Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 482: Uplifting Tragedies

Episode Date: August 12, 2019

We chat about tragic stories presented as uplifting, AOC, minimum wage, and lunch debt.    

This episode of Cognitive Dissonance is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. recording live from gloryhole studios in chicago this is cognitive dissonance every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence to any topic that makes the news, makes it big, or makes us mad. It's skeptical, it's political, and there is no welcome mat. This is episode 482 of Cognitive Distance.

And this is our last pre-recorded episode, Cecil. So by the time you're hearing this, Cecil, you're back in town. How was your vacation? I'm good, maybe. Hopefully. Here's to hoping. This episode's going to be a lot of economic stories.

We're going to be sort of covering quite a bit of, there's a big story we're covering in this about a interesting media device that's used to sort of exploit capitalism. And then a lot of other stories that have to do with economics in this episode. So it's not really a deep dive, but a lot of these stories really do match up with each other. So, uh, so if you are one of those people who's pretty far left and likes,

uh, to talk about, uh, poverty and, horrible capitalists, this is going to be a great episode for you. Children. I'm,

I'm afraid I have some very bad news. Um, one of your mothers was just killed in a car accident. Who wants to guess whose mother it was for a sucker? Whoever can guess whose mom it was correctly can have anything you want out of the goodie basket. Do you kids need a hint? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

She'd been drinking. Joey's mom! Joey's mom! Yeah, who said it first? Very good. very good now how many hours did it take for the jaws of life to get joey's mom's body out of the crumpled vehicle all right so this one is from fair.org and we're actually just going to read the whole thing and talk about it as we go through um media just can't stop presenting horrifying stories as uplifting perseverance porn. I couldn't love, hate this story more. I'll tell you, the writing in here,

there's a couple of great lines, but just that line, perseverance porn, I think it's brilliant. I do too. And this, well, we'll get through it. This is awesome. That's how Fox 5 DC described its story about Logan Moore of Cedartown, Georgia,

a disabled two-year-old whose parents were unable to afford to buy him a walker, so employees at Home Depot fashioned one together for him. And there's a picture of a walker built out of PVC and shit at Home Depot. The story closely resembles another recent CNN report. Quote, a two-year-old couldn't walk on his own, so a high school robotics team built him a customized toy car. That piece noted how Minnesota toddler Cillian Jackson couldn't walk due to a genetic condition

and how his parents couldn't afford treatment. It described the ingenuity of the school children who built him a car and Cillian's newfound freedom, but it did not explore why a baby with a disability had been abandoned by U.S. society. Jesus. The clear implication in these stories is that those children

would have been left permanently unable to move if not for the help of underpaid employees or the kindness of other children. How many disabled American children

with poor parents are not so lucky? The articles didn't ask. Instead, they were presented as uplifting human interest pieces. You see this shit

all the time. Oh, yeah. I see it constantly. Yeah, constantly. And it's like, we've talked about this before, every single Kickstarter, every single GoFundMe, I shouldn't say Kickstarter, every single GoFundMe or similar, which starts off telling a story about some medical need related to money, it is a striking moment of the utter failure of our social safety net, of our social responsibility to one another, of our healthcare system in this country. It should be excoriating. And the idea that we play this as, oh my gosh, isn't it so great

that the kindness of strangers has come through when society has failed? A person on my feed recently, someone who my friends know has esophageal cancer and trying to collect a certain amount of money to try to make sure that they have enough to pay the co-pays and all the other stuff going forward because they know they're going to get hit with a medical debt that they cannot incur and continue just having a car, having a house, doing all the things that they need to do. We live in a system that punishes poor people. That's just it. It just punishes poor people. Poor people don't have the means to basically have their own social safety net. They don't have their own safety

net. We don't give them any opportunity to create a safety net. And then when things go bad for them, we say it's their fault. It's your fault. You didn't save enough. It's your fault. Well, they didn't have any savings to begin with. Well, it's just still your fault. It's still, and here's how it's your fault. Look at all this other, these other people. Look at all these heartwarming stories

where all these other people pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. You're just too lazy to pull yourself up by your bootstraps or you just don't have good friends or whatever it is. Yeah, right. Whatever it is in these stories. Sucks for you if you're new to town. Yep. You know? Yeah. Sucks. Yeah. Well, let's keep reading because it's pretty amazing. So, Cillian's story is part of CNN's Good Stuff series, which is incredible, which asks its

readers, want more inspiring, positive news? Sign up for The Good Stuff, a newsletter for the good in life. It will brighten your inbox every Saturday morning. Unfortunately, these stories are part of a popular trend of unintentionally horrifying, uplifting news, which we had fair of cataloged before, where out-of-touch corporate media gives us supposedly charming, wholesome, and positive news that actually, upon even minimal retrospection, reveals the dire conditions of late capitalism

so many Americans now live under and makes you feel worse after reading it. I don't agree with that. Yeah. I think people will not agree. I think you're right. I think you have to think, really think about it to feel worse. Yeah. And I think, I don't agree that the media is out of touch. I think the media is incredibly savvy, incredibly savvy. The idea that they're out of touch is wrong. It's just plain wrong. The folks writing those stories are journalists. Journalists aren't exactly making tons of money on the individual, right? So these are people who know that this is a clickbait article. And this is uplifting for people who

just see somebody got helped, right? They see the good Samaritan, not, well, why is that person abandoned on the side of the road? Right? They see the outcome, but they don't see what led to the outcome. They don't see the dearth of opportunity that created the need for everybody to pitch in. Right. You know? Yeah. It's like watching Old Yeller all up until the last moment.

You know what I mean? Like, it's just like, it's not happy. This is not a happy story. Yeah. You know, what's interesting to me is that as we're talking about this, you were saying, you know, journalists, not really super well paid, but they're doing what's best for them, right? They're trying to do something that's best for them. Get more clicks on an article, right? So they'll do something that they know is going to be that quote unquote heartwarming thing that people will share. It's going to go, it's going to be more viral

because there's going to be people who are going to be like, isn't it so sweet? They built this little kid a walker. Look at how adorable, look I'm toddling around on that thing. It's so cute. And so they're going to share it. But what they don't realize

is that even though they're paid badly and they're probably never going to get paid super well being a journalist, they are doing something for capitalism. They're going out of their way to report something. So I don't feel like it's a nefarious thing for them to be like,

oh, they're pro-capitalist, they're pro-oligarch. I think that they're just trying their best. At least that's what occurs to me. I don't think that there's orders on high from the capitalist in chief telling them, you need to make some fucking feel good pieces so people feel good about capital.

I don't feel like that's the case. But I think unintentionally, there's a sort of perfect storm going on in a feedback loop where it keeps feeding it. And it feeds a bunch of people in the United States this weird narrative that it doesn't matter, charity will pick this up. Yeah, and let me use these two examples

as really is illustrative of why that's an utter failure in your thinking, not your thinking, but thinking in general. All right, so there's a two-year-old kid and he can't walk. And so the local high school, you know, they built him a car, a little car, and that's awesome. And in two years, when that two-year-old is twice the size that he is now, that car is not going to fit him. It's useless. Yeah. And you better fucking hope that every year the new fucking sophomores or juniors coming into that high school, up until the point where this kid becomes 17, 18 and is done growing, you better hope one of them decides that they still fucking pity this kid enough that they want to spend their fucking summer project building them a fucking automated car and that they have the increasing resources to do that. That's real unlikely, right?

What they did is they solved a momentary problem. Yeah, exactly. They neither addressed the issues that led up to it, but nor did they address the issues that are immediately going to follow subsequent. Yeah. The strollers are the same, the walkers are the same thing.

