When Democrats Actively Try To Lose The House & Senate
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss Senator Joe Manchin's reluctance to do away with the Jim Crow Fillibuster in order to protect our democracy. Plus, they break down the G7's decision to impose a universal corporate tax and the possible ramifications.
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That election will go down as the crime of the century and our country is being destroyed by people who perhaps have no right to destroy it.
I'm going to continue to keep working with my bipartisan friends and hopefully we can get more of them.
Hey everybody, welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Sexton, here as always with Nick Kalsman.
We got a lot of things to talk about today.
We got a lot of momentous situations occurring that are showing us, unfortunately Nick, probably some future paths that our country, our economics, and our politics are going to head down.
Um, this gives me no joy, but we have to start in the, uh, actually the beautiful state of West Virginia.
I'll just say like West Virginia, beautiful.
Beautiful, beautiful state.
Unfortunately, they have a real piece of shit senator in the name of Joe Manchin, and Joe Manchin has revealed himself to be the Joe Manchin that we all knew that he was.
It gives me no great pleasure, Nick, to tell the people that hopes that he would be a part of the solution or make anything better.
Those hopes were ill-founded.
I mean, for him to reject the notion of protecting the integrity of our elections across the country, we should get him out of there, right?
He needs to just sort of not be in that position.
But the problem is, if he were not to be in that seat, then it's somebody along the lines of a horrible Republican.
But by the way, is that even worse?
Probably not.
At this point, let's just be straight-up honest.
And I want to go ahead because we've been getting new listeners.
We've got new people paying attention to the show.
Welcome, by the way.
We hope you're... I'm putting quotes around enjoying the listen.
But they would enjoy the Patreon that we have as well.
They would enjoy patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast where you get an extra episode every week.
But I will also say that just to go ahead and make a thesis clear to draw a line in the sand for people who are kind of wondering what's going on and I'm going to read the statement from Joe Manchin here in a second.
We need to make it clear.
Just because an individual identifies as a Democrat does not mean that they are the exact opposite of a Republican.
It doesn't mean that they are a hero, a savior, or a messiah.
There are problems on the Democratic part of the aisle.
They've been involved in an economic consensus for decades now.
So we need to go ahead and make that clear.
And Joe Manchin is not your friend.
He is, in immortal words, he is who we thought that he was.
Right, but Trump has told us that all these Democrats are vicious and they band together in an incredible way and they're in lockstep with each other.
Of course, they're just a huge conspiracy.
And let's go ahead and look at what Senator Manchin said in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.
Quote, unquote.
I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy.
Now, I'm going to stop with that clause real fast, Nick.
If you are worried about partisan attempts to restrict voting in this country, what should you do?
You should work to protect that.
You should work to protect voting from partisan attempts to disenfranchise people.
Nick, can you check your notes?
Who is attempting to disenfranchise Americans right now?
Wait, let me check.
The Republicans.
The Republicans.
And that's why we're going to go ahead and finish this clause.
I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy.
And for that reason, I will vote against the For the People Act.
Furthermore, I will not vote to weaken or eliminate the filibuster.
Nick, you know, I knew that this was coming.
I knew he was going to do this.
It doesn't make it any less frustrating.
It doesn't, you know, make me any less pissed off to hear Manchin using this twisting puzzle logic.
It makes absolutely no sense except for the fact that Joe Manchin is not at all concerned with Americans' ability to vote.
Here's what really kind of shook me was so let's just picture how this kind of works.
He's probably believing that he's representing the people of West Virginia to some degree, right?
He obviously wants to continue to win there.
So you go to a town hall or you have your phones open and you're listening to the you're reading your emails from constituents.
And it sounds to him as if all the huge swath of people in his state really want him to vote against this.
And so he feels like he's representing it.
But then When you discover that a place like the Heritage Foundation has sponsored these kind of movements to influence him, and when they have these in-person things, which are, you know, powerful.
You know, Trump seems, when he has his rallies, he feels like this is the entire world speaking to him.
They would bring people in from other states to be this big voice and this impressive, you know, movement against the For the People Act and against eliminating the filibuster.
That is what's so concerning to me is that he's like probably thinking that he's just representing his people in his state when he's not.
It's not even close.
Well, and I want to go ahead and say this too.
Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona are the two most outspoken proponents of holding up the filibuster.
And so everyone is on the same page.
The filibuster has been used over and over and over again, particularly to maintain white supremacy in America.
That is the main reason that the filibuster is there.
I thought it was actually really telling that Manchin said in his editorial that this is a tool that has protected the Democratic Party in the past.
Well, I don't think he meant that white supremacy back when the Democratic Party was the main proponent of white supremacy in America and slavery, but that is no less true.
Now Manchin and Sinema are of course the two most outspoken proponents of keeping the filibuster.
That doesn't mean that we know that other Democrats wouldn't, right?
We know that those are the two who, because of Arizona and West Virginia, they can be the most outspoken about that.
We do not know who in the Democratic Party is interested in protecting voting rights.
Yeah, there's a gerrymandering part of this thing.
There's a disenfranchising part of this thing.
But there's also a group of people, and I'm glad that you brought up the Heritage Foundation on this, who by the way are just, they're on like a 48-hour bender right now celebrating the fact that not only did they reinforce Joe Manchin's political opinions, but this pretty much disables any opportunity for the Democratic Party to make widespread change at this point.
