Tracing Colin Powell's Mistake To The Political Mess We're In Now
With the news that former Secretary of State Colin Powell has died due to complications from covid, co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss in depth his legacy - with mostly memorable moments of historical importance framed around one huge mistake he made in selling the Iraq War to the UN Security Council. They then pull apart more of what motivates Joe Manchin to behave more like a Republican day by day.
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I'm also troubled by what members of the party say.
Such things as, well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.
Well, the correct answer is he is not a Muslim.
He's a Christian.
He's always been a Christian.
But the really right answer is, what if he is?
Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?
The answer is no.
That's not America.
Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop this suggestion.
He's a Muslim and he might be associated with terrorists.
This is not the way we should be doing it in America.
What you will see is an accumulation of facts and disturbing patterns of behavior.
The facts and Iraqis behavior, Iraq's behavior demonstrate that Saddam Hussein and his regime have made no effort, no effort to disarm as required by the international community.
Indeed, the facts and Iraq's behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction.
Hey everybody, welcome to the McCreek Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Saxton.
Nick Halseman is here.
He's traveled America long and wide, the beautiful, but he is back.
And boy, are my arms tired.
It never gets old, never ever gets old.
We got a ton to talk about today, but before we do, a little bit of breaking news as we're getting ready to record.
Colin Powell died today at the age of 84, died from complications of COVID with an underlying problem of had a had a case of blood cancer that exacerbated the COVID, even though he was fully vaccinated.
84 years old, former Secretary of State, general, really, really complicated legacy, and I think one of the defining characters of the last generation.
I think you can tell a pretty good story about where we are in America based on Colin Powell, but we thought we might sort of unravel that legacy a little bit.
Sure.
I mean, to give you an idea of where I've come and where I've gone and where I've gotten to at this point in my life, you know, there was a moment where I really felt like I just wanted to give a really big hug to him after what they forced him to do in theory.
It's not clear if they forced him to go in front of the UN in the run-up to the Iraq War.
I've gone back and forth a lot, and I'm still not sure, as you mentioned, the complicated legacy.
But that said, that is the one, like, really big stain, and there's a lot of other things on the other side.
So, I feel like, you know, the guy deserves, you know, as much kudos and respect as we can give him for all the service he did provide us and the leadership that he showed.
But, you know, it's not easy to overlook that.
Well, first and foremost, there is an alternate reality out there, right?
If we live in a multiverse where there's constantly changing opportunities and things that happen, there are many alternate realities out there where Colin Powell would have possibly been the first black president of America.
He was constantly sort of pinballed around Republican circles as a leader and a statesman, Always with one glaring exception, which we'll get to in a second, not afraid to speak his mind, not afraid to go contrary to political and party orthodoxy.
You know, you have to give him credit for a lot of things.
And chief among them is the fact that over the past few years, he vocally and relentlessly spoke out against Trumpism.
He said that his own party had moved away from any sort of a reasonable path.
You have to tip your cap to him, but you also have to realize that this person, Colin Powell, played a pivotal role in not just an illegal war that screwed up this country in ways that we're still dealing with, that moved resources, of course, away from a lot of the human projects that we have to talk about today.
But also resulted in the deaths of millions of innocent people.
And that is, unfortunately, in the first paragraph of his obituary, wherever it's published and whatever it is, his his carrying of water for the Bush administration in telling absolute lies to the United Nations and the world community is an incredible stain on an otherwise really inspiring laudatory career.
And in case people have forgotten, you know, in the run-up to the Iraq War, he brought actually a vial of what he called, you know, WMD as anthrax or something like in a little vial and as sort of evidence, as if that really was evidence they had somehow found in Iraq of what Saddam Hussein had and what he could do.
And that was really, really devastating to any kind of doves in the administration because if anyone is going to be able to have the kind of credibility that was required, it was Colin Powell.
And for whatever reason he decided, clearly without the evidence that they said they had, decided to use his credibility to make that argument.
And that's really what's so devastating to this is because, you know, most anybody else you might have been like, ah, he's just a general, he's a hawk, he wants war or whatever.
But he was the guy who we all probably shrugged a little bit and said, oh, well, if he's going to say that, then there's probably, it's probably true.
And what's sad about it is that Powell's entire career was spent burnishing up this reputation for being a straight talker, for not being a hawk, right?
This is a person who said constantly, even though he was a general in the armed forces, that he didn't want war and that we should avoid it at any and all cost.
And building up that reputation and building up that capital is what made his presentation so damning.
You know, you had a lot of people around the world who looked at him and said, Colin Powell's not going to go out and tell a bunch of lies about what's going on in Iraq.
We now know that he knew that this evidence was probably inaccurate or at least incomplete.
He was the person who continually told the administration of the you break it, you buy it policy, which is if you start, you know, muddling around the Middle East and you start overthrowing regimes like you're going to have to deal some stuff afterwards.
He was the voice in the room that constantly, when Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, all of these assholes were talking about gallivanting around on a new American crusade, he was the one that told them that we weren't going to be welcomed as liberators.
So then there's the question of why did he do it?
Why did he go out in front of the world community and do this presentation?
He has rationalized it in the past by saying that he needed to be in the room, that there needed to be, you know, the damned adult in the room that needed to be there as this stuff rolled out.
But again, you want to talk about alternate realities, you want to talk about sliding doors, you know, choices not made.
There is still a possibility that if Colin Powell would have been tasked with this presentation and would have come out and very publicly resigned rather than carry it out and sounded the alarm that the administration did not have the intelligence that they claim that they did, there's a possibility the Iraq War might not have happened.
