No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen - Trump sabotages the U.S. Post Office to undermine the election

Episode Date: August 2, 2020

Trump has quietly moved to sabotage the Post Office to undermine nationwide vote-by-mail efforts. Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey discusses his high-profile Senate primary race against Joe Kennedy and Trump’s dangerous calls to delay the election.Written by Brian Tyler CohenProduced by Sam GraberMusic by WellsyRecorded in Los Angeles, CAhttps://www.briantylercohen.com/podcast/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today we're going to be talking about something that's really important. It is a five-alarm fire, and that is Trump's quiet plan to sabotage the Post Office to undermine nationwide vote-by-mail efforts. And I'll also be speaking with Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey about his high-profile Senate primary race against Joe Kennedy, as well as Trump's not-so-s subtle calls to delay the election. I'm Brian Tyler Cohen, and you're listening to No Lie. So I want to focus on the Post Office because it's an issue that people seem really worried about, and there's a lot of. of confusion about what's actually happening here. So in May, Trump installed a guy named Lewis DeJoy as the Postmaster General because he has a ton of experience working with the USPS.

No, no, wait, I'm sorry, I'm looking at the wrong notes. He is a Trump mega donor with no experience whatsoever who's content to help the president weaponize the post office for his own personal benefit. Yeah, that's the correct one here. And when I say mega donor, I mean $360,000 to a Trump super pack and $2,000. and $2.5 million to Republicans across the country just in the last election cycle. So this guy takes over on June 15th, and his first moves include taking a bunch of steps that have deliberately slowed mail delivery under the guise of cutting costs.

So they've stopped paying overtime that have been necessary to make sure that mail deliveries were completed every day. They shut down sorting machines early, and they're requiring letter carriers to leave mail behind when necessary to avoid extra trips or late delivery on routes. DeJoy has pushed back and he said in a statement that the ban on overtime was intended to, quote, improve operational efficiency and to, quote, ensure that we meet our service standards. Yeah, nothing says improving operational efficiency like slowing the operation. Nothing says meeting service standards like failing to accomplish the principal service you offer.

Like, this is not what those words mean. Being inefficient doesn't magically become efficient just because you say it. That's not how reality works. Plus, we're talking about the post office. The motto is literally neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night. Try and square that with Lewis DeJoy, who within five minutes of signing on has decreed that mail should be purposefully left behind because he's doing away with overtime. It is an attack on the core foundation of this agency, because what would a Trump official be, if not completely loathing of the agency that he was tapped to run? So before anything else, so that we don't let this red herring distract us, I just want to say, the post office is not a business.

It is a government service. It does not need to be profitable because some things aren't about extracting every last single solitary penny out of people. It's about offering an essential service necessary to a functioning society. We pay taxes so that services like this exist, right? Like, this is going to shock Republicans, but a billionaire CEO doesn't need to be behind everything. Imagine that, right? By the way, just so you're aware, this isn't a new strategy. Republicans hate government.

So when they govern, they purposefully break things and then point to that broken thing as proof of why it should be privatized and not run by the government, even though they themselves broke it. That's the issue with electing people who don't believe in government, is that when they're elected, they proceed to destroy it. And do you see how that could be problematic during, oh, I don't know, a pandemic and accompanying economic crisis coinciding with mass civil unrest and protests coming up on a nationwide election? So getting back to the post office, it's the perfect target for Trump for a number of reasons. One of which is that Trump hates Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon, but also owns the Washington Post, which has had critical coverage of

Trump. So to get revenge on him, he wants the post office to raise their prices as much as five times higher because Amazon uses the post office for shipping and they benefit from the low rates. But Trump is an idiot because the post office also benefits from the deluge of business that Amazon brings. And raising the prices wouldn't mean that Amazon would just blindly pay more. They wouldn't just blindly pay those prices, it means they'd probably move to a competitor like FedEx or UPS, meaning that the post office would lose a massive client and that the rest of us, the millions of regular American people who use the post office on a daily basis, would be stuck paying five times more because Trump tried and failed to get back at Jeff Bezos.

Make 350 million people pay more because one guy's newspaper had critical coverage of you. Yeah, that's just petty enough to be a Donald Trump plan. But the more obvious reason here is that Trump wants to sabotage the post office because he's resigned to the reality that Americans are going to vote by mail. That it's not up to him. It's up to the states. And while Trump might be cool with letting hundreds of thousands of people die from the pandemic, governors of those states aren't. And so they're going to make sure that their constituents can vote safely. And that means voting by mail.