And I'll grow that walker in an hour. 10 days, yeah. In an hour. It's outgrown now. I blinked. Yeah. The problem is because no, that's why you need systems,

not hodgepodge, band-aid bullshit. Because what systems do is they recognize and they take into account the needs of people as they grow, as they change. They're systematic in their approach to problem solving. The problem with using charity to solve problems is charity might help today, you can't rely on it tomorrow. And most problems aren't fixed because you got something once, especially when they're ongoing medical issues. Systemic change in charities is a big,

there's a big push for that because like you say, it's a bandaid, right? It's just one bandaid for one moment. And there's several books out there that say that charity in a lot of these places in the world can really do some serious harm. If you have a charity that gives people shoes in a certain area, do you put out all the shoemakers in that area? You put them all out of business. All those people, they don't have a... Or what if they don't need shoes? Or what if you are also giving them Bible verses

as well as shoes? There's a lot of things that happen with charities that are really kind of shady. And there's, look at what happened in Puerto Rico, just like the unorganization of charity, right? A bunch of food comes in and then it just sits and rots, right? Very often it's the big name group comes in and says,

we're gonna tell says, we're going to tell you how we're going to fix this thing instead of just asking people how to fix it. I might've told this story before. I don't know if I told it before, but there was a group I was working with, a nonprofit I was working with for a while that was a very small nonprofit here in the States. And they were working with people right after the Haitian earthquake. And there was a bunch of people in camps down there, right? So they have all these camps. And they came in and instead of telling the Haitians what they were planning on doing, they came in and they sat down with a group of the leaders and they said,

what can we do for you? I don't, you just ask us to do something and we'll do it. And they said, you know what we really need? You know, everybody's setting up schools, everybody's setting up, you know, water facilities and this and that, and you know, all this other stuff. And they said, what we really need is lights at night because there's people being raped in our camps and we need lights at night and the lights at night will help us. And so they set up the lights and it knocked down all the assaults by a crazy amount because all they did was stop to ask the people what they actually wanted. And it turned out that that

thing worked for them. So, you know, like, like lots of times that's charities really bad for that. It just does. It thinks it's going to be the doing the right thing. And it does, it doesn't bother to look around. And like you say, like try to fix the problem instead. It's like, I can do something that makes me feel good right now and will help you momentarily. And so that's going to be a win-win for us. A lot of these stories involve mothers and the extremely difficult circumstances of raising children in the U.S. while poor. CNN's feel-good story about a teacher

sitting in a car with her student's baby so the new mom could attend a job fair What the fuck? raised far more questions than it asked, which was zero. A little bit of editorializing there. Why is there so little public child care in the U.S.? Should a new mother really need to immediately find a job so badly?

Is this good for an infant's development? On a similar subject, Good Morning America describes the trendy new, this is appalling, the trendy new baby shower gift of donating your pregnant co-worker your days off to give her maternity leave. How does that even work? You can just give someone else your days off, I wonder? Yeah, you can.

At least in my company, I could donate my PTO to someone else. Wow, I didn't realize that was possible. Yeah, so if somebody was in need and I wanted to give them my PTO, I could give them my PTO. That seems to me to be a little weird

in a company where salaries are so different. Well, they don't get my pay rate. I know, but like, let's say you took your, like, let's say you're paid at a high rate and your coworkers paid at a low rate and you needed PTO and they gave you some of their PTO,

that rate is not the same. And so they are technically giving you way more money for your time off. And specifically, I guess what would be more skilled labor than the other person. I like that when he looked at me and described my work as skilled labor. I did do air quotes. He did air quotes? I did air quotes when I said skilled labor.

I totally did. I totally did. I totally did. And I meant it. I know. I know. And you were right. And that's the thing.

You were right. But it's the thing, you were right. But you know, it's interesting that that would be, that that could be possible, right? It would seem like, yeah, if you're all the same pay grade,

right? If you're all like, let's say you all work at the same plant or the same thing. I wonder if it would be like, I need two of you to equal. Two days. I need two days of yours.

I need three days of yours to equal one of my days because it doesn't, it doesn't equal, right? So like the, you know, but who's going to give the fucking whatever. No one's going to give the boss. Nobody's going to give the boss their time off. But you know, if it's like your supervisor, maybe you might, you know, who knows? And that's, and that's because like, I'll also say like that having worked my way up to a position where I'm a little higher where I'm at, like my time off isn't hounded the same way it was

when I had lower level jobs in my life. Sure. When I had lower level jobs in my life, my time off was micromanaged. Every minute of my day, I clocked in and clocked out, you know, like your time is managed way more aggressively. And then when you work your way up the corporate ladder, Absolutely.

all of a sudden what you find is like, my time is more my time. Yeah. There's more of a work-life balance once you like, my time is more my time. I, you know, there's more of a work-life balance once you become an oligarch. Yeah, it's true. You know, it sucks, but like, maybe it doesn't, it doesn't suck to live it, but it is unfair to say it. Like, like, like if I don't, if I decide to work from home, I just decided to work from home. And that's a privilege that I have gotten. I'm in the same position. I'm not, you know, I work in higher ed, so I'm in the same position where I know that I can do that sort of

thing. We've done my job for over 15 years now. And so they, I can turn to them and say, Hey, I need to work from home tomorrow. And they'll, they'll have no problem. They won't even bat an eye. They'll be like, of course, no problem because they know I'll do what I need to do and get my work done, et cetera. But, um, but you can't do that as an Amazon employee, right? No, you can't do that as most employees. Yeah. Can't do that if you're working in a gas station. Right. Yeah. You just don't have that. You just don't have that freedom. Right. Just so happen to work a job that I'm lucky enough to do. I'm privileged enough to, to experience that. But there's a lot of people in the country that can't experience that. And so for a perfect example, maternity

leave, maternity leave in other countries is a fucking given. It's just a given. They're off for a fucking lot of time, like a really lot of time. Paid time. Yeah. The time we get is not paid time. You get FMLA time. That's not paid. Yeah. That's just like, yeah, you can't eat food or keep the lights on, but you don't have to come to work. We can't, yeah, you can't eat food or keep the lights on, but you don't have to come to work. We can't fire you if you don't come to work. There's some paid time for certain institutions, right? And a good friend of ours had a child,

and the couple happened to work at the same institution, right? And so when they went to work, the wife decided to take her time off. That was, the company said, here's your, you get six months of free time or whatever it was, three months, two months, whatever it was. And then the wife had also saved up

X amount of time to stay off. Well, as she was nearing the time off, she had been off for about six months with her baby. The other person, our close friend was going to take over and start using his PTO and also using the time that he thought he was going to get with the baby. But they came up and said, no,

you're married. So only one of you can use that business time that we allow, that we award. Yeah. FMLA is shared. If you're married, both of you can't do it. And he was like,

well, what the hell? Like, why would that even be like it. And he was like, well, what the hell? Like, why would that even be like that? And they're like, no, sorry, too bad. And so what he was expecting was four or five months off of work and only got a couple off with his new baby and then had to, again, you know, daycare and all that stuff. In other countries, that wouldn't even be a thing.

Right. You wouldn't even consider it. You'd be like, whatever. Everybody's got plenty of time off to make sure that the new baby gets acclimated into the world and then gets off to daycare afterwards or whatever. It's probably paid for by the fucking state too.

Many outlets, the CBS, HuffPo, People, cheerfully reported how one man did at least 15 years of backbreaking labor as a night shift janitor at Boston College so his children could attend it for free. But none even mentioned that if he lived in nearly any country in Western Europe, this wouldn't have been necessary as university

there is free or virtually free to attend. It's the same thing with any kind of medical stuff. Yeah, this is a guy who worked a second job. He worked all day, then he worked at night a second job because he knew that being an employee got his kids an education through the university. So yeah, great.

If you work two fucking full-time jobs, then maybe you can afford a fucking education for your kids. I know tons of people that stay at the job that they're currently at. I work in higher ed. I know tons of people that stay at a job that does not make as much money and does not really have a lot of upward mobility

just so they know that 100% their kid's tuition is paid for. They know that's a given and they're like, that's worth it to me. That amount of money that I'm going to be paying for tuition somewhere else is worth it for me. And it's funny because like,

if you think about it in whole dollars, it's like, yeah, that's a lot of money. It's a great benefit, except for that it should not be an expense, right? That's the part that I think people who have always been embedded in the American educational system, first of all, it wasn't always an expense in this country. It used to be that sending your kids to university was free, even in this country. And if not free, it was very, very, very reasonably priced.

They do these memes all the time where they talk about these people in the 70s. They're like, all you had to do was work X amount of hours to pay off your entirety of all your school. And in like nowadays terms, it's like exponentially higher amount of hours to pay it off. And it's because universities not just were cheaper, they were also highly subsidized by the government. Right. And that's a big part of why they were so inexpensive. That's why they were, we used to consider education a general public good. Yeah. Now we consider it a fucking commodity. Yeah.

And that shift in our thinking from a public good to a commodity has shifted our thinking, I think pretty insidiously through stories like this. Sure. Into saying like, oh man, that benefits Cecil that you were describing it, you know, you work in higher ed. Well, that's worth this huge amount of money. Sure. Yeah.