You know, I don't know what the number is on that, I don't know what the percentages are on that, but it sure as hell would have been a lot better than him going to the United Nations and telling bold-faced lies.
It's a really tragic story.
It truly is.
And his passing during COVID just adds, you know, one last coda to a much larger, much more tragic situation.
Right.
And you can open that whole thing up to a direct line between that situation and like Trump getting elected.
Because that was a lot of the beginnings of the imperial presidency, which if we don't remember, you know, Cheney was so hell bent on getting more and more power back installed into the White House after Watergate.
And all these things kind of lead to a situation now, like where we're seeing Trump could order civilians not to follow subpoenas even, you know, that kind of a thing, which just sort of expands the entire Failure of our democracy.
Oh, by the way, you know, we're not supposed to call it democracy anymore.
Jared.
We don't have a democracy.
We have a what are we calling it?
A republic.
They call it something republic, a democratic republic.
Yeah, or whatever.
And and I find that hilarious now as everyone wants to argue that this isn't democracy and everyone's like, well, we don't have anyway.
The right do that.
So, yeah, they're they're they're so much fun.
I got to tell you, I and I have to tell you, I think I completely agree with you.
I think there's a through line from not just the Iraq War, but from what the Republican Party was while Colin Powell was part of it.
And, you know, one of the reasons why he never did emerge or float up towards the top of the major candidates he was always bandied around is because the Republican Party has had white supremacist roots in the modern era.
And he continued to go out there and serve as sort of a reluctant face of them in spite of how they treated people and in spite of how they carried out their politics It's really awful.
It truly is and you know, this is again, I can't help but think that Colin Powell is one of the definitive stories of of modern America and to watch how sideways this thing got despite best intentions, you know what I mean?
Like, we talk a lot about people who have bad intentions.
We talk a lot about people who do this for power and wealth and prestige, and they get into this in order to muck it up.
By the way, we're going to talk about Joe Manchin here in a minute.
That's just a quick little segue there.
But, you know, Colin Powell, based on everyone that I've ever talked to who's been in the room with him, everything that I've ever read about him, had good intentions.
And it turned out, despite his best intentions, he still played a really terrible role that led to incredibly tragic consequences here and around the world.
And I think that is Again, I think that's the first paragraph of the obituary.
And you can't help but think that his penance after that was to sort of be out in front of a lot of these things.
I mean, what's going around now on Twitter a lot is his interaction on Meet the Press, I think it was, just, you know, lamenting when Obama was running for president, how he was being accused of being a Muslim and how that was as if that was a bad thing.
And really just terrific words and a really well-orated point about why not?
What is wrong with somebody who's an American who's also a Muslim?
Like there shouldn't be anything wrong with that.
And we had him and McCain, you know, being like way out in front of what should have been an easy explanation for the Republican Party.
It partly, out of that black stain, emerged a guy who, while doing it as a penance, you know, did the right thing and was able to hopefully lead a little bit more on that front and maybe move some people.
But again, the through line is there without question to where we are now.
It absolutely is.
And, you know, I had already mentioned people with bad intentions.
And, of course, we have to talk about Senator Joe Manchin III on that regard.
But I will say very, very quickly, you don't have the Iraq War.
you don't have the trillions spent in Afghanistan and in Iraq, we're not having necessarily the conversations that we're about ready to have, which is about a senator who has held up a legislative agenda and who is now basically ruling by fiat, more or less.
I mean, has completely taken over this thing.
You do not have the massive deficits that were used to go over and plunder resources and kill civilians and just destabilize basically everything.
And by the way, Nick, I don't know about you, but I'm sick as hell of talking about Joe Manchin.
I resent that we have to talk about him today.
Can we go one more tangent on to Apollo for one second before I forget?
Which is, you know, it's not that long ago that the right was denying COVID deaths, right?
They were saying, well, they're just already going to die from something else that's not going to be COVID.
But I find it very interesting that Colin Powell's death, having been vaccinated, is definitely a death from COVID after getting vaccinated versus the major underlying health issues that he had.
And I suspect he probably had more than just what he was dealing with with the cancer.
That is really fascinating to see Fox News starting to really wring their hands over this and kind of pitch more of this vaccine denial, having, you know, been doubting the numbers and the vaccine, the COVID deaths before this anyway.
Yeah.
And real fast, before we move on to the mansion situation, I, you know, we keep telling people The GOP is not a principled organization.
You know, it's whatever helps at the moment, whatever the cudgel is.
I'm starting to see a lot of appeals about that, which are Joe Biden can't even deal with COVID.
Look at all the COVID cases.
Look at all the COVID deaths.
He can't even get people on the same pitch.
It doesn't It doesn't matter.
It is not a principled, across-board idea.
It's whatever gains power and whatever gains profit.
Yeah, but they're also, look how bad the economy is.
Look how bad unemployment is.
When in fact, they've gotten to below 5% out of this terrible recession that we had.
You know, it's again, it's the horse race we talked about.
It's a little cliche and I'm like, okay, the press needs to have, you know, the good guy and the bad guy and they have to rotate.
You know, but we're getting into just complete and utter dishonesty.
We are, and you know, that's the thing that is really frustrating, and we've talked about this before in the past.
You know, Colin Powell, like, his status for the longest time was, this was a person who actually had principles.
You know, he actually had a vision of how the world was supposed to work.
If that stayed within Republican orthodoxy, it stayed within orthodoxy.
If it didn't, it didn't, you know?
And we've now reached this point where That is all gone.
You know, you brought up McCain.
It's like Powell and McCain were just swept away.
