Grubstakers - Episode 63: A Crisis Wasted - Obama’s Early Decisions feat. Reed Hundt

Episode Date: April 23, 2019

For this episode we interviewed Reed Hundt, former FCC chairman and author of the new book “A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama’s Defining Decisions.” Hear about his role in the Obama transition and the things he wishes he had told the 44th president to do differently. He shares an insider’s perspective and his book brings a fly on the wall view to how many of Obama’s early decisions were made and how they ultimately contributed to the election of Donald Trump. After the interview we discuss the future of this podcast including our plans to launch a Patreon next month.

This week on Grubstakers, we have a special interview with Reid Hunt, author of the new book, A Crisis Wasted, Barack Obama's Defining Decisions. Hear all about what he thinks about the 44th president's early decisions, his advisors, and what he wishes he would have told him to do differently. All that and more, coming up on Grubstakers. First they think you're crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world. Berlusconi flatly denies that any mafia money helped him begin a start to the war. I have always had a thing for black people. I like black people.

I'm telling you, these stories are funnier than the jokes you can tell. I said, what the fuck is a brain scientist? I was like, that's not a real job. Tell me the truth. But anyway. Five, four. So loud. Hello, welcome back to Grubstakers, the podcast about billionaires. I'm Sean P. McCarthy. I'm here. I'm joined by my friends.

Yogi Polio. Andy Palmer. it, Barack Obama's Defining Decisions, and it's by a man named Reid Hunt. And I read the book, and I loved it, and I actually looked up the man, and he agreed to join us on the podcast and talk about this new book. So I am very happy to welcome our guest today, Reid Hunt. I'm happy to be here. Hello. Hello, Reid. Again, thanks for joining us. And I did learn that you were actually the chairman of the FCC from 1993 to 1997. So I just wanted to congratulate you up top on becoming the first FCC chairman to appear on our podcast. Thanks for that.

Inventing podcasts was certainly part of our plan. Maybe not exactly specifically but we certainly were there in the salad days of the internet in the beginning of digital cellular and we really did know that the entire media landscape would change and and we're happy that you are illustrating the fact that all of us who saw the future as being completely different we're right certainly yeah we were and we're still waiting for Ajit Pai to return our emails, so hopefully he'll be the second. Me too.

I'm waiting. It's probably buried under 15,000 every day about net neutrality. But yeah, so as a former chairman of the FCC, you do actually have a perspective on the Obama presidency from the you know how the sausage is made, whereas we're just kind of on the outside throwing stones. So I just wanted to ask you first, if you could give our audience kind of a short overview of who you are, how you know President Obama, and also why you decided to write this book about the early years of the Obama presidency. So I got involved in politics because of the people that I met in high school and college and law school. I went to high school with Al Gore. And later in the 1980s, I went to high school in the 1960s with Al Gore. And later in the 1980 1980s I started helping on his campaigns and then it turned out that in my class in law school there were the Clintons and I remember standing there

next to Bill Clinton talking about what we were going to do after school and he said I think I'm going to go down to Arkansas and just start running for things that's what he did. And ultimately, one of those things was the presidency. And then he asked Gore to be the vice president. And about a year and a half later, after they met, and they had the electoral victory, I became the FCC chairman. I'm sure it was a meritocratic process. I didn't actually have to, I didn't actually have to interview anybody. The two of them thought it was okay. And that's how I got into that wonderful job at that wonderful time. I spent a lot of money in the late 90s raising money for Al after I'd gone out of the government.

And, you know, hopefully, you know, he was going to be the president. I'd go back into the Gore administration. That didn't quite happen by 500 hanging chads in Florida. And then... Do you wake up every night and blame Pat Buchanan? There's a lot of wake-ups took place in those days. And then I was introduced by a friend to Barack Obama in 2003. And my friend said to me, this guy could go all the way, which in Washington language means could be the president.

At the time, he was beginning to get supporters for a run for the Senate in Illinois. He was the long shot candidate. I gave him a little bit of money, probably should have given him more. He got elected to the Senate in Illinois. He was the long shot candidate. I gave him a little bit of money, probably should have given him more. He got elected to the Senate. And then to make an interesting story really, really short, in March of 2007, at my house, we hosted the first fundraiser for Barack Obama in a house not owned by David Geffen. And that was a big success, and he won, and I ended up on his transition team in the fall of 2008. You mentioned you knew Al Gore in high school.

What was he like then? Ninth grade? Well, he was, I don't know if he met anyone in high school like this. But, you know, back in the day, you would identify someone and say, well, that person is going to be the president. I don't know if you guys had that experience, but I really did feel that way about Al Gore. And I felt that way about Bill Clinton in law school. Now, I should admit to you all that I knew George W. Bush pretty well in college, and I did not feel that way. So, so, you know, feelings aren't everything. But the point is,

the point is that Elvis father was a senator, and he knew about politics, and he was a very striking personality with a big brain and a tremendous vision about what to do, you know, with public service. And similarly, Bill Clinton, two of the smartest people that I've ever met. And I've met a lot of people that are a lot smarter than me. And they were two of the smartest of that in that in that category. So I had a lot of luck by who I met and stumbled into a lot of good situations. And one of them was the transition in 2008. And I ended up talking a little bit to pretty much all the people who were involved in the decision making. When the years passed, I decided I would

write a book about that decision making. And I interviewed about four dozen of them. And I couldn't figure out what the conclusion of the book was until November of 2016. Did something happen then? And when Donald Trump became the president, thanks to the Electoral College, I said, boy, this is not a happy story. The end of this book is that somehow these decisions that were made with an awful lot of good intentions by all of Obama single worst person in the world for Barack Obama to imagine as his successor. A guy whose campaign consisted of promises that he would undo everything that Obama had done, that he would reverse the polarity of the ethical compass of the nation and the person who had even denied that Barack Obama was born in the United States.