It makes 2022 Nick, that's big.
Now, the main shot that the Democratic Party had of holding the majority in 2022 and possibly the White House in 2024 was massive widespread change, right?
It was a moonshot program to change the way that the country worked as opposed to being drug in the mud with the Republican Party and basically the Republican Party possibly regaining a majority in the White House.
In this case, The Heritage Foundation has won out.
The corporations of the country have won out.
And these are the forces that have chipped away at all of these different things, including the Democratic Party.
This was a resounding win for the aristocracy in the United States of America.
Right.
I was going to say, all in the name of, you know, lower taxes.
Like, it's like there's a root here of something in terms of governance.
That doesn't seem worth it, right?
When you boil it down to what they're really trying to accomplish here.
I mean, I know white supremacy is the overlying cloud over this whole thing.
In practice, right, it's like, well, lower taxes is what we have to have.
And we can't have, you know, weird people in the military.
Otherwise, what are they arguing here for?
What is this about?
Well, so white supremacy is also a tool to an end, right?
It's a means of, it's a means of impressing a hierarchy on society as a whole, right?
So you have like white supremacy here and then all of a sudden you have everybody down here and everybody lords over.
That automatically cuts the population up into pies, right?
And then if you actually go back through American history, And you look at times like, I don't know, the Confederacy, when you start to realize that if you actually read the writings of the people who ruled during the Confederacy, they're like, oh, there's nothing better than white supremacy because it enforces a strict caste system.
Right?
Back in medieval times, it was called the Great Chain of Being.
It was like, oh, everybody has their station.
Everybody has their rank.
You stay within your rank.
And some people, by the way, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, are born You know what I mean?
people, right?
It's just natural.
It's a hereditary thing.
So when you start to do that, it starts to dismantle the idea of democracy.
Because here's the thing, in the United States of America, from the very beginning, you don't want a lot of people voting.
Do you know what I mean?
Because they're not capable.
They don't understand, Nick.
They don't get it.
And I'm using the founders' words here.
They're liable to make mistakes, right?
I believe one of the founders said it's like trusting a matter of sight to a blind man.
Right.
And by the way, that's the founder, if you're pissed off.
That's a founder of the United States of America.
So on one hand, it is lower taxes, but on the other hand, it is literally about the dismantling of the democratic system of power.
It's about making sure that people don't get in the way of the better people and maintaining rule and law and profit and all of those means of oppression.
But whatever happened to land of opportunity?
You know, I was just kind of mulling this over because my son is a really big proponent of communism and he's always trying to debate whether communism is better than capitalism, right?
It's interesting.
He's coming out hot.
Oh, I know.
Listen, he'll have to come on the show one of these days and he'll discuss it.
But I was kind of thinking like in a communist, in a pure communist state, like you don't get a chance to choose like what career you want to have, right?
You don't have that kind of complete, you know, like Right now, if you want to come out of college and you can choose a career and whatever you want to do, if it makes you happy, you can at least try that and see if you can do that before you have to go to the factory and kill yourself in a coal mine the rest of your life.
But the point being that it sounds a little bit like the same thing here.
The founding fathers under the guise of like what capitalism was going to be like, but still was going to want to keep certain people in their place where they can't Yeah, so a couple things we need to do here.
And again, this is going back to the red versus blue, left versus right dynamic.
We have to go ahead and get rid of dichotomies, right?
Like you either believe in the freedom to vote or you don't believe in it.
Like I have to imagine.
That when Joe Manchin lays his dumb head on a pillow at night, he's like, good job, Joe.
You really you you you you're out there fighting the good fight.
And meanwhile, he's looking at the money he's bringing in because he's fighting the good fight.
Right.
It's a delusional type thing.
There are tons of Democrats who feel that way.
They have for years thought that the idea of a meritocracy existed.
Right.
If you worked hard, if you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, if you were smart, This, by the way, is called the noble lie for anybody keeping track.
This is an old Plato idea, which is you'll have the ruling elites who take care of everything, right?
And they are born into the noble elite.
And then everybody else, they have a chance to prove themselves.
They could rise up through the ranks.
But guess what?
If they don't, Nick, what's that mean about them?
Why would you tell me?
That means that they weren't worth it.
That they didn't deserve, right?
And as a result, if they're poor, they earn that poverty.
They earn that suffering.
So, I have to assume that Joe Manchin and others within the Democratic Party who feel this way, they believe in a meritocracy.
They really, truly believe that America is the land of opportunity and it works.
The problem is that these assholes over here at the Heritage Foundation, the people that they represent and the corporations, They don't believe in a meritocracy.
Maybe they do after a few scotches, but they truly believe.
It's like going out to gamble, but having the dice loaded.
You know, they want it tailored to their interests.
They don't want to have any chances based on that.
And there's an inherent, um, incoherence to that because then if you don't have a meritocracy, things go to shit real fast.
You don't have innovation.
You don't have things getting better.
They kind of stagnate.
You start having scions to wealth like Donald Trump.
Winning the presidency, even though he's never been good at anything.
He inherited everything.
But it is a giant clusterfuck of a situation.
And this message that he's not going to vote for this, it is going to affect millions of people.
millions, if not tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of people.
It's going to hold America back and it's going to hurt our economy.
It's going to hurt our culture.
And I don't care what he tells himself when he goes to sleep.
This is disgusting.