You know, after 2012, of course, where, you know, Obama won his reelection, we reached a point where, like any Republicans who had any sort of principles, needed to get out of the way in order to create this new group that is currently sort of holding sway.
And on top of that, like, it's not just Republicans, and that's the terrible part of this.
Joe Manchin, who is again holding up a legislative agenda is going to cost people lives, could very well be contributing right now to the coming climate catastrophe in a way that hardly any other one human being is besides himself.
It's not about principles.
It's not about some sort of, you know, budget hawk.
You know, it's not like he's worried about deficits.
We have a person who, again, much like the Republican Party, and he should be a Republican.
Let's go ahead and state that outright.
Joe Manchin should be a Republican.
It is coming out here and pushing his own agenda, which has absolutely nothing to do with anything besides serving the wealthy and the powerful, you know, lobbies that own him, that buy and sell him.
And also making sure that, you know, people don't get used to the government funding projects that help anybody.
Because, my God, can you imagine if we started expecting our government to actually do things for us?
I mean, my God, cats, dogs living together at that point.
Well, you know, he came out with at least, you know, compared to like cinema, he came out with some very specific things he wants cut.
Now, the problem we have with this is that he wants the whole like clean energy part of this reconciliation bill just removed and because he has a business where he makes money off of And his son, they have this business where they make millions of dollars off of this, and clearly this would be a direct threat to that.
And it just doesn't make sense that these guys are in charge of passing laws when they're so knee-deep in their own businesses without being in blind trust or whatever, which is also bullshit as it is anyway.
Then, as if that wasn't enough red meat to throw to the right that has to vote for him to keep him in power, He pulls a welfare queen thing with the need to work, a really stringent need to work for any kind of benefits that people get, you know, over $60,000 a year, which I had said to you earlier in a DM was, you know, we have to understand that this is a huge country and $60,000 a year goes a long way in different areas.
So I, you know, but I would say at least half of the states it doesn't.
And he is in one of those states where it is... I would say more than half.
You think more than half?
I got to look at some of the numbers.
But it's, you know, there are places where it's cheap to live.
I don't want to like, you know, downplay that at all.
But again, this notion that, you know, people are working.
Unemployment is historically low.
You know, anything under 5% is amazing.
We should be rejoicing.
And yet they're trying to, you know, slam Biden for that.
But it's not like we have a wave of unemployed people Who wanted to sit there and take their measly handout that's gonna, you know, that they think is gonna keep them in their houses and not work.
Again, this is the Republican thing that we've heard since Reagan.
And he pulls that one out of the bag.
Just, I think, reveals everything about where he sits and what he's really trying to do.
No, absolutely, and there's so much to unpack there.
First and foremost, you're exactly right.
Joe Manchin, his entire wealth is based on the coal industry.
Right now, he can claim that it's being in a blind trust or being taken care of by his kid.
I'm so pissed off about this Manchin thing today, I'm going to throw out some wild stuff.
First off, we gotta get money out of politics.
We got to.
There has to be a movement that goes ahead and gets special interest money out of politics and makes it possible for regular people to run for office.
That is, background, one of the most important parts of this.
Second of all, if you get elected to a position such as senator or representative, you should have to sell off any business that you have.
You should not have a stake in anything at that point that could possibly interfere with your ability to govern and help everybody else.
Three, and this is, I'm gonna go ahead, I'm gonna put a big chip on the table, alright?
So, I'll say this.
Coal, I get it that the coal industry is terrified of the idea of going towards clean energy and that there are places around the country that are very, very worried about what happens when old, dirty energy starts, you know, fading away.
I get that.
And listen, I know that there is a financial incentive there.
What has to happen at this point is either there has to be some sort of willing transformation, because I have to tell you, the coal, there's only so much of it in the There's only so much of it that is going to continue to be done.
And on top of that, those jobs suck.
You know what I mean?
Like, I have people in my family, people I care about, who go in the ground and who are absolutely destroyed and mortgage off decades of their lives.
So at this point, you either have to make them willing to make the transfer over to clean energy and that they will be the centers of the new economy, Or, you need to go in and you need to nationalize energy.
And you need to say, you know what, this is a matter of national security, this is a matter of America being able to do something for the future, and let's take our money and let's buy these people out.
Let's go ahead, let's buy up these industries, let's buy up these places where we're getting the coal, and let's figure this shit out so we can actually make some sort of a direction.
And listen, I know that that is, that right now people are listening to this podcast and some hair on the back of their neck just went up a little bit.
I get it.
But we're tiptoeing up on the line.
He killed a $150 billion clean electricity program for no other reason than the fact that his money was at stake.
And his financial future was at stake.
And the people that he represents, their financial future.
We can't have that.
We are going to end up in a climate apocalypse if we keep messing around with this shit.
It's time to do something.
$150 billion out of a $3.5 trillion package.
You know what I mean?
That's why it doesn't even really affect the bottom line when you're looking at what you want to cut.
Anyway, so you're, I mean listen, nationalizing our energy certainly would then allow us to put in better controls on environmental protections and things like that, which is interesting, very provocative.
That's not capitalism. - I'm not saying that you and I need to form a Soviet and go in and occupy the coal mine.
I'm talking about making people right.
And you want to talk about the coal industry.
There are people in the coal industry who see the light at the end of the tunnel and they know there's only so long that they can make money.
Give them money!
Just buy them out.
Say, congratulations, you're now retired.
Oh, do you want stocks in the new green energy coming?
Absolutely.
We'll get you some stocks.
Absolutely.
We'll make you invested in it.
You have so much money to get made.
But it's time to do something bold, because assholes like Manchin are not going to even let the beginnings of a solution get realized at this point.