And that's the guy who replaced him. Yeah, no, I was going to say reading your book was very fascinating to me because, you know, we all know like the broad strokes of this story. But, you know, reading it like and actually seeing inside some of the meetings and stuff. I mean, it's it was like reading a horror movie where you know how it's going to end. And, you know, you feel like shouting at the screen and telling Obama not to go into that room with Tim Geithner. You know, yes, that was my takeaway. It's like and then now we're wondering like, oh, God, Freddy Krueger. Don't let there be a part two.

Right. Right? Isn't that it? Yes. You may remember that Nightmare on Elm Street ends with Freddy Krueger coming out of the mirror and grabbing the protagonist's mother and dragging her to her death. That is how you know that there's going to be a sequel, right? Indeed. That's how you know.

So I'm thinking, like, is the Mueller report the same thing as that mirror? That's how you know there's going to be a sequel? Oh, my God. I think Mitch McConnell just introduced that on the Senate floor. There you go. I did want to ask you, because you do describe these meetings with Obama's transition team, where you have this idea that maybe you could briefly describe to us about pitching for Obama's stimulus a green energy bank. And you're meeting with Larry Summers and Tim Geithner,

and you're asking for about three different green energy banks, about $10 billion each in the stimulus. And I just wanted to read a quick little quote. You talk to Tim Geithner, and he asks you, where is this coming from? And you say, I'm a policy entrepreneur. And then he says, I like that term. And the conversation ends. And then you speak with Larry Summers summers and you quote him as saying the problem is you're talking about creating more debt our economic problem is that the country already has

too much debt and this is in december 2008 when the entire um economy's in free fall so it just seems like their priorities were were entirely backwards their priorities were different uh the british historian maitland uh said it's very important to remember that things now in the past were once in the future. And I remember and I want to not forget that at the time I was talking to those decision makers, those key advisors, they were quite terrified about what else might happen after the Lehman bankruptcy. Not terrified in the sense that they were running around with their heads cut off, but they were more worried and concerned about the state of the economy than they had ever been in their professional lives. OK, you know, you get that. I get that. We can understand that. What I was trying to say to them is this is, well, as Rahm Emanuel had already said at the time, a crisis is too good to waste. And one of them should be, or three of them should be, different green banks that could invest in the infrastructure so that we would be doing business and conducting society on a clean energy platform.

They weren't against it, but it wasn't the priority. And the first rule of priority is you only get to have one top priority now oh uh hey this is andy i one thing i thought that was uh interesting uh when i was reading your book was that uh you were very uh critical of neoliberalism and um just now you also said that like bill clinton and al gore were some of the smartest people that uh you've ever met and i was i was, as they're very much prototypical neoliberal politicians, how do you think that kind of came to be? Do you think it was like a confluence of just the circumstances in which they came up in politics, or maybe other factors? So, short answer to an incredibly important and insightful question.

In the 1980s, all Democrats that I knew could not figure out how a Democrat would ever again get elected president. Right. Ronald Reagan had a solid lock on the old Confederacy. Twenty years earlier, it had been Democratic. Now it was solidly Republican. And then Reagan had cemented that with the votes of most of the people in most of the rest of the states. And it just didn't seem to be any way for a Democrat to ever win the Electoral College. and what were they to do and so in reaction uh there was gary hart who said well you know let's have a thing called atari democrats what is atari that was like you know the pre-computer computer right but what he meant was let's get aligned with the tech industry and others thought well you know let's let's let's be aligned with the military instead of against it in the continuing reaction to Vietnam. In other words, there was a search for building a coalition that could compete with the Republicans and get a Democrat elected.

And and the Bill Clinton campaign was the gluing together of a new coalition. One of the fundamental pieces of that coalition was to have allies instead of enemies on Wall Street. And the fundamental view that Bill Clinton allied with on Wall Street was marketplace economics, that markets capitalism would produce tremendous growth in the economy. And as Bob Rubin used to say, the best social policy is a rapidly growing economy. Well, you can't dispute that. A rapidly growing economy is a lot better than the opposite. And when the different events associated with the Internet and digital cellular led to a

tremendous tech boom in the mid-90s. And people used to call me and say, what did you do? And I said, well, you know, we did some important things, but frankly, the technology is just taking off. And the entire economy grew very, very rapidly. And all of a sudden, instead of running a deficit, the government budget was in surplus. And I would say that generally speaking, Democrats over interpreted all of this and thought, oh, the market always works out really great. But the answer is it doesn't. And indeed, the tech boom in the economy popped sadly right before just months before the election in November of 2000. And then even

more catastrophically, the markets went nuts in 2007, 2006 in real estate. And then starting in 2007, the real estate market began to decline. And what I'm telling you is that the cycles of market behavior over these decades should have taught everyone that there's a very important role for government as a stabilizer and as a repair mechanism and as the voice of the public interest. But that lesson was not believed and absorbed in 2007 and 2008. And so the government didn't step in when it needed to step in. This was the Bush government. And there was what Henry James called a failure of the imagination of disaster.

