted to do, I didn't do, I'm kind of, uh, upset about it was with my son.
It was gonna be like a project.
We were going to drive around the neighborhood and just film the stores and film everything over time and to see we can kind of see that the what happens over this pandemic we didn't do that but clearly in my memory knowing yes it's the same thing here as well where there's just so many of these storefronts are completely closed boarded up not open um we even see that in like beverly hills believe it or not and some of the nicer places as well that that happened uh you know substantially so uh yeah it's crazy yeah
we want to talk a little bit about uh a little bit of a radical shift that has happened um particularly over the past year um i'm Obviously, we're not done with the pandemic, but I think that we are now seeing political, socioeconomic changes.
And there is one that is very, very alarming.
And also, it's alarming, but it's also a little bit hopeful.
And we like to start this thing, and listen, we're getting into some really hard shit today.
Like, Israel right now is on fire.
And we have to talk about that.
But before we do, we wanna have a little bit of hope.
And this is, when we initially talk about this, it's not gonna sound hopeful.
But if you drive through an American town or city right now, On like the Taco Bell, the Long John Silvers, the Walmart, all of these signs you keep seeing one thing which is open interviews, noon to 3 p.m.
every day, help wanted, all shifts.
Then of course we're seeing these things go viral where somebody at like a Hardee's is putting on their drive-thru it says Closed today.
Nobody wants to work, right?
Because it's their fault.
The people just don't want to work.
They're too lazy, Nick.
They're just, there's something wrong with them.
But this is ushering in a new thing, and there was actually a jobs report that came out, and it's being treated with a little bit of, there's a hesitant hope, but there's also a little bit of worry, and that was that in the last quarter, 266,000 jobs were added.
And of course, that's great that the jobs are added, but for some people it was a disappointment.
Now, business leaders and Republicans are complaining that there is a quote-unquote worker shortage.
And everywhere we turn, we're hearing how, again, people are lazy.
Nobody wants to work.
Everyone wants to live on the dole.
But what we're actually seeing is a realignment post-pandemic where people are deciding they don't want to be paid nothing.
They don't want to be treated like shit anymore.
They spend all this time in the pandemic.
They're re-deciding what they want in their life and how they want to live it.
There is actually a little bit of reason for hope here.
Maybe.
I think the problem that you might have with the HOPE idea is that it's a very powerful drug to disgust welfare queens or people that don't want to work.
And it can convert people.
It can actually convince them.
A small business owner, some random guy on Twitter who may or may not own a business, is now saying that nobody wants to work.
So, Jared, you know, we were talking before this and I amassed some numbers because really the key here is when I hear those things, it's like, well, let's look at the numbers.
Is it true that perhaps the stimulus that we've had the last year to help us get through a pandemic has been leading to people not wanting to work?
Before you get to the numbers, and I'm so glad that you crunched them, and I was driving, I was driving through the heart of America, and I was imagining you, Nick, just hard at work at your keyboard.
We know that you are a keyboard warrior.
And before we get to those, I want to point out what you just said is really important, which is This country has such a long history of pitting workers against each other and pitting people against each other and saying, hey, you work hard.
Those people are lazy.
You deserve more than them.
They deserve less.
And as a result, it fractures solidarity.
Right.
And so what has happened is that we are actually watching a little bit of a realignment that could help everybody.
And in pandemics, in these big, giant situations, history shows us every time that these things happen, There are labor realignments.
And if we put our shoulders into this stuff, we can get to the point where people might actually get paid a living wage, right?
They might actually have things happen.
And the main message, and we've been talking about this for a couple weeks now, the main message is it's really bad when the government helps people.
Because when the government helps people, they don't want to work.
Right?
If you help people, they're not going to work for pennies on the dollar over your fry fryer.
Right?
Like, that's the idea, is that they're now on the dole because they're lazy, they're abusing the system.
Look what's happening.
And that's what, again, business leaders and Republicans are pushing so hard right now.
Well, they're very quick jumpers.
You know, in basketball we have things called quick jumping.
They can jump the conclusions very quickly.
So, like, with guns, if you pass a law to eliminate, let's say, AR-15s, well, that means that you're going to eliminate every gun, you know, across the board.
Which, by the way, I'm all for.
But like that will never happen.
So they'll jump there.
And the same thing here.
Here's the thing that's frustrating because I'm a small business owner.
But like let's just pretend I was running one of those diners that the Fox News loves to go and interview people at.
And all of a sudden I am told I have to raise the minimum wage of my employees by, you know, two or three dollars an hour.
You have to raise weight?
I'm sorry.
That doesn't sound right.
Yeah.
Well, here's the thing.
It's like they'll immediately say, just like we keep hearing all the biblical referencing to the destruction of our country.
If I raise the price of my French fries, like 12 cents, I can cover the increased costs I have to, you know, whatever, across the rest of the menu.
But like, so either they don't realize that, Or they refuse to do that or they are doing this in bad faith and knowing that they will do that and then still complain and say that they're going to go out of business anyway knowing that all it's going to do is help their employees.
Ding, ding, ding.
All of the above.
Yeah.
All of the above.
And by the way, it's time for a little bit of hard medicine because what we're actually talking about, everyone always says to me when I'm like diagnosing what's going on in the country, they're like, well, what do we do about it?
And it's like, Pay $0.10 more on your fries.
Yeah.
Pay $5 more on your phone.
Right?
Like, I'm sorry, and if you are going on Twitter and you're like, I don't want to pay an extra dollar for my value meal for people to live lives of basic human dignity and for children to go to daycare, you're part of the problem.
These people who are engaged in this sort of thing, like, these low prices, they come at a price.
It's like everyone says with the internet.
If you're not paying for something, you're the product.
In this situation, you are benefiting from the cruelty and oppression of other people.
