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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman have a feel good pod for y'all, as they go over the important push by Joe Biden to negotiate drug prices for Medicare. It gets better! Brian Kemp, Republican Governor of Georgia, defends Fani Willis and stresses that lawmakers should not interfere with her legitimate investigation of Donald Trump. Then there are questions directly from our Patrons - and they are a great batch this week.
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It's the sweet, sweet sound of yet another week coming to an end.
I'm Jared Yates Sexton.
I'm here with Nick Halsman.
This is the Weekender Edition of the Buckrake Podcast.
Nick, today's episode has a theme.
What did I say to you in the email?
What did we decide that today was going to be?
Good news!
This is a good news episode of the Muckrake Podcast.
A good news episode of The Weekender.
Is it not?
Why not have a good news episode?
I don't even know what that means.
I don't know what it's going to feel like, but I'm excited about it.
You've got to be open to trying new things.
The Muckrake podcast is so named because of our willingness to jump into the ugliness of American politics and figure out what is going on and figure out how to make it better.
We are going to take a second now in the dog days of summer.
I'm sick of summer now.
I'm done.
I'm tired.
I want to feel the chill of the air.
I'm ready for it.
I'm ready for everything that the that the autumnal era brings.
I'm sick of it.
We're going to have a good news episode of the Montclair podcast.
Nick, this show is loaded.
We're talking about tons of good things that are actually happening right now.
By the way, just an aside, Zachary Real and Joe Biggs of the Proud Boys sentenced to 15 years and 17 years respectively.
Congratulations, boys.
The revolution apparently will not be televised.
Also, we have listener questions.
Nick, one of the questions this week, and this is why I wanted to do this in the first place, it asked a question that is going to have me reveal something that I've been discussing with Democratic strategists that I didn't know how to talk about on this podcast.
I'm looking forward to sharing that with people.
More or less about how Democratic strategists feel about the 2024 presidential race and Joe Biden's candidacy, and if they have any plans on the other side of what they're thinking about all this.
I'm excited to talk about that.
Nick, if people who are not patrons want to listen to this entire episode, if they want to join the Muckrake podcast on our drive to victory, where do they need to go?
They have to go to patreon.com slash muckrake podcast.
Otherwise, you're not going to hear the question that they're going to ask.
You're not going to hear the answer, which is a more important part of it, unless you're a subscribing member of our Patreon.
Absolutely, you need to go over to patreon.com slash muckrake podcast, not just for your own good, but for the good of the show.
We are growing, we are moving, we are improving, we are evolving.
And we just had a feedback.
Somebody was like, you know, I've been listening to this little, the free part of it on Fridays all these years.
I finally signed up and I didn't see why I hadn't done it before.
They love it.
Out of the words of the guys now.
They love it, Nick.
It was like me trying sushi for the first time.
What was I doing all these years?
Why was I denying myself pleasure?
But you need to go over to patreon.com slash my Craig podcast.
Nick, let's go ahead and start.
Tell me something.
Now I'm trying to picture sushi like in Indiana.
Don't get sushi in Indiana.
That is a professional tip from Jerry J. Sexton.
Do not get sushi from Indiana.
Nick, is it fair to say on this show, the McCraig Podcast, that we are critical of Joe Biden when he deserves it?
That's fair.
Sure.
Yeah.
We call balls and strikes, do we not?
We do.
Well, the answer positively would be no, we do not not.
We do throw balls and strikes.
Oh my god, now I have to try and deconstruct what just happened, and I'm done.
I think my neurodivergent brain just went to different places.
We have no problem shitting on Joe Biden.
When Biden deserves it, which is often, we have no problem whatsoever telling you how Joe Biden has messed up.
Let's talk about something that the Biden administration is doing really, really right, Nick.
In the past few days, Biden, as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, which was a pretty big deal, the Biden administration has directed Medicare to begin negotiating for 10 major drugs.
These are drugs that deal with heart problems, with diabetes, with cancer.
They are going after the pharmaceutical companies in order to go ahead and try and deflate their absolutely absurd and offensive prices.
People on Medicare right now are paying over $3.4 billion out of pocket for these medicines that should be cheaper.
This has all of the right people pissed off.
This is absolutely the right thing to do.
And are you ready for this, Nick?
On top of it being the right thing ethically and morally, it's the right political thing to do as well.
So win, win, win.
I wish you luck.
I'm glad that these people are pissed off.
This is absolutely a thumbs up to the Biden administration.
Well, is it my turn to be, like, the point-counterpoint guy?
Are you the Debbie Downer here?
Well, I mean, here's what they're gonna say.
Here's what big pharmacists, right?
We have all these expenses we need to do to develop the newer drugs into the future.
Wait, hold on, hold on.
Before you— Before you develop all these cancer-curing drugs y'all want.
Hold on, Nick.
Before you feed me this line of absolute bullshit, Should I imagine that the pharmaceutical companies are just modest farmers coming to market with straw hats with a little straw coming out of their mouth?
They can barely put food on the table.
Mike, you know why they're in the pharmaceutical business, Nick?
It's not for the money.
There's no money.
It's just for the love.
It's just making their drugs.
That's what does it for them.
Is that how I'm supposed to imagine this?
Jared, how do you expect them to do their jobs properly if you limit the amount of money they can make?
