Bill Meyer Show Podcast - Sponsored by Clouser Drilling www.ClouserDrilling.com - 11-25-25_TUESDAY_7AM

Episode Date: November 25, 2025

Capt. William E. Simpson from Wildhorse Fire Brigade talks the Copco Road song rise in popularity, its inclusion in a new documentary and a whole album devoted to it. Former Sen. Baertschiger talks the debt and the consumer...it matters a lot.

The Bill Meyer Show podcast is sponsored by Klausur Drilling. They've been leading the way in Southern Oregon well drilling for over 50 years. Find out more about them at Klausurrilling.com. Here's Bill Meyer. Have to play a little bit of Captain Bill's latest hit, Copco Road, but it's for the horses. Try to take care of nature here a little bit. Good stuff. Once it was a mountain way where the eagle's sword and the children play,

the water shone like a mirror. bright fish would run in the silver light but then they came with plans and hands and said tear it down we'll free the land they sold the dream they cashed the claim now nothing here remains the same oh cock-corro you twist and cry under the wheels of a greedy lie once two lanes wide now broken and cold I still hear the ghost of the lakes you hold oh oh cop go road captain william e simpson ended up writing that producing it we appreciate you back on here from the wild horse fire brigade that gosh just even on my facebook page was what eight nine thousand listens to you know over the last week or so and then how much

many overall, like 50,000, tens of thousands around the web right now? Oh, yeah. It's good morning, Bill. It's just taken off. I'm getting emails and calls from all over the United States. People where the, you know, this extreme green dam removal craze is basically threatening other people's communities. And, you know, these people are desperate to have a voice and what's happening is these people, the American rivers and these other people have bought out so much media. They have huge PR firms and media firms working for them to dominate the public narrative. And they just write and say whatever they want when the reality is here on the ground. You know, I live on the river here. I mean, I know what's going on in the

river. Nobody can fool me. Well, you had mentioned that it's going to take a 100-year flood or maybe more than one 100-year flood to really clean out, what needs to be cleaned out there. Isn't that right? Or, yeah, exactly. And the thing is, the clay, that's why Gethard engineering spent so much time emphasizing the 70% of the sediment was clay, which is microscopic. It sticks to everything. And when it gets down into the reds where it is right now. And what are the reds here, Bill, so people understand that?

Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, that's the gravel. The little spaces in between the gravels where stamina steelhead will drop their little eggs in there. And then the little eggs are protected down in the gravel. And they get aerated. You know, you've got water circulating through there with oxygenation. And then the little fish can hatch out.

Well, when you fill those spaces up with clay, it's like, you know, concrete. And there's no – not only is there nowhere for the egg to drop into, but if there's any eggs there, just like in these. wildfires after the wildfires, the rains come and the eggs are already in the gravel right now on a lot of these streams and rivers. And then here comes the Lahore of mud down. And we do have a lot of clay around here. So the fires are the big causing the loss of salmon and nobody's looking at that. You know, the tribes, they do not understand science anymore. They don't want to learn it. They don't want to go out with anybody who knows who actually, you know, I mean,

it's pretty funny people talk about indigenous wisdom well i live up here in the wilderness with some other people and we don't see any native americans out here anywhere you know i mean we are the new indigenous we we grew up in these mountains so it's pretty funny you know they do come out here to hunt once in a while but we're here day and a day out night and day and you know we see what's going on now there have been many stories and i've continued to bang this how the uh how the the the cartel media continues to uncritically put the stories up. Oh, look, we've had salmon show up here. And I'm thinking to myself, yeah, that's salmon that actually have come up the river from when the dam was still here. And so they went down the river. They, you know, now coming back to spawn and

reproduce. My question is, though, not how many fish are coming back here, Captain Bill, but do we know what the health of the riverbeds are that they're trying to lay. their eggs in? Is there any way to evaluate that? That seems to me the real question. How healthily will the next generation be able to hatch there and get out? What do you think? Right. You're absolutely right, Bill. We're not going to know what's really coming back how the dams impacted the river until probably 2027 will be the beginning of at 2028. You know, because the cohorts that are trying to happen now, for instance, fish that may or may not be coming up the river. and are trying to, you know, put some eggs in the main stem, you know, that would hatch.

Those fish aren't going to come back for three to four years. So we've got a way to find out, is the river actually productive anymore? We don't think it is. So there's no way to evaluate that right now? There's no way you can just take a look at this and say, hey, this is too much clay or whatever. Well, as far as clay, yes. Al Kudski, who's, you know, he's been fishing on this river since he was a little kid. His dad was a river guide.