Well, there is no greater example that we do not live in a meritocracy than Trump becoming president.
That is, that is, so I love how I love how you said that and you framed that because that's exactly how we need.
If we needed any proof, it's right there.
You know, Trump would spend his entire presidency lobbying McConnell to get rid of the filibuster, right?
He wanted to get rid of the filibuster so he could jam all this shit he wanted to get through as well.
So it's like, you know, we can't have any more outrage over the hypocrisy of the Republican Party, right?
We just, it's, there's no more outrage left to give because we, it's, you know, you just sound naive if you want to express that.
By the way, I want to say this and I, right now, do you watch C-SPAN?
Do you ever like, do you ever turn on the, ever turn on C-SPAN?
Not really.
Not really.
I can't say.
It's a rough hang.
It's a rough hang.
I will just say that our representatives are oftentimes a flummoxing group of individuals who don't know how to speak, don't know how to think, don't know how to vote.
It's a big mess.
But I will tell you that sometimes you'll turn on C-SPAN and you'll turn on and that, you know, we saw this back on January 6th.
This was one of the things that like made me lose my mind.
On January 6th, of course, these hallowed halls, and we have always operated with decorum, and we are a deliberative, beautiful, ethical body.
Nick, they used to beat the shit out of each other on the floor of Congress, right?
We have to uphold the filibuster.
Do you know how many times the filibuster has been gotten right?
rid of in order to push agendas multiple times.
And I don't know about you, but the actual assault on democracy that we're dealing with right now, and by the way, I have to tell you, it's gotten so extensive, and I keep an eye on this stuff, an eagle eye, if you will, on this shit.
Before we started taping, you told me about an egregious assault on democracy that I hadn't even heard of because it's so widespread and so blatant at this point that it's becoming normalized.
If anybody actually cares about elections being held, people being able to vote at all, Now is the time to pass something sweeping and broad and bold because this shit, I mean, the horse is about out of the barn.
I mean, it really is.
I wish we could just somehow, you know, the filibuster I think is some sort of French word about pirates and whatnot.
Why can't we, the Republicans would instantly hate that if you could tell them that it's French, you know, but they didn't hate that the Russians involved in the election in 2016 either.
I suppose they're beyond that anyway.
But yes, to see what happened in Pennsylvania, as reported in the Washington Post today, they did a secret covert audit of a county.
One of the Republican-controlled counties was like, yeah, sure, come on in.
It'll be voluntary.
We won't have to pay for it.
Just come on in.
Here are the machines.
You can have them at your disposal, by yourself, whatever you want to do, and go through the votes, and count all the ballots, and go through the mail-in ballots too.
Just have at it.
See what happens.
This is in like late December, early January.
Do you know what they found?
What I, by the way, I just had in the midst of you talking about this, I just had a vision of something really awful that I'm going to elucidate for a moment.
Yeah.
I just like, I just, I just, I just almost went into a fugue state thinking about it.
Go, go ahead.
I'll, I'll elucidate on that.
What did they find?
They find nothing.
It was a very nice report.
The report gets buried and doesn't get publicized at all.
But interestingly enough, somehow they were able to dig up the revisions of the report and how there were changes.
Because after the report was written by this company that says, you know, everything is nothing to see here.
Everything is up and up and very well run election.
They then add at the end of that saying, well, that doesn't mean that there wasn't fraud with some of the machines, even though you just said you went through all machines and you went through all the mail-in ballots and everything look kosher.
There still could be something in there.
Now, this was funded by a company that if you try and trace it all back, we discover who the person is funding it.
And it's your friend and mine, Sidney Powell, who was in the midst of, if we can't remember that long ago in January.
It was in the midst of all these ridiculous lawsuits that continue to get shot down one after the other.
And then until she finally went off the rails.
She was she was too far off the rails for Trump.
That he had a disowner.
And, uh, but that's what happened.
And so that, by the way, speaking of the connect us to the Arizona, one of the companies that's doing this audit, cause it's, it's multiple companies.
This is so hot.
This is how crazy this is in Arizona.
They brought in like three or four of these companies to kind of come in there and fight each other to do this audit all together.
One of the companies is the one that did this thing in Pennsylvania and they got it because they did it in Pennsylvania.
Like they had already had some experience doing this.
So this is all coming out and it's all supposed to like then influence New York.
Which is shocking to me because New York never really was on my radar for a recount.
And then, you know, nonetheless, speaking of like all the other Republican controlled counties across the country, this is scary stuff because this is where you're going to continue to foment the doubt in our in our elections, which is basically our democracy.
First things first, Filbuster is Dutch.
Check this out.
Oh, it's Dutch?
Okay.
But it's about pirates, right?
Yes, and I want to say real fast that I think the Republicans might be okay with that because the Dutch are partly the innovators of modern capitalism.
So I think they'd be alright with that.
And the Dutch love it.
Wow.
That was a lot.
I didn't expect that.
There's a lot of surprises taking place.
Much like that.
I will say, though, that on this front, and this is something I think, I think, and I know this is a shocker that our media doesn't get this or really wrap their heads around it.
The big lie is not just about 2020.
Like, they're not going to overturn the election of 2020.
That's not going to happen.
They're not going to overturn it.
They're not going to award all the electoral votes to Donald Trump.
He's not going to be reinstated in August unless there is a violent coup attempt.
That is the only way that that happens.