Well, the worst part about it is that the Green New Deal creates more jobs than anything that you would create out of coal mining, you know?
I told this before, I feel like any politician that goes into those kind of towns, or even goes to like Michigan, where they're manufacturing cities, and they make these promises that we're going to bring the factories back.
And I've said this in the past, if anybody, while they're running, would say that, they should be instantly disqualified.
Because it's the biggest lie of all time.
And the people who have no hope at all, like, get excited about that and want to vote for those people.
No matter, even though it's the biggest boldface ridiculousness, those jobs are not coming back.
And it's kind of like the climate itself.
We talked about this before.
We had our guest talking about climate, which is these solutions that we want to do for our climate merely delay the apocalypse.
We're not going to reverse it.
At some point in this life, this timeline, the world is going to basically come to an end.
It could be 500 years from now.
Okay, if it delays it, it does more than most of our solutions do.
For the most part, it just makes people feel a little bit better about it.
Oh, don't worry, we've got a conference next month.
We'll sit here and we'll set some goal.
Right.
And so as a result, it's a little bit like this where, okay, we all know what's happening with the coal industry, but we need to milk it for just a little bit longer because again, it's going to end.
But it's an interesting thing, because you would think America, or Americans, and ingenuity, and all those values that we thought we had, would value the notion of, we got to pivot to something else.
And we're going to like, you know, find a whole new industry to build out of the ashes of what's clearly failing.
It's like, you wouldn't start a DVD company today.
Like, that would be silly.
But then again, even in like 2005, if you hadn't seen then, that you better get out of this business pretty damn quick.
Like, you would be in real big trouble.
Newspapers!
Newspapers all delay the notion of going online and doing subscription-based services.
And look at what we have now.
We have a completely decimated, you know, newspaper climate across the entire country.
The writing sucks.
You know, the principles suck.
The journalism standards are so low now.
It's like, it's all related.
It's all like this lack of ingenuity, lack of forward thinking, lack of progression that people don't want to seem to move towards.
Well, and I'll tell you this.
Again, I know my fair share of coal miners.
A large part of the appeal to keep factories or coal mines going is within identity.
Right?
Like, I'm sorry, like you were saying, like, nobody associates DVDs with some form of masculinity, you know what I mean?
It's not like, oh man, this, you know, this laser disc, it shows how tough I am, you know?
But, like, that's what coal mining has done, because the psychology at the heart of it is, it's like, people who are miserable in these jobs have to rationalize why they want to be in it, and it becomes part of their heritage.
My dad was a coal miner, I'm a coal miner, my kid's gonna be a coal miner, and it's part of this, like...
Like lineage, and it doesn't, it's not going to work.
I mean, it's, it's literally insane.
Like, and I mean that not in the pejorative way, but I mean, it's, it's an actual thing of insanity that in 2021 AD, that we're sitting here having this conversation about a dying industry, such as coal, holding hostage any solution of climate change or developing something new and innovative.
Like that, that makes no rational sense whatsoever.
Well, I want to say the Hollywood version of that is that, you know, the coal miner wants his sons a better life.
I'm working so you can get out of here.
But then I'm thinking about, I think it's, I think it's Zoolander, where you have Walken and somebody who is the brother of Zoolander, you know, working the coal mine, wanting to come back, I think.
But, you know, as a grandkid of an immigrant, you know, that's an interesting take because your, you know, heritage is a lot different than mine.
So mine was always like, we want a better life for you and you need to be, I don't want you to work in the store that my dad worked in and, you know, you're gonna become a doctor and lawyer.
I think we've, that doesn't, I guess, exist in certain parts of the country is what you're saying.
Yeah, I think that that has pretty much been squeezed out in certain ways.
I actually think there's a generational shift that has happened because of ... I know this is going to shock everybody, but Ronald Reagan's era has something to do with this.
Which is, at some point or another, I think that capitalism, or hyper-capitalism, starts to corrode us.
And it turns into a thing where it's like, how dare you think you deserve better?
You know what I mean?
As the family unit starts to get squeezed what actually ends up happening is in the past it was like oh here we are this is our small little group and we're all here for each other and we want this and eventually over time because capitalism infects everything it ends up making you a competitor of someone in your own family and as a result you start to resent their success you start to see them as turning their back on it and there is
There is a certain sort of a thing, you know, the phrase dying of whiteness has been bandied around a little bit over the past few years, but I think it's true, which is white Americans because of the way the economies worked and societies worked and demographics have changed.
A lot of them have reached a point where they're like, yeah, screw everything.
Let the world burn.
I don't care anymore.
If I'm if I'm not going to have like, you know, white supremacy anymore, if I can't even engage in like casual racism and casual sexism, absolutely.
Let let the climate apocalypse come.
I don't even give a shit.
Right.
It's a very weird multilevel thing, but I think that's what Mansion represents to a certain extent.
And then then at the same token, I'm not going to wear a mask.
Sure.
What's the point, right?
And then you throw these sprinkles on about, like, look at Colin Powell.
He got the vaccine, died anyway.
I happened to wander down an ugly rabbit hole on Twitter the other day, looking at some responses to some tweets.
The anti-mask thing is still so prevalent and so strong as far as, like, they don't work.
Like, whoever was able to get out there and pretend that there's some sort of science behind the fact that, like, that can prove that masks don't work, that person needs to be, like, I guess you can't arrest that person, but, like, that's how serious it was because they're clinging to that one.
But either way, it's interesting.
You're right.
You get to a certain point where all these things, you know, fill in your head and it becomes futile.