He's a river guide. I think you've got 40 years of river guiding right here on this portion of the Klamath. And he went down with some people in a drift boat. And he said, you know, all the big holes are filled in with clay. You know, they're just completely mudded in. That's what I was concerned about because that's the real story, not that fish are coming up the river for the first time without the dam there. It's that, you know, they're coming back to a desert, though, I guess, a, you know,

As far as fish are concerned, it would be a desert if you've got a lot of clay filling in those holes in those places where they would breathe. Right. Yeah, the refugia are filled in, the place, the deep holes where they would rest in between making runs. You know, they just don't drive all the way up the river. Yeah. You know, they'll come up and rest. They'll find a deep hole and sit in there and rest, then they'll go up. But, you know, a lot of that's damaged, and it will take 100-year flood to move that clay out of there. Because once that stuff settles in, it's very sticky, it's microscopic, and so.

You see, people don't study soil science. They don't realize clay is one particle and all the particles that make up sediment. Yeah, but it also sticks to the gills pretty well, doesn't it? I understand correctly. Because it is microscopic. The next largest particle in sediment is filth, then sand is the next largest, and then gravel. So, you know, people just throw the word sediment around really not truly understanding what they're saying because it's a mix of different-sized particles.

and the clay is devastating to any kind of aquatic life. It's just horrible stuff. It's great for sealing a pond if you have a pond and you want to keep the water in. Sure. It's not so good on the membranes of a fish's gill or an amphibian's gill. Why do you think that that fact or those facts like you've been mentioning here, Captain William E. Simpson with me once again, why are those facts kind of glossed over in the whole removal Copco road?

kind of a scenario that we've been living out here the last year or two. Why does that get passed over so easily, you think? Well, because it's an inconvenient truth, and it throws a lot of light or cold water on dam removals because it's a profitable business. These guys came in here, these big companies, they made a fortune, and it was a quick smash and grab operation. Instead of doing it, I mean, if you've got to do it, let's do it carefully and thoughtfully. So we actually have some restoration, you know, after the process, but that's not what happened here. So they were right when the study came out a number of years ago that said remove the sediment, dredge the sediment first before you blow the dam for the reasons that we're experiencing now?

Exactly. I mean, you know, what it came down to when CDM Smith did the first study in early 2011, that's exactly what they said. They designed barges and dredge systems and dewatering bunkers. for the sediment that they would bring up off the bottom. And they would clean that up before the, and not, and they talked about it. We can't let this go down the river. And they talked about all the toxins and everything in there. And then, you know, this whole big fight that we had with Sisku County. You know, we had a pick at the courthouse.

I mean, the river was polluted after they opened the dams up because all that sediment came rushing out because they did it wrong. And we had an arm wrestle with the county to get them to declare an emergency. They didn't want to, like, upset Newsom. You know, well, what are we going to achieve? Well, let's face it, though. Siskue is a very weak political county. It's small in population.

That's why I think we're looked at, you know, in Southern Oregon, Northern California is easy to boss around for that reason, right? Well, and that's exactly why we picketed to get the declaration done because we need, we're not trying to get, we knew Newsom, my new Newsom was going to give us 10 cents. But when a county declares an emergency, the governor's got to deal with it, and it draws media attention. So we did get some valuable attention on that. Now, people are looking at this from around the United States, and they're going, okay, hold it. This isn't it so wonderful, as everybody's saying in the media. And I think that your song, Copco Road, which, by the way, is a real earwig. I'll sit around there at home taking a shower.

I'll copco road. and I'm, you know, it reminds me a lot. The song structure itself reminds me a lot of Garth Brooks' old classic from the late 80s, The Thunder Rolls. There's something about that that kind of feels familiar, I guess, and maybe that's why I, you know, recognize it as being such a great song. A point is, though, you're doing this to bring attention to what happened to the river, the wild horses around the river, all the whole,

ecosystem and you have put a bunch of these songs together in an album now, haven't you? And where can people hear that? That's right. Yeah, it's called The Last Mustang Voices from the Wilderness, because that's kind of what we are up here, a voice in the wilderness. I'm trying to get the word out because the horses have been here for millennia. And, you know, people can argue that they're not, but you know what, hey, you argue with the science, you can argue with carbon 14 dating. You know, you can, the bottom line is they've been here for millennia. Yeah, the Europeans brought horses to no doubt about it. But all those horses they brought are just reintroduced American horses that crossed Beringia a million years ago. So they're just coming home. So, but yeah, we're trying to draw attention to the collapse of the ecosystem by mismanagement, by people who are driven by economic agendas, instead of being driven by what's best for the American public, what's best for the public, what's best for the public, Lance. These are our lands. It's not their personal playground. Yeah. Where can you go to get the songs, though? Because the more it gets streamed on Spotify