It's not going to happen through legal means or any of these things that Sidney Powell is going in front of QAnon audiences at this point.
And by the way, you'll hear it in what she says to them.
Because the QAnon messaging has completely shifted.
Now it's not about Q. The message now, Nick, are you ready for this?
Because remember it used to be trust the plan, right?
Now it's you're the plan.
So all of a sudden it makes individual action, collective action, and violence more possible.
Well, so this is about getting ready for 2022.
2024 and any future elections.
It's getting the Republican Party ready to deny any electoral process that doesn't go the way that they want.
And again, the horse is out of the barn on that.
The only way that you could even begin to do anything about it is to pass some sort of federal reform that will rein in so-called red states.
Because all of those red states, and by the way, I live in the blue state of Georgia, Right.
Which is where a lot of this has gone on and where they're already going after their secretary of state and saying there's widespread fraud.
Some guy just came up the other day and said that if they hadn't disenfranchised people in Texas, Texas would have went blue.
Right?
Arizona went blue.
All of these states are in danger of losing their majorities and losing their power.
And if you think that the stuff that people are saying on the national level, that they're not saying it on the state level and the local level, you're out of your mind.
That's why the federal government needs to pass something to get this in order.
Now, the thing that crossed my mind, Nick, and it makes my blood run cold, Is if they're going to find a solution to this thing, because we're talking about shared society, right?
We're talking about whether or not a person can go into a voting booth and press a, press a button or pull a lever and make their choice anonymously.
I am really afraid.
And it just made me realize that they're going to totally look for a market solution in this.
They are going to hand this process because now that that businesses are getting involved in it.
They're going to look to hand this over to any one of the major corporations that has started to become like completely integrated in the military, in state secrets, state technology.
All that shit.
We're talking about either Google or Apple or one of those people coming in to take over the process of voting so they can come to some sort of a solution.
Which, by the way, for anyone keeping track who's listening to this podcast, and welcome new listeners, anyone who's listening, that is a hell.
That is a L that I'm talking about.
That toe is already dipped completely into that.
It's already there.
Yeah.
I mean, think about like Dominion Voting Systems.
That is what you're talking about.
It's it's at that far fetched then make a next jump saying, OK, well, let them actually like, you know, I mean, they're tabulating the votes.
It's like they are doing what you're describing.
The only worry I suppose you have is that it's going to be like maybe one company across the entire I hate this conversation.
I hate it.
Yeah, then it's forget it.
So the only possible way you can say this is work is that if we have enough companies, it's only a couple, right?
Two or three.
There's Dominion.
There's a few others.
I hate this conversation.
Yes.
I hate it.
I hate this conversation so much right now.
Well, here's what's even more interesting, which might give you some faith, is that, you know, you might say, oh, what the hell would a federal law do on these local elections and the local election process?
Like, you know, we can't get Trump in prison for the shit he's done.
And meanwhile, these federal laws are going to do anything.
But here's the actual answer to that.
They actually did work, like until Roberts struck down the main parts in 2010 of the Voting Rights Act.
Like, it kept these southern states in line.
And if they did try the shenanigans, it had to be approved by the federal government, which they were never going to do.
And it seemed to work.
Now, we're in a different time 11 years later.
So maybe it doesn't work like that anymore.
But at the very least, there is some precedent that the federal government can put in restraints and force these local elections to be run in a certain way.
But you're right, if we don't get this thing done now, here's the thing, I don't even know if it matters if we can get a free and fair election for 2022 because if we look at the past at all, they're losing the House as it is.
The House is lost.
There's just no way.
It would be so unprecedented that they would win it, or keep it, excuse me, that I don't even know what we do about that because they're still going to be able to get in there between 2022 and 2024.
I think he will.
If I had to put money on it right now, I would say he probably will.
You know, it's concerning.
And by the way, is Biden going to even run again in 2020, in 24?
I think he will.
If I had to put money on it right now, I would say he probably will.
But I do I do have to talk about 2024 and beyond at this moment, because this is an important moment of reflection and understanding.
I think everyone thought that, oh, if we can just get Ossoff and Warnock in there, like it'll be totally fine.
Biden won.
We'll get Ossoff and Warnock in there.
That's not how this works.
It's not how this works, because here is what has happened in this country.
And we've talked about it and we've talked about it, but it remains no less true.
We have a political elite in this country that is First and foremost, dedicated to retaining status quo.
They like where things are.
They don't want big giant changes.
They don't want an influx of things.
We're even hearing talk now that because of like this, and we've covered it before, this shift in the power between labor and employers.
Laborers have the advantage right now.
They absolutely do.
Their wages are going up.
People are courting them.
They're trying to bring them in.
You know, they're trying to Like, actually get people to staff their kitchens and their factories, and they're having a hard time.
They have the advantage.
Well, guess what's now being said?
Well, we don't think the employment benefits need to go much longer than fall.
Right?
Because the point of the government is to maintain the market.
It's to maintain the economic status quo.
If we start pushing infrastructure bills, right?
This is why Manchin isn't doing this shit.
This is why Sinema isn't doing it.
Any of the Democrats who aren't coming out more aggressively about the filibuster.
They don't want to put a bunch of money into infrastructure.
They don't want people getting used to the government actually helping them, right?
Because once you start thinking about that, all of a sudden the jig is up.