We can get people in this country to... Because the wages are not livable wages.
They're not.
And this is another piece of hard medicine.
If you have a business, and your business relies on paying people less than a living wage, and you can't afford to raise their wages, and you can't afford to pay for their benefits, you don't deserve to have a business.
That's hardcore stuff from a bleeding heart, but I will tell you, if your business can't handle paying people a living wage, you should be an employee somewhere.
You don't deserve to have a business, right?
You don't have the money necessary, and we shouldn't change the entire political structure of a country to your whims in order to bow down at your feet and treat you like you're something you're not.
Well, hey, Jared, this is America, and you should be allowed to destroy your business any way you want to.
That's your right.
So, you know, let's talk about this, because I went through some numbers to figure out how much money people were actually getting from the stimulus or the last year.
And then we'll talk about how much money somebody makes, maybe some of these jobs, we kind of compare to see whether it's worth it.
Okay, there was a stimulus package that for a maximum of 39 weeks, you can get an extra $600 per week, which is a lot of money because, aside from that, the average benefit somebody might get from unemployment insurance is $320 a week.
So, for anybody before the pandemic ever hit, who would have said, oh, well, they're just on the dole, they're living high on the hog, that's $16,640 a year.
That is also not necessarily guaranteed.
Right.
Go up.
You know, you have to jump through certain hoops to be able to get unemployment insurance throughout the year like that.
So let's just pretend like, OK, that's where we're at the baseline.
Most of these Republican states are making people either prove that they're applying for jobs or take drug tests, which is bullshit while we're on the subject.
Right, right.
Now, with the $600 per week, and only for a maximum of 39 weeks, remember this isn't like a full year salary, there's a maximum to it, you could get an extra $23,400.
which are 23,400, 23 grand, $23,400.
So there is some way where you could cobble together, though, you know, your basic, You actually have to make your job doing this.
the extra $600 a week, that actually does equal $40,040 total.
You have to really work hard to get up to that point.
You actually have to make your job doing this.
This is not an easy process whatsoever.
And I can assure you that hardly anybody is getting the full maximum 39 weeks of the Now, we also have to throw on there, there's an extra $1,800 in stimulus payments that they issued to everybody.
So you can add that and you get $41,840.
Now, if you made $41,000 in a year without having to work, okay, that is a lot.
That is more than, you asked me to go through some numbers of what the average Walmart employee makes, or Amazon, or McDonald's.
So, I went through it and Walmart actually, their average salary is $32,703.
The lowest I could find is the pharmacist technician who makes $28,177.
The only problem with that is that Walmart has been notorious for not giving people full-time employment.
Oh, I can tell you as a former Walmart employee that if there's anything that they work at, It's making sure that they keep their employees underneath that benefit roof.
Absolutely they do.
By the way, while we're talking about Walmart, I just want to make sure that everybody knows that Jim Walton, with an estimated worth of $54.6 billion on the last Forbes list, was the eighth richest person.
And by the way, of the richest Americans, Many of them are Waltons.
It's not just him.
But, you know, let's go ahead and let's talk about how people aren't being exploited and how lazy they are.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, let's, you know, so Walmart is an interesting issue there because a lot of people are going to complain that they can't get enough hours to make anywhere near the average employee's salary of $32,000.
I have a quick question for you, Nick.
If you can't work 40 hours a week at Walmart, which most Walmart employees do not, and you don't qualify for benefits, Nick, where do you get those benefits from?
If you don't qualify for the unemployment benefits, you don't get them.
Where do you get your health care benefits if Walmart keeps you underneath your full-time employment?
You're not getting it from Walmart.
Oh, that's weird.
Is there like some sort of a body that provides those things on behalf of Walmart in order to invest in their profit margins?
Oh, the United States of America.
That's weird.
Also, when you get hired on at a Walmart, do you or do you not get lessons and training in how to apply for welfare benefits?
Which is basically being used by Walmart as a way to work around a living wage, plus also to go ahead and get an investment from the government.
It's weird how that works and they want to talk about how people are lazy, but that's neither here nor there.
Sure.
I mean, they're trying to subsidize their workers with taxpayer money when all they have to do is pay them and continue making hand-over-fist money.
Unbelievable.
So, yeah.
Now, McDonald's is another interesting case because what I could find there was that the average yearly salary is around $22,000 a year.
That's really low.
You know, if you're a cashier, I think it's less.
So, that's a tough one because, okay, you could not go back to work at McDonald's and make more money.
Now, I haven't heard much about McDonald's saying that they can't open their stores and have people staffing it to make it work.
Every McDonald's I've seen and heard is working fine.
Well, it's going to be weird on May 19th because in 15 American cities, the McDonald's employees are going to strike and demand $15 an hour.
Fuck McDonald's.
Okay.
That's what I will say.
And they can, they can put a smile on it all they want.
They can try Ronald McDonald on his happy ass out in front of everything that they want.
They have abused people for years.
Yeah.
We have a happy, a happier story because you asked about Amazon as well.
You want to hear what Jeff Bezos was treating his employees.
The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos.
You know, in 2018, when I was looking this up and found it, the median salary was just over $35,000.
And that was because, and they had just in 2018 moved to $15 an hour minimums.
And Bezos actually challenged every other major corporation to move to this and actually pay people that number before it became a law enacted.
So, kudos to that, you know.
Now, you know, Amazon's working conditions are horrible.
You know, probably as draconian as any.
But you also can't afford to buy a house on that.
You actually can't afford to even rent a place in any of the cities around these places.
Also, while we're putting this out there, Amazon has required the places where their distribution centers are located to give them tax breaks in order to go ahead and pay for any pay increases that they're doing, which, Nick, I'm going to check my notes real fast.
Who is taking care of that?
Oh, that's right.
Us.
Yeah.
Us.
The government.