and these various other places, the more that the Wild Horse earns out of this. Right, right. Yeah, the last month saying, Voices of the Wilderness, that's the subtitle. Voices from the Wilderness, I should say. And yeah, it's on Spotify. It's streaming now on Spotify. It's on Apple Music, Amazon Music, you know, all the typical places where you can get digital media music stream to your devices. And, you know, so we're basically, I'm working on my second album already. And, you know. Did you ever think that you were going to switch from just being the ethologist

to also being a music producer for the cause? Did you ever think you were going to get there? Do you remember, do you remember after the Klamath on fire? I couldn't even, I was on your show a lot, and I couldn't even get through a whole sentence without coughing, remember that? Remember it well? Well, I suffered lung damage, and so since 2018, I can't sing, you know, and I wasn't a great singer, but it would have been nice to be able to maybe sing my own songs. I can't do it. You know, I'm handicapped in that way. In this particular case, AI helped you on this.

Right. Yeah. It's my walker, a wheelchair, or crush, whatever you want to call it. But the AI allowed me to have a voice again so that I could take my poetry and get it out there to tell people, because the whole time I was going through all that terrible stuff. stuff from the fire and everything. You know, I was writing stuff down. By the way, the death of your wife, too. We can't forget that, okay? Yeah, yeah, the smoke is, you know, and at the time when she was at OHSU, I kept on the doctors, I think it's the smoke. I think it's the new toxins, and they kept checking boxes that they knew how to check, you know, that's their clinical experience, but it turns out that UCLA did a study during the time when, you know, it was 11-year study when Laura passed away in June 2019,

they were still in the middle of their 11-year study. Well, it came out last year, and it turns out 5,000 Californians alone die every year prematurely from wildfire smoke. Yep, they're starting to figure this out more and more. Captain William E. Simpson once again from the Wild Horse Fire Brigade, and needless to say, I just think you're doing a great job on this. Here is what I wanted to make sure people knew, though, that there is a gentleman running for Congress.

Is it in Washington State that he's doing? this or is it uh you know where is this going on here uh bill yeah yeah so um gerard sessler is is running for a congressional district in the state of washington he's a he's a decorated war veteran it seems like a really in the super guy yeah but he reached out to you because he heard the song apparently right yeah yeah people have been sending him the song because you know everybody wants to take out the snake river dams now you know i'm sure they're eyeball in that another another two billion dollar project and uh so he he's done some documentary work and now he wants to use copco road as a soundtrack and uh so i told him hey go for it you know um i'm doing

my work pro bono in the interest of public welfare i'm not i'm not doing anything that i do right now is to help the community the people the public and and to serve the way we all should serve our fellow mankind. I mean, that's what God expects of us. If you're a Christian, that's part of what's expected. Well, we're to be responsible stewards of Mother Nature. That's right. Yeah, my mom taught me raised this up. You know, I grew up on a ranch, working my butt off, and she said, you know, you shouldn't have to get paid to do what's right. That's what she always used to tell me. Don't. It shouldn't have to be paid to do what's right. Great line. It is.

It's stuck with me. Well, I'll tell you what, you're doing good work on this one. Congratulations here, and bit by bit, the word spreads, and maybe we can change this attitude towards this, you know, the idea that removing dams, and then the problem with removing the dams here, Kevin Bill, as we've talked about, is that there's an existing ecosystem that grows up around there. That's right. And it gets completely ignored and trashed.

It does. Well, here's the thing, Bill. that blows my mind. Okay, there's 4% of the water on the planet is fresh water. And freshwater ecosystems are the rarest. Shoreline freshwater ecosystems are the rare, some of the rarest ecosystems on the planet. And we just, I forget how many miles of lake shore we had here that they just destroyed, but it was dozens of miles of lake shore that was covered with insect hatches and then rare amphibians and reptiles. And, and then the layers of, you know, when you go up in the cascades, you know, all the way up to the birds in the sky, the eagles and the

hawks. They never came back. You know, we've got so many empty Osprey nest, it's unbelievable. Our eagles haven't come back. Why? Because the food source is gone. It's all gone. Yeah. It's an in-hospitable environment. Yeah. Right. All right. Okay, I'm just running a little short on time here, but I just want to make sure to give you a blast of this because, like I said, to be, you know, expanding into the documentary world. I'm going to reach out to that Congress. congressional candidate, too, see what's going on with him, because if he's concerned about yet another dam being pulled out, he should be, because those anti-dam forces are very strong and very well organized, and maybe they can learn from the Klamath, you know, the Klamath experience.