So would you say that some of the boom in the 90s might have given some of the the boom in the 90s kind of might have given um some of the members then of the obama administration um when they had to deal with the disaster maybe like a false confidence in the markets that's exactly right okay or or you might even add and they believed that even in the crisis if government did only what was necessary, but not what was possible, that the necessary would be good enough. And yeah, and I would say one of the central arguments I took away from reading your book is you actually had a chapter entitled Obama picked his people and thus his policies. And you describe John Podesta,

then the head of the Center for American Progress, is an influential Clinton backer. He was put in charge of Obama's transition. And you actually describe these, to me, kind of horrifying stories of Obama's economic advisors actually hiding information from him. They did that. You go through how essentially, I think,

Christy Romer and Larry Summers actually calculated the stimulus should be like $1.7 or even $1.2 trillion. But by agreement among the advisors, the highest option Obama was presented with was like an $850 billion stimulus. That's right right and then like another story that's that's not in your book but that's by in a book uh confidence men by ron uh suskind is essentially in march 2009 timothy geithner uh actually slow walked obama's instructions to break up city group into a good bank bad bank and and these kinds of things so i mean I guess my question is, is that fair to say that that's a central thesis of your book, is that Obama made a lot of the decisions of his presidency just by picking these people who were associated with the Clinton administration?

Well, they're all smart people. They're all good people. They all had reasons. If you could go back in time time you'd like to whisper in the president-elect's ear ask them for better ideas like to whisper in barack obama's ear and have him and say tell him you want bolder choices he'd like to whisper in his ear and say tell him that if you can't explain it to the American people, it's not a good enough policy. That's what you'd like to whisper in his ear. Ten years later, I wrote a

book saying I wish we could have whispered that in his ear. I have asked myself, why write this book? There's a lot of crying over spilt milk here. The answer to that question, you didn't ask it, but I've asked myself. The answer to that question is all the candidates running now who want to be the president, they need to learn from something. Maybe they could learn from this history. Maybe they could learn that they cannot be successful as candidates, or maybe they could be successful as candidates, but they can't be successful as presidents if they don't have a range of options that include very bold choices. They can't be successful as presidents if they don't insist to all their advisors that they be given solutions and not just steps towards solutions. And they have to make all their decisions really, really early. Barack Obama is the only president in the entire history of the United States

who made all the decisions that determined the entire arc of his presidency before he was even inaugurated. Well, that's the way things go. And, you know, the rapid pace of the economy today and the necessity for him was precipitated by the financial crisis that in turn was caused by the bailout or excuse me, the non bailout of Lehman Brothers on September 15. But for all of them, if they don't make their decisions really, really early and implement them, whoever is the president is going to find that the moment has slipped away. Now, by the way, Elizabeth Warren announced just today that she was going to basically totally reduce student lending between one and two trillion dollars of fix you know god bless her that is a

bold idea right well and that is the kind of idea that you have to entertain at this stage and you can't be so cautious and so worried about the votes in michigan or wisconsin that you don't put the big idea out there that's one of the ideas that could have been put in place in the stimulus package in the winter of 2008 and 2009. Yeah, I was going to say, just in your book specifically on the student loans thing, you make the point that student loans were about $500 billion in 2008, and now they're about triple that. So you do make the point that essentially we're giving

these zero to one percent interest rate loans so you could have just refinanced student debt using that same mechanism um that's right yeah and uh one thing i was uh wondering is like one of the main criticisms of the obama administration of course is that um many of his policies, as you were leading to, were kind of pitched where he had already compromised in hopes of working with the Republicans. Would you say then that some of that was just because he wasn't given, I guess you would say, stronger options to negotiate with? You know, Al Capone said, I like to negotiate, but I prefer to negotiate with a gun in my hand. And so, you know, if I could go back and do it over and over again, I would say, you know, to President-elect Obama, make the Republicans an offer.

Make them offers they really shouldn't refuse. But if they refuse, then figure out how you're going to get it done without them. Don't spend months and months in the critical early going of your administration trying to please them. Because if you've already given them an offer that they couldn't refuse and they still refused it, you needed to go ahead without them. This is true with respect to energy. It is true with respect to health care. It was true with respect to the stimulus.

It was true with respect to housing. You know, at one point in the summer of 2000, excuse me, in the summer of 2009. In that summer, he had 60 votes in the senate not for long due to the tragic death of ted kennedy but he had 60 votes and he could have pushed through everything when he had those 60 votes or he could have decided early in 2009 to go ahead and get rid of the filibuster the way that it's already been eliminated now, which is why Justice Kavanaugh is sitting on the Supreme Court. So the point is there were options. Putting yourself in the power of the opposition party? Not a good idea.