Yeah.
I mean, listen, it's frankly disgusting how little taxes a lot of these corporations pay anyway, right?
We beg them to come into these cities because it's going to revitalize and whatever, but all they do is keep wages low, keep conditions shitty.
You know, of course, people don't want to work in those situations, especially during a pandemic.
Now that we're getting out of that and things are going to start coming back to normal, you would hope that, like, you know, if I was going to start a restaurant right now, I think I'd kill it, right?
People want to go out to restaurants back again and go out there and do that.
You would probably do really well.
But that would be knowing that you would have to be able to give some of the money you're making back to your employees.
I guess that it's the communist word then, you know?
If you want to give too much money back to your employees, you're a socialist, communist, pinko bastard or something.
I'm sorry, but we do not spend a year and a half calling them essential workers.
We don't call them heroes.
We don't clap when they come out of their job and then refuse to pay them.
I've said this before, I'll say it again.
If somebody ever says, we're family, it means they're going to fuck you on your paycheck is what it means.
They're going to ask you to take less than you are worth it.
And for anybody listening who is trying to figure out this job market right now, the realignment that we're talking about Look around, see the signs that say open interviews, we need people to work.
I'll tell you what rich people and privileged people understand, and I think you and I have probably learned as we've, like, moved up in the world.
That's this.
You have a legit right to leverage employers against one another.
If right now, labor is in demand, that means that you have the advantage over the employers.
If they want people to come and work in their shitty restaurant, they need to make the restaurant less shitty.
They need to pay people more.
They need to have better benefits.
They need to give you scheduling preferences.
So you know what?
Go over here for an open interview.
When they say, when can you start?
Say, hey, I'm going across the street, so we'll figure out what's happening afterwards.
And I'll tell you who does that all the time.
That's rich people.
That's wealthy people.
Privileged people.
Go out and make them compete with one another until this bullshit job market starts to change.
And if you want to unionize, unionize.
If you want to engage in solidarity, I've talked to multiple people right now who are working in fast food restaurants trying to put together labor unions.
There is a reckoning coming.
And what is it?
God, what's that third Batman film?
It's Dark Knight Rises, right?
It's where Catwoman comes up and says, you're going to wonder how you've lived so richly, right?
That's a terrible thinking of the quote.
That's not the right quote.
It's probably not, but I don't remember.
But yes, we all remember that.
It's awful remembering the quote.
But you cannot keep doing this.
And now, by the way, I don't know if you saw this, Nick, but there was like this CEO that did like an op-ed.
I want to say it was in the It's either the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal.
And he's like, oh yeah, well you can work at home, but you're gonna have to start being a contractor.
And I'll tell you what happens when they call you a contractor.
They get rid of your benefits, they get rid of your salary, they get rid of all that stuff, they clamp down, and they take away any sort of leverage that you have, and they squeeze and squeeze and squeeze.
And you can be damn sure that that's not gonna be the end of it.
That's the beginning of it.
That's the next step in all of this labor exploitation.
It's coming.
Well, this happens every time we have a contraction of our economy.
And we've seen this especially, like again, the millennials must feel like this is a godforsaken country that doesn't help anybody because there's been a number of those since they got out of college that have not only constricted the workforce to some degree, but it's made their jobs change to the way they have to do the job of two people.
For the same amount of money and it never grows from there.
Now this is sort of why I like the idea of Bitcoin.
I think that Bitcoin comes in and again it's so volatile and people are going to end up losing a lot of all their money that they had perhaps.
But the idea that you are no longer bound by the old school patriarchy who would try to keep everybody away from this and keep it too complicated so people couldn't understand it.
You can't stop that now.
And we are now seeing some transformations of, you know, people who are in their 20s and the 30s who never had any kind of assets or wealth.
They could leverage this now and actually make some money.
I mean, I had no money when I was in my 20s.
And you can see I've been talking to people on my shows who are now, you know, thousands and thousands of dollars are sort of coming into their bank accounts now from nothing.
That's exciting to me because we talked about this before of just how The barriers that have been put up on purpose to prevent people from being able to get in on this.
The idea that you can take your phone and in real time buy, it could be stocks doesn't have to be Bitcoin.
It's insane, you know, considering like I used to work at the mercantile exchange in the 80s.
And I used to literally run orders from the phone banks to the trader in the floor to fill that order.
Otherwise, it wasn't happening.
So the idea we can do that now is transformational.
And so you have to hope that enough information, enough education can come along from that and that their people won't be beholden to this and they could get out of that, the pressure of having to take any job that's offered to them.
Yeah, we talked about this a while back whenever the GameStop phenomenon was going on, right?
And we talked about how, like, yeah, the whole run on GameStop was weird and possibly destructive, but it also represented a new epoch, right?
Which is a lesson, and listen, I grew up extraordinarily poor.
I didn't understand money.
And I'll tell you some of the lessons I've learned as I've climbed out of working class into the middle class.
And the secret is that rich people Their money always grows.
When you start putting money into markets and investments, you don't lose money.
You gain money.
Like, the system is rigged.
It just churns and churns and churns and churns.
And you're not supposed to know that.
You're not supposed to know how to navigate the same sort of rivers and, you know, these markets that they do.
I've been having conversations recently.
I'm talking about barbers.
I'm talking about working class people who are like investing in like Dogecoin.
They're investing in GameStop.
They're investing in Bitcoin.
They're talking about how to make this money sort of go up and up and up.
And listen, it might very well destroy our economy.
I mean, there's a real possibility that it might.
But we also need to point out that This economy doesn't work the way that we've been told that it does.
It's been rigged from the very beginning.
And watching people, by the way, for anyone listening, fuck the Chamber of Commerce.
I know that they were in your parades probably when you were a kid and you saw them waving as they went by.