Hi, you're wrong with Captain Bill. Who's this? You've been holding a little bit here, caller? Who's this? This is Gene, and I would like to ask Captain Bill a few questions. Sure. Go ahead. Has he ever thought about putting his songs out on CDs so that we can buy him and play them at home? And he's got a song about Mayor and Her Fold. Good question. What do you say?

Well, I guess CDs are kind of old hats, Jane. I'm sorry to say, but yeah, I've got a CD collection myself. I think people are moving to digital, but you can put it on, you can stream it down onto an SD card, a lot of these new stereos have a little. Yeah, Jane doesn't have a computer, though. I know that. She's talked about it before. Yeah, and or you can just actually go to Spotify and hear the songs.

If you go online, you know, if you have a computer, you can go online. Yeah, Jane, we're going to have to get you a computer. I'm going to have to buy you a computer, okay. Yeah, yeah, we, yeah, I'm sorry to say, but. Hey, hey, okay, Bill, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to do a service for you, Gene, all right? I'm going to get those songs from Bill. I'll put it on a CD for you, and I'll send it to you, okay?

How about that? Oh, that would be great, and I'll pay for it. Oh, don't worry about it. I'll do it. Because I can't have you be grumpy. You'll be nicknamed you Grumpy Gene in the past, so, you know. But hang on, Gene, all right? I'll get your address in just a minute, okay.

Hey, just trying to help. We've got to help people wherever they are, Bill, okay? Yeah, yeah. I, see, we don't have any money to spend on this. Doing it the way we did it digitally, I didn't have to spend any money to produce an album. Yeah, distribution costs are very inexpensive in that way, and that's true. I get that, but I'm going to help some of the folks on the, whoever thought we'd be talking about a digital CD, a CD as old school, but yeah, it is. You know, okay?

Yeah, so we're going to, just so everybody knows, all the proceeds, capital A-L, all the proceeds from this effort goes towards protecting our local heritage herd of horses here. and helping to continue our programs with Cal State to educate kids about, you know, wildfire mitigation using the horses, you know, fuel management. You know, we can't put livestock everywhere. The ranchers need to wake up. You can't put livestock everywhere. It just doesn't work. And now we have predators coming down in the valleys out of the mountains and eating stuff

because there's nothing else on the menu, but livestock and people's pets. All right. I'll give you that, okay. Hey, got a roll here, Cap, but hey, thanks for the update, and good luck on spreading the word and moving into the documentary world and getting a bunch of plays out there, too, all right. Good hearing from you. All right. Thank you. Captain William E. Simpson, ethnologist, once again, Wild Horse Fire Brigade.org.

733, K.m.D. Hi, it's John at Wellburn's Weapons, Southern Oregon Suppressor Headquarters. This is the Bill Myers Show. 20 before 8, former state senator Herman Berichiger joining the show. We've talked to little politics and some economics every week here. Interesting, Herman, welcome back. Good to have you on, as always. Yeah, it's great to be here.

It's actually a pretty nice day here in Grants for late November. I'll be honest with you. Pretty nice day everywhere, really. And it's going to be kind of a mild traveling day, at least here in the southern Oregon area. You head up north. It'll be rainier, but it's winter. We're getting to be winter, I guess. You know, there's a lot of talk and focus on, of course, Black Friday.

I don't know if I'm going to go out to Black Friday sales as I once did because, my gosh, they start Black Friday sales at, I think, at Labor Day, don't they? At least it kind of feels that way, the way that it has been working. But there's a lot. It's all marketing tools, Bill. Yeah, but there's a lot writing on this right now. And the consensus, if you want to call it that, a lot of economic, stories going out there that even though our Thanksgiving dinner arguably is a little less

expensive this year. And I'm happy for that. Very thankful for it. And, you know, biscuits and turkey and various other things are considerably less expensive, a little less expensive on the gas, too. Well, maybe not less expensive here in Oregon because the Olympic pipeline is shut down. You heard about that. And so our single point of failure may be popping our gas prices up.

We'll see about that. But overall, the consumers folks out there wanting the shop, they aren't feeling it. They're not feeling the love. You agree? I mean, that's kind of what I'm reading in the tea leaves out there. Well, you know, all the spending during the holiday seasons is supposed to be, you know, expendable spending. In other words, you have the extra money. But, you know, things have changed so much, Bill, since.