Well, there's two questions, or a couple questions I wanted to ask you specifically on mortgages and foreclosures, because to me, one of the most horrifying things that happened with the crisis was the foreclosure crisis. And you write about this, and I believe what you write is that the plan that Obama was presented with was to accept essentially 5 million foreclosures. The actual number that happened is probably closer to 9 to 10 million foreclosures, which is absolutely horrifying to me. I think it was three and a half. But what he was told on December 16, 2008 was, we expect about 5 million foreclosures. In fact, that was about half the number that ultimately

did occur in one shape, form, or fashion. So there was a horrible underestimation of the seriousness of the housing problem. But he was told specifically that about two-thirds of the five million they weren't going to do anything about. And that was not a good thing to accept. Yeah. And you actually, you write about, I think you did an interview with his political advisor, David Axelrod, and Axelrod told you that Obama's biggest frustration was housing. And he would even talk to, you know, Tim Geithner, Larry Summers about, there's got to be more we can do about foreclosures. And they would just kind of shrug their shoulders. I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but that's what I took away from the book. So, I mean, is that fair assessment of essentially his advisors just said, hey, we have to let the market sort itself out via foreclosure?

You know, it's it's a I think it's a fair assessment. I think that pretty much everybody involved looking back wishes that they had handled housing in a more aggressive way. At the time, what can be said to explain the behavior? There was then what you see now on steroids, which is a tremendous media machine for generating hatred and division in the country. And specifically, the very timid housing policy of the Treasury Department in early 2009 led to a ranting and raving by Rick Santelli on CNBC about how he was going to go down and have a tea party in Lake Michigan because he was in Chicago at the exchange. And Wilbur Ross, now the Secretary of Commerce, said, oh, that's great. If you're having a tea party, I'll join

you. And that was actually the beginning of the Tea Party movement. And so faced with this kind of wildly irrational reaction, you can see why people in government might say, we just don't want to take bold measures. Unfortunately, that's the kind of reaction that they needed to ignore. Yes, well, unfortunately, we don't have presidents who make decisions based off cable news anymore. Right, right. But yeah, and I guess just one other question on that, because I could talk about foreclosures for a long time, but I did just want to follow up on one thing. I think you say, and please correct me if I'm wrong, you say that TARP under Geithner, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, where Geithner had all this authority to spend hundreds of billions of dollars, I think you say they only spent about $300 billion of TARP money was unspent. And I think the New York Times quotes Tim Geithner in some 2012 article as saying something to the effect of, even if I could buy more mortgages, I would not use TARP money to buy mortgages.

And it's just so strange to me because they do have that model of FDR and the Great Depression, and the homeowners loan corporation, just the government buys mortgages and then reduces the principal to something people can pay and actually turns a profit. So I guess I don't really have a question, but it is a great frustration of mine that, you know, maybe a lot of stuff in your book, you quote people saying, oh, we just didn't have the 60 votes in the Senate, but here they have 200 or $300 billion of TARP money they didn't use, no 60 votes required, you know? They also had unlimited authority under the law called HERA,

or HERA, H-E-R-A, to pretty much do anything they wanted with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. That anything they wanted could have included refinancing mortgages so that people who were underwater and could not on their own get the bank to refinance underwater, meaning the mortgage was bigger than the value of the house. They could have used Fannie or Freddie to refinance for those people who were underwater about 40 of all families in america and give them lower interest rates so that it would have been cheaper for them to stay in their house what happened instead is the people with money with capital with other savings even if they were underwater because they had other money they could

refinance and get the benefit of the fed lowering the interest rates the people who didn't have any money outside their evaporated home equity they were the ones who couldn't refinance and so that would have been a bold creative but feasible way to address the underwater problem. They decided before Barack Obama was ever inaugurated that they would not address the underwater problem. They never changed their mind about that. It's extremely frustrating. And I guess just one last question on that.

Essentially... You know, you want frustrating, though. It's this this directly, directly over eight years created the opportunity for Donald Trump to be. Oh, absolutely. Right. Because the houses that were underwater in the sand states, Nevada, California, Florida, Texas, they recovered their value much more quickly than the Midwestern states, because in the Midwest, people were migrating out. And so there wasn't any new incoming population to drive up the demand for housing. So for them, not being able to refinance in the midwestern states meant a decade of really really depressing you know economics at the kitchen table do i have to keep paying the mortgage on the house that isn't worth as much as the mortgage or do i leave and if i leave where

do i go and where do i live well you know when you when families go through that for you know eight years well they switch from voting for ob Obama to voting for Trump eight years later. And that's actually what happened. Yeah. pretty well. There was a lot of fraud in mortgages leading up to the crisis, you know, bundling these kind of no income, no asset, no job loans into mortgage-backed securities. There was a lot of fraud in the lead-up. And then, of course, with the actual process of foreclosing on millions of people, there was a lot of fraud that took place there. There was robo-signing. They were making up fake documents because they didn't do proper chain of title transfer to throw people

out on the street. And then, of course, there was in 2012, the federal government settled about this. But I guess just my question, and this is more just your opinion as a lawyer, would be essentially because they made the policy choice not to nationalize Citigroup, not to nationalize Bank of America and some of these other firms because their balance sheets were so vulnerable. And you had, you know, Attorney General Eric Holder talking about it keeps him up at night, the idea of indicting a bank and then it, you know, collapsing. So I guess I'm just wondering if maybe the decision not to nationalize these banks meant that they had to protect bank balance sheets even from criminal liability so that part of the reason we didn't get any criminal prosecutions was

