Weekender PREVIEW: Total Eclipse of the Subprime Market
Both of the boys are in studio this week, and thank god, it's a big ol' show. Donald Trump gets bailed out of his bail-bond by a billionaire who made his bones on sub-prime car loans. Because of course he is. Then, the Right is reacting in a totally normal and not-at-all weird way to the solar eclipse, AI is here to save fast-food, retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer chimes in with an ode to going to the opera with his best friends - the Justices who want to destroy democracy.
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Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the McCraig Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Sexton.
I'm talking to a very chilly and hotel-bound Nick Halseman.
How we doing, bud?
It's not right, Jared.
I traveled to San Francisco for a quickie, and man, walking around here at 48-degree weather and pouring rain, I don't wish that on anybody.
I love, by the way, that you're out there and one of the things you were doing is you're going to Alcatraz, which is a tourist destination, and it's a jail.
It's a jail where we go and we're like, wow, look at this old jail.
Isn't this an incredible old jail?
Well, it's funny because my buddy remembers being there.
I went with him.
You know, he went there in the early 80s, perhaps, or late 70s.
And in the, there's an area where they show you the isolation places where you have to be, you know, locked up by yourself.
And he remembers they would let you walk in and they'd close the door.
I'm not saying it's not cool, but we are a wild country.
out and silent for a minute or two.
So they don't do that anymore.
I think that would have triggered too many people.
But I tell you, it's a cool little thing.
You get on the ferry, you go over there, you get some good pictures, and then you can come back.
I'm not saying it's not cool, but we are a wild country.
That's all I'm saying is that it's absolutely incredible that we're getting on a ship to go sightsee this stuff.
But by the way, there is a very focus on sort of the notion of incarceration and rehabilitation versus punishment.
So, you know, people would call it woke if you were there on the information on the signs, but they do pay attention to that for sure.
Absolutely.
And listen, on this note, we have a theme today, and it is how absolutely screwed up the United States of America is in so many different ways.
I want to tell people.
If you want to get on the Patreon, if you've been thinking about it, if you've been considering it, like you want to hear the entire episode, this is a great episode to get your start off point.
We are talking about so much stuff today.
We're talking about Trump being saved by a subprime car mortgage guy.
We're talking about the solar eclipse.
We're talking about artificial intelligence.
We're talking about the Supreme Court.
We are doing so much.
Also, by the way, before this is over, you and I are going to have our much needed discussion about the octopus murders.
Like, there's so much that's going to take place on this episode.
Go to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
Support the show, keep us editorially independent and growing.
Nick!
The news of the moment, Donald John Trump, the assumed Republican nominee for President of the United States of America, the former President of the United States, who was given a gift by the courts.
He was given more time to post his bond.
Also, his bond was reduced down to $175 million.
You and I had talked about the obvious fact that he was throwing out a flag and hoping that even foreign nations and foreign banks were going to help him out.
Well, we don't have necessarily proof that that is what has happened, but there are plenty of reasons to think maybe it did.
But the story is that billionaire Don Hankey, known as the king of subprime car loans, swooped in and gave Donald Trump the loan that would help him keep his assets from being seized.
This is a person with a long, long history of taking advantage of people.
And of course, he's right there with Donald Trump.
Man, this guy's got some really interesting friends, doesn't he?
You know, I wish I would call this a little bit, you know, a couple weeks ago when we thought, you know, Crazy Eddie was going to get involved here with his sublime loans because this is the only person that, of course, that's going to cover this bond for him.
It's not only cash, though.
It's interesting.
It was mostly cash.
And then so the question was like, well, then why didn't Trump just use his own cash to do this?
You gotta have it to use it, my friend.
Yeah, and he uses some like stock assets or something like that as well to kind of cover part of it.
And by the way, do you believe that this guy only charged a modest fee?
Was that the quote, modest?
It was something, you know, that made it seem like he didn't charge this money.
I really find that hard to believe.
Okay, so there are so many, listen, there are so many juicy elements to all of this.
I want to talk about the fact, why this billionaire has billions of dollars.
We need to get into that for a second because it ties into Trump, it ties into the United States, all of it, why this guy was able to do it in the first place.
But let's point out, and this is something that we have to do on this podcast all the time, Nick, because Trump's bullshit is so off the charts crazy.
That at times we lose sight of it, right?
So let's just say, in plain terms, the president, the former president of the United States of America, and possibly the future president of the United States of America, had to take out a subprime loan with a person who specializes in predatory car loans in order to keep his assets from being seized
And by the way, this is a person who is invested in, you know, one thing after another that would benefit from having a president in his back pocket.
That is, when you say it out loud and you actually sit with it, Nick, is some of the most mind-numbingly crazy shit that you could actually ever sit with.
And this is the guy who, this isn't like the recent subprime loan scandal that we've seen, you know, in the 2000s.
He goes way back.
Way back!
And I was actually impressed, like, they were, you know, the prism of what we know now after 2008 and the whole debacle there, like, this guy was way ahead of the game.
Way ahead.
And he understood how people with really bad credit would be willing to pay a lot of extra premiums to get any kind of hands on money.
You know, it's also one of those things where, like, Trump wouldn't be able to get a top clearance, you know, security clearance.
Because he's in such indebted to people like this who could then, in theory, leverage him for certain things.
And that's not supposed to be, you know, kosher when you're in politics.
The former president and possible future president could not secure himself a loan and had to go to a subprime loan guy.
Now, one of the reasons, and when you actually take a look at this, and for people who don't know, Hankey not only goes way back, he also is an investor in Axios Bank, which is one of the banks that has just consistently helped Donald Trump time and time again and kept him afloat.
One of the things I talk about a lot on this show is how people like Donald Trump, unfortunately, have become too big to fail.