Since you and I are close to the same age, we were born, the United States has doubled in population, and the personal debt is literally off the charts. They can't keep up with it. So what is the definition of expendable savings? Is that the limit on your credit card, or is it actual money that you don't have to use, you know, to keep afloat? you know it's so it's it's a lot different than it was back in 1960 yeah the sustainable debt load it seems like the united states economy has been designed over a number of decades to have a

instead of a sustainable savings and spending kind of rate it's almost like what's the sustainable debt load is that a fair way of describing it maybe i'm maybe i'm doing it elegantly and like i said just in our lifetime now when you you know when you and i'm I entered the world, and, you know, I'm late 50s, your early 60s, there was really no credit cards. Remember, the first credit cards were gas cards. Yeah, they were. Okay.

And then you had some department store charge cards. You know, they would do that kind of thing. And it started, and it started with a charge, you know, the Steers card or the J.C. penny card or whatever, but you were limited what you could buy. And then, you know, things kept going, and you could, you remember, you remember, you could not buy groceries with a credit card for a long time. No. No, you cannot buy that. So now you can buy everything. You can buy everything. You can buy alcohol whether you buy anything with a credit card. Okay. And so that's why our debt has just went completely off the chart. So I don't even

know what these definitions mean anymore, you know, when we come to expendable income. Expendable income is, you know, I get a paycheck every, every week for $1,000, but I spend $1,400 every week. So, where's the end? You know what I, you're following me? Yeah, and I'm trying to think, what is the root of it? Because some are claiming that the Mondani election, of course, was based on, you know, you hear this talked about a lot, affordability, you know, the affordability of things out there.

And yeah, groceries are certainly part of that. I think real estate costs are a big part of it. Cost of housing has just continued to climb incredibly. And you see younger generations that are feeling like they are cut out, that they're cut out or they ladder is kind of being pulled out from underneath them. Now, you know, I'm sitting there on a fixed rate mortgage and refinanced a number of years ago, you know, and I'm kind of, you know, happy about that. people like you and me, I guess, are looked at as the problem by that generation because we

haven't died yet, and we haven't moved along, I suppose, but yet they'd be handing out. They'd have the handout for the equity, though, in the... Well, and you're right. So, you know, the inflation is killing us, and I'm looking at the house prices. And in 2010, the average existing home was 173,000. And today it's $401,000. That's in 15 years. Now, that's in 15 years.

Now, you cannot tell me, though, that the income, the average American income, went up two and a half times during that same period, right? No, in fact, when you look at those numbers, you look at there's 133 million households in the U.S., and then when you look at the average income, so people, people making over $500,000 a year in the U.S. is less than 1%. And people making between $100,000 and $500,000 is 41%. So... Now, let's take it to your neck of the wood. Josephine County, what's the average income? It's less than $30,000.

Yeah. Now, I think it's going to go up because those numbers are starting to be old. Okay, so in 2030 we'll redo it. So I'm going to say it's probably over 30, but it's probably like 32, you know. Sure. But so, but if you look at it, half the country is making, not quite half. Well, yeah, over, over 41. So, so roughly half the country is making less than 100,000, and the average house is 400,000.

Mm-hmm. So, I wonder. You see that, and you juxtapose that with the same people who couldn't buy that house, though, could qualify somehow for a $60,000 or $70,000 truck. Does that make sense? Well, and it's credit cards. You know, it's personal debt. That's crazy. Personal debt is absolutely crazy.

And, oh, I'm trying to find it on the debt clock here. It's on a dead clock somewhere. I just pulled the dead clock up on it. You know, a person really ought to take some time and familiarize themselves with the national dead clock because there's so much information on there. And you click on this and you click on that, and that takes you down all these rabbit holes and everything. But, yeah, it's just anybody that has half a brain after spending some time with these numbers can just say, you know, we're kind of living in an artificial economy.

I would agree with that in which, well, look at even Southern Oregon. Southern Oregon really survives on transfer payments, doesn't it? Right. We're surviving on cash falling from the sky into our economy every year. That's what we're really surviving on. Now, you go back 50 years or 60 years, it was actually a pre-year. productive economy, and we've been told that, of course, we can't be productive because reasons, as you well know, right? That's... The debt to GDP back in 1980 was 31%. Now it's almost

140%. So, you know, these, and, you know, I hate to bore our listeners with numbers, but, you know, I'm a finance revenue guy. That's what I did for eight years. And I'll, there's one thing I've learned about politics. Numbers don't lie. Everything else can lie, but numbers don't. What I'm wondering here is if when people talk about feeling pinched, could it be that it's not the food, it's not the groceries, but it's perhaps the services that are built in to the cost of a life these days here, Herman?