it is so important to keep these private financial things alive that we can't afford to allow them to be exposed to criminal liability well that's interesting and um i can't speak you know to the mindset of everybody involved but i would say that i think the general reluctance to have the government-owned stock in the big banks that at one point were non-banks the big wall street behemoths the government reluctance to not own stock and to not direct their behavior at all. That's the essence of neoliberalism. That was the way that the Bush people thought. That was the way Obama's advisers thought. That was the way Tim Geithner thought. And it's almost religious, because the truth of the matter is that you know that the government is the backstop of these firms, as it has to be, because a functioning finance sector is essential to a functioning economy. So it's almost like, you know, some kind of psychological denial.

We know the government and the banks are fundamentally linked and are partners in China. The government controls them. In our country, we spend a lot of time denying that the government is the backstop. When it's obvious, when it is clearly the backstop, when it should be the backstop, well, give into reality and go ahead and exercise enough control that you can tell the banks what to do now what are the things you would want to tell them to do don't pay these bonuses you have to take a year off from the bonuses because it's simply outrageous uh number two the one or two weakest of you simply have to be bought up by the others there's no choice we're telling you that

that has to happen uh yes the management in those firms has to leave, that they have to be gone. They don't have to necessarily go to jail, but they have to be gone. The government didn't have any problem behaving this way with respect to General Motors. The CEO was fired. The government put the company through bankruptcy. The creditors took a haircut. A lot of people took a loss. They came out of bankruptcy. We have a functioning General Motors today. But the banks were treated differently. And in retrospect, that difference was not a good idea. I do just want to say I was not expecting a former chairman of the FCC to be the first person to endorse the Chinese model on this podcast.

Well, you can say this about the Chinese. Faced with the exact same facts, in November of 2008, they committed to a stimulus plan that if you translate it to American dollars and adjust for the relative sizes of the economy what the chinese did in 2008 is exactly almost to the penny what christie roemer said was the right stimulus program in the united states wow the result in china was they were looking at the possibility of one third of all of their college graduates in 2008 not being able to find a job. And they were looking at the possibility of 13 million people working in the factories, making all the products in the East, actually losing their jobs. And instead of suffering that, they made sure that didn't happen. And the further result over a decade is that China has replaced the United States as the number one country whose investments drive the global economy. system like that, a system that endorses the kind of surveillance that puts nearly two million Muslims in the west of China in jail when they're spotted by technology, a system that,

and there's many things to admire in China, but freedom is not one of those things. Right. Right. And so to have it be that they become the global leader of investment in the global economy because they were bolder and more creative than we were in the crisis, that's something sad. Hey, Reid. This is Steve Jeffries. I just jumped on. Sorry I'm late. Hi, hi, hi, hi. Fascinating book. I couldn't finish all of it, but I just had one question. You talked about how important, well, a lot of presidents measure their success in terms of their first hundred days. And I think part of your book is focused on how it's actually the first, like from starting from day negative 60 to day zero is often very important too as far as choosing who your council is going to be and stating what your priorities are to them and then keeping tracks on what they're working on so um you know we're we've we've talked a little bit on this pod about what where are the drivers for the next

crisis basically so um i mean last time it was housing. 10 million people lost their homes. Incredible financial loss, but also in a lot of other ways, like health, psychology, all that stuff. It might not be housing again. It could be, you know, a combination of other consumer debt we've speculated about like auto loans slash student loans slash other non-housing related consumer debt being a bubble at some point um maybe we've covered um like blackstone um they've been buying up a lot of a lot of the housing stock that they got at a severe discount in like the early 2010s um they're using a lot of the housing stock that they got at a severe discount in like the early 2010s um

they're using a lot of corporate debt in order to buy that up so um anyway um i guess my question is what um what could the next president should they not be trump in 2020 do to really ensure things get out on the right foot? It's a really, really great question. You know, unfortunately, the Trump administration and the Republican Congress in their tax cut proposal, quite knowingly, quite intentionally, has put the federal government in a much, much more difficult spot, really, than it ever has been before. Meaning, without appropriate investing in infrastructure, without appropriate investing in any of the five major platforms

that undergird all society and the economy, they are power and transportation and communications and sewage and water. Without that investment being increased in any way at all, we've locked ourselves into years of tremendous deficits. So this is the fundamental problem. Here's just one of many examples. Virtually every high voltage power line in the world right now is built in China. A high voltage power line is the way to take clean power from a sunny area or a windy area and deliver it with almost no loss of electrons to an urban area. It's those high voltage power lines that should be bringing wind from the Great Plains to Chicago and sun

from the southwest to Los Angeles and Houston, but they don't exist in our country. The president elect asked for them, but he was told that they wouldn't be in the stimulus. They were built in China. I could tell you the same story about trains. I could tell you the same story about sewage, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So the number one job, in my view, since you asked, of all the candidates is to have the following commitment. Whether we have to raise taxes or whether we have to have a bigger deficit or whether we have to have public-private investment with the private sector, one way or another, or all those ways,