Those people are dedicated to exploiting you and if you notice what they've been doing lately is they've been putting out press releases and articles and op-eds and they're saying we have to stop helping people.
We have to stop giving people money during a pandemic like they don't want to work and they are quitting their jobs and they're taking up new jobs.
They want to establish a rigged economy where employers keep their employees terrified.
Living paycheck to paycheck, never wanting to speak back, never wanting to contribute, never wanting to ask for a day off, because that's how they win.
And things are changing.
And by the way, we're getting ready to talk about this Israel situation.
We are in a really volatile world moment.
Like the economy, after a pandemic, and particularly after years of hypercapitalism and this political decay, you reach a point where things Are getting near a crisis.
And we know that.
We've been talking about that.
The reports are all saying that.
That everything is racing towards this big, giant problem.
Right?
Like all these intertwined types of things.
The economy is part of it.
And we are watching it move and structure and restructure and change.
And nobody can tell you anything except for if you want to use leverage right now, this is the time to do it.
It's when you have the advantage and when the employers have to start paying people what they're worth and treating them with dignity.
Absolutely.
Well, you know, to sort of focus on the question, we saw, you know, Elon Musk was on Saturday Night Live on Saturday.
Did you watch that?
I did.
I watched a lot of it.
He wasn't so bad.
By the way, he comes out saying that he has Asperger's, although we're not really supposed to use that term anymore, but I guess he's grandfathered in.
I thought that was rough.
Oh, really?
I thought he was fine.
And it certainly changes the way you want to digest.
It explains a lot, actually, when you realize he's on the spectrum like that.
And so, listen, guys like that who are way out of the box, Hyper-intelligent like you know they become successful, but they asked him on the weekend update They had a little bit where they were trying to find out what doge is or what Bitcoin is and like they wouldn't tell them and It was funny that was part of the joke, but I think that this what this piggybacks on is you know We don't have democracy unless enough people believe that this thing exists We don't have currency unless enough people believe that this green piece of
Paper in our pocket actually has any value.
Well, of course, the next iteration of that would be something like a virtual currency, which has value because enough people believe it has value.
That's all it is.
That's all these NFTs are.
And so it doesn't have to be anything tangible.
I think that's what we're sort of we're kind of getting the post post whatever this time is where we realize that like nothing is necessarily real.
And it's only what we choose to create out of this.
Again, if we decide not to follow the laws today, there's not enough police that can handle that.
We can have all this if we all wanted it.
Just like we can have Bitcoin if we all wanted it, and enough people do.
Well, I don't know what the age range is of the muckrake listening demographic, but I can guarantee that most of us were either coming up in the 1980s or the early 1990s.
And this was a period of time, particularly with American hegemony, where we were taught, this is how the world works and it's going to be like this.
Right?
I mean, just, just hold on.
Like, you'll get your chance.
Like you, when I graduated from college in 2008, I was like, well, now it's my turn.
And then, and then the economy cratered.
Yeah.
And all of a sudden I had to learn a very quick lesson, which was, oh, a lot of that was bullshit.
And it just so happens that the American economic miracle of the post-World War II era was a blip on the radar.
Yeah.
It was one and a half generations long.
That's it.
And it didn't carry over because there were particular circumstances.
And on top of that, there were inequalities that were carried out through oppression and cruelty.
This thing was always going to change, but we got told that it wasn't going to.
What we're dealing with now are the consequences of thinking that today is always going to be tomorrow and the day after and day after.
Everything is changing right now.
Everything is on the table.
I mean, and that is the truth of history, is that every time you think that things are stable or good or you've reached the quote-unquote end of history, history turns around and socks you in the mouth.
Yeah, well I think the post-war economic situation in America was every 10 years there was a depression, not a depression, a recession.
And they were able to keep the propaganda machine going and keep it short enough that we could kind of get to the next part where there was a run and prosperity, people felt it.
It was only going to lead to getting worse and worse and worse.
The 70s was really bad.
We had a really bad one in the 80s, the Black Monday, the 90s, and now into 2000.
It was sort of like clear that this – the wave every time it hit was getting stronger and stronger until it broke down the barriers and flooded the whole country.
So that's – And you get told by the way, hey, I know you don't have it right now but wait your turn.
Promise.
The American Dream returns on its investment.
Just wait.
It'll come around.
And not only just wait, but we have this awesome house on the beach that you should buy that, you know, by the time we get to 2008 will then be completely underwater, you know.
But meanwhile, you got a great deal on it when you got it, right?
So I could see that this is this is sort of what we were talking about this before the existential crisis I was having with like my daughter going to college.
It's like what are we doing here?
Are we just sort of continuing this meat grinder where you're expected to go?
I mean, I know my parents were the first generation.
So, of course, they were expected to go to college and have a better life than their parents who were immigrants.
And then I was the son of that.
So I was supposed to have a better life, but somehow maybe like my job better than my parents did.
But here we are now, generations into that.
And then, you know, talk about people who had been in this country for even longer.
You know, at some point, you kind of figure out there's got to be sort of an end cycle or something needs to radically shoot into some other direction because it's just too many people to be plugged into these things.
My daughter, like she probably won't be able to get into like a good college.
It seems the way I'm hearing is that it's impossible, you know, to get any of these colleges now because there's so many people all applying and trying to get in.
And the expectations have been growing over the generation after generation.
So anyway, the point being that, you know, yeah, everyone was promised.
If you work hard and you study hard and you do well, you'll be successful.
But if you were an alien and you came down and observed how we set this country up, you'd be like, oh, this is done on purpose, right?
You have your education system this way, so you need to have people who don't do well and get these menial jobs and never have any ambitions.
That's what the purpose of this is, right?
Oh, 100% that's the purpose.
I mean, none of this is on accident.
And one of the lessons that they don't teach you, and I didn't realize it until I was writing American Rule, which is our economy just constantly crashes.