What do you think about that? The services. I think it's because the credit availability, you know, we used to have to live within our means pretty much. We're basically, when you and I were born, we were on a cash economy. It was just that simple. But, you know, back when you and I were born, Mom and Dad, well, yeah, we need a speedboat. We need a side-by-side.

A quad or two. How about a jet fee? You know, all we got to do is put 25% down. And the next thing, you know, you have all these things that you really can't export. Do you think, then, that what has also happened, along with the increase? increase in prices with inflation in services and everything else, is that what we think we need to be able to be a conventional American has expanded along with the credit supply? Yeah. Well, it is a credit supply, and so we're all living on credit. I wonder how many of us

can actually look in the mirror and say, you know, I am, I am not spending any more per month than I'm making. I wonder how many people can actually say that, Bill. Well, I can, fortunately, but I don't think that, you know, I don't think I'm common, unfortunately. And that's just because, well, I got kind of a boring life, you know, I guess that's part of it, you know, not a lot of vacations and things. like that and just kind of taking care of business, but maybe if I was in my 30s, I'd be looking for something different, Herman. I'm trying to understand, you know, how people, how people live, do their things. Yeah, it's just, it's too easy to live on, on credit, you know, and then when you

look at these huge, these huge debts, you know, just a national debt, okay, that's money we borrow, that's money our federal government borrows to pay their obligation, all right? you break that down to per taxpayer right now, it's $330,000 per taxpayer. So you and Linda's share are $660,000. So I'm $660,000 in debt to the federal government just on the national debt. I love that. I love that. Thank you for it. That's just national debt. Then if you, if you start throwing in, you know, Medicare, Social Security, all those other obligations, I mean, you know, I always say, look at this stuff early in the morning, it's less likely to push you into drinking.

Okay, I appreciate that. Former state senator Herman Barrettiger with me. Herman, I don't think we're going to be able to solve that national debt problem anytime soon, and I don't think there's a whole lot of seriousness about trying to attack it in D.C. I'm just talking about it. No, but I think people need to understand, you know, and quit going to. through your life with blinders on, this eventually is going to be reconciled somehow. Yeah, indeed.

Speaking of which, interesting stat which is in making it out there, Bill O'Reilly probably made it most famous, you know, on his blog post the other day, about what's going on in the state of Oregon. One of the half billion dollars that we're spending every two years on illegal alien health care in the state of Oregon. Meanwhile, we have states like Hillsborough and others that are declaring states of emergency because, oh, my gosh, ICE is coming in and trying to pick these people up at the same time. And a billion and a half, it's more than OSP, Herman.

It shows you where our priority is. The OSP budget is 777 million. Yeah. But Bill, I'm tired of beating this drum, but the Democrat. what was that harming your phone cut out there just a second before you were doing the rant okay go ahead so the democrats have been using our taxpayer dollars to enhance their likelihood of being reelected this whole this whole um homeless issue we've always had a certain percentages of the population that they kind of live that way and if you roll the clock back 30 years

you know, you had the people living under Burnside Bridge in Portland, but in a rural communities you didn't have it. But Democrats have helped expand that, okay, those are likely voters, not people that are in the United States undocumented are likely voters. So they're going to keep promoting these things because they are likely voters. Those are people that will likely vote for Democrats. because they're getting free ice cream from the Democrat. Very difficult to run against free ice cream.

You know that. That's right. You know, I always remember, I always tell the story in some of my talk. You have a fifth grade class, and you have one young man who is just outstanding student, great speaker, and he's running for class president, and he gets up there, and he says, you know, well, all of the good things that we're going to do and we're going to probably extend recess and we're going to do this and everything. And this other little girl, she gets up there and she just says, vote for me and I'll

give you free ice cream. Yep. She wins. So she wins. And that's what's going on. And they're using our money. Bill, they're using our money. Are we reaching the end of this, though?