So, while Trump has no power to change that, he just worked his way up the system and figured if he can't get people not to cast ballots, then he can at least try and make sure that the ballots don't get there. And so the way to do that is to break the post office from the inside. His only hope here is to make sure that the mail is delayed enough that even if we're able to overcome the massive hurdles to actually acquiring a mail-in ballot, even if we're able to get through all of the roadblood. bullshit that Republicans have enacted in front of us, that it won't matter. And we've already seen examples of this play out across the country. According to NPR, in the primary elections held so far this year, at least 65,000 absentee or mail-in ballots have been rejected because they arrived past the deadline. In some states, the rejection rate is more than enough to swing the results of an election.

In Pennsylvania, it's more than 1%. In New Hampshire, it's more than 2%. In Virginia, it's almost 6%. In Wisconsin's April primary, over 2,000 ballots were rejected for missing the deadline. But if it wasn't for a six-day grace period that had been granted on an emergency basis, that number would have been 79,000. And in a lot of these cases, late ballots aren't even the fault of the voter. We're hearing countless instances where people are sending their ballots in a full week prior to their due date,

only to have them arrive as much as three to four weeks. later, three to four weeks to mail one piece of paper. If that sounds off, that's because it is. And these apparently dire cost-cutting measures are happening at a time when the post office is poised to become inundated with mail-in ballots. In Michigan, mail ballot requests are up 260 percent. In Vermont, they're up 1,000 percent. In Kentucky, mail-in ballots accounted for 85 percent of votes in the June primary. There's one district. in Virginia, mail-in ballots went from 1,300 in 2019 to 34,000 this year. The states of California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, and Utah will automatically send all

registered voters mail-in ballots. Dozens more states are offering no excuse mail-in voting or are automatically mailing all-registered voters' applications for mail-in ballots. The point is that this is happening at a time when the post office needs more support, not less. and Republicans' excuse to all of this is that there could be fraud. Granted, there's no evidence of fraud.

There's no evidence in any of the states that have been voting by mail for decades. In fact, it's so safe that Mike Pence and Bill Barr and Rona McDaniel Romney and Kaylee McAnnie and Jared and Ivanka and Melania Trump and Betsy DeVos and Larry Kudlow, Wilbur Ross, Brad Parscal, and Trump himself all used it to vote. But still Republicans' position is that there could be fraud,

meaning that it's based zero on facts and solely on fear, which, you know, in fairness is a pretty consistent principle on the right. Got to give them that. As for Trump's specific fraud excuses, it's not worth a time of day because they're all bullshit. But I do want to bring up one because I think it's hilarious. And that is that Trump has said that kids would steal ballots out of mailboxes. Because who among us doesn't remember back in the good old days, you know, when we'd be riding down the block on our bikes and then break into someone's mailbox so we could open up legal

documents and then forge their signatures and then mail them back to the appropriate government agencies to take part in a coordinated mail fraud scheme like what has trump ever met a kid like you think that's what they're doing with their free time mail fraud yeah that's it a whole generation of kids not looking to play sports or make out with each other or do tick-tock dances no they're looking to forge signatures on mail-in ballots to to achieve their goals of ending government subsidies of fossil fuels. Yeah, leave it to Donald Trump to know what kids in America are really up to. Like, the guy has a kid.

If he spent any time at all with Barron, he would know what kids are really do. Yeah, I think I just answered my own question. So why has Trump been targeting vote by mail all this time? What is all of this based on? There's a few alternatives. Think about who would vote by mail versus in person because of the pandemic. In rural areas that vote Republican, there are short lines and small crowds, so not that high of a likelihood that people can contract the virus. But in cities where people vote Democratic, there are way more people, meaning longer lines and confined spaces, so a much higher likelihood for people to contract it.