Would never even happen. Right. Fucking millennials. Fucking millennials. Quote, millennials move from job to job in order to climb the ladder. For baby boomers and other generations, loyalty and dedication to a single company or career drove and still drives much of their working lives. No sentence has ever been more full of shit than that sentence. Right, right, right. You want to talk about loyalty to a company? I've, I've show me loyalty from a corporate perspective to the

individual. Show it to me. Yeah. Where's your loyalty to me? It, that shit is fucking maddening. And it's always been a one-way street. It's always been a one-way street. Yeah. You want to tell me working for GM? Yeah. All those people that work for GM and they loyally work and they put in their hours, they work for, you know, ComEd, they work for NICOR, they work for GM and they loyally work and they put in their hours. They work for ComEd. They work for NICOR. They work for these big institutional employers. And they get laid off by the thousands and the tens of thousands. There's no fucking such thing as corporate loyalty to the worker.

That's a lie. That's bullshit. We have this crazy fucking idea that it's a good thing to be a loyal worker without requiring the same moral exactitude from our goddamn employer. There's no reciprocation at all whatsoever. They don't give a fuck. They don't give a fuck. They would fucking shoot you in the head if they knew they'd get profits for it. Are you kidding me?

A hundred percent. They'd feed you into the fucking grinder. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. Because you're just there. You as an employee are a commodity unit. You're there to produce a thing that drives the fucking grinder. Yep, yep, absolutely. Because you're just there. You as an employee are a commodity unit. You're there to produce a thing that drives the bottom line.

Unless you work for a very small family business that might be the exception to the rule. That's just the true thing. Yeah, all the big places. And you know, like when I said feed you into the grinder, there's many businesses out there that you go in as a young strapping buck and you come out

a decrepit beat person. Yes. You come out broken in so many ways because they physically fucking used you up. Yep. They just used you all up. Yep. Like I'm thinking coal mines. Yeah. You know, those coal mines I watched, uh, we watched when we do in the opioid crisis, I watched like a bunch of stories about these coal miners and they're taken, like there was one guy who like got his leg nipped off. Yeah. Like his leg got nipped off and then he's on a bunch of pain pills because his leg got nipped off and he didn't want to lose his job. So he's taking pain pills and going to work. Right. Like, like these are people, these are companies who do not give a fuck about you. They do not care. Like you said, I'm sure there are some mom and pop institutions

out there that do probably care about you and probably will extend, do something to help you out if you ran into some sort of problems. They may change things around. They would do what they can to make sure that you stay on. But most places out there, especially when you start getting into bigger corporations, they could give a fuck about you. You are a body. Get to work. One more piece of that quote I want to touch on real quick is millennials move from job to job in order to climb the ladder. And I read that and I thought,

yeah, because that's the way you get to climb the ladder. Right. Because that's how you decide it. Right. If the way for me to climb the ladder is to change jobs, and that's true. Every time I've changed jobs, I've gone up. When I've stayed at a company, I've stagn jobs, I've gone up. When I've stayed

at a company, I've stagnated, right? That is almost universally the case. To describe that, where, okay, well, if I am loyal, then I'm going to be stuck without any upward mobility. Oh, okay. Well, that sucks. I can't get ahead. That's not your fault or my fault, but it's certainly not acceptable. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to change companies. Oh, you're a job hopper. Yeah. Yo, I'm in it for me. Yeah.

The company's in it for the company. Yeah. This idea that like, that that's a bad thing when it's literally what the system requires in order for you to succeed. And success is the only thing we fucking jerk off. You don't understand. We're adversaries.

Right. We're not on the same side. That's what you don't get. Like, I'm not, I don't understand. We're adversaries. Right. We're not on the same side. That's what you don't get. Like, I'm not, I don't go to work because I like it. I know. I don't go to work because I want to. I go to work to make money. I go to work to make sure that I'm there every day

so that they know I'm there and doing my work. That's why I'm there. It's not because I fucking wake up with a big smile on my face every day and be like, man, I really hope I get to edit some video today. Fucking right, man. Fuck you. Like I'd much rather sit home, play video games and sit with my cat on my lap. Are you fucking kidding me? There are a thousand things I think I can think of that I'd rather do with my time to wake up in fucking February at eight o'clock in the morning and drive my ass 35

miles to a job I don't particularly enjoy. I do it because it's a fucking ATM machine and if I push buttons in the right order, money shits out of it. I'll get something out of it. The thing is too, think about it when they're talking about cuts and things like that, when things about cuts start coming around.

You're not on the same fucking team anymore. You weren't on the same fucking team anymore no you're not on this you weren't on the same team you were tentatively like you were like you had a tentative agreement before after that you're not on the same team anymore you're suddenly spending all your time at work looking like building up your resume posting on linkedin looking for jobs hoping you can beat this wave that comes through and kicks you out so you out so you can fucking crest the next wave and hopefully not lose anything along the way. Not have to stagnate on unemployment, not have to

explain some sort of fucking gap in your resume. There's never a moment you're on the same side. Once in a while, you work in conjunction together. That's the best you could say. That's it. That's it. Fucking judgy shit. Any of these stories could have been used to explore the pressing social and economic realities of being poor in the United States and having to work for things considered fundamental rights in other countries. But instead, they are presented as uplifting features, something only possible if we unquestionably accept the political and economic system. I want to stop for a second. If you're a listener from another country, this may seem fucking so beyond the pale and crazy to you.

So I do genuinely, when we are talking about this, this is stuff we're talking about the United States. I've never been employed outside of the United States. So I have no idea what it's like to work for a corporation in a country that has things like socialized medicine, has things like socialized college. So I don't know what it's like to work in a country like that. So I would be very curious to find out from someone in another country who isn't like an entrepreneur, who is like working for a corporation, if there is sort of an adversarial relationship like we

have there, or if it's different, if there is a different relationship, I'd like to hear about it. Because I don't know what that would even be like. I can't imagine a world without some amount, genuinely, without some amount of existential dread related to your work. Sure. Like, I just, like, what would that... I would be curious to hear that story too. Like, I, you know, what would that, I would be curious to hear that story too.

Like, I, you know, that would be, that would be an interesting thing to listen to because it's built into, we have an idea here that we should be grateful for the job we have. We should be grateful. Fucking kiss the fucking boots of whoever it is that employs us so we can come home and feed our family.

Sure. And it's not, it's not, it might not be like that anymore. So I just want to throw that out there. I know this is a very American-centric story. Most of the stories we cover are very American-centric. This one in particular feels that way. Right.

Many of what think progress labels feel good, feel bad stories involve children doing things they wouldn't have to do in any reasonable society. CBS invites us to enjoy an account of a boy selling his Xbox to help his single mom, and another repairing his town's ravaged roads by himself. What the fuck? The Hill, meanwhile, describes a nine-year-old saving his pocket money to pay off his school friend's lunch debt.

So, Tom, you explained lunch debts to me earlier, because I didn't understand what they were. What is a lunch debt? So, I guess when you go buy lunch at school now, you don't bring money. You just have an account. So when we were a kid,

when we were kids, mom and dad used to have to give us money every day. Right. Or you were on, and this was for me, I was on the lunch program. For me,

I was on the program that was, that was, that was the free program. Right. So I was on the one that the school provided. Right. So I know that there was other people. I was was on the one that the school provided. Right.

So I know that there was other people- I was on that too. You got a ticket. Yeah. Like I got it. I remember you got to the lunch office and you got five tickets for that week. And those are your five lunch-

Those are your five tickets. Yeah. There was, I also went to a school where there was an a la carte line where you could just go buy whatever you wanted. Right. And there was, you know, you could spend whatever you wanted on lunch every day. And there was, you know, you could spend whatever you wanted on lunch every day.

And there was an a la carte line where you would walk through and pay for things. And, you know, they had pizza in there and other stuff. When you were on the meal line, like the one that was a free line, you didn't get anything except for what was the main meal of the day. And when I was a very young kid,

for all of elementary and middle school for me, I went to a school that did not have hot lunches. So everyone had to bring their own lunch to school. And so I used to get a bagged lunch every day from the school. I would walk in and just get them. They would give me a bagged

lunch. And I genuinely would only eat the cookie. Like I would throw the rest of it away. Cause it was like all like summer sausage and stuff I didn't like. And they put a bunch of goop on the sandwich, on the stuff. And I'd be like, I don't want it. I would give it away. Everybody, every day I would give it away to another poor kid. I would be like, I'd come to the table and they'd be like, Hey, you can eat your sandwich. Nope. Here you go, kid. And so I'd eat the cookie and I drink the milk and I maybe eat the apple if there was an apple in there. And that was the,

that was what I do every single day. Always a red delicious apple. I know, the worst. And that's the worst apple. That's the most egregious apple. Can we have a quick talk about apples? Yes, absolutely. Can we digress into apples?