And what we're actually having a conversation about, and this is the next thing, unfortunately, that we have to talk about, and it's a much larger, weirder, esoteric thing, is that in times of hypercapitalism, like we're in right now, corporations, they don't just gain up their profits.
They buy off political bodies.
And that's what's happening right now.
Like, if you were to make Joe Manchin wear all of his corporate interests, he would look like a NASCAR driver.
I mean, and by the way, maybe that's what should happen.
Maybe they should have to wear like those track suits where they're like showing off which corporations and private interests own them.
But that is what has happened.
We have reached a point where there's so much power and there's so much money on one side of the scale that they have co-opted the actual mechanics of government.
And as we've talked about in the past, they have come to outgrow the state.
And we have to report on that today because there's been an interesting move here.
And that was from the G7.
And for those who don't know, the G7, so this is Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, England, and the U.S.
This is where they come together to discuss politics, but mostly economics.
Right.
And should we remind everybody why that's not a G8 right now?
Would you like to do that?
Sure, I mean, you know, our old pals, the Russians, when they went into Ukraine, that was what, now I'm forgetting exactly what, but they were the G8.
Yeah, and so because of that, they got kicked out of the G8 and our Trump, remember, he spent time trying to get them back in, you know, without any penalties or anything like that.
So anyway, with the G7 now, it's better, it rings better, it sounds better up there.
So this is a network where you can get all the nations together.
And by the way, it's really interesting because it's not the United Nations, which is where you'd think all the nations would get together and discuss this stuff.
No, this is specifically so this block.
Can come together and sort of compare notes and decide things.
Well, what has happened is as they're meeting in London right now, these financial leaders within the governments of the G7 have come together and they came to a really interesting agreement.
And this is one of those things that unfortunately went under the radar because our media is just so bad at this.
They are just so bad at covering this stuff and understanding context.
They came together and all of these countries agreed to what they're calling a basement level tax on multinational corporations.
And they're putting it at 15%, which is nothing by the way.
It's nothing.
But it is an agreement.
It's almost like, to put it in terms maybe people would understand more, it's collusion is what we're talking about.
It's a bunch of baseball teams getting together in a room and being like, hey, we're going to like do this.
So everybody get on the same page.
And the reason they're doing that is because the old system existed where like if the United States tried to tax a company, Well, that company would say, uh, hasta la vista, and then they would go ahead and move their headquarters somewhere else, preferably to a tax shelter or some other country where they could exploit labor and money and these resources.
And the corporations would make the nations compete over this shit.
This agreement is an acknowledgement by the major nations of the world that corporations have eclipsed them.
They have gotten way too big, and if they don't try and get this thing under control, we might be heading into some really weird, really terrible territory.
I mean, this is just the microcosm of what we see in the U.S.
here by itself, right?
We see states competing with each other for all sorts of things like that and tax breaks and whatnot.
So it's funny because to me, it sounds like, OK, this is either it could be a good thing, right, to finally, you know, sort of sticking to some of the corporations and make it a little bit more of a level playing field.
It certainly puts more money in the coffers, in theory, like if this is going to if certain countries did not have that, you know, that basement floor.
Why would it be important for nations right now to have more money in their coffers?
What's going on politically in the world right now?
Just in America, for instance, what's happening with the fact that the government can't pay for human projects and can't pay for infrastructure?
What happens?
Oh, well, the defaults can happen and you can have a big stock market crash, if you will, or if that were to happen, then we're really screwed.
You could have a crash or, I don't know, people start picking up guns and going to the Capitol and trying to take over the government.
We have talked about this, and for those who haven't gone back, you should go back and listen to the episode where we talked about the intelligence report, 2040, like what challenges face in the next 20 years.
These governments have come to the realization that because they've been hobbled by corporations, and it was in that report, they said it explicitly, because they've been hobbled by these corporations and unable to tax them and bring in any sort of money whatsoever for projects, Because corporations have used countries as bodies.
They've used their welfare, they've used their subsidies, they've used their tax breaks, all of that stuff to grow larger and larger and larger.
If they don't bring some money in, shit's gonna hit the fan, and soon.
I mean, this is... they don't like to mess with this stuff.
You know, they don't like to they don't like to spook the markets.
You know, my argument always used to be or was, you know, when faced with rising costs for whatever, be it taxes or goods to produce, you simply pass that cost on to your consumer.
And there's a big deal.
You kind of wash your hands and launder it that way.
It doesn't seem to be a compelling argument, certainly not to the Republicans who rail against taxes, because you know, when they they always say, well, it'll put businesses, people out of business, when in reality, all they have to do is, you know, we talk about this, they'll charge, you know, 10 cents more for their fries and then they can stay in business.
It doesn't seem like that is a factor to these corporations.
And so I suppose your concern now is that the corporations are gonna have to try and fight back on this.
But how would you fight back against the G7?
It seems like that's an entity that's not really... If they're gonna band together like this, I don't know how they get the leverage back.
I'm sorry, Nick.
I wasn't paying attention.
I was reading this article titled, Jeff Bezos is going to space on first crewed flight of rocket.
Okay.
I'm sorry.
Oh, I'm sorry.
We're live.
Yeah.
How are they going to maintain their profit and their way of life when you have people who are so moneyed at this point that they have their own personal space programs and plans to colonize other planets?
In a sane world, they would take the L. You know what I mean?
They would just say, oh, by the way, it kind of looks like we have so feasted upon these countries, right?