So those are the people who could be more likely to vote by mail, meaning those are the people whose votes he wants gone. And another option is that, regardless of whose votes they are, he just wants to break down the system, right? Republican Democrat, third party, doesn't matter. He wants mass distrust in the election so that he can discredit the entire thing and claim that the election is illegitimate and just stay in power. Or rely on the Supreme Court to litigate and hope that a 5-4 majority, conservative majority helps him like it did with Bush in 2000. It doesn't matter how he breaks it. The point is that it breaks. and obviously that's that's you know the more extreme but I'm tired of giving this guy the benefit of the doubt and fooling myself into thinking that he doesn't want to be a dictator and then being proven wrong every single step of the way this past week he tried to delay the election something that hasn't ever been done it was so drastic so egregiously authoritarian that even a co-founder from the federalist society came out against it and called for his removal from office so when I say that he wants to sabotage the entire election

I say it knowing full well that it's an absolutely insane thing to have to warn against, and yet here we are. So with all of that said, I try and make a concerted effort on here not to whip everyone into a frenzy without any actionable solutions.

So now that I think I've made it painfully clear that this scheme to sabotage the post office is dangerous, what can be done. So let's start with Congress. Any relief bill, or in fact, any bill at all, should have USPS funding, and rules attached governing how those funds are to be spent. And nothing should be passed without it.

Here's the thing. And I'm just going to speak from a political perspective right now. Trump is the one who stands to benefit most from passing any relief bill. The American people are hurting, and it's him on the ballot. And he knows that. He'll try and blame any lack of movement on the Democrats, but no one's buying that. This election will be a referendum on the president. And if the recession is deepening and people are getting evicted,

and not able to put food on the table, no one's going to say, oh, I wish the Democrats agreed to the one-week unemployment insurance extension. No, it doesn't work that way. The blame will be on Trump. He needs to pass relief. So Democrats need to make sure that

when relief is passed, that USPS funding is attached. The fact is that in order to ensure a fair election this cycle, which we know will occur mostly by mail, the post office needs to be able to actually operate. And mail being delivered is a pretty important component.

component of having an election by mail. So call your elected officials and tell their offices that they need to prioritize funding to the post office. Your calls matter. If these offices are inundated with calls, it makes a difference. And I know that's like a thing people say to call your elected officials, and I don't mean to sound trite, but you have one congressperson and their offices exist to take your calls. So take advantage. On the legal front, we have an army of lawyers, people like Mark Elias litigating in states around the country to replace election day receipt deadlines with postmarked by election day deadlines. So as it stands right now, 34 states consider completed ballots that are not received by

election day as invalid. And that includes every single swing state except for North Carolina. Even in situations where the number of rejected ballots might be greater than the margin of victory in that election, if they arrive too late, that's it. They're invalid. So they're trying to change that. They're also pushing to allow community groups to be permitted to collect and deliver sealed mail ballots. So those are two of the more high-profile ones.

You should follow Mark on Twitter at Mark E. Elias, and his site is DemocracyDocket.com. At some point, I'd like to get Mark on as a guest to speak to a lot of these issues too. So that's the legal front. And finally, for those of us who aren't elected officials or lawyers, our job is simple. If you're voting by mail, return your ballot as soon as possible. That's it. It's easy. Do not wait until November. Assume that it'll take three weeks to get your ballot in,

meaning that election day is not November 3rd. It's the first week of October. When you get your ballot, fill it out right then and there and stick it right back in the mailbox or bring it to a drop box if that option's available to you. States have drop boxes where voters can deposit their ballots and then election officials come and pick them up. So this allows voters to safely, you know, bypass the post office or polling places and still get your ballot in on time. So again, bottom line, when you receive your ballot, you fill out your ballot.

It is such an easy step, and it will be so effective against this top-down coordinated voter suppression scheme by Trump. The solution is right in front of us, so please spread the word. Election Day is whenever your ballot arrives in the mail. Next up is my interview with Massachusetts Senator Edmark. who is currently in the middle of a high-profile primary race with Representative Joe Kennedy. Now, Senator Markey is co-author of the Green New Deal. He's an original co-sponsor of Medicare for All.

So if having a champion for a progressive legislation in the Senate is important to you, then this race should be important, too. Okay, today we have Senator Ed Markey. Thank you so much for taking the time. I know you're busy in campaign mode. No, great to be with you. Thanks. It's fun to be on with you.

So I want to talk about your election coming up. But first, there is the obvious news. Trump has tweeted that he would like to delay the election. Now, I'm not going to ask you if he's going to do that because I know it's not going to happen. Only Congress is able to move the date of the election and Congress isn't going to, isn't going to help him out there. So my question for you is, what have you heard from Republican senators on this? Is there any disillusionment behind the scenes? Publicly, they love him.