Let's digress into apples. I'm sure the audience wants us to digress at this point. Who the fuck wants a red delicious apple? Nobody. What fucking dire circumstances have caused anybody? Thick skinned, right circumstances have caused anybody thick skinned right so they're thick skinned that when you bite into them you tear your gums up that's number one two the skin is bitter like the skin is actually kind of bitter on those apples the the the inside

is mealy and unappealing and not sweet or tart somehow it's just like a water food it's like it's like it's like eating a saran wrapped water chestnut it's a useless food it's just like a water food. It's like eating a saran-wrapped water chestnut. It's a useless food. It's like there's no reason to ever put one in your mouth, and they're uncookable, too. What are they for? They're for throwing at people or bobbing. Those are your two options.

You could bob for it or throw it at someone. I don't understand why that's always the shitty apple that you give away. Because nobody I've ever met buys that themselves. No, no. There's so many great apples. Apples are an amazing fruit with dozens and dozens of amazing varieties. And it's like, okay, cool on an apple. Fuck. It's this goddamn fucking leather wrapped thing. I won't even eat them anymore. Like if it's turning out, I could thing. I won't even eat them anymore. Like if it's turned out, I could know that I will not eat that.

I'm sorry, that's not a food. Somebody was telling me once like, oh, but if you get them and they're like perfect and they're fresh. No, they're not. Get the fuck out of here. You're a fucking liar. They have the word.

You're with the apple lobby, aren't you? You're with Big Red. Big Delicious yeah it's a that's a horrible what's your favorite apple favorite apple

is a toss up between I got three alright Gala Braeburn Pink Lady

I think those are those are really solid apples Fiji's good too Fiji apple yep but you know like Fiji's can sometimes be Fiji apple. Yeah, but you know like, Fiji's can sometimes be mealy. Yeah. Like you can get- It's not great.

The hit or miss quality of the Fiji like is like, oh, but what if it's miss? Yeah. Braeburn's an excellent apple. Yeah. I like the Pink Lady.

The Pink Grips is also good. Pink Lady's an excellent apple. Jazz apples are fucking money in the bank. I like jazz apples. Jazz. I'll have to look it up. I don't know that I've had one.

That's a fucking solid apple. Yeah. And I'm right there with the Gala, man. The Gala. That's a terrific apple. It's an excellent apple. That's a great apple. And it looks similar to a Red Delicious.

It just happens to taste delicious. It's just delicious. It's just a good apple. When it comes to, I'm not really a big green apple guy. It's not for me. Like for eating? I'm talking about eating apples,

not baking apples right now. Don't get me wrong. If you take one of those and you dip it in caramel and then nuts and make an afi-tapel out of it, I will fuck that thing. Are you kidding me?

I like green apples in my coleslaw that I make for old pork. Oh, that's nice. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. A little bit of pork and apples is an absolutely classic combination. Delicious combination. All right, let's go back Yeah. A little bit of pork and apples is an absolutely classic combination.

Delicious combination. All right, let's go back to this. All right. NBC likewise shared the story of homeless Tennessee teen Tupac Mosley graduating high school as a valedictorian and earning many college scholarships, something that was widely reported

by the BBC Newsweek Business Insider. NBC matter-of-factly noted that after his father died, Mosley's family's home was foreclosed and they were left out on the streets, accepting the situation without comment. This was still among the most critical of the reports, however, as many did not even describe why a child in the richest society in history became homeless. CNN's report, for example, did not explain the background circumstances,

let alone comment on them, and frames the story with the sentence, hardships were never an excuse for Mosley. That's so insidious. It's such a shitty line. God, it makes it feel like, and it makes it feel like you're basically saying, buck up, everybody. Yeah.

Oh, you didn't have it as hard as this kid whose father died and he was homeless, and he still managed to be the valedictorian. Yeah. So why can't you manage to be amazing? This is so fucking tone deaf. Yeah. It's kind of unbelievable that we would celebrate the story.

So don't get me wrong, not to take anything away anecdotally. No, absolutely. The problem is that when anecdotes are not reflective of social realities, then they are telling a story that blames everybody for not being unbelievably extraordinary. It'd be like saying like, well, that guy over there worked really hard and now he's an NFL player and he could bench press 650 pounds. So why can't you bench press 650 pounds? What a no. We're not all built the same. We're not all the same intelligence, temperament, emotional intelligence, emotional resilience,

capacity for work. We didn't all grow up with the same experiences that shape who we are. Like there's a thousand things that make us who we are. And this idea that we are in control of all of them to such an extent that we can simply look at success, decide that we want it. Decide success. And as a result, if I don't get it, it's my fucking fault. Yeah. And to the people who didn't decide hard enough, it's their fault. You know, this is the reason why we don't take anecdotes when it comes to medicine either.

You know what I mean? Because it doesn't tell the whole picture. It doesn't show the whole picture. It doesn't talk about every single person or a large group of people or how the average works. Instead, it's talking about one particular instance. We don't take anecdotes when it comes to that. We don't bother to talk about that when it's a cancer patient who goes

into spontaneous remission. We need to throw that out. We don't need to think about that in a way to be like, oh, you know what? People can go into spontaneous remission. So therefore, what we need to do is hope for that. No, we solve for the worst problems that people don't go into spontaneous remission for. And then we just hope that you do because that's really great. It's so funny because like, I guarantee that anybody that you talk to, if shit goes south in their life, like real south, there's going to be a hundred reasons why shit went south. Because when it's you, there's a reason. And when it's somebody else,

it's an excuse. When it's somebody else, when it's a group of people, especially, when you pigeonhole a group of people and say why that group is not as successful as me, when it's me, my successes are mine. My failures have a reason.

When it's you, my successes are mine. My failures have a reason. When it's you, your successes are because of your privilege or your circumstances or luck. And your failures are your failures. We make everybody else own their shit, but we don't hold ourselves to the same standard. Yeah. There's so many times in my own life where someone I know has been on public aid

and bitched about people on public aid. And you're like, but you're on public aid. And they're like, yeah, but I need it. And you're like, okay, well, there you go. Like, you just don't, you don't understand, you don't understand, you don't have empathy, you know, or you don't have the correct level of empathy to understand that everybody is basically the same as you. They're in the same position you are. This sentence is telling the corporate media even the trauma of losing a parent to being forced onto the streets is merely an excuse and not a cause for poor grades. The implication is that poor housing, a lack of adequate safety net, underfunded schools, and a decimated public education system are simply excuses from bellyaching lazy people

as to why they did not attend the private Boston University at over $54,000 per year in tuition, like the article's author did. That's pretty catty. Meow! No excuses is a common phrase in perseverance porn. Oh, great. For example,

Today used it in the headline of a story about a Texas man who's forced to walk 15 miles to work every day. It reveals the ultimate bootstrap ideology of the media where societal factors

are irrelevant and everyone is where they are on merit. Thus, Mosley's story is effectively weaponized by CNN against anyone

who would question the system. Terrible work conditions? No excuses. Homeless? Stop complaining. It's not even at all wrong. Right.

This is our story. This is the problem of the bootstraps mentality. Absolutely. The bootstraps narrative is a dangerous narrative. Yeah. It's a dangerous narrative

because it only tells you about the very few people who actually do make it. And it does not tell you about all the failures or all the struggles of people who never even scraped past, you know, never even get that,

never can even scrape by. And even when it does tell those anecdotal, aberrational success stories, it never talks about the impact and the cost of that success. When I think about somebody like myself, like a hetero middle-class white guy, right? In order for me to be successful, it cost me less. It just cost me less to do that. It cost me less in money. It cost me less in time. Sure.

It cost me less in social resources. If somebody had less advantages and they achieved the same thing, it might still be a great story. But if we don't factor into that, what extra it cost them in order to do that? How much did it cost them in terms of social interactions? Were they working so much that they don't have strong social connections, right?

There's always a cost. The more difficult the circumstances of somebody's life make something, the higher the cost for success in time and in resources. We don't take that into account. We're only looking at an outcome-driven society. Yeah. And that's a fucking horrible, disingenuous way to look at things. Yeah. Another reprehensible story treated as heroic by media was that of a Michigan mother who had quit her job to look after her terminally ill son who died of leukemia. She couldn't afford a headstone, his best friend 12 year old caleb

worked many jobs to attempt to pay for one many many media outlets associated press fox nbc celebrated caleb's spirit but none asked why children are performing hard outdoor labor through a michigan winter so other children can have adequate burials. Such reporting implicitly normalizes the situation and the system that allows it to happen. By the way, burying someone in the United States is a fucking immense amount of money. It is crazy. It is an unbelievable amount of cash you have to spit out just to put somebody, to put somebody in the ground is way more money than cremation. And cremation is very expensive. Like it's not, in the ground is way more money than cremation. And cremation is very expensive. Like it's not,

it's not cheap. Nope. Like it is not a cheap thing to do. Uh, it's, I've had to, I've had to burn a couple people. And, uh, that is, it's not like, uh, in fact, it was so expensive for my dad that my mom, one of the things that she told Lou and I was, do not, I don't want any services whatsoever. I don't want anybody to get any of the money that I made throughout my life. I don't want you to spend all that on a funeral. She's like, do not do that. She's like, I want the cheapest casket I can get and put me, you know, burn me.