we are going to rebuild America's infrastructure so that we are not just close to China, so that we're the country that simply is the best in the world in terms of clean power, efficient transportation, clean water, really great sewage, and broadband to everybody. That's the number one thing because that's the that's kind of the platform for everything else you know it's on all of that that you build really great businesses that you have plenty of people working in construction that you have a delivery of all goods and services to everybody

anywhere in the country we just have to we just have to say we're going to get that done one way or another, a call to action, right? And we're going to get that done one way or another. So boldness is the right answer, in my view, since you asked. And some of the Democratic candidates are being bold, and some of them are being really timid. And the ones that are being bold are the ones that i'm thinking well you know remember when i had that fundraiser for barack obama

well okay i'm the bold one is the one i'm inviting you get the picture i was gonna ask while you're here are you prepared to make any democratic primary endorsements and make news on our podcast? I don't know that my endorsements matter at all, but on a personal level, I'm waiting for the one or two or three that really put the whole package together. Aren't you guys? Don't you feel the same way? We're all in the tank for Bernie. We've drank the Kool-Aid.

Well, you know, I mean, you've got to give Bernie the credit for in the previous election for getting the big ideas out there. I think he needs more big ideas, not fewer, right? I mean, I also think he needs to kind of freshen them up, you know, not meaning to be really critical. They sound a little bit recycled to me. Do you agree with that? Yeah, he's been saying the same thing for 20, 30 years now. Almost 40. Well, that would be recycled, right? But look, I mean, we're not here to be doing too much second guessing.

The point is, you know, boldness is not radical. Boldness is what's necessary. I agree with that. In your mind, what do you think of the Green New Deal? Is that kind of what you're asking for in terms of boldness and a call to action? Maybe not so much specifics at this point, but a direction, like the direction of the wind. So I would say there are two major sponsors of the Green New Deal, AOC and Ed Markey. You agree with me so far? Yeah, they're who introduced it. Yeah, so I've spent a lot of

time with Ed Markey. I don't want to jump the gun, but I think you'll be seeing a bill introduced in May that gives real substance to the vision of the Green New Deal, meaning not betraying it, but living up to it, living up to its call to action. And I think you guys will like it. And if you know whether you like it or not, call me back and we'll talk about it. If my prediction comes true, which I actually am pretty sure it will. And then the only other thing I'd ask you, and I kind of have to go now, but the only other thing I'd ask you is could you arrange for me to have a cup of coffee with AOC? I have met her and performed for her a while ago, so

I don't have an in more than anyone else, but I do have an email for you. That'll do. That'll do. I'll be happy to email a smiley face. But, Reed, before you go, you have time to answer a

miscellaneous FCC question. I might have one or two. One miscellaneous question happily accepted. What is it? When you were in the FCC from 1993 to 1997, were you the guy in charge of fining Howard Stern? Yes. You did? I'm just curious about, in a job like that, how often Howard Stern was brought to your attention while you're trying to work on the internet?

You know, one time would be too much. Howard Stern, you know, Howard Stern, who I would just add parenthetically, was a big buddy of Donald Trump in those years. I just mentioned that, you know, by way of character assassination. Howard Stern went on the radio and said that he hoped that I would get cancer. Oh, Jesus. That's not really nice. Even people I really don't like, I really don't feel that way.

So what does that mean? Is that why we find him? No, that's not why we find him. The reason we find him is because the law did require it and I felt like you know, you gotta do what the law says when you're in government

you may read in the Mueller report that not 100% of Americans feel that way, but in any case that's why we find him. But you might be interested to know that I then had a meeting with his boss. And I said, look, we had to meet up this fine. You know, if you're willing to tell Howard to cool it, I'd be happy to compromise on the fine because I'm a practical guy. And he said, I'll go talk to Howard about it.

And apparently Howard told him, I'd rather the guy get cancer and die rather than compromise with him. So that's what happened with Howard Stern. Well, I just want to say on behalf of the podcast, I appreciate you taking anti-fascist direct action against someone who platformed Donald Trump. Thanks a lot for having me. See you'all. Thank you so much for your time. The book is A Crisis Wasted, Barack Obama's Defining Decisions, and I found it a great read. If you're interested in the inside history of the first days and first two years in particular of the Obama administration, really recommend checking it out. Puts a lot of color on the things that we've seen coming through today. Thank you so much, Reid Hunt. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Bye.

Bye. All right, so you've just heard our interview with Reid Hunt, the author of the book Crisis Wasted. And, you know, if we were nervous, it's because this is our first big power player in Washington we had a conversation with. So our first former FCC chair. A lot of pressure. You know, I flubbed my Howard Stern joke

because I got it caught in my throat and didn't stick the landing. But overall, I thought it was a very interesting conversation and it is why I thought the book was interesting in that there's been a lot of, there have been books critical of Obama, but this is kind of the first one from an insider in the Obama transition, you know?