And populations.
They would have a moment where they would say, you know, we have just billions upon billions upon billions of dollars.
It's enough.
Right.
But it can't be.
That's the problem with capitalism.
And all of them looked at their bottom line, record profits, and they're like, we got to do better.
How do we do better?
How do we crush people?
How do we do this?
And so it's an incoherence of capitalism.
There's no way to do it.
So what do you do at this point?
And we keep talking about this.
The only thing that they can do is that they can interfere in the political process.
This 15% basement tax is not done, right?
Like, it's going to have to be, like, oh my god, it's going to be such a pain in the ass trying to make this happen.
Like, you have to go and you have to take it to the other countries to make sure that they're not going to do it.
That way, you know, Apple isn't like, hey Sri Lanka, how are you?
Let's talk, right?
So you got to get everybody else on board, which by the way is going to be a hell of a thing because competition is a natural deterrence here.
And what you were saying, to put it in a local or regional idea, it's like Texas.
Texas has it all over people because they're like, Hey, don't worry about it.
No income tax.
Come on down to Texas.
It's the Texas miracle, right?
Uh, you know, and the South has done this too.
The South is continually said to Northern manufacturing.
Hey, we're not going to enforce regulation and we're not going to let them have, you know, unions.
There's no way.
So like bring your stuff down here.
So you have the states competing with each other.
Who loses in that?
The worker.
The worker always in the communities that get hollowed out.
Well, in this case, you're going to have to also get these taxes approved.
So how, as a corporation, do you handle this stuff?
Let's take our old friends, the Koch brothers, who, by the way, played a huge role in trying to get somebody like a Joe Manchin to not approve Voter reform, right?
And to protect voting.
Well, what do you do?
The Koch brothers, for instance, in order to change American politics forever and to create a more conducive political environment, spent millions upon millions upon millions of dollars in 2010 to fund, push and direct and strategize the Tea Party movement, push and direct and strategize the Tea Party movement, which used racial paranoia, political paranoia.
It used all of those things to create this idea that the government should not be taxing people, right?
And the government was out of control.
The government needed to be opposed.
And on top of that, it made use of conspiracy theories.
You astroturf a movement.
You and it's not.
And by the way, that's what the Republican Party is there to do.
The Republican Party is an organ of these people.
That's the only thing that they're capable of doing.
And they're going to do it by talking about tyranny, and they're going to do it by talking about white supremacist paranoia.
Well, you know, for so long, the Republican Party was obstructionist.
They really couldn't do anything.
They didn't want to do anything.
We saw this when they had control of everything in 2016.
But I don't know.
It sounds like that's changing now, because at least, at the very least, they're going to change how we vote, right?
This is something they're going to actually get through.
Aside from the one tax cut they did.
That's interesting to me.
All of a sudden, this zombie party, which again, in 2016, was dead.
Hillary Clinton was going to win.
Both the House and the Senate were going to be Democrat.
It was going to be another 40, 50 years of a reign by the Democrats because of how poorly run out of the Tea Party movement really kind of destroyed their party.
We're getting more and more of these long term Republicans like Stuart Stevens and Charlie Sykes and all these guys really acknowledging that this is all a sham.
Yet here we are on the precipice of this party not only going to take back the House, they're probably going to take back the Senate and they're going to then forever change the rules.
It was already bad enough that there was a... Here's the thing, if you were to talk to even moderate Republicans and you try and tell them that in the last 11 or 12 years there's been a systemic attack on our voting and you have the receipts to prove it across the country, they won't believe you.
Right.
I don't think that they're going to believe you when you say that, because we've seen it in Wisconsin and Georgia.
I mean, I'm talking about not talking about 2020.
I'm talking about how they gerrymandered these districts and how they made sure that certain people weren't allowed to vote even then, 10 years ago.
The census is another thing that came out and we're realizing how they try to muck with.
This is a really, you gotta hand it to them because for however horrible they are at actually legislating and being in power to help people, which is clearly not what they want to do anyway, they really have this diabolical monologue going that really ends up being, you know, this is the 4D chess we've been accusing Trump of playing.
Yeah, but they're not playing the chess.
That's the whole thing.
It feels like an incoherence.
The Republican Party isn't playing the 40 chess.
The Republican Party is really bad at this.
Okay, so it's the Koch brothers who are doing it.
It's people like the Koch brothers.
It's people who don't want a 15% multinational tax.
So for instance, do you even for a second Think that if Donald Trump was president, that we'd be hearing about a G8 decision for a 15% minimum tax on corporations?
Never.
No way.
No!
They would have walked out of that meeting before the meeting ever began!
This is the whole point.
Everyone's like, why can't they see beyond Trump?
Trump was an incredibly useful idiot for these people.
And corporations understood that he was an idiot.
They understood that he was disgusting.
But guess what he did?
He messed shit up.
And he wasn't going to build a border.
He wasn't going to drain the swamp.
All he did was sell off America for spare parts and pass major tax cuts.
That's all that they wanted there.
So the question at this point, and I want to go ahead and say because I have to tell you, The last episode that we did where we were talking about QAnon and we were talking about Flynn and the coup, that was a rough hang.
This is not a good hang either.
This is rough stuff.
So I want to go ahead and say this real fast before we move forward in this episode, and this is very important.
2020 was a breath.
That's all it was.