She's like, that's what I want. And like, so she specifically didn't, cause she knew what, it had nearly broke her when dad died because he didn't have any life insurance, you know, and just.

Well, that's a huge part of what drives that death industry is the life insurance industry. So similar to medical is like, because so many people

do have life insurance and because when you're making funeral arrangements, you can leverage the cost against the forthcoming benefit from your life insurance. can leverage the cost against the forthcoming benefit from your life insurance. It drives the costs up the same way that health insurance drives the cost up for medicine

over what it would be if people were paying cash. And so who gets fucked? People paying cash. Yeah. A common media trope is presenting kids selling lemonade as cute, sweet stories, no matter how horrifying or depressing the reason, including to pay off school lunch debts, Yahoo, MSN, or to raise money for their baby brother's medical treatment, New York Post and CBS, or for their mother's chemotherapy, KTSML Pansel.

Or how about the story of a New Mexico girl selling lemonade to try to fund her mother's kidney transplant? People Magazine applauded her resolve and local radio described it as heartwarming. I can't think of anything less heartwarming. That she had raised over a thousand dollars. The massive problem is a kidney transplant in America can cost over four hundred thousand dollars. To anyone with a heart, what this actually represents is the desperate struggle of a child trying in vain to save her dying mother. Worse still is the fact that if she lived in Sweden, Spain, or Saskatchewan, she'd be given a kidney free of charge

and without question. That is so heartbreaking. I don't know how you would hear that story and think, oh, isn't it adorable? She got $1,000. Like you have to be, your head has to be so far up your own ass to not know that $1,000 isn't even a fucking dent that.

$1,000 wouldn't even be the amount of money they would pay for gloves. It's like for 400K, $400,000. Think of how much fucking money that is to pay for one thing, for one person just to live a little longer. And this little girl, terrified she's going to lose her mother, trying to do anything she can. This story is heartbreaking. It is so sad. And if it's not heartbreaking to you, you're a fool. You've missed all the cues of what it takes to be an empathetic

human being. Isn't this a perfect example of the misplaced burden of responsibility? Absolutely, yeah. Like, if we're going to say that government has any role in our lives at all, shouldn't one of the roles of government be to make sure that we don't mistakenly place the burden of healthcare responsibility on little girls to try to sell enough lemonade to save their mother through money? Yeah. Through money.

It's one thing to say, oh, we don't have the technology to fix this. It's another thing to say, there's no cure for that. It's entirely its own thing to say, there is a cure, there is a solution to this medical problem, but that solution has a gatekeeper called your fucking checkbook. Yeah, your checkbook, yeah. And we're going to place the burden of responsibility to save someone's life financially upon a child rather than spread it out and aggregate it across 327 million people? I'll tell you what, 400K, if somebody hit me with that tomorrow, I'd find a way to fucking pay it, but I would probably be out of

my house. You know what I mean? I'd be out of my house. I probably wouldn't have a car. I would be in debt up to my fucking eyeballs as deep as I could possibly go, but I'd do the best I could. If it was me or Sarah, I would be like, well, fuck it. One of us has got to get a kidney. You got to get a kidney. You got to do what you got to do.

But man, that would fuck your whole life. It would fuck your whole life. It's why most, it's why medical bills are the number one driver for bankruptcy in this country. Any of the numerous other outlets,

ABC, Good Morning America, and Albuquerque Journal that picked it up could have used the story to discuss the dysfunctional healthcare system that is the leading cause of bankruptcy in the country. While producing some of the worst health outcomes in the developed world. Or to scrutinize how corporate health care gouges the sickest and most vulnerable Americans, including children. Surely the most basic function of government should be to prevent its citizens from needlessly dying.

to prevent its citizens from needlessly dying. Not if you wholly accept the tenets of neoliberalism, where education, housing, and healthcare are not basic, inalienable human rights, but commodities to be bought and sold and bargained for on the market. To be clear, while we can admire the never-say-die attitude of those in tough conditions, this is no substitute for guaranteed public programs

to help those in dire need. The problem with perseverance porn is not the brave subjects of the articles, but the lack of any journalistic scrutiny examining the failings of society that placed them in such desperate circumstances to begin with. Mic drop.

That's amazing. That's a mic drop line right there. It's awesome. It's a great line and it's perfect and it encapsulates the entire thing. What these articles highlight so clearly is not only the grim, inhuman, and unnecessary conditions so many Americans are forced to live under, but the degree to which mainstream corporate journalists have completely internalized these as unremarkable, inevitable facts of life, rather than the consequences of decades of neoliberal policies that have robbed Americans of dignity and basic human rights. and basic human rights.

Because corporate media wholly accept and promote neoliberal free market doctrine, they are unable to see how what they see as awesome is actually a manifestation of late capitalist dystopia. I only laugh because it's so sad. It is so sad. It's so sad. And it's a thing that we are subjected to all the time. And there are these little pieces in the news constantly,

this like feel good piece. And if you stop to think about it for two seconds, it's not a feel good piece. No. You should not feel good about this. Hey, rich lobster. Blow. You want a cash on me

Zoidberg, what are you doing here? And what's with all the money? It's my eight million dollars. God gave it to me. Oh, come now. God didn't get to be God by giving away money. Now I'm heading down to the casino and I'm taking my money with me. This is why you never see a poor person with millions of dollars. This story comes from New York Magazine, The Intelligencer.

AOC thinks concentrated wealth is incompatible with democracy. And so did our founders. This is a really interesting article. We've got to read parts of this. I'll start at the top. In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville produced one of the earliest accounts of the

American dream. In his famous study, The Jacksonian U.S., the Frenchman wrote that Americans possessed the charm of anticipated success. I love that line. A ubiquitous optimism that he attributed to our country's democratic character and to the general equality of condition, and I think that's really important important that prevailed among its people. A little further down in the article, there's a quote from our founding fathers, which the fucking right just absolutely cannot get enough of. And this quote goes, the solitude of my walk led me into a train of reflections on that unequal division of property, which occasions the numberless instances of wretchedness which I had observed in this country and is to be observed all over Europe. The property of this country is absolutely concentrated in a

very few hands. I asked myself, what could be the reason that so many should be permitted to beg who are willing to work in a country where there is a very considerable proportion of uncultivated lands. These lands are kept idle mostly for the sake of game. It just seemed then that it must be because of the enormous wealth of the proprietors, which places them above attention to the increase of their revenues by permitting these lands to be labored. So here's how, and this is Jefferson, here's how he proposes to address this. I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable, but the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind,

legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind. The descent of property of every kind, therefore, to all the children or to all the brothers and sisters or other relations in equal degree

is a politic measure and a practicable one. Another means of slightly lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Wow, that's very different from what I think we've been seeing. That is the progressive. That's right there, the blueprint for the progressive tax model, as laid out by Jefferson, founding father. Yeah. And founding father, they don't like.

That is the one they don't like. Admittedly, that's the one they don't like. But this, this, this to me brings up the idea that, um, that AOC is talking about in this. And she's talking about like, should we live in a country that has billionaires and also has people that are like dying because they can't get medical, medical coverage? Like, is that something that should be happening? And, you know, you got to think to yourself, we don't let those people pay the correct amount of money. We don't let them pay the amount of money that they should be paying that is in relation and a good ratio to their wealth. We just don't let them do that. What we do is we cut their taxes, we give them crazy loopholes. We don't tax them on when their money makes money.

We only tax them when they get income, right? We don't, we very often, the amount of money that we tax people on capital gains is much, much less or not at all when it comes to real taxation. And so they get away with not getting taxed at all. And yet the amount of like, if you were just to take it, I know that

when we live in Chicago, my house is taxed based on the property that it's owned, right? So how much the value, right? So how much it costs is how much I'm taxed on. So like, yeah, if you owned an $18 million house in Chicago, you would be taxed much higher than I would be, right? That just, it would just be natural. But when it comes to like big corporations like Amazon and people who don't pay taxes, right? Those big corporations that don't pay taxes, they're using the roads exponentially more than I'm ever using the roads. They're using, you know, they're, they're, they are using all of the things that make us a civilized country at an exponential rate past what I can. Now I understand that they are hiring people. I get that there us a civilized country at an exponential rate past what I can. Now,

I understand that they are hiring people. I get that there's a give and take there in the sense that they hire people. But to not pay taxes on any of that stuff is absolute robbery. And we let them get away with it constantly because we're afraid of losing businesses to overseas. That's always the boogeyman that comes up. I think that there's pretty clearly no political motivation because the politicians are the guys who are extraordinarily wealthy.