Like, if they were to get wiped out, like, there would be problems in the economy.
Like, they've become in the network of whether it's, you know, New York City or Washington, D.C.
or anywhere where on top of that mob money, blood money, corruptive money, all of it, Donald Trump is like a node for all of this.
Well, you have to recognize that Donald Trump is an essential component in what I've taken to calling the poison market.
So, for instance, Nick, we talk sometimes about capitalism and how it's so dangerous, right?
Capitalism on its face isn't necessarily dangerous, like paying like a dollar to get a loaf of bread.
Like that on its face, there are problems, right?
Where does the money come from?
Where does the bread come from?
You name it.
But what has happened?
In the past few decades is that people have taken away regulations, right?
We've deregulated everything.
So as a result, people keep coming up with new ways to make money that in the past would have been dangerous and would have been frowned upon.
What Hankey is involved in, I mean, it's glorified loan sharking.
It's what it is.
Subprime mortgages and subprime loans are predatory and they're there to take advantage of people.
The reason is because these markets were made possible.
For those who, like, maybe, you know, we pay attention to things.
The subprime implosion of 2008 took place because all these people started coming up with new ways to make money.
Instead of giving people products or, like, making loans that were going to work, they would go out and take advantage of poor people, and then they would figure out a way to use derivatives to make money off of losing money.
Because they have so gamed the system that people like Donald Trump and people around him who don't have scruples, they're able to take advantage of every single corner of the system, including the destructive components.
Right?
So of course he's being helped by this guy.
This was written in the stars.
Especially because, I mean, this is the reason why you wouldn't want to have capitalists be in government, right?
Because they view these policies as, you know, as things that get in the way of real money making.
So when they start passing laws or getting rid of laws to protect the consumer, then we just continue to see these horrible stories about people who are, you know, basically for like the rest of their lives would be indentured servants forced to have to pay these loans that they didn't necessarily understand what's going to happen.
We've already seen that they've single-handedly tried to dismantle the Consumer Protection Board, and for years have been trying, and they will do that if they ever get control of Congress again.
And so, you know, everybody wants to trumpet democracy, how important that is.
We can't let, you know, communism, it's evil, whatever.
But the bottom line is when you let outright, you know, capitalism get involved in your decision-making, this is what you get.
Yeah, no, this is exactly where it leads every single time, which is why you need regulations.
These people can't help themselves.
Of course they're going to take advantage of this.
Oh, I can make a lot of money by not doing anything and hurting people?
Well, I mean, I don't have scruples.
Let's go.
That's the Donald Trump story, and that's the Don Hankey story.
And while we're talking about, Nick, you had brought up getting rid of consumer protection, which is absolutely on the chopping block should Donald Trump come back into power.
There are reports coming out that there is already a muscular effort being put in place that if Trump were to get re-elected, that there would be an all-out assault on dismantling DEI efforts, affirmative action, whatever we want to call it, using the Department of Justice, calling it reverse racism, of course, or racism as they would call it.
And it's coming out now that this has been prepared by a group called America First Legal, which is another one of these, you know, groups that is funded by billionaires who want to get rid of government oversight based on what we've already talked about.
Of course, Stephen Miller's all over this thing.
But it's already being made very clear that if Donald Trump were to come into power, we would see the end basically of affirmative action in our lifetimes.
I agree that that's exactly what would happen.
And I think that the general gist of this whole thing is that they just simply won't acknowledge that it had been wildly tilted in favor of white men for basically the existence of the entire country, right?
1789 and beyond.
Yes.
And if you don't want to acknowledge that or accept that, understand that, then of course it makes sense to you that you just want to ignore everything and somehow get into some weird equality of everything versus let's see if we can't let more people have more of an opportunity to find success in this country, the land of opportunity.
And so it's a real fundamental way of how you want to look at this.
And so I almost can follow the line of thought, right?
Like, if I can get my... I believe I would never want to get my headspace in their headspace.
I would not want to walk around in that morass.
But, um...
But, you know, if you can try that, yes, it probably does make some weird sense that we're going to ignore all the racism we've had in the past and just say, OK, from today on, we're going from neutral and there should be no problems.
If we just ignore all that, it'll all go away.
Right.
I think that's what they're trying to get to quickly.
And we know for a fact that that's never how it would work.
Yeah.
And I think to begin with, and again, there's always layers to this is one of the reasons we do this show.
Like on one hand, these people get themselves to sleep at night being like, I built myself.
I pulled myself up by my bootstraps.
And like these people are getting handouts and they're trying to take advantage of the system.
It's unfair.
It's reverse racism.
Meanwhile, Nick, what they want to do Is they like if let's say over here to to my to my left here, let's say that this is where institutional racism and sexism and classism is located.
Right.
There's a door on it.
Right.
There's a door that you can open or close.
If you open the door, you see it.
You know that right there.
Oh, my God.
All of our systems from the very beginning were created with institutional racism, sexism and classism.
Right.
Right?
Which, by the way, is 100% historically accurate and true.
Verifiable.
They want to close the door.
Don't worry about what's behind that door.
Stop asking what's behind that door.
Don't even consider what's behind that door when you're thinking about that door, right?
They want to get rid of this in order to very, very quietly bring us into a past in which, like, white people were, you know, overtly a protected race.
And that's what it is.
It was never about competition.
It was never about, you know, making sure that everybody started from the same place or, you know, meritocracy, whatever it was.
The entire point was it was a protectionist racket all along.
It was making sure that white men in particular always had a head start in every way possible.
And for the record, that has only started to change in the 20th century.
That's when it started changing and started like being pushed back against.
That means that like we are dealing right now with the consequences of a protectionist white male society.