Like, it doesn't feel like there's any purpose to a lot of this stuff.
So why do any of it?
I'm not part of this community and we can't get better anyway.
Well, let's go ahead and let's loop in this child income credit thing that we're talking about with Manchin as well.
I'm going to read this quote.
Basically, this is seared into my brain at this point.
Manchin, of course, who has never met a means test that he doesn't love, Has said that in order to go ahead and pass this child income credit, like we were saying, he wants to get to the point where it's down to a $60,000 combined income limit.
And you know, like you were saying, in some places that goes a little ways, right?
And you know, maybe there will be people who are making minimum wage who possibly could do this.
And for the record, A lot of those people, as I've said before, they're not going to know how to get that credit.
They're not going to know how to apply for it.
Why?
Because they are intentionally kept out of the apparatuses that make sure that the government can help them.
So it's not just about limiting the amount.
It's about limiting the people who are even going to apply to it in the first place.
But Manchin said, he was talking to Dana Bash, and he said that he really wants to help the children, but he wants to make sure it gets to the right people.
He says, there's no work requirements whatsoever.
There's no education requirements whatsoever for better skill sets, which, by the way, fuck you, Joe Manchin.
Don't you think, if we're going to help the children, that the people should make some effort?
And you want to talk about what you were just saying about people who lose hope.
How is it possible watching someone like Manchin watching what's happening in current politics, to continue to get kicked in the teeth over and over and over again, to not lose hope.
And, you know, one of the things we like to do, we like to diagnose this stuff, put it into context, but we also like to talk about where there are possibilities so that we can imagine a better, real, or more human world.
But, I mean, my God, after a while, you get tired of getting beat.
You know what I mean?
Like, what he is pushing here and what he is saying here is so insulting and so cruel.
Well, by the way, he probably, while he said that, he was getting ready to go vote in order to, like, I don't know, send four or five trillion dollars towards a failed new jet program or buy a new aircraft carrier for 13 to 14 billion dollars that we don't need.
But to continually be told that, insulted, and just pushed around and forgotten, and basically have your face rubbed in the dirt, it takes a toll.
You know what I mean?
It really does.
But we have to be aware of who he's talking to when he says these things.
He's definitely not talking to anybody that is struggling and working 80-hour weeks just to barely make ends meet and without getting, you know, kicked out of their houses, right?
Those are the people who would really benefit from this bill.
Yes.
He's not talking to them at all because he's imagining, I suppose, as wealthy people do, this whole class of people.
But again, like I mentioned, unemployment is low.
People are working.
They're out there trying to make ends meet here.
This isn't a society of freeloaders.
And that's what he's describing, basically.
An entitlement society.
Right.
And somehow, it must be the way Virginia is set up, that he can afford to alienate a lot of those voters.
They must not be voters.
And he can't afford to alienate the richer voters and the white people who want to make sure they can look down their noses at people who have to work so hard.
Clearly, if you're that poor, then that's because you're not working hard enough.
That is the issue.
We've talked about this before really quickly, you know, the benefits that people have gotten in through COVID from the government directly has been generational as far as changing some of their plights just by having a month to breathe.
Well, and I'll tell you as someone who comes from a poor background, here's the mindset that happens with all of that.
It's remarkable, truly remarkable that he thinks he can win another election in 2024 saying this kind of stuff.
And you know what?
He's probably more right than wrong.
Well, and I'll tell you as someone who comes from a poor background, here's the mindset that happens with all of that.
Everybody else is lazy.
Oh yeah, right.
I'm working my ass off and I'm not getting ahead.
I would get ahead and my government would help me if it wasn't for all of these lazy assholes around me who don't want to carry the weight.
And so what ends up happening and I have to tell you I have a lot of people in my family who are like this right now.
And you're exactly right.
They're working 70 to 80 hours a week.
That's right.
Two careers.
They're working the equivalent of two jobs within one.
I have people in my family right now who go three months without a day off.
And I'm not exaggerating.
That's not over-talking.
I'm talking about literally three months without a single day off.
And why?
Because they have been taught to think that everybody else is lazy.
And so they're not going to work with other people.
They're not going to build solidarity.
And I have to tell you, one of the things that gives me hope right now, it's not just the big resignation, right?
The great resignation.
It's the fact that we're seeing labor disruptions.
At a size and a scope and a frequency that we haven't seen in a very long time.
We're seeing people who say, you know what, I'm tired of being treated like shit at my job.
And that is a big thing.
And I want to talk about that for a quick second.
I had somebody the other day, they said to me, why do you think people are leaving their jobs right now?
And you know, all the extended, you know, social safety nets that happened during COVID, like they're gone.
Like, it's not like they're getting paid that.
COVID revealed that these people don't care about them at all.
They threw them into the pandemic.
They didn't take care of them.
They didn't make sure that they were safe because all of the businesses in this country have turned into scam grifter businesses.
If you buy a McDonald's franchise, you don't care about how the food tastes.
You don't care that people have a good experience.
You want to get people in and out as quickly as possible.
It's a factory.
Go, go, go.
You don't care about who works there.
You don't care about how anything goes.
And so as a result, people say, I would rather starve.
Than put up with this shit anymore.
I would rather be on employment.
I would rather be looked down upon.
I would rather worry about how I'm going to live in my house anymore besides take this abuse anymore.
And I want to talk about the history of it here in a second.
But it's not a surprise that the pandemic has unleashed this.
It makes you reconsider who you are and what the world is and how you go through it.
Oh, I know.
And, you know, this month is being dubbed Striketober.
And if you can indulge me, Jared, I have a list of the number of strikes that are going on right now.