Taking money from those corporations to fund their re-election campaigns. You know, you fix a lot of this problem if you change the way that we fundraise for elections. Politicians will be significantly less likely to listen to a lobbying bloc that has no financial ties to that politician. Now they're just somebody asking for something they want. If I go to Congress and I try to form a lobby and show up in front of Congress, and I can't buy a ticket to a table at a fundraiser. And I can't do anything financially.

I'm not getting my foot in the door. No one's going to give me time to sit with anybody because I'm not offering anything in return. If we get rid of the quid pro quo system that allows for campaign contributions from corporations and even private citizens, if we just fund campaigns entirely, you take money out of politics.

And I think in large part, what you just described, because what we've done is we've allowed politicians to create a tax code that redefines income and defines income in a way where income for middle class and poor people is any money you got, and sometimes not even money that you got. For example, if you settle a debt for less than the value of the debt, the amount that you settle is taxed as income. Oh, no shit. Yeah. So if I owe 10 grand and I settle for five grand, I have a $5,000 tax penalty. Oh, whatever you didn't pay? Whatever you didn't pay is considered income. We redefine income in lots of different ways and ways that specifically target the middle class. Yeah, sure. The people who are taking out debt like that. Right. Yeah. And then we define other things like you were talking about, like capital gains and money that's made by money. We define

that not as income or as a lesser kind of income, which is fucking insane. And then we create tax shelters like 1031 property exchanges. We create ways to shelter money from taxes or to kick the tax can down the road for people with means and for corporations with means.

And all of that I think is done because powerful groups show up to Congress and ship money into campaigns. And that's what gives them a voice. They have a louder voice in our political system. The easy fix to that is to remove their voice from the political system. If we say money is a form of voice, fine. Okay, money is a form of voice. But the answer to that is like, well, let's only give people the biggest bullhorn, the only voice.

That's a terrible solution, but that's what we've done by allowing private campaign contributions into the electoral system. What's interesting too is that it's not just that. It's not just the money in politics. It's the promise of jobs in these corporations after they leave.

Oh yeah. Right? That's another huge way in which they get these, the politicians to, to do these things. You know, politicians, once they leave office,

make their money through being on boards, joining large corporations or being consultants for these large corporations that they've, they've done sweetheart deals with in the past or going out on speaking tours. And they don't want to offend certain, certain groups for the speaking tours. They they don't want to offend certain groups for the speaking tours. They want to do what they can do so they can make quick money. They make tons of money off of just an afternoon of saying stuff. And they make gobs and gobs of money.

And so some of these action groups that they don't want to piss off, they won't. They will do what they can because the moment they leave office, they're going to be making a lot of money. Look at Joe Biden. Joe Biden, when he was in office, there was like that idea that he was like a man of the people, not a lot of money. He's worth over $15 million since he stepped down as vice president. He's gained about 15, I want to say $15 million or something since he stepped down because he's out doing speeches. He's out doing these things. And you know that for sure he didn't piss any of those people off because if I pissed you off and I didn't vote for your thing, or I didn't push for your thing, or I didn't help you in some way, you sure as shit aren't going to give me a 40 or 50 or $60,000 speaker fee. You're not going to invite me over there. So there's all these ways in which

we compensate these politicians once they leave. You think Mitch McConnell not going to invite me over there. So there's all these ways in which we compensate these politicians once they leave. Once they leave that, you think Mitch McConnell's going to be wanting for anything after he leaves? You know, even though they're not paying for his fucking political campaign anymore, it doesn't matter. He's going to be sitting on three boards. He's going to be making a shit ton of money speaking. And he's probably going to be a consultant for really large corporations. They're going to pay him an ass ton of money speaking. And he's probably going to be a consultant for really large corporations. They're going to pay him an ass ton of money because they're going to remember

what he did for them. You're right. And there needs to be some, so I know that there is something in there when it comes to, you know, they were trying to make some laws that made it so that there was

at least a time gap that you couldn't just leave office and start doing some of this work, right? Become a lobbying consultant the day after you walk out the door. There needs to be something there that stops that. And I know that there was either something in the works or they tried to pass something,

but that needs to be seriously looked at. It needs to be seriously looked at in the sense that, you know, you're basically, as a politician, making your bed after you leave and you're basically behaving unethically while you're in office because you know that you want to try to make that fucking fat cash when you leave. Yeah, right. Yeah. You're setting the table for when you walk out the door. Yeah.

You know, these companies also, like they hold hostage big employers. Amazon's a great example. Amazon was going to move its headquarters. Oh yeah, yeah. This was a big circus. And they held hostage New York City, for example. Yeah. And they're like, yeah, I want this. I'm not going to pay any taxes for this. I'm not going to do that. You got to subsidize this, that, and the other piece. And in exchange, I'll show up and I'll bring jobs. Yeah. I get jobs. And you get jobs on your record. Since when did we become a country that has to beg its own companies to employ our people? Like we can't pass, there are no other laws or no other solutions that we can come up with that would encourage or fucking require. You think Amazon can run their company effectively

from overseas? They can't do it. But the thing is that we have, part of the problem is, and this may be somewhat unpopular to say, part of the problem is that we have, part of the problem is, and this may be somewhat unpopular to say, but part of the problem is that we have an over-reliance on states' rights. So we don't have any single federal control that says, okay, once an employer reaches a certain size, that employer now has some public responsibility. And we are not going to fucking lick their boot heel to beg to get them. New York should not be competing with Oklahoma about who can suck their dick the hardest.

That's what it is though. And that's exactly what happens. That's exactly what happens, yeah. And so as a result, those companies pay nothing to anybody and then they proffer out jobs as if they're granting some fucking genie-like wish, some magnanimous wish.

They don't exist without us. Yeah, it's some kind of bullshit largesse that they're throwing onto the populace. Look at me! I give you gold coins! No, you don't. No, you don't. You're basically taking them from the government and then you're throwing them back to us, is what you're doing.

And so the idea is that you need to somehow have some sort of regulation in there where New York can't compete with Kansas City. Because if that happens, then it's always going to go to the, we're racing to the bottom. You could do that just by establishing a federally mandated minimum tax rate for employers of a certain size. Yeah. And then nobody, no state can go under that tax rate.

So it's no matter what, you're stuck. That's it. You're stuck. You're going to pay at least this. Okay, well, we know we're all going

to race to that bottom, but everyone, like, wherever we go, that employer is going to show up and pay into the community. Yeah.

Not just be like, oh, you got to suck my dick because I gave you some, you know, quasi minimum wage jobs. Yeah. To another successful year of the festival.

Pitting poor people against each other for thousands of years. What is the meaning of this? Here's the deal. I'm not here to judge. I'm just a guy from another planet. But this girl is one of your poor people and I guess you guys felt like it was okay

to subject her to inhuman conditions because there was no chance of it ever hurting you. It's sort of the socio-political equivalent of say a suit of power armor around you but now things are evened out so arthritia all right sister comes from cbs news school district the turndown donation will accept offer to pay off lunch debt. So there's actually a couple of these that have popped up. So a school in Pennsylvania sent letters out to a bunch of parents and said, hey, your kids have lunch debts. They got to pay their lunch debts. And if they don't,

maybe we'll call CPS and call this abuse because you're sending your kid to school without food or money to pay for food. Another school said, hey, if you got a fucking lunch debt and you can't pay it, everybody else gets a hot lunch and we'll single out your fucking kid and give him a cold sandwich. We'll give him a lesser, shittier, stigmatizing food that identifies them as a fucking poor kid

instead of giving them a lunch and making them feel like a fucking human being like everybody else. And even more crazy, people have offered, like the CEO of Chobani and a few other people have been like, yeah, I'll just pay that debt.

They're like, it's 22 grand. That's what it was. It was 22 grand. It was like somebody like on Instagram and somebody else, like several people have said, I'll just pay it. Can I just pay it for those people?

And they wouldn't accept it initially. Initially, they wouldn't accept it. Can I just pay it for those people? And they wouldn't accept it initially. Initially, they wouldn't accept it. They eventually did accept it. And the representative for that area was like, yeah, I don't know why you guys weren't accepting it. And we hope we hear a story as to why, but they were like refusing it.