Privately, they can't believe he's the leader of their party and that he controls the Republican. base, they're voters. You know, they think, they thought that they control their voters, but they don't. And anything he tweets out about the Republican senator to the base could mean a career ending experience for them. So, so on something like this, where they haven't criticized them yet, really, but what he does with Putin, if he's like, once again, maybe talking to Putin and it's not being recorded, then Putin's saying, hey, why have an election?

Why don't you just stay as a dictator? You know, you could drag that out indefinitely. You don't have to ever give up power. You know, you're right through 2021 and say the election still isn't over. And so he's just modeling himself on these authoritarian leaders and the members of his own party. They go along because it's career ending because of the now the crazy radical right-wing control of the Republican base in our country. Right. I mean, this isn't quasi-fascism either that we're seeing.

It's not fascist adjacent. This is an outright fascist move. So how do your colleagues on the right defend this? Is there a point where they actually cut the court or is it like you said? They just, they're all in. They're hitched to his wagon and, you know, they'll go down in flames with him if they have to. I think they're going down in flames with them. Look at their fighting over should we give relief to people on a coronavirus package right now.

As if that's a question. Yeah. So what's happening is there's a pragmatic wing of the Republican Party. And they're saying, of course we have. have to help people. And then the ideologues show up and they say, there's no way that we're going to be having the federal government get in. So the Republican paradox is that they don't believe in government, but they have to run for office in order to make sure that the government doesn't work. So now they have all these offices. And now we need the government to work. And the Republicans

who won on that Republican paradox say, we can't let the government work. And the pragmatists right now, a stymied, we're going to have a crisis. This is just going to bubble and bubble and bubble one week, two weeks, three weeks. And finally, suburban swing voters are going to be going, we're wiping you out. There's a tsunami coming and then they'll cut a deal. But it's only after a complete exhaustion of every other option, their own personal survival will be on the line. And then they go in and see Trump and go, we have to do more for these businesses, for these families, you know, for testing. But that's not their, that's not their real position. Their real position is we don't want the government to work.

And they're going to pay a big price in November because of that philosophy, because obviously there's a contract on the day we're all born that the government will be there. You know, it paves roads, it builds schools, and make sure that there's medical care for people. And they're just saying, no money for schools, no more money for hospitals, no money for individuals who are unemployed. And it's all because they're petrified of Donald Trump. We're seeing a sustained campaign right now to sabotage this election. And something that's been flying kind of under the radar is what's happening with the Postal Service. You know, there are purposeful delays. There's no overtime for employees.

And this is just when mail-in voting is set to overwhelm the system. funding for USPS was included in the CARES Act, which it's looking like McConnell has no intention of bringing to the floor for a vote. So how do we ensure that USPS isn't sabotaged that the Senate won't allocate funding as part of legislation? Yeah, so we're asking, the Democrats are asking for $25 billion for the post office. The Republican's goal is to have the post office collapsed, privatize it, and just get rid of another couple of hundred thousand federal unionizing.

employees. Pretty simple. And it's a formula that helps them politically, and it just happens to coincide with their private sector philosophy. We can't let it happen because, amongst other things, we're going to have one big mail-in vote in America this year. And we need the post office to be working. So I think what's running counter to their desires is this, that a lot of people are home all day, every day. And now they're seeing the postal worker come down their street every day. And it's now through rain, sleet, snow, gloom of night, or coronavirus, that postal employees walking up your stairs, taking the risk, exposing themselves to this disease. So as Democrats, we're going to hold.

We're not going to let them destroy the postal service. It's just one more issue where we have to be absolutely firm in our resistance to this ideological anti-government philosophy, which the Republicans are afflicted with right now, and amongst other things make the point to them, it's not the post offices fault that the economy is in a collapse because the president isn't handling the coronavirus well, and as a result, advertising has dropped to almost nothing, and as a result, there are no revenues, and it has nothing to do with the management of the Postal Service. It has to do with things that are more under the control of the president, and we're not going to allow you to then use it as an excuse to destroy

this wonderful couple of hundred-year-old service. And isn't that the ultimate irony of this, too, that it was Trump's job to coordinate the response to this virus. He didn't. He failed in his response to the virus. That impacted the postal service. And now he's pointing at the postal service, having failed as some completely separate issue.