And also, oh my God, your mind races with like, what combinations of words could I use to totally blow this? Just get him to like, hang up and threaten to sue if you put it out there. I really wanted to ask him about his stance on man boobs on TV because he was the FCC chair. Because I mean, honestly, why we let those things fly free? You know what I mean? Yeah, it's too bad we couldn't keep him on another 10 minutes because then we could have put Howard Stern on the

line it's hard to get the scheduling to work out but Stern is oh he was almost there if we had him for 10 more minutes we could have gotten Artie Lang to join and Artie has a lot of things to say to this guy um but yeah and I guess like another question I didn't get to ask him and I guess I just got to google it now is I was going to ask him why I live in Queens, New York and I can only get spectrum internet, you know? Yeah. I mean, it's just kind of a fucking monopoly. It's fucked up.

It's not a public utility, but there's only, it's, I'm told it's not a monopoly either. So what the fuck? But it is. Yeah. It's a regional monopoly. They're not willing to admit that. And because they also probably get it off on a technicality where they say, oh, Verizon or something also. Or, you know, you can do dial-up.

We actually did ask him that, and then the phone just cut out immediately. We're not sure why. I think it's because I have Verizon internet here. Steven got shot through the window. But actually, in seriousness, I did want to ask him about the Communications Act that was passed while he was the FCC chairman, he had a lot of like a lot of decent foresight in expanding, you know, communications to make room for the Internet and the advance of technology. But at the same time, it allowed for a lot of functional monopolies to be created, such as Sinclair Media or what is it? iHeart Radio, that group. But they bring me Ariana Grande, Andy.

Oh, man. No, I mean, just honestly, I don't know enough about the Telecommunications Act. I know about, like, Section 230 is what they always talk about with Facebook, that, like, essentially it says if you publish something, or no, if people write in your comment section on a website, you're not liable for that which i which i agree with but essentially facebook and these other people have used this to become news publishers while pretending they are not news publishers you know gotcha um but

but again i don't know enough about uh the communications act but you know maybe i could always send him an email question and get his response to it i want to ask him what it was like to live in dc pre. pre-today where there's a new spin every day, but during the Monica Lewinsky days, because he knew Bill Clinton at one point. And so to open the paper or turn on the TV and be like, oh, looks like Bill's getting head in the fucking Oval Office.

Like, how does that feel? I mean, I guess, you know, some of us, like we did open mics with Michelle Wolf. So, you know, there's kind of like, we can kind of us like we did open mics with michelle wolf so you know there's kind of like we can kind of approximate that feeling i don't know if she pissed off the president yeah all right if she's getting head in a uh political office room then maybe you've got an argument there but until then i think your wolf story doesn't pan to his, I knew Bill Clinton

and then later on an intern blew his cock. I mean, everyone gets blown. I'm just saying that we have kind of an idea. The language gets salty as soon as the FCC chairman hangs up. This is the future he built for us. The future of the internet. Did you guys

swear a single time? I don't think I did. I said the N word a few times before I got here. I did really want to make a Bop-A-Booey joke during the Howard Stern thing, but I couldn't get one together. I was going to ask him if they had a file cabinet at the FCC for B for Bop-A-Booey and E for Eric the Midget. Was there a swear jar? No. I just love that he was like, I mean, we find him,

but only because he said I should die of cancer. I like when I asked him that question. I had no idea Howard Stern said he should die of cancer. That wasn't why they find him. I just wanted to make that correction. I'll catch him. I wasn't listening to the show we just made. Well, this was a fun episode

I'm sorry I didn't bring my keyboard So we could do the fart drops while he was on the phone You could have played the bop-a-boo While he was answering the question It would have been nice to have A couple of soccer tummies During that You'd be like oh yeah that reminds me of

This summer afternoon when I met Richard Nixon on a golf course. What did you think, audience? Did you like us pretending to be serious journalists instead of just complete jackasses? Did you like that 45-minute experimentation we just did where we all tried to sound smart and be on our best behavior for the FCC chairman.

I mean, if there's a guest to be like kind for, it's this guy. Yeah, no, I mean, honestly, I very much do appreciate him taking the time to call us. And I did. I read this book. And I think, you know what? I think what I was trying to say, I don't know if I expressed that right, was essentially we who are like former Obama voters, former people who were very much inspired by Obama, we know the broad strokes, you know, we know something went wrong. But if you want to actually get into the meetings that took place before and immediately after Obama took office, he has a lot of insider interviews and he paints a pretty compelling and damning picture of just Obama's advisors hiding information from him and just giving him kind of the neoliberal consensus as it's already a done decision.

You know, so I mean, it made me on one hand more sympathetic to Obama. But on the other hand, he's a smart enough guy. The buck stops with him. He should have known better than to pick these people and rely on these people. Yeah. Yeah. should have known better than to pick these people and rely on these people right yeah yeah it it echoed uh actually fairly common criticism of the um early obama years which is that and it's it's interesting it uh it's an interesting kind of look at american politics which was that the um one of the the running criticisms was that he didn't have many contacts in politics and so

essentially he took on the Clinton team and his first term was essentially a third Clinton term, which it's one of those things where, especially when you have like major positions, it's a bit astounding that, you know, he didn't have a thought for like some, he didn't have a thought for some economists who might be better suited to handle the housing crisis than former Clintonites. Yeah. And the lack of vision and kind of need for a call to action is shared between Obama and his advisors.

It's not like only a... It's not a one-person thing. Well, sometimes people who are critical of Obama and willing to even sort of tut-tut him about not having vision or whatnot, they still place most of the blame or even sometimes all the blame on, like, well, he's misled by Geithner or someone. Right, right.