They were saying they weren't going to accept it. And I thought about this and I thought, if you're not accepting the donation, then it's not about the money. So you have to set the money as a side, right? Which means that whoever're not accepting the donation, then it's not about the money. So you have to set the money as a side, right? Which means that whoever is not accepting the money thinks that there is a moral point here, thinks that there is a larger point.

Yeah. And I think the larger point is like, fuck the poor, right? Poor people should know better than to be poor. I don't know how else you interpret that, right? Because as a kid, I was on the program that was that. And it sucked. It sucked to be that kid on that program. It was not fun to be on that program, to be the kid who got a free lunch every day at school. It wasn't fun to be on that program. And then to single out these kids,

to show that they're getting a free lunch, at least in the school that I went to. I wasn't, there wasn't a free lunch. The free lunch option for me when I was in grade school and middle school was it was a bag, handout bag, right? So, but everybody brought their lunch from home. So it didn't matter, right? If you brought a bag, you brought a bag. It didn't matter. I didn't get singled out in that sense, right?

But could you imagine being singled out as like a kid in school? Like, first off, school is already a hostile zone, right? But could you imagine being singled out as like a kid in school? Like, first off, school is already a hostile zone, right? For classism, right? For being a kid in there. You know, you're judged on everything when you're in school, when you're in high school, middle school, whatever. It's a nightmare. It's absolutely a nightmare. It's a nightmare. You know, and you're judged about everything. I was, I remember I had holes in my shoes and holes in my clothes

and I was made fun of mercilessly when I was a child because of I didn't have the same clothes as other people. Would you imagine there's also another indicator of your poverty? Like, it's just like, you keep on, you might as well just have them wear a big sandwich sign. Yeah, I know. That says, pick on me.

I'm poor. I'm fucking poor. Please pick on me. Yeah, I'm already disadvantaged. Can I make sure that I go nowhere and get to feel like a dignified human fucking being? Yeah. Like it's,

and to send letters out to the parents, like parents that are just like, I mean, obviously like if you've got cash, you're going to pay for your kids. Like you just send letters out. It says, I'm going to threaten CPS. I'm going to threaten child protective services to come to your home. I'm going to threaten you your kids school. Like you just send letters out and says, I'm going to threaten CPS. I'm going to, I'm going to threaten child protective services to come to your home. I'm going to threaten you with reporting you for neglect when there's

somebody willing to pay it. It's not about this. It's not about the money. It can't be about the money. You're what you're trying to do. If you're, if you're taking that stance is you're trying to make sure that nobody gets a free ride, not even people that are better, that are struggling financially, not people that are struggling financially, not people that need food, not kids that need assistance. There's no fucking free lunch, right? That's the message you want to send.

And fuck you if you think you can get away with it. It's awful. And this is in Pennsylvania. I have to assume everybody in Pennsylvania is poor. You'd leave Pennsylvania. Just go somewhere else. Like, look around. You're poor. You're in Pennsylvania. Just go somewhere else. Like, look around. You're poor.

You're in Pennsylvania. I remember when I was a kid and I think it's, I think there's also like a level of ignorance even by teachers. And I might've told the story on the air. I don't know if I did or not, but I remember I was in grade school, middle school, pardon me.

I was in middle school and I remember I didn't have good clothes and I was, you know, constantly, you know, like in poor clothes and whatever. And I was also a kid who acted up. I wasn was, you know, constantly, you know, like, like in poor clothes and whatever. And I was also a kid who acted up. I wasn't, you know, a shitty kid. I, you know, I guess a lot of kids are shitty kids, but I acted up a lot. And the teacher asked me to come after class one day, stay, come after school and do a, it was a detention. You got detentions in the

school in a weird way where you got a detention. You had to go with that teacher's office and like, you know, sit in that one. It wasn't one big office. So you'd have to go to that teacher's office. And she was, she gave me detention that day. I had to come back. And I remember being in detention that day and her saying to me, don't you have better clothes at home? Can't you wear better clothes to school? That's fucking ridiculously ignorant. As a, as a, as a teacher. Right. To a student who, you know, for sure know for sure there's going to be, you know, like, it's not like I'm coming to school in, you know, one day coming in brand new clothes and then the next day coming in garbage clothes, right? Or something like that.

Or something I picked up out of the garbage or I'm wearing some weird shit. I'm wearing the same clothes all the time. Right. The indicator is, is that I don't have better clothes than this. It's a pretty obvious indicator. But she was so oblivious. She said that out loud to me. She said that. And I was just like, no, I don't have better clothes than this. This is what I have. This is what I can come to school in. I don't have anything else. But I'm a seventh grader and I don't know any better. What else can you else can you do? But you know, there's, there's a level of obliviousness to people that all that have, uh, that have some level of comfort.

There's a level of obliviousness that they have where they don't, they look at the person on the street and they're like, can't you get a job? Won't you go out and get a job? You know, can't you go out and do this? Can't you wear better clothes? What's wrong? There's a level of obliviousness you carry with you. And this is the exact thing where it's just like, can't you just fucking pay this fucking bill? You know, don't these parents know, you know, when you send this letter, these parents know they can't pay this bill. These parents know that they don't have the money for this. It's not like this is a fucking newsflash to these parents like, oh shit, I forgot. I just didn't pay the bill. You know, maybe one or two of them might've forgot to pay the bill.

But a lot of these people that you're sending this to, they didn't want to not pay the bill. They just don't have the fucking money for it. They just don't have the actual money. Do you think shaming them is going to help them somehow fucking magically pull that money out of somewhere? It doesn't help them. You're just fucking insulting them.

That's all you're doing. And you're also making, you're threatening to have their children taken away. So it's like, oh, thanks. You know, I'm fucking already struggling financially every day of my life. You know, when you're broke and you're struggling, every single thing is harder.

Adding this other stressor into the equation, into the family life. Sure. Like, how's that going to help the kid? Let me have an anxiety attack as an adult. Right. And isn't the focus of the school supposed to be on bettering the kids,

about making sure that they have good social and educational opportunities? Isn't that the focus? How is like calling CPS, this kid's getting fed. Yeah. Yeah, the school is footing the bill for it. Okay, cool.

You know what? I want to be a part of a society where we make sure the kids get food. However that needs to happen. Whatever has to happen in order to make sure that kids get food, that's the part of the society I want to be in. I don't want to be a part of a society or build a society or condone a society that says, well, you know which kids I want to have food? Anyone who answers that question can go fuck themselves. If the answer isn't all the kids, that's a stupid question.

It's mean. Yeah. My name is Shayna Monroe, and I make $30,000 a year. My name is Becca Neeson, and I make $40,000 a year. My name is Charles Wicket. I make $6 a year,

and I demand a raise. Please. I want a raise too. So I don't want to play this clip because it's part of a video and it takes him so long to get to the point. So I think we're probably just going to read parts of this and sort of summarize what he says. But you can watch this video. It's like a full hour of his live stream and they do bookmark it to the kind of area that he talks, but you can watch this video. It's like a full hour of his live stream and they do bookmark it to the kind of area that he talks, but I don't want to play it, so. This is from my wing watch.

Matt Walsh argues for a $0 minimum wage after a negative McDonald's experience. If that's exactly what happened. Here's what he said. He says he went to, he had a negative experience with a cashier at a McDonald's restaurant in which the cashier he ordered from

made him feel unwelcome. So in the video, and I did watch this, he's like, he comes up and he says, yeah, I'd like a number one. And the person says, and pauses for a second

before they answer. Is that it? He says, yeah, that's it. Then they pause again because he's not saying that they're doing anything but pausing before they answer his question.

That'll be 625. Oh, can I get it medium size? And he goes, okay. And then he takes his money. That's what happened. That's the entire experience that he had at the McDonald's.

He didn't want to use, he goes into a big long diatribe about how he doesn't want to use the touchscreen because somebody greasy touched it before he went in there to use it. You goes into a big, long diatribe about how he doesn't want to use the touchscreen because somebody greasy touched it before he went in there to use it. You're the one in McDonald's, dude. Thank you.

Jesus Christ. And then he comes in expecting, you know, service like a lineal-like service at McDonald's. You're at the Walmart of food. Right. Right? You're at the lowest common denominator of available food stuffs yeah

yeah this is it this is what you get you showed up at a mcdonald's okay they're not thrilled to take your order okay nobody's thrilled to work if nobody wakes up it's like i can't wait to go to my job at mcdonald's and be a cashier and stand there drudgingly fucking tapping buttons on the fucking thing all day. What do you expect? Oh my God, thank you so much for ordering the number one. This really made my day that you wanted this fucking thing medium size. Oh my God, nobody wanted a fucking number one all day

except you. I'm gonna call my mom and let her know. Mom, somebody want to fuck you. What do you want? I do want to say though, right afterwards, he says that fast food workers that make him feel good could be worth 30 to $50 an hour. He's like, but you know, what's your worth? 50 cents an hour at most, maybe if you're being a jerk to me, but if you're, if you're somebody who makes me feel good, it's that much.