Yeah, it's like trying to victimize the victim. Right. It's all your fault, that tree fell on your head. It's all your fault. You know, that that trailer came up on the sidewalk and hit you. And now I'm going to punish you by not giving you, not even taking you as a little hospital and helping you out. So that's just how their minds work. It's all, how does it fit inside of the contours of this anti-government philosophy, which they have?

And they're doing so in an era where most families are realizing they've never needed the government more. It's becoming clear to them that without the government right now, that their ability to fight the disease, fight, the economy in terms of its impact on their families. And so I just think that there's a reckless disregard for their own political well-being that is the overall characterization I would give to the Republican Party right now. And I think they're cruising for a political bruising of historical proportions in November. Well, I don't think I could have said it better than that. So speaking of voting, there's a primary election between you and Joe Kennedy coming up. The elections on September 1st, but early voting has already started. Now, we're used to seeing these

types of primaries from the left. Joe Crowley lost to AOC, Elliott Engel, lost to Jamal Bowman. And this is as a new generation is coming to power, right? A generation that's focused on climate change and social justice and expanding health care. But this is a situation where you're being primary, relatively speaking, from the right. Now, do you think that that undercuts the progressive movement at a time when it's hitting its stride, when it's most important? I can only run as myself in, you know, in this race. Alexandria Ocasio-Cottes has endorsed me. The Sunrise Movement has endorsed me.

Progressive Democrats of America have endorsed me. NARAL, Planned Parenthood, Sierra Club, NRDC. They're all with me in this race. So I'm running on the issues. And interestingly, the issues have a lot of charisma this year. Yeah. Green New Deal, Medicare for All, taking on the gun lobby. And so from my perspective, I accept this race.

And it's actually been an incredible experience to see with the groundswell, a progressive support all across the state and largely driven by young people who are rallying to my side because of how much they care about the Green New Deal, the climate, and social justice that AOC, when we drafted the Green New Deal, is an integral part of what we're trying to achieve, because obviously, minority communities, black and brown communities, poorer communities suffer disproportionately from environmental injustice. And we actually call it out in the Green New Deal,

and it anticipated, in a lot of ways, where we are right now in the country, because that's what people want. They want justice, and not just environmental, but racial, criminal justice, educational, and health care justice as well. And so this rally to my side is actually very powerful. And AOC today began a television commercial up here in Massachusetts, POMI. And what she did at the end of it was she concluded by saying, it's not age. It's the age of your ideas which are important, which is why we need at Markey to stay in the United States Senate.

Right. Totally. Totally agree. I mean, here's the thing. Democrats are hopefully poised to take control of government for the first time. in a decade when we need climate change legislation. The time to move was yesterday, right? So, I mean, I can only speak for myself, but the solution here doesn't seem to be removing the champion for bold climate change legislation in the Senate at a time when we need climate change legislation champions in the Senate. So, you know, so thank you for that.

Yeah, let's just put it this way. If Donald Trump gets a second term, it's like a death sentence for the planet, it will have gone eight years, done nothing, roll back the progress which we were making giving permission to other countries in the world to sit on the sidelines to not really act

to really not move and really not create millions of jobs which we could if we unleashed the Green New Deal so that's all on the ballot in November matter of fact the Paris Climate Accord expires in the first week of November

so that's on the ballot as well, we can now see years later that even that agreement is not strong enough and we have to strengthen that, but we need Democrats to do it. From my perspective, it's at the top of the list of the reasons why I want to go back for the Senate. It is to make sure that President Biden has a climate champion on the Senate floor that's already done it before my law to increase fuel economy stands. My law to increase the appliance efficiency standards, blocking the need for a couple hundred cold burning plants ever having to have been built. The Waxman-Markey bill in 2009, still the only comprehensive climate bill to ever pass either chamber of Congress. And we passed

that in June of 2009. So I know how to do this. I'm ready to go on the chair of the Climate Task Force for the Democrats in the Senate. And that's why I'm fighting so hard to get back and why it's so gratifying to me to have sunrise movement and all these other progressive groups coming in, I mean incredibly aggressively to support my candidacy. So does running against a Kennedy in Massachusetts pose any particular problems for you? I would prefer to view it as somebody running against a marquee from Malden

who has done the job. I'm here in my house. I'm here in the house I was raised in. This is where I live. It's a blue collar community, and my father drove a truck for the Hood Milk Company. My mother was going to be senior class president, but my grandmother died. It was an immigrant mother and father. So my grandmother died when my mother was 17, about to become senior class president.