Everyone tells you it's like, oh, don't worry about the economy.
Like, it's solid.
Like, just don't mess with it too much.
It'll work out, right?
But it always crashes because these people can't help themselves.
It always goes and goes and goes, and it always goes in a predictable cycle, which is where FDR came in, and it was supposed to regulate it, and then they changed it back in the 1970s, early 1980s.
And the whole point is, they will exploit you, they will pay you less, and guess what?
Then you don't have enough money to buy the things or live, so what do you do?
You start going into debt.
Well, that's okay.
We have a debt system that allows people to go in debt.
And by the way, one of the secrets of American society is that everybody spends more than they have.
They're all trying to spend up to the next level.
Working class people are spending like they're in the middle class.
Middle class are spending like they're in the upper class.
Upper class don't have to worry.
They can buy islands, right?
And by the way, part of that keeps us from actually being able to, I don't know, associate with people in our class because we don't see ourselves in our class.
We're going into debt so we can buy big trucks and boats and all this shit.
Well, guess what?
You only have so much debt.
And eventually, and America shows us this, it's happened for centuries.
You reach the point with debt, and then it's done.
And the house falls down.
And then what happens?
The richest of the rich get bailed out, then they make more money, and they make the cycle go forward and forward and forward, and schmucks like us end up on the streets selling pencils and getting kicked out of our homes.
Like, that is how this thing is designed to work.
You know, it's not a bad argument for something like communism, because at the very least, with communism, their economy is pretty stable.
It sucks, but it's stable.
It doesn't have these wild runs up and down.
And that might be a reason why we need, you know, I guess, more regulation.
Which also means, like, don't be surprised when they move in on Bitcoin, and they try to do that.
I don't know how that would ever work, because there doesn't seem to be Any way of to have jurisdiction over this over this virtual world that they've created but don't be surprised to see them try and just put the same kind of You know institutional controls that they do over the stock market as well In the name of like protecting consumers all that bullshit, which they clearly don't care about either, you know
Trump even dismantled the Consumer Protection Board you know the probably the nicest part of the government we have right that would serve us in earnest you know the most earnest way and they could dismantle it completely and hopefully they're gonna put it back together but the point being that I would see I would not be surprised if things like Bitcoin would they try to regulate that out of existence
Well, it's going to turn into, I mean, one of the things about Bitcoin, just to go ahead and put this on, is it is a wonderful way to commit crimes.
I mean, like it really is.
And a lot of people are involved in this in order to be able to use non-traceable income.
Right.
It's incredible for that type of stuff.
So there are a lot of people who, by the way, are probably pretty powerful who are using this stuff and they're trying to convert it and launder through it.
So it'll really stick around for a while.
What I would expect at this point because of this, what are they calling it, worker deficit or whatever the hell they're trying to phrase it as.
They're going to lobby for an end to public assistance.
They're going to probably try and talk about small business and business loans in order for the government to pay for higher wages and more benefits, which, by the way, goes ahead and takes the money out of our pocket for the wealthy who should be paying for this shit anyway.
Or we could see a realignment.
We could see the rise of labor unions, solidarity, and the possibility that Biden might actually start taxing the richest of the rich.
And if that happens, Hold on to your butts because it's gonna be a lot.
By the way, that is a Jurassic Park reference.
It is.
And that is the type of situation that we're talking about.
We're talking about the power going down and the T-Rex getting out.
Because if they actually go after that money and we start not dealing with giving money to the businesses to hire people and subsidize them, You're going to see knives come out and they're already getting sharpened right now.
These businesses and the wealthy are starting to sharpen their knives.
But that does not mean that change cannot happen because we are in a moment of possible change.
Right.
And you'll see them describe it as the destruction of America, literally the destruction of America by Raising the minimum wage and, you know, making, you know, subsidizing health insurance and all those things.
And, you know, it's funny because we've seen four years of this through Trump and how they systematically lay the blueprint out.
And now that they're going to completely embrace this and realize that, you know, the Republicans need this, more of that economic structure to continue going forward, or at least to get more votes.
But like, can you imagine, you know, If we still had Trump in the White House with what's going on like in Israel right now, because that just hit me in a way that like, by the way, Biden, you know, he's renowned for his foreign policy and his deep knowledge of things outside of this country.
But I'm not even sure how well he's going to handle this.
But like the idea that if Trump would have been involved seeing these things, I mean, he would have been flamed, but even worse on Twitter, I'm sure.
I mean, like applauding I can't even imagine.
And if you add in the extra layer of his relationship with Netanyahu, Trump and Netanyahu were two strong men who, I mean, they attracted each other like magnets.
I mean, they saw each other, they recognized each other, they knew that they could use one another.
Yeah, Trump would be a total disaster here.
The problem that we have right now And this goes back to the economic thing, but also the pandemic thing.
The fact that we're in late-stage capitalism and this entire situation is just starting to crumble a little bit.
Going back to the intelligence report that you and I reported on, I don't know, a couple weeks ago.
We have a situation where political structures are starting to fall apart, economic structures are starting to stretch thin, we're moving towards a point of crisis.
Also, everything's unstable right now.
Like, we haven't even talked about the fact that China and Australia are saber-rattling with each other right now.
Like, if you listen to China talk about Australia, they think war is inevitable, and Australia is basically like, We're in war right now, right?
So one of the things that happens whenever we have these economic and political realignments is you oftentimes see the frictions that were there in the past start to increase.
And then you start to see other people allying each other because it's, the way to think about it is, so let's say with China and Australia before we actually get to Israel and Palestine, because those, that's a, that's a horse of a different color that has a lot of interlocking parts.
But with China and Australia, all of a sudden you start to see alliances build based on resources.