And then he was sort of a victim of history a way of like he you know what could he do in the face of a horrible financial crisis and somehow forgetting that um they had control of both houses for almost two years i like how larry summers blew the financial crisis then had the audacity to go back to Harvard and say women couldn't do math? One other thing I actually didn't get to ask him about but was in this book and it's like just worth kind of remembering.

He actually says this on page like four or five of the book. When President Jimmy Carter came into office, he actually had veto-proof majorities in, you know, both bodies because, of course, this was right after

Nixon and Watergate. And Democrats in Congress actually proposed, you know, job because of course this was right after nixon and watergate and democrats in congress actually proposed you know job guarantee universal basic income single payer and carter was opposed to those things and you know there was like some inflation going on and such but it is just like that's actually what i wanted to make the point is you know these proposals are all treated as like extreme and radical and like trotskyite ideas but it's like no i mean going back to jimmy carter this was the mainstream of democrats in congress and we're just seeing that come back now i'm really glad that you brought up how bad carter is because for some reason people

give him a pass because he was an engineer or whatever right because he was such a good guy he built houses i try to i try to uh never let people forget the failures of Carter when we bring up inflation. Well, he also campaigned as a strong anti-nuclear advocate. And then, what's the Pentagon paper guy's name? Ellsberg. Ellsberg. In Ellsberg's book, The Doomsday Clock, or The Doomsday Machine, he says that Carter came in and essentially the uh national security apparatus they just scared the shit out of him and he became pro nukes um because essentially you can kind i i

guess there's a lot of like you know manipulation of the president that goes on from these um you know types of like bureaucratic groups with certain vested interests. The CIA chief took him aside and said, I don't have to hope you die of cancer. I can make you die of cancer. We have the gun. We have the cancer gun. His initials are JC, like Jesus Christ.

Oh, good. I don't know. Liberals fall over themselves over the gay. Yeah, that's true uh we wish you a speedy recovery president carter um but yeah I mean I guess on my end I was gonna say is he dying of something then I realized he outlived like uh the two successive presidents after him like of course he's dying of something you don't have to feel bad, Andy.

The FCC chairman's not going to be up our ass. I guess I was just going to say to the listeners here, we are thinking about probably next month launching a Patreon, and we would like to hear your ideas for it. I know there's a ton of podcasts, many of them better than ours, that you may or may not already give $5 a month to. If you give $10, Sean will pronounce it Patreon. But I guess, you know, we want to make an entertaining podcast. We want to also hopefully provide some sort of repository of information on billionaires. And we would like to hear from you,

you know, things you like, things you don't like, things you want for us to do for the Patreon. Because I think right now our idea is essentially we would do an extra billionaire every week. And then maybe at the end of the month, we would just kind of do a wrap up episode where we talk about what we talked about that month. But you know, if, if there are things, if you are a person who would consider giving us money, we will give you a lot of weight in terms of making decisions for us and about the direction of the podcast but in in all honesty it is a collaborative effort between us and the listeners so we we want to hear from you and we will keep you posted about our plans and i would like us to make more money than mueller she wrote because i just got in a twitter fight with them and it would just be so nice to make more money than them.

They charge $30 for their live show. Also, we're going to be switching to a Tuesday-Thursday release schedule. Yeah. Because I don't want to fucking be up all night to get it out by Monday morning. So that's the reality of it. But you're going to get G-stakes on the two Ts, if you know what I mean. We did not realize in this worker-owned cooperative we were exploiting Yogi's labor.

And we did not realize because we are petite bourgeoisie. That's another thing. If you're into workers' co-ops and worker control of the economy, we are one. That's right. We are going to incorporate as a worker-owned pot. I feel like that's kind of a marketing gimmick, though.

I mean, technically, it's true. Every one of us is going to have a 25% share. I did ask David Harvey at his Capital Lectures whether work-around cooperatives are sustainable in the long term of Marxism, and he said... And he said your podcast will fail. Fracture. You know what?

Long story short, yeah, he did. So that's absolutely fucking stupid ultimately we have to pay the bank you know and even though we are a worker on cooperative we will still be hiring um uh third world children to do our social media because we subscribe to the bernie sanders imperialist model of socialism where it's okay for us to exploit the downtrodden and have them doing fucking manual posting labor for three cents an hour on our behalf. Socialism in one country. One. A single country.

In one Brooklyn apartment. And with that, this has been Grubstickers. I'm Yogi Poliwalt. Those kids are really good at posting. Randy Palmer. Steve Jeffries. I'm Sean McCarthy. One more time, the book is A Crisis Wasted,

Barack Obama's Defining Decisions. It's by Reed Hunt, and as much as we joke around, we do very much appreciate Reed Hunt joining us today, and we hope you enjoyed the episode. Thanks. That was amazing. Dad and Grandpa don't hate each other. The Lubeckis got most of their house back,

all because Jesus showed up. Bobby, what are you talking about? That guy. A carpenter, worked a miracle. His name was JC. Rode in a limo. Him? You thought that was...

Ha, ha, ha. rode in a limo. Him? You thought that was... Well, he ain't nobody but a one-carbon peanut farmer. Man wore a sweater. Hand-picked by the OPEC.