I love it.
Do it.
I want to sit here and just bathe in it.
Give it to me.
All right.
So, Deerhoof.
Get it, John Deere!
Good work.
Twitter had posted this, either ongoing or potential strikes.
10,000 John Deere UAW workers.
And UAW has been stuck.
Get it, John Deere.
Yeah, they've been stuck in this endless cycle of having to do this and never getting great deals.
60,000 film and TV IATSE workers, which is really interesting and that shuts down Hollywood.
Good work.
37,000 Kaiser workers, which is huge because of health care.
Thousands of grad students at Harvard, Columbia, and Illinois University and 20,000 Cal State University faculty members.
2,000 Buffalo hospital workers.
By the way, time out.
I want to put my chip down on this.
There is not an academic worker in this country that shouldn't consider a mass strike right now.
Right.
It's time for that to happen.
And I hope and I pray that they have divided us and they've made us feel powerless.
There should be mass action across higher education, but that's neither here nor there.
We've got more.
2,000 Washington carpenters, 2,000 telecom workers in California, 1,400 Kellogg's workers in Michigan, Nebraska, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, 1,000 Alabama miners, 700 Massachusetts nurses, and then 450 West Virginia steel workers, 420 Kentucky whiskey workers, 400 hospital workers in Oregon, 250 hospital workers in California, 350 Denver janitors, 300 L.A.
aerospace manufacturers, 200 Reno bus drivers, 100 Pennsylvania teachers, 75 San Antonio Symphony musicians.
There's a Chipotle strike in New York based on Hurricane Ida.
And also in Buffalo.
So it's it's just kind of like all over the country.
And you know the other thing is is you know the restaurants and all these restaurant owners who are crying about how they can't get people to come back and work.
It's the same thing you were mentioning.
They'd rather sit at home and somehow figure something out rather than risk their lives and getting paid a dollar an hour.
Uh this is finally it may be a reckoning a reckoning and there will be a correction.
I mean there's going to be a correction at least in the service industry where they will have to pay people more and it'll just be simply be more expensive for people to eat at those places or stay at those hotels.
That is the cost of doing business and I don't think anyone's gonna mind if it costs another dollar extra for the internet and another two dollars a night for this to cover those extra costs.
That's all it is when talking about some of these bigger businesses and like it's ridiculous that they can't figure that one out quicker.
I want to give the history behind this, but before I do, just a little cheat sheet for everybody listening at home.
Number one, if you get frustrated at the grocery store waiting in line or at the drive-thru, remember that that is a small price to pay for people being treated like human beings, and eventually it could come around full circle and make sure that you make more money and that you get more things.
Remember that it's not the people working there's fault, it is the employer.
Number two, you always, almost always make more money when you leave your job and go to the next one.
That is a secret that rich people have been aware of for a very long time.
Another quick piece of advice that rich people knew, I didn't know this for a very long time, Nick, and I still feel weird about it, You absolutely should leverage one employer against another.
If you work in the service industry, and by the way, drive down any street in the nation right now and you'll see, oh they need work, they need work, they need work.
Go from one to the next and say, oh that sounds great, I would love to be on the grill.
How much are you offering?
Well, guess what Arby's is offering?
Go into that interview and when he's like, "When can you start?" Be like, "Well, actually, I'm gonna go down here "to the KFC and see what they're talking about." And they hate it.
They don't want you to do that.
It's their worst nightmare.
Finally, before we get to the history of it, nothing is going to change unless we keep doing this.
Nothing is going to change unless we finally put our foot down and say this is bullshit.
And one of the reasons that we're finally ready to say that this is bullshit, and I want to take us back to the 14th century with the Black Death.
And of course, Black Death runs through Europe and Africa.
It kills upwards of 200 million people.
And the Black Death, when this happens, it's one of the main things that moves us from a feudal society Into a liberalized, capitalistic society.
Because everybody lived on these, you know, feudal areas in which they were lorded over, and eventually, as people kept dropping, their labor was worth more, right?
So they could go from one person to another, compare wages, compare benefits, all of that, and eventually they were like, what are you gonna do, send a knight after me?
I'm going to the city, I'm gonna see what's happening out there, because you sure as shit don't know what's going on.
We are due for a correction.
And it was an intentional thing in this country.
And it happened on all fronts, by the way.
Everybody has blame for this.
The Republican Party specifically, but the Democratic Party rolled over and betrayed unions and solidarity later on.
We've talked about that in depth.
There is a correction coming in which there is going to be a labor problem in this country that is developing.
And once it does, wages have to go up.
They've been stunted for decades now, and that power has to move.
And almost always after a pandemic, we see those corrections come, and we see them hit hard.
So we have to take advantage of it right now, and the more that we realize that we have power through solidarity, it's addictive!
Once you realize you can change things by working with other people and forming these alliances together, you realize you can change a whole hell of a lot.
I agree.
You know what's interesting to me as well out of that is the college route.
For a long, long time in the country, you work really hard, you go to college, and that sort of guaranteed a nice life where you can actually make money, right?
Is it safe to say that's not so much a guarantee anymore?
As an academic, I have to tell you, Nick, I have a lot to say on this subject.
And I will say that higher education becoming a basis for our economy has been turned into not just a boondoggle, but a scam of the size that we rarely see.
I don't want to get in trouble, so we don't have to expand too much on... I don't give a shit.
You know what?
I'm to the point I don't care.
Let's do it.
I looked up while you were talking the amount of people who, you know, went to colleges since 1965 till now, and obviously there's a pretty big growth there.
Obviously there's a growth in the population too, but this looks like this is outpacing that.