So like, oh, here's a resource that Australia has, and we can go ahead and get in with them and possibly take a resource away from China over here.
You start seeing alliances form, and the next thing you know, you have a worldwide geopolitical A moment.
You know what I mean?
Where it could explode at any given time and you could have all these conflicts and wars and all this stuff.
We're at a moment like that.
And we've been at that moment for a little while.
Something like this Israel-Palestinian situation has been brewing for a while, obviously.
Like, we've been seeing it for a long time.
But in recent years, particularly under Netanyahu and changing economic political conditions, this thing has been ready to blow for a while.
And now we're seeing that come to a head, and God knows what happens if it continues.
Well, the worry is is it was quiet for a while and yet without anything fundamentally changing.
So, like you said, that's where you get the kind of things where it starts.
It's bubbling and bubbling.
And, you know, it's going to just explode one day.
And we know it's unclear just yet how serious this ends up.
This is going to be.
And when it centers on like the frustrating thing, because it's like obviously with the Trump psychosis of connection to Israel, nobody in Israel could do anything wrong.
You cannot criticize Israel.
The BDS thing is a movement that needs to be destroyed.
How dare anybody talk about it?
The problem is that there's an allegiance issue with Jews in America.
We're supposedly supposed to be behind Israel no matter what.
The problem is that Israel isn't.
They have culpability here.
And they continue to inflame this by building settlements in regions where the Palestinians feel like it's their land.
There isn't going to be a solution other than a two-state solution, right?
We can't just wipe off a people, a race off of the face of the earth.
We cannot do that.
So, if you want the same thing to happen, just like our economy continues to recycle its rises and dips, you're going to have the same thing happen in this area of the world until you fundamentally change something.
And we saw that with the Oslo Accords when Clinton brought together Rabin and Arafat, and that was radical and people were really, really upset.
No one believed it was going to work, but at least that's the kind of thing that you would need to try and figure out, Romeo and Juliet style, to change this.
Otherwise, we're going to be in this for another thousand years or longer of them, you know, both these sides warring with each other and blowing up and then calming down and blowing up, and you're never going to get anywhere other than where we are now.
Well, just a little bit of inside baseball.
I have to tell you that had John Kerry not had a recent slip up, which was he supposedly was leaking information that he wasn't supposed to leak.
We would be looking at a situation where John Kerry would have been dispatched to the Middle East, and Biden would have went ahead and tried to have brokered some sort of a peace.
We know from Joe Biden, his career plus also his presidency so far, he really enjoys legacy defining questions.
I mean, this is a guy who now that he's president, he has decided that he wants to try and leave his mark on the world.
For good or for ill, however you feel about it, that is what Joe Biden is trying to do.
We would have seen John Kerry going to the Middle East.
If the chips get down and nobody really wants to deal with it, you will hear that John Kerry is being dispatched.
But he's currently in the barrel, so to speak.
So that's not necessarily going to happen.
The problem here, and let's go ahead and make this relevant, because I know a lot of people hear Israel and Palestine, and they have their preconceived notions, right?
And we're not going to have a podcast here where we convince you who is at fault or who did the wrong thing.
But let's give you a little bit of context of one of the reasons.
Well, actually, let's talk about two of the reasons why this thing continues to happen and why there's never really any inroads.
One is going back to what all is happening here, which is it's defined as a holy war.
Like, it's not a political war.
It's not a political struggle.
It's not a struggle over resources.
It's the added thing of the religious war, right?
This is a flashpoint for these two faiths that come together, and whenever they come across one another, or they rub, or there's a little bit of friction, it is seen as some sort of a holy situation, obviously.
The second part, because of that holy war, the American Republican Party has a lot of sway over this thing.
And they have turned this into a political issue.
And for anybody who at home is like, well, the Republicans have always like sort of engaged with white supremacist groups and sort of anti-Semitic groups.
Like, why are they always on the side of this?
Well, it's because they believe that Israel has a role in millennia, millennia, end of the world apocalyptic scenarios, and that they need to be on their side so that they can, I don't know, go us into heaven, eat dinner with God, you know, convert them at some point to Christianity.
Like, it is totally about power and influence in this stuff.
The American Republican Party has made it part of their platform, one of the only things on their platform, by the way, to never ever examine this thing or try and figure out a two-state solution or anything approaching it because it is one of their only actual winning policy ideological platform ideas that they have.
You know, they described Trump as being the most, you know, Israel-friendly president of all time.
Is that the guy, by the way, was Trump the guy who was saying there were good people on both sides as Nazis were marching in Charlottesville?
By the way, what was it?
Let me clear out my ear canal.
What was it that they were chanting as they were carrying torches?
Jews will not replace us.
Yes.
Jews?
Jews will not replace us?
Yes.
It wasn't Jews.
It was Jews.
Weird.
Yeah.
So, but here's the thing.
Even independent of that, you know, because, you know, Truman would be pretty upset if, you know, if he heard that Trump was being, you know, described as the most friendly president of Israel.
But, The absence of doing anything in that region, all right, and the approach of trying to be involved in brokering a piece, because it seems like that will be needed to ever get anywhere positive in this situation.
You need to have that third party like the United States to come in.
So by Trump virtually ignoring Israel for the four years, ignoring it, but like, you know, giving high fives to Netanyahu, who is about to be thrown out of his own party because of corruption, just like Trump.
And hopefully tossed into jail.
Yeah.
Hopefully.
Yeah.
That'd be great.
So like, in the absence of any kind of actions to try and broker any kind of peace, that's like terrible.
That's worse than trying to do something that totally backfires, you know?
So he's not friendly to Israel.
He doesn't do anything.
And by not doing anything, he's basically approving them encroaching on Palestinian lands by building more of these settlements and flaming the region even more.