I'll tell you what, I guarantee that person's making $30 an hour. You're going to walk in there and they're going to be as smiley as fucking hell to you. They're going to, you know, the difference between them not making a good living and them making a good living will change their attitude. Here's a perfect example. If you ever go to the cheap chain of restaurant that has a waitress, let's say a Denny's. When I was in going to, when I was a kid, I went to Denny's all the time. The Denny's waitresses were mostly people who just got out of high school or were, you know, maybe putting themselves through like community college.

Some of them were like older ladies who were working shifts after their husband came home from work. There was not a, it wasn't like that they were a waitress class of person. It's just that they, you know, there was a waiter class of person. It's just that they, that was a job that they could get, that they could make some money at. They weren't terrible at it, but they weren't making a shit ton of money at it either. Right. I never, it's not like I'm making fun of those people, but that was, they weren't making a lot of money in tips. It's Denny's. The average bill is $25. You're maybe making $5 for every customer you serve that night, plus whatever you do. And that's on a good night with good tips. And I went in there many times with asshole people that

I was hanging out with that did not want to tip at Denny's. So trust me, that probably happens more often than not in the lower end establishments. But then you look at the people that serve at these really high-end restaurants in Chicago, like Maple and Ash, or you're talking about like Alinea, or you talk about even just some of the big steakhouses like Gibson's or Ruth Chris, those people, that's their career. That is their job. That's not like, it's not like a look down your nose at them. Those people make more money than I do. They make a lot more money than I do. Those people are pulling in a lot of money at those establishments and that's their career. And they're really good at it. Tell you what, you go into a lot of those places and it's never, Oh, I'll take your order. They're always super sweet. They're always trying

to make sure that you're, you're having the very best time that you can. They're making sure that they're available at every moment that they can be there for you. That's because they're making a lot of money because you're compensating them for the work that they're doing. If you start compensating people for the work they're doing, suddenly their attitude changes about the work they're doing. Yeah. Well, also, like if you want to pay somebody $35 an hour to be nice to you, you're not going to buy a $4 Big Mac either, right? Like what is a place like, you know, a Lenny or a Maple and Asher, like, you know, nice restaurants cost versus McDonald's? Yeah. If you want to spend no money on a service, you have to understand that, like, the employees get paid roughly equal to the value of the service that you purchased.

Yeah. When I go to a restaurant and the bill is going to be $200, I'm going to need a level of service that's different than when my bill is, like you said, at Denny's, $20. Well, that's okay. Yeah. That's reasonable. That's part of why my bill changed. Yeah. What do you want? It's at fucking McDonald's. Well, and then he has this argument that minimum wage should be zero. If you put in zero effort, we shouldn't pay you any money. Zero effort's not even showing up. Well, here's the thing. There already is a minimum wage of zero. It's called being fired. That's a minimum wage of zero, you fool. That's what it means. If you go in and you get shitty service, the guy looks at you like, fuck you and spits on your burger. Sure. Should he get paid? No, because he should be fired.

That's why he should be making zero. But somebody who is, you know, we don't pay these people a lot of money. If we raise the minimum wage all around, those people are all going to appreciate their job a lot more. Well, because their standard of living in the rest of their life will also go up, right? Like we have a problem in this country where there's a tremendous amount of underemployment, which means that, yeah, that guy at McDonald's making fucking nothing an hour, that guy might have a whole nother job. He might be on his 14th, 15th hour of work today. He might be working the first and the third shift and squeezing in a few hours of sleep in between. People work like fucking mad in this country to try to make ends meet. We don't pay people enough to live. We don't. We're not paying people enough to live, which squeezes them in every other part

of their life. That means they don't have enough money to eat good food. They're not getting enough sleep. They're not making meaningful social connections. Their relationships with their children and their families are suffering because they're never fucking home. This is like the America of the minimum wage class. It's a hard, brutal, shitty, awful life. And you want them to fucking smile because your entitled ass showed up to spend $4.99 on a burger that you don't want to wait for?

Yeah. What the fuck? Like, who are you? The other thing too is like, you know, these companies that get away without spending minimum wage or spending minimum wage currently, which is a pittance, by the way. That's well under the poverty line if you or spending minimum wage currently, which is

a pittance, by the way. That's well under the poverty line if you work a minimum wage job, by the way. Minimum wage job, if you work at the regular hourly rate of the year, I don't care where you are in this country. Most places, it's under the poverty line. I think one or two places in this country have a livable minimum wage, like $15 an hour. But the federal minimum wage, if you are on the federal minimum wage, $7.25 an hour. You're not going to make that, you're going to be well under the poverty line at the end of the year.

But that being said, these people who make a minimum wage and then they work extra jobs or whatever, they're also sometimes subsidized by the government. So the government is the one who's coming in as the safety net to give them food stamps and to help them with HUD housing and other things. So we're still paying for them.

We're still helping them pay, but we're just not letting the corporations pay their fair share. They're getting it from us. All the rest of us suckers are pitching into the big kitty and then they're taking some of that money

and giving it to these people that you can't even afford yet you won't even bother to pay a living wage. We've got to subsidize their life that's bullshit it is why the fuck do we have to do that yeah i never thought of it that way that's really fucking true it's fucking outrageous yeah we gotta pay for we i gotta pay for some walmart greeter i gotta pay for their food stamps because walmart won't do it you won't

do it yeah i gotta pay for their health insurance because you won't give them health insurance because you're gonna put them on a system. No, that's bullshit. We got to subsidize your fucking company. We're subsidizing you through no taxes already. And then we're extra subsidizing you because you don't take care of your workers. It's outrageous.

And AOC today, one of the things that happened was on Fox News, they had said some bullshit about like, oh, these minimum wage workers, you know, they make a bunch of tips and yada. They made some stupid thing. I think they were talking about McDonald's people making a bunch of tips. They don't make any money on tips. I know. One of these idiots on

Fox News said something stupid like that. And so they made it. They're like, no, that's everybody on the entire internet is like, they don't make tips, dummy. But this other person was going through how when they were a kid and they had to work, they loved that they got tips and they were, you tips, dummy. But this other person was going through how when they were a kid and they had to work, they loved that they got tips and they were, you know, they were putting themselves through school at the time and they were about there working. And AOC was just like,

these people never worked a day in their life. Like they like to make fun of and attack all these other working class people, but they've never worked a hard job. McDonald's isn't an easy job. It's not an easy fucking job. Working fast food is not easy. Working in a restaurant, not easy. Working one of these minimum wage jobs. I worked in a plumbing supply warehouse and I wasn't minimum wage. That was the hardest job I ever had in my entire life. Every day I would come in at 10 in the morning. I would leave at two in the morning, every night. I would work from 10 till two every single day. And I was exhausted at the end of my shift.

I'd work overtime. It was constant overtime. There was never, it was mandatory. You had to work until the work was done. Once in a while, you get out at 10 at night. You'd pull a 12-hour shift and you'd be excited that you had to only pull a 12-hour shift there. I was exhausted every night. I was on my feet for 10 to 14 hours a day. No, I mean,

not, I mean, just completely on your feet and you're carrying lifting heavy shit. And here's the thing. Like, I know my job was not the hardest job in America. I know my job was probably in the, like, maybe, you know, there's probably 50% more jobs that are even harder than the job that I worked. And I thought it was absolutely grueling. I did it for several years. I've worked a lot of shitty, hard jobs in my life. It sucks to work that much. It takes so much out of you. It takes so much. And to not compensate those people and to then make fun of them and be like, oh, geez, I remember I'm wistfully look back as a very rich person on television.

I wistfully look back at those days and when I had it so free and didn't really work all that hard and got tips. That was pretty awesome. Like, fuck you. Like, it's a fucking hard fucking job. And to not appreciate those people is fucking criminal. So that's going to wrap it up for this week we are going to be live streaming like we said on August 25th so be sure to mark that on your calendars and we are going to be thanking

our patrons next week thank you patrons we will be thanking you by name next week but thank you for your patronage but that is going to wrap it up for this week we're going to leave you like we always do with the Skeptic's Creed credulity is not a wrap it up for this week. We're going to leave you like we always do with the Skeptic's Creed. Credulity is not a virtue.

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