And so the other thing though is, you know, having going through it right now with my daughter and trying to apply to all these different colleges is that it's much easier to apply to colleges now than it was back then.
You're telling on yourself now.
literally put an application into a typewriter and somehow line up and get the margins right.
I remember doing this, right?
And then, God forbid, you had a typo and you had to get the whiteout and fix it.
You're telling on yourself now.
I know, I know.
That's how it was like.
And you couldn't just like write one application and then just blast it out to 12 colleges like you can now.
As a result, and people want to push back on this argument and you feel free to do this as well, but the notion that colleges have now been inundated much more with applications and more and more people who want to come to college, I think maybe lessens the value of that degree.
There's just so many more people now when the economy isn't able to absorb as many who all have the same qualifications that we might have had 25 years ago, and we're successful with that education.
I mean, we don't have to get into the whole thing of whether or not we actually learn anything actionable in college.
Wow!
Because I've been reflecting on that and I'm like, I didn't learn anything that I need now really from college except for the fact that I was a basketball manager and learned how to coach.
But that was a very specialized thing.
Nothing in the actual classroom.
I guarantee that you did.
I'm so sorry to pop the brakes.
I guarantee that you learned something that isn't in the forefront of your brain that Like, so for instance, like, I'll teach a creative writing class and I tell people, you're not just in here to learn poetry.
You're in here to take consideration of how to craft narratives.
You're in here to understand how to write in a more compelling way.
I guarantee there's stuff you've learned in college that is... Did you rehearse that?
No, it's true!
Listen, okay, listen, this is a conversation for another day to get into in totality, but I want to go ahead and give the history of this a little bit.
After World War II, We start having the GI Bill, which of course starts paying for education.
You start seeing people come back and they start going to college, right?
The government starts paying for them to go to college.
It becomes a regular thing for people to go to college.
As the economy grows, as technology grows, and this is what college has always been about from the very beginning, from the moment the university opened up in medieval Europe, right?
Like, this is what it's always been about.
It's about taking, it used to be about taking wealthy people and teaching them how to administer Politics and how to administer in cities and all of this stuff.
What college is now is where you go to learn basically how to join the administrative class in America currently.
It is a strange situation that has happened because particularly with Neoliberalism with the democratic embrace of hyper capitalism and with globalism There was the decision that America was all going to go into the middle class, you know We weren't gonna have working-class people anymore.
We weren't going to have industry.
We were going to ship those things elsewhere.
And basically, we were going to serve as administrators of empire and also continued economic thinking systems growth and communications.
Well, guess who decided that was going to be a great time to jack up, you know, all kinds of fees and prices and all that?
Colleges.
They totally ripped everybody off.
And they started charging exorbitant fees because everybody had to pay debt in order to play a role in the economy.
And that, by the way, took the place of everything from training in businesses.
Businesses don't train that much anymore.
They more or less offload that into colleges.
Meanwhile, you pay an arm, a leg, and a foot, and the other foot I certainly did.
I had to pay a certain amount of money in order to try and climb up the ladder in terms of class, and everything that we're talking about right now is part of what was supposed to be the deal.
Supposedly in America, if you worked hard, if you were willing to go a little bit in debt, if you were willing to, you know, study and put in your time, you were going to find yourself in a place where you were going to get a job that was going to pay the bills, and maybe you could even do better than your parents had done, and maybe you could have kids.
Well, guess what?
You can't have kids anymore, basically, because you can't afford them.
If you do have kids, you can't really go get a job because you can't put them in daycare.
That's basically a mortgage in and of itself.
And by the way, good luck getting a mortgage.
Good luck buying a house right now.
If you buy a house, you're good for pretty much ever because you're just going to continue turning that into wealth.
But now all the houses are being bought up by hedge fund capital and algorithms that, you know, they never step foot in the house.
So basically that deal that we're talking about, it doesn't exist anymore.
It's been hollowed out to the point where now we have, you know, again, Joe Manchin talking about $60,000 and a tax income credit.
And we've gotten to the point where people look at this and they say, there's nothing in it for me.
There's no reason for me to go and punch the clock.
I'm not going to make enough money.
I'm drowning in debt.
How am I ever going to pay off my debt?
So, you know what?
Screw off.
I'm going to go stand in this picket line.
I'm just simply not going to work.
I'm going to say, hasta la vista.
I'm done here.
And so that deal has been totally corrupted.
It was never real to begin with, but it has been exposed as a complete and utter fraud.
I concur.
And that's a great way of putting it, especially in the historical context.
And I just feel like, you know, I mean, listen, of course I'm being hyperbolic, but like, you know, just looking at the curriculum, just if you want to get really specific for a minute there, it's like none of these colleges talk about social media and how you are supposed to... Oh, me too!
There isn't the class, like, you know, and obviously I'm biased because I'm a YouTuber, but like...
Like, how is there not at least like one semester of a class that's going to teach you all about social SEO, social engine optimization, social, gosh, SEM, which is marketing of social media.
It's just mind-boggling that they're not giving actionable kind of training for those kind of things, because I can guarantee you every job that you take going forward from now will have to rely on some knowledge of how to build up on social media.
But I will say this, and there are classes like that.
Those things exist, right?
But there is a problem in this country, and this goes back to everything that we're talking about in terms of the Great Resignation and this strike situation.
So, let's even go back into public education.
Let's go back to high school, right?
You know how there used to be, they called it home economics, obviously.
You learn how to balance your checkbook.
Guess what you don't learn in high school, in public high school?
How to invest money.
You don't learn how to fill out forms.
You don't learn how to dodge certain taxes, right?