So that's where we're at with that, and it's really frustrating when I would see that and hear these Republicans talk about how Trump was so friendly to Israel when he did nothing, and nothing was worse than trying to do something bad.
I mean, that's Trump's entire legacy.
Well, it's a Republican's legacy.
How about this, right?
You know, the politics has become about winning, right?
It's winning races.
It's not about governing.
And that explains why so many Republicans keep voting these assholes in, no matter how these policies they try and institute don't benefit them at all.
They keep voting for them because it's about winning the race.
It has nothing to do with actually governing or actually doing anything positive in earnest.
And at least the Democrats have this ability to convince us, right, that they do care about us.
and their actions don't always prove that out to be so, but they've done a better job than the Republicans of convincing most Americans that they actually want to help improve their lives and around the world as well.
I kind of think that.
Although, interestingly enough, Obama and his foreign policy didn't necessarily agree with that.
He didn't give me any confidence in that either.
Like, if you wanted to criticize him for anything, it would probably be how he treated other people across the globe and what we did to make what matters worse.
Yeah, it's really hard for a guy named Barack Hussein Obama to, you know, go and try and broker this stuff out, particularly as he's being known as a secret Muslim who's trying to destroy the United States of America.
But his foreign policy, you know, I hate to say it and alienate people, but it was less than stellar is what it was.
It was a continuation of a lot of what we had seen before.
But it's also important.
I think what you just hit on is absolutely key in all of this, which is there is a worldwide movement among the right.
to not really improve people's lives.
This goes back to the economy that we're talking about, which is they don't really want to make sure, they don't really want people to have money, they don't want people to be able to afford things, they want to exploit them.
On top of that, they don't want them to have healthcare, any of these human projects that they deserve.
Um, you know, Putin is one of these people.
Netanyahu built his entire political career on the waging of this holy war.
You know, like that, that, that, that was Netanyahu's calling card.
And so what you, and, and the, uh, American Republican Party is the exact same way.
They, they say, Oh, we're facing an apocalypse.
They're coming for, you know, it used to be, they're coming for your guns and it's a new world order.
Now it's, they're not gonna let you eat meat on Tuesdays.
But, you know, it's it's it's this thing where it's like, no, we are in a war.
We have to win it.
Don't worry about rationing food.
Don't worry about like being able to afford anything.
You know, we got to win this war and then we'll take care of this.
And then it turns out that the war or whatever this hegemonic project is, it goes on for generations.
And they just continue kicking the can down the road and making sure that people are not able to take care of themselves.
Well, here's the thing, because you're describing a situation where the rhetoric that they use and the fear and the hate that they engender is more finger changing.
I don't know if it's changing at all.
Like Elise Stefanik, who is this woman who's – this is crazy.
She's going to take over for Liz Cheney despite having a much lower rating on the conservative scale.
She's like a radical liberal who's going to take over the third spot in the Republican Party.
But I've got to give her credit.
She pulled out the hits today in a tweet where she said, Joe Biden is weakening our standing in the world by betraying our allies, abandoning the American working class, and Islamic terrorists are on the march.
I was like, I gotta hand it to you.
On the barge?
Where are they marching?
We need to unite with strong Republican leadership in Washington, D.C.
So it's like, I was like, wow, you really, you know, you're going, you're playing American pie for everybody, man.
And that's like, that's like the one hit that you have.
It's pretty impressive that they can still pull that out.
I drove my party to the levee, but the levee was dry.
I mean, that is, you're exactly right, because it's just like, nothing that she actually said there meant anything.
Like, who are these allies that they're turning their back on?
In this case, it's North Korea.
You know, I like it.
Literally, it's North Korea and Putin.
Yeah, that's it.
Because that's that's actually the Republican Party wants to work with because they're anti-democratic.
Oppressors.
That's what they're interested in.
They don't actually want civil liberties or rights for anybody.
They want those people.
We know Tucker had already acknowledged that, you know, fascism is going to be, uh, you know, that the Republicans are going to turn to fascism.
Or was that what he said?
Fascism?
Whatever the word was.
No, he said, the guy said, uh, if the Democrats keep this up in 10 years, the Republicans are going to elect an open fascist.
And Tucker, and I keep, I think about this all the time.
Tucker's like, yeah, yeah, that's, that's what's going to happen.
Well, and it's part of my whole thing about how it's nice that they are actually saying what they're truly doing out loud now is, how long will it be until they finally acknowledge, it's like, well, we're not really about democracy.
We don't really want that.
We really just want America to be great again.
And we want a strong leader.
I mean, they're already saying that.
I mean, really.
I mean, with the laws that they're passing.
And on top, we have that National Review article that said, we don't need more voters.
We need better voters.
Right?
You were better voters.
Like, they are just on the verge of just putting it all out there.
Yeah.
We're a year away from them, or maybe less, of them literally just saying it that way.
And some, one of these bigger leaders in the GOP acknowledging it like Tucker did and saying, yeah, yeah, right.
That might, I wonder if it makes it easier then to argue, you know, or to have that debate with them when at least they can come to terms with like what they're advocating for.
I don't know.
That's a hell of a question is, is what is that going to look like?
And I, man, you know, I think a lot about what we do with this podcast and what this, uh, what this project is all about.
And I feel like we're documenting the movement towards that.
You know what I mean?
Like narrative wise, it feels, it feels like we're going to have that show.
Like the day where it's like, well, fascism is not that bad.
I mean, like with this, uh, with this crisis, uh, with, uh, Israel and Palestine, like, You know that somebody is going to, in the next few days, if this thing doesn't go ahead and simmer down in a hurry, they're going to be out there and they're going to be talking about the Arab threat.
They're going to be talking about terrorism.
We're going to have Fox News talking about the southern border and, you know, are we going to have terrorists on the southern border?
And, and when that crisis starts to ratchet up, they don't even have to say it, right?