It was like, Okay, now we can catch our breath.
We've been in the middle of this thing.
Now we have to regroup.
If you want actual change in this country, we have to start forming grassroots organizations.
We have to start finding people who are not of that democratic ilk.
We need to replace people like Joe Manchin and Sinema.
And all of the leadership who's not interested in doing what's necessary.
You need to start finding the new batch of politicians who will actually take this fight to the fight because this is not going to work.
It's going to get really bad.
We need to find the people who can put their pants on forward and not backwards.
If that is, I will tell you what it is.
It is a relief to have a president of the United States who knows how to put their pants on and doesn't.
Oh, my God.
What a disaster.
Well, for what it's worth, and we're referring to this video that came out of Trump speaking at a convention at Hootenanny.
It appears that, you know, I think he was just wearing pants that didn't have a zipper.
Or it was doctored.
I kind of tried to study the video.
It looked like maybe it was blurred a little bit.
Were you breaking it down?
You're breaking it down like NBA playoffs?
I love doing that, especially when it comes to Trump and his, the way he, his gait and all sorts of interesting, you know, clues.
But nonetheless, it was hard to ignore the fact that there was some bulge.
And some very strange wrinkles and no zipper on the pants.
Anyway, it was it's just serves to remind us of what we went through.
Oh, he's absolutely terrible.
And by the way, like he he was slipping when he was in office.
And it's just it's next level stuff.
Right.
I have to tell you, watching.
Watching.
Progressive leftist movies or movements in this country and watching this whole thing about even a corporate tax, which 15% they should just take the L. You know what I mean?
Just take it.
Just pay the 15% tax.
So there's not rising, uh, really polarization and human misery, but they can't do it.
So what that tells me, particularly with where Trump is, Trump was a useful idiot.
He was just a guy who could go out in front and say some dumb shit and then he could, you know, like pass tax cuts or sign the bill or whatever.
Well, now we're talking about like the rubber meeting the road, man.
And we're talking about possible economies starting to fall apart.
We're talking about possible actual progressive leftist movements gaining some traction.
They're not going to fuck around with that.
And we've been telling people Trump was one thing, but probably a harbinger of something worse.
And they're going to look for a hatchet man, particularly if things start getting hard.
They're going to look for somebody serious, and it almost always moves towards the direction of fascism, because that is the natural alliance.
And the Republican Party is ready and willing, and the demographics at this point, what we've talked about, the historic unpopularity, these elections, they're ready to burn this thing down and just say, hey, I know this doesn't look good, but here we are.
This is what we're doing.
I mean there's no better example of that than what Pence said this weekend where he comes out.
It was actually like this is good stand-up comedy at some point if it's comedy it's tragedy plus time it becomes comedy at some point.
He literally just describes how horrible the January 6th insurrection was and clearly acknowledges what was going on and then he terms The relationship between him and Trump over this over that day as, quote, not seeing eye to eye like that.
Oh, it was like, you know, he's a Cubs fan and Trump is a Cardinals fan like that.
We just don't see eye to eye on this.
But talk about a guy who is so, the cynical nature of this thing, where he is so hellbent on trying to run.
I don't think Pence has a chance in 2024, but he clearly is, but he is a frontrunner at this point.
But it's been impressive to watch him.
It's like that movie where the guy's walking on the wire in between the trade center towers.
Like, I've never, this is as brazen an attempt that I've ever seen to be completely corrupt and amoral and unethical.
Well, speaking of Mike Pence, just some linguistic directness.
January 6th was not only a coup attempt, it was an attempted assassination of Mike Pence.
It was.
It was an attempt by supporters of Donald Trump to assassinate the vice president, his vice president.
I have to tell you, so I mentioned this on The Weekender last week, and by the way, if you're not subscribed on patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast and not getting The Weekender, I don't know what you're doing because it's a good show.
You should do it.
We were talking about it, like I was getting ready to do a little bit of traveling, and I have to tell you about some weird shit I saw on the road then.
Like last time, it was QAnon stuff.
You know what I mean?
Like just a ton of QAnon stuff as I was heading up to Indiana.
I saw, okay, so going back to the pins thing.
I saw a couple of instances of the Trump Pence sign or the Trump Pence bumper sticker where people have just crossed out Pence.
Oh, interesting.
Like they've just they have just taken like a marker or electrical tape and they've just put it over the Pence name, which if you do that, You have obviously not only, like, become red-pilled and black-pilled toward the conspiracy theory of Stop the Steal and the idea that Mike Pence was a part of it, you were okay with the fact that Donald Trump tried to get his vice president killed, right?
I mean, that's what you were signaling that to the world.
Well, it wasn't like they built like a gallows or anything for him.
Oh my god.
And I'll tell you the other thing that I saw so much of.
It was not just fascist iconography, which is, it's been around for forever.
These skulls and these pictures of like militaristic violence or whatever.
The amount of Christian nationalist fascistic iconography, Nick, has just exploded.
I mean it has, it's everywhere.
What does that look like?
Uh, in one case, you have the actual, like, Punisher's skull in front of America, but now they've started painting, like, the cross on the skull.
Uh, you know, you now have, uh, there's, there's this, the black and white American flag.
You know what I'm talking about?
The one that you see and you're like... Yeah, I'm picturing, like, Trump on the cross or something.
Well, no, now it's, like, the cross taken out of the flag.