There's no incentive anymore to work hard.
I have to imagine over the last few decades that the pharmaceutical companies have just been basically just scrapping together a living.
There's no way whatsoever that they, again, they're losing money doing this.
It's basically a charity.
So I think what you're trying to say is instead of making like 30 billion dollars in a year, let them make 20.
30 billion I think is conservative.
Really?
You know, let's just say, you know, but let him, yeah, only let him make 20 or 15 instead of the 30.
You know, that's, that's, that doesn't, you know, they wouldn't think that's reasonable, but it sounds good to me.
Well, that's the issue here, as we talk about when we're talking into such myths as perpetual growth.
The idea is, if you made $30 billion last year, Nick, you got to make at least $31 billion this year.
Anything else is a loss.
And they will always fight tooth and nail to protect not just the bottom line, but where they are.
It has to perpetually grow.
That's one of the problems with unchecked capitalism and hyper capitalism.
It takes something like the government coming in with something like Medicare.
And we should be past Medicare, by the way.
We should have Medicare for all.
We should have a system in which this type of stuff is just sort of the entire landscape.
You have to have a government that comes in and says, hey, guys, you've had your fun.
You've made your profits.
Who even knows what you can afford at that point?
You're not only islands, right?
You buy governments.
You're buying steaks for colonies on Mars.
And like, you have to come in and say, guess what?
The party's over.
You have to start providing this stuff for some people who need it, who are dying without it.
And meanwhile, the pharmaceutical companies, Nick, they ain't happy.
They have filed so many different lawsuits.
The Chamber of Commerce, I mean, Friend of the Pod, the Chamber of Commerce, is out there filing their own lawsuits.
They have just gone absolutely cuckoo for lawsuits on this thing.
They are reportedly furious and apoplectic about this, which means that you have hit the right People in this.
Nick, I want to try something out on you.
This was put forward as a possible anti-Biden slogan moving forward.
Are you ready for this one?
Oh, yeah.
One of the things we love on this show, Is whenever we get to climb into the strategist mind.
And you know, there's some good strategists out there.
There are some people who can communicate.
But other times, like, this is just focus group level bullshit.
Are you ready for what they're trying out to try and go after this?
I'm more than ready.
Let's keep government out of your medicine cabinet.
Which is bad.
That's a bad slogan, is it not?
That's an F minus grade slogan.
Doesn't really roll off the tongue very easily.
It doesn't roll off the tongue, and on top of that, like, you kind of want government in your medicine cabinet.
You don't want to be taking, you know, like a little bit of cocaine mixed with shark tooth.
Well, let me let me take a sidestep, not quite a detour, because what we've gotten to with when you're mixing capitalism and democracy, a republic, whatever you want to call it, is something that you end up getting a lot of things that should be controlled by the government is controlled by private sectors, right?
They outsource that.
And, you know, Tesla or SpaceX, sorry, SpaceX is the one I'm thinking about.
And the problem here is you need people who are a very smart, And B, who aren't affected by capitalism, right?
They're not going to be affected by cutting corners that, you know, all these big companies will want you to do that risk lives.
We've gotten so far away from that, that we don't even know anymore how that's supposed to work.
We don't even believe the government could ever be efficient or can work for you anymore.
You know, the Army Corps of Engineers used to be like the gold standard.
If they came in to do something, you knew they were going to do it fucking right, and it would take as much time as it needed, and the bridge wasn't going to fall.
Um and and here we are like outsourcing all these things to people who want to cut corners that it's it's I don't know I'm sorry and now the positive energy is flowing.
No you listen here is I I okay I'm we're in seg we're in we're in the A segment of our good news podcast.
Okay.
And we would not be the Montclair podcast if we didn't say good news has to be troubled.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, if you don't trouble good news, which, listen, I know I'm the guy that I get on Twitter and something big happens that everyone's happy about, and I'm like, well, actually, here's the reason why it's actually terrible.
I know that that's who I am.
I know that's what my brand is.
But we have to trouble good news so that we don't fall into naive disrepair.
You're right!
Like, part of the issue in all of this is that government has been so destroyed as something to overlook things and intervene in things that it basically has turned into, let's just let the private sector do everything, which is one of the reasons why we have a technological elite who can't be touched.
It doesn't matter really what Elon Musk does.
His entire enterprise holds up our space program.
And on top of that, you can't go after necessarily Facebook or Google or Microsoft because they basically run all of the computers and programs and applications that the government requires in order to move forward with everything.
This is one of those moments where you have to push back.
There might be some lawsuits that will win.
There's a very real possibility because a lot of our judicial system is completely run through with judicial maniacs who shouldn't even be there in the first place.
But Nick, this is the right thing to do.
You should not be charging this stuff for these medicines.
You should not be charging these things and making poor people and old people pay for this stuff out of pocket.
And I will tell you something else in all of this.
Let's pivot to the political part of it.
The GOP strategist class has no idea what to do with this.
They are split almost down the middle.
Some are saying you have to go after Biden and say, well, this is going to stifle innovation.
Nick, what happens when Americans are given the choice between, hey, we shouldn't stifle innovation and I like cheap medicine?
Can you tell me how Obamacare fares whenever you don't call it Obamacare?
Oh, everyone loves it.
It's the most popular damn thing in the world!
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