There's an American, there's an American part of the brain that's like axis of evil.
Well, that doesn't sound good.
Do whatever you need to do.
Kill them all.
Don't give them trials.
Torture them.
Hold them in CIA black sites.
If this thing continues, that's the kind of move you're going to see particularly with the right.
Well, the real fear for me is this bubbles up into more of a conflict that might require us to have to go in militarily to help.
But then, what if at the same time, something happens in South Korea and North Korea, right?
All of a sudden, if something is going on, we're going to deal with it.
In India and Pakistan right now, you know, like that's where you started to get worried because these things are related to some degree and related to how we need to respond to them all.
Wait, there was one other thing, another impact I was going to mention, another area of the world.
But anyway, the point being that like there's a lot of these smoldering fires out there.
Yes.
Thank God they didn't happen, I suppose, when Trump was in power.
I don't know if that's related or not either, but like that's we're lucky that we didn't have to deal with any kind of major, major crisis.
Well, but Trump also has played into it.
I mean, really, like, I'm not I'm not an American hegemony guy.
I'm not a Project for New American Century guy.
But he did decline America's sort of authority in the world.
Right.
Like, even though we were starting to struggle a little bit because of our economic problems, He really drove a stake through that.
I mean, let's talk about the Iranian factor in all of this.
I mean, he submarined the Iran deal.
And who knows what the fuck Iran's going to do in the next few days?
You know, I mean, like again, like if this thing just continues to go like he possibly could have went ahead and set up the dominoes to go somewhere else.
I mean, Trump's presidency Destroyed so much not just credibility, but also that authority and and we don't we still have no clue How that's gonna play out and what repercussions that's going to happen Meanwhile that we're pulling out of Afghanistan and the Taliban are gonna completely take over that region again The last time that happened was we had 9-11.
So yeah, we're we're moving to somewhere which could be I do take a little solace I think in the sense that we were a competent government perhaps is in charge a little bit and And I feel better about how the response would come out from the Biden administration versus the Trump administration.
But it doesn't make me feel like completely great considering how many of these fires are smoldering that could all ignite at once.
I have to say, and this is going to be something we're going to cover in the very near future, the saber rattling against China.
You cannot hear a speech in America right now from an American politician, left, right, Democrat, Republican, without bringing up tensions with China.
And as the economic situation that we talked about continues to collapse, that is going to continue to be heightened.
Because one of the things that America, and we'll talk about this more and more and more, It's the military industrial complex.
You need an enemy.
You need a rival.
And China is that rival.
It's a good reason to pump money into these projects.
It's a good reason to pump money elsewhere and to like raise up the idea of like one identity, you know, nationalistic pride, those types of things.
It's not even about Biden.
That's the problem.
The president obviously has authority over the military.
The military is the military regardless of who is in office.
And they are constantly pushing their own agenda.
They remain there.
Like, yes, you can replace people.
But they call it the blob for a reason.
They continue to do their own thing.
They mission creep, do all this.
And, I mean, Nick, how many war games Simulations have they done thinking about China?
How many different ways have they thought about this thing?
They have prepared for it.
And it's like one of those things where you prepare for it.
The more you prepare for it, the more likely it is to happen.
And so that's game theory and the way that it works out.
And it's a way that these two polar sort of nations come to blows.
So we have to be careful about that.
It doesn't always matter who's in the office because these things are always ramping up, particularly in times of political and economic instability.
Oh, for sure.
With China, what worried me is that we don't really have a proxy war to fight with them.
Although, now that I'm thinking about it, and that was the one I was going to mention, was Hong Kong.
We had seen China ratchet up their oppression over Hong Kong and threaten their democracy.
And that, I mean, it's geographically not probably advantageous to have some sort of a proxy war through that.
And as a result, if you do have any kind of conflict, you're talking about China, capital C, versus United States, you know, capital U.S.
I have to tell you, I think the proxy war of the future, like, you know, there's Hong Kong and Taiwan, obviously, but proxy wars of the future aren't even necessarily about land.
It can be intellectual property.
Yeah.
I mean, the United States and China right now, they're basically beating the shit out of each other, fighting over intellectual property.
And and how these things are treated and and who has dominance over the markets And I mean the the economic thing that Trump started, you know what?
I mean that he actually took it to another level They're still reverberations of that and if it's not bleeding, it's bruised Sure trade wars can start real wars without question and we've seen that in the past So that was what was really concerning about why he wanted to upset that apple cart so much and like kind of burn it down but then also like Man, Donald Trump.
Not do anything to get a deal done before the pandemic happened.
I mean, it was such a mess.
And so, you know, apropos of what Trump was about, which was nothing, which was no organization, no plan.
And, you know, right.
We're going to feel these repercussions for a decade.
Man, Donald Trump.
What a fucking gift that keeps on giving.
Anyway, so again, we're going to wrap this up.
A reminder that we're going to be doing a Patreon-exclusive live show this Thursday, May 13th.
Is that right?
I believe it's May 13th.
Yes, Thursday the 13th.
May 13th at 8 p.m.
Eastern.
To gain access to that, all you have to do is go over to patreon.com slash monkrakepodcast.
We will go ahead and put out a call probably tomorrow for Questions for the show, and then people can come in, log in live.
You'll be able to watch that feed later if you can't make it.
We'll be interacting with people during that.
We'll do our usual Weekender shtick, plus also question and answers.
We're looking forward to hanging out with everybody.
If you haven't already joined the Montgomery community, like, great group of people.
They hang out.
They're good to each other.
They're having conversations about Hegel over on the Discord, Nick.
They're talking about philosophy and economics.
Smart group of people.
Go hang out with them.
It's better than Twitter and Facebook combined, I have to tell you.
But if you need us until next time, hopefully by the way, this thing in Israel cools down, my god.
If you need us until then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