Are you reaching the end? I mean, I'm dead serious about this because, you know, when you have people going to those tax petition sign-up locations over the weekend. And I heard this from more than one person. In fact, there was one guy, I think it was Gary Clark that was telling me that they were down in Ashland. In Ashland, right? You know, the dreadlocky kind of guy comes up there and says, I'm not like you

and pointing to the Make America Great Hat that the fellow was wearing. But I'm signing this, and he walked up and he signed it. You know, you wouldn't take a look at the guy and figure that he was part of this anti-Cotech kind of deal about what she's trying to do. with these tax increases are we reaching the limit i guess is what i'm asking well these are all good signs but the the arrogance of the democrats here in oregon are so let's go back you know when we did the uh when we killed cap and trade we did the walk out and timber unity was born timber union was actually the idea was conceived in my office and i remember that day very well i

You know, I come from the logging community, and we had a dozen loggers show up at my office, and they waited out there. Finally, my chief of staff said, hey, you got a bunch of logger. I bring the loggers in. And they were in literally in their rigging clothes, okay? There's logging costumes, I call them. And they just come out of the woods, and we talked, and they go, you know, a cap-and-trade goes and diesel goes sky high. It's going to kill us, and I remember one of them, say to me, Herman.

What can we do? And I said, bring me a thousand long trucks. That's what they did. And they did. They left my office, and that group of people came up with Timber Unity. And when we were denying quorum and we were out of the state, and the governor was trying to get us back in. Oh, yeah, I was up there. I was up there when they showed up there doing the show when they were doing that.

Remember? And she called me, and she said, hey, can you come back? I says, we're not going to come back until after this weekend, because they're going to have their protest or whatever. And I am not going to in fear with that. I'm not going to try to steal any headlines and get any press. They're going to do their things. Well, it was a massive display. I remember the state police superintendent, Travis called me, and he goes,

well, Herman, you got I-5 shut down 20 miles the either direction of Phelham. And I, well, I didn't have them down, but Timor Unity did. Oh, I know, but it really showed what could be done. Do you think, though, that this anti-tax push here has similar legs? Well, and this is what I'm getting to, Bill. So that day, Governor Brown called me, and she says, my God, Herman, you were right. This is huge. And so that's why they knew we won.

we won there's no but because of their arrogance what did governor brown do she just went and did tap and trade through executive order climate friendly equitable community stuff like that yeah right exactly so i predict knowing knowing the governor as well as i do and i know her very well i served eight years with her she's going to figure out a way to increase taxes in this short session. They're going to fight like hell with their unions, because they're going to get the signatures. This thing is going on the ballot. Oh, yeah, no doubt. There's going to be a huge battle. There's going to be a huge battle. I'm going to figure there's going to be a couple hundred thousand petitions submitted by the time it's all finished. It's going to be big.

Right. So, but they're going to, they're going to go down two pathways. They're going to say, I already know Coach actually is going to say, well, we may lose this battle, but we'll just start another battle and she'll head a different direction. So that's what I think will happen. But what I guess I'm saying is, so the timber unity thing was huge with citizens. This is huge with citizens. And back to your question, are we heading a different direction? Yes, I would say we are heading a different direction, but it's all going to be a long battle. And it's not something which is just going to be one battle and done. No.

All right. Herman Barrettigar with me this morning. Caller, you have been very patient. You have a question or comment for Herman? Go ahead. Hey, Bill. It's Stephen Meprin. Yeah, Steve.

You guys are talking about important stuff. I used to be a financial advisor, and I've been retired for something like 12 years now. And the effective inflation is you really don't feel. until after about four or five years of being retired. And I've been fortunate myself, but there are a lot of people who aren't. If you're living off of a credit card and you're making ends meet and you retire, you're going to go downhill dramatically because everything is working against you. Things like the government spending more money cuts down on the money you have.

And right now, you've talked to Chad McCann. McCorm of the Joy community over there. They have, I don't know, maybe six or eight of those little units, and they have 100 people signed up for moving into that community because there are that many people out there who are broke and they don't have enough money to rent even an apartment. So we're talking about the, you're cutting to the chase here, Steve. the inflation that was lit on fire 2021 up until, you know, 2023, 2024, is just now

really burning into people. It's like people, especially people who retired, right? Is that kind of where you're coming from here? Absolutely. And if you're living off a credit card, you're just burning yourself up. All right. I appreciate the call. Thank you very much for that, Steve.

Boy, that may be why there's a bit more of that gloom feeling, wouldn't you say, Herman? bit of that? Well, like I said, numbers don't lie. And if you look at the dollar loss and value from 1913 to now, it's lost 96% of its value. Yeah, and that's also why I think you're looking at gold at 4,100 and silver at 51. Now, there are other aspects of it, too, but ultimately maybe what we're looking at here is that maybe we're running out of time on the paper promise world. What do you think? I think, I don't know how this is going to close, but I do know it has to be reconciled because

the whole world is doing the same thing, Bill. It's not just the U.S. I know. There's not a country on this planet that isn't running some massive deficit. And I just don't know how that's all going to play out. I literally do not know. I just know that it's going to have to reconcile itself. Yeah, prudence is the order of the day, for sure.