There are certain things that you're only going to learn in either a private school or because your family has money.
Like, I've said this before on the podcast, like, I grew up in a working class family.
Like, we didn't understand money.
We just understood that you get money and then you just go ahead and spend it.
Don't worry about it.
You don't need to keep it.
You don't need to do anything with it.
You get into college.
Why would you want to teach every student Things like social media, because then they're not going to take it and use it on their jobs.
They're going to use it for their own optimization or their own establishment.
All of education in this country is focused on making sure that you're going to go to your job and you're going to stay at that job.
You have so much debt that you need to pay off.
You could never possibly leave.
And on top of that, your health care is always tied to that job.
So as a result, you're not going to walk out.
Right?
Meanwhile, the people who are walking out, they don't care about health care or they don't have health care.
I mean, what?
I'm going to die early?
Well, that's what I'm doing anyway by working all these hours.
The entire purpose of public education and the school to employment pipeline is to make sure you stay at your job, you don't question your employers, and you just continue churning the same wheel of capitalism that we keep talking about.
I think I'm going to go on strike, Jared, that you've inspired me.
Listen, from the podcast, I'm striking until I get better working conditions.
If you went on strike, that would make me the man in this relationship.
I would be the capital T, capital M, and I refuse.
I will not oppress you.
I will not exploit you.
We now have to find a mediator.
If you want to form a union, I'm all for that.
All joking aside, if you can't pay your employees, if you can't provide them benefits, if they're walking off the job en masse, you've done something wrong.
Like, you have failed.
If you can't afford to provide for those people, and if you can't treat them like human beings, you shouldn't have a business.
And my God, I hope your business shudders.
But don't forget, the right will say, these regulations are killing my business.
Why?
Because you're supposed to pay your workers a fair wage.
You're supposed to actually offer them some sort of health care.
Like you're supposed to do the things that you're talking about that everybody really wants and yet that to them it's kind of like it's it makes sense how they can picture people sitting on their couches in masks all day long just collecting checks and buying TVs right like that's what there must be their images of them.
And they also picture, oh, there's more regulations, it will put me out of business because I can't afford to do all these things, when in fact, that's what business is.
You know, when you are, you know, placed in situations where there are costs of doing business, you now need to figure out how to run this business so you can afford those things, or you're no longer in business.
It's not the fault of anybody else's, and yet that's where they live in, and that makes sense.
And finally, I can at least put together a couple of ideas It does.
And you know, I think it's something I don't think Republicans are the right to understand this as well.
and horrible, but at least it makes sense.
It does, and you know, I think it's something, I don't think Republicans are the right to understand this as well.
They're really bad at understanding trends and technology.
They don't understand...
They don't understand epochs.
They don't understand that there are moments where things change, right?
Because conservatism is about, well, that's how things have always been.
Leave it alone.
Matter of fact, let's even rewind time a little bit.
You know, one of the ways that people right now are leaving their full-time jobs and they're able to subsist is because they're driving Ubers.
They're working for DoorDash, you know, they're driving a Lyft, they're Grubhub, whatever it is in your town that makes things happen.
And they're being pushed towards gig economy.
And let's talk very, very quickly about that because gig economy doesn't necessarily have a 40-hour limit.
On top of that, it doesn't necessarily have benefits.
You work when you want or however hard that you want.
We are now creating a class of people that are meant to serve middle class and upper class needs right oh i'm so busy with my tech job i'm so busy with my information job let's have somebody run me my mcdonald's or my wendy's
we're going to move to the point where like these gig jobs are what start working at a mcdonald's where all of a sudden you go into mcdonald's for five hours and you know you drop fries and and and by the way quality will suffer but so will safety and you'll start losing benefits you'll start losing any of these structured things that we're talking about what We are pushing further and further towards a futile state.
And that is why we're seeing this current moment after this pandemic is where people are being forced into these situations.
They're unhappy.
They're being mistreated.
There is going to be a correction.
The question is, what will that correction be?
And we need to figure this out before automation Runs people out of the workplace in totality.
It's not going to solve mistreatment, it's only going to exacerbate it.
So we have like a ton of shit on our plate that has to be addressed, and people can't even wrap their heads around that fact.
Like how much actually needs to be done here in the next few years.
Well, we're going to continue talking about this.
I don't know about you, Nick.
I'm emboldened by these strikes.
How do you feel about this?
Oh, solidarity forever.
Solidarity, absolutely.
And anybody who listens to the Mike Rake Podcast, if you are striking, drop us a note.
Let us know.
You have our utmost support.
We're very, very proud of you.
Make sure to let these people know that they cannot mistreat you and exploit you.
We will be back on Friday with our Weekender episode.
If you want access to that and other additional content, go over to patreon.com slash mccrakepodcast.
We missed Nick last week, but... How do you do an hour straight on your own?
I was driving, I listened to it, and it's still... When you start your cult, and everybody starts following you, which is what it feels like when you listen to the one-man hour pod, really, I'll come visit.
I'll come visit the cult on the clothing optional days, and we'll have fun.
But man, I don't know how you do that.
I grew up in a cult.
I don't need to be part of a cult.
Listen, I appreciate that, and I appreciate the kindness.
No, I just decided if we were going to talk about social media, we had to go back to the dawning of civil society, so that's what we did.
So, if you haven't listened to that yet in order to understand a lot of what's going on with big tech and where we're going, particularly with neo-feudalism, Go and listen to that episode.
That's patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
We'll be back with The Weekender, which it'll be nice to be able to loosen the tie a little bit, let it all hang out, and hang out with my good friend Nick.
If you need us before then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