And then on top of it, you've obviously got pictures of You've obviously got pictures of AK-47s.
You've got, you know, all kinds of different kinds of things.
So, but I have to imagine that you also, independent, like the bumper sticker stuff, going into Iowa must have been a lot of other interesting experiences as well, or, you know, with people, I can imagine, right?
Do you know what the damnedest thing about it is?
Like, I talked about this back in 2016.
I don't know if you and I talked about it, Booz.
Like, maybe you read about it too.
Like, there was this thing where it was like, Trump's campaign couldn't get yard signs out.
Like they couldn't even get the logistics of sending yard signs around the country.
So like that didn't end it.
They actually just started making their own.
Yeah.
And so what I saw particularly, it's like this weird stuff, like tons of, tons of, of, of signs that people have made.
And like, you've got billboards on one hand, they're like, uh, everyone has to answer to God, even Democrats.
So, like, you see that.
And then, of course, there's just, like, houses where, like, people have, like, painted Trump on their houses and on their barns.
Just, like, big giant things, big made-up signs, you know, like, reinstall Trump, America needs Trump, get Trump back now.
I mean, it is, it's widespread.
And the whole point of why I'm talking about this, and this is the important thing, There are going to be so many shadow operators over the next year or more that they are going to continue to play these people and they're just gonna pluck their strings and their paranoia not just through Fox News but online avenues and the Republican Party.
I mean you have Matt Gaetz who's fighting for his political life right now by spreading conspiracy theories and calling for like violent uprisings.
It's not done, is what I'll say.
And I'm sorry to tell everyone that, but this thing is not even close to being done.
We're at the end of the beginning, is what I would say.
And I know that that's exhausting, but we have to keep understanding that and keep fighting it.
Because it is.
It is a really gnarly thing that we're butting up against.
Right.
And just the historical nature of the likelihood of them winning the House and probably the Senate as well really tells you that we're not done at all.
In fact, we could be on the precipice of going the other direction, that anything we might have felt in 2020 is going to go the exact opposite for a long time.
Again, it's just amazing how in 2016, it really felt like that was the corner that we had turned.
And fucking, you know, the investigation into her emails comes up seven days before the thing and then the Russians.
It's it's it's incredible how some some things no one probably could have fathomed very much in 2015 all came down.
And and we're now on the we're about to turn the corner and we have a choice which direction to go.
And I mean, how how long would it be if they got control of the House and Senate in 2022?
How do they do they lose power for for any time soon?
That's a hell of a question.
I mean, here's the issue.
This thing with Manchin.
Him doing that...
You know, let's just go ahead, and I hate to do it, the armchair quarterbacking, right?
There are options.
And one of the options is that Joe Biden decides to take the case to the American people.
You know what I mean?
And he's like, hey, just so you know, here are the executive actions I'm going to take, but I need to level with you.
Because obviously I've got a couple of senators here who aren't on board, and I've got other senators who won't come out in public and say it.
You need to understand what's at stake right now.
So you could have a transformative presidency where he takes the lead.
I don't know if that's going to happen, but I have to tell you, you're exactly right.
If Joe Manchin blocks all of this stuff, him and Kyrsten Sinema, if they block it, I don't know what that government gets done over the course of the next year.
And if that's the case, then...
then it does not look good for 2022 unless the Democrats want to make an actual case that there's a there's a crisis in the country.
But what have you seen from the Democrats that shows they're willing to make that case?
Right.
The bipartisanship is what we've seen from them.
And that's all over this.
It's all over the mansion thing.
You're exactly right.
Their natural instinct or natural inclination is always to downplay it and talk about how the better angels of our nature are going to win out and that history is heading towards this direction.
But no, if this doesn't, if this doesn't turn into an actual fight, because that's what this is, it is an actual fight.
If they don't treat it that way, no, we're looking at really bad electoral power because I don't know if the Republicans aren't stood up to.
It reminds me a lot pre-Civil War with the Democratic Party in Congress.
They were running roughshod over everybody.
It took the Republican Party to come up from the grassroots to actually start taking the fight to them.
That's one of the reasons we end up, of course, in the Civil War, but that's a different podcast.
But I don't see if they are not opposed and if they aren't if they aren't punched in the nose over this thing.
I don't know what happens.
I really don't.
Yeah, that's that's that's that.
I will say again, because I don't want to end it on too bad of a note, we all have control over our own destiny.
We can take care of ourselves.
We can take care of the people around us.
We can do our part.
We are made to feel small and powerless and alone.
Those things are not true.
We have to reject this shit.
I'm sorry for any of our West Virginia listeners.
I'm sorry you have a piece of shit senator like Joe Manchin.
I'm sorry to the Arizona listeners who have cinema.
I'm sorry.
What do we hate more at this point?
It's interchangeable.
That's all it is at this point.
We can do better and we have to do better and we have to find people who are actually going to represent us and not live in the thrall of this shit.
So, I hope we can do that.
I believe in us.
I have hope in all of it.
We'll come back.
Again, we have an episode on Friday, The Weekender, which is available to our patrons, and we absolutely love our patrons.
They are so, so appreciative.
All you have to do to get access to that is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
Also, we're gonna be talking here pretty soon about the second episode of our audio documentary.
I've started to put together a couple sources.
We're gonna have a conversation about it.
Also, we're talking about merchandise.
These are nice things.
But if you need us until the weekender, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