And I will grab one more call, and then we'll cut you. I know you've got to go and take care of the cows, okay? And hi, you're on with Herman. Who's this? Good morning. Yeah, this is Mark. Hey, Mark, what's up? Hey, I just wanted to add a little correction there. The very first credit card was not actually a gas card.

It was the diners club card, hence credit was born. Oh. Part of the problem with overspending is the commercialization and greed of corporations. Like Phil Morris, for example, as soon as they took the advertisement off for cigarettes and made glorifying the smoking habit, smoking dropped dramatically. So we're being fed as a society, you need this side-by-side. You need this camp trailer. this to keep up with the Joneses, you know, the credit card. Yeah, and that's been going on a long time here, but it's the machine, right? It's the economic machine that were part of, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And then, you know, when we, when the Dinus Card was created, there was no interest, right? So the banks and, you know, these companies that issue the cards, they're the wanted to tell you what the interest rate is, and it's nothing more than green and overspending gluttony, I would say, with the American people living beyond their means. All right. I appreciate the opinion there. You know, that kind of brings up something I've wondered about here, Herman. Whatever happened to usury in the United States?

Huh? Yeah. I was just taking a look the other day. I pay credit cards off. I just use them to pay for things and then pay them off. immediately, sometimes before the, even the, you know, I just, I traded that way as something that you can contest if something goes wrong. But I looked at it, I think it was, even though I have great credit, it's like it's 29%,

29% interest rate at the same, at the same time that at the bank they'll pay you, what, 3% on a CD? Yeah, oh, yeah, well, I think it's a little more, three, but just a little more. Yeah. Okay, let's say four percent. I'll be generous. Say four percent. Okay. Four percent, yeah. I, you know, I don't know, but you look at the emerging countries. They're really trying to go to get away from cash, but they don't give credit cards. It's only debit cards. So there's a reason for that. Can you imagine these emerging companies giving all these people that are, that live. of a sustainable lifestyle, in other words, whatever they... Or subsistence lifestyle, just to, you know... Subsistence, that's the word, yeah.

Do you imagine giving them credit? Well, everything works until it doesn't, and I guess maybe that's what is a little bit of the feeling out there, too, Herman. It's starting to work a little less than he once did, okay? Well, I think the banking community is extremely nervous about the debt, but But they have to keep up. They have to keep out credit. They have to keep going because you've got, you know, this bank is competing with all the other banks. And well, we're not going to give credit anymore. And the system is designed that it must be in constant expansion or else bad things happen. Hmm. Exactly. How sustainable is that long term? I have no idea. And I'll just tell you my thoughts are I know at some point it has to be reconciled. Fair enough. Former State Senator Herman Berichiger, I always enjoy the call and the talk,

even though I guess this maybe sound a little weird, but I think maybe we understand a little bit more why, in spite of all the happy talk that comes out of any administration, they always talk up happy talk. You know, it's just the way they do. It's what they do. But there might be the reason for those stories that we're reading about a little bit of gloom behind the scenes. That could be what's going on. Well, and when you go back to the state Oregon, you know, if they don't win this battle with this with this tax, which I don't think they're going to. They're going to put up a hell of a fight. Sure.

They're in a bad. The state is actually in a horrible spot because all of the things they want to fund, they will not have the money to fund. They can't bond anymore. Yeah. And see, to me, I look at that as a beautiful thing. Well, I know. Well, it can and it can't be because what they're going to do is they're going to defund the things

that make you hurt. Kind of like ODOT snowplow drivers, that kind of thing. Well, and I think it'll be medical. They'll say, oh, well, you know, we can't give out medical, and they're going to cut back medical. Oh, yeah, they'll cut the Oregon Health Plan, but they'll keep the illegal aliens on it, though, right? Right, exactly. Oh, man, I'll tell you. Well, that may be when the riot begins.

We'll have to see, Herman. I'll get back to you on that one. But happy Thanksgiving and enjoy it. We'll talk next Tuesday for sure, all right? You'll be well. You take care. Yeah, one of the half billion for illegal aliens, no problem there. Let's declare emergencies in Hillsborough and other cities because, oh, my gosh, they're trying to remove these people that are, well, they're having to spend one of the half billion dollars.

I mean, it's amazing stuff. KMED, KMED, HD, HD, Eagle Point, Medford, KBXG grants pass. We have open phone time here. It's pebble in your shoe Tuesday. Any pebbles you would like to discuss, let me know. We're here with Kevin.