So she had to become a single mom, really, for the younger three kids in the family. So here I am. We made it exactly four blocks from where the immigrants cut off the boats. but I grew up here with a mother and a father who was a truck driver. I could see them struggling to pay bills at the kitchen table when I was growing up. And I know right now that people are struggling to pay their bills all across Massachusetts and all across the country. And it helps and animates me to have an agenda which I know that people need.

So Kamala Harris and I, for example, we have introduced the bill for $2,000 a person until we get out of this coronavirus. So that would be for a couple, four thousand bucks. They had a child, $6,000. Pay the bills, paid the rent, paid the mortgage, pay the medicine, pay the food. Let's help people get through. It wasn't their fault that all of this happened. And those progressive values I get from just living here and seeing how these people are being affected by the pandemic and the consequent economic crisis.

And that's all I can really bring to this race. I can't, I can only bring a marque to the race. And the more than 500 laws that I have put on the books over the years, which I will say is not something that my opponent has done in his near, near decade in the House of Representatives. I'll just leave it there. So let's actually talk about the Green New Deal. That's the main issue you're running on and rightfully. So there's a perception that issues like the Green New Deal and Medicare for All are outside the mainstream. I'm sure that basically no one has spoken to more people about this than you.

Is it outside of the mainstream? When AOC and I introduced it in February of 2019, we just got killed by Fox News. We got killed by the president. We even got killed by people inside the Democratic Party. Oh, look at them. Socialists. Way out there.

Just unrealistic. And why did they throw in all that stuff about intersectionality and social compacts? Everyone should get health care. job. They're just so far out of the mainstream. So it unleashes the sunrise movement. By the time you reach the presidential debates, all of a sudden, everybody's got a position on the Green New Deal. Everyone's educating themselves on the magnitude of the problem and what their particular response would be. And suddenly, intersectionality matters.

Well, you know, the important issue is intersectionality. The important issue is understanding how it all interconnects from everything else. So here we are no longer, I would say, socialist, but more like profits.

And nothing fits this moment better than the Green New Deal. Nothing fits this moment better than Medicare for all. Millions of people have now lost their health insurance. We've got,

and guess why people are focusing on now? Oh my goodness. In the United States, we're 45th in the world in towards a mortality. We're 38th in the world in health outcomes. And we spend twice as much as the rest of the world. Maybe the system is broken.

Maybe it's not a health care system, but a sick care system. And by the way, there's millions more now coming with little likelihood that it's going to change in 2020 or 2021 or 22. We're in the middle of a meltdown. So, hey, you know, maybe the Medicare for all idea, it's a good idea where everyone gets the coverage they need. You know, maybe this Green New Deal is a good idea where we can create millions of jobs, putting people to work in the same way FDR put millions of people to work,

doing great work for the country that we still look back at with great admiration. So sometimes liberals are right, but too soon. So you've got to wait for people to catch up. And no longer seems socialistic and now seems pragmatic. And you can actually see it in the program that President Biden announced for climate last week, much for ambition than a year ago. And he asked AOC to help him with the drafting of it. So that wasn't on the scoreboard in 2019. So yeah, the country has moved traumatic. And I do want to talk about Vice President Biden's plan, but I do want to stay on this for just a

moment. How do you cut through the BS about cow farts and no more hamburgers and whatever else the right cooks up to convey to people the necessity of this legislation? What's the most effective strategy because we know we're going to hear that we we can cure cancer and the right would say that you know would demonize it they they turn it into a boogeyman so so how you know what's the what's the most effective strategy that you've seen since you've been out on the campaign show since you've been speaking to people since this bill was introduced uh you know to bring people aboard we just have to explain it to people it's net zero carbon net zero so obviously if you want to build windmills you're going to have to have steel so

the question is, okay, it's not that we're going to say that you don't have to manufacture steel, that it's not going to create some pollution, it's that after you then deployed the wind turbines, it winds up net zero. Yeah. How hard is that to figure out? And the same thing will be true in each sector, that once you apply the energy efficiency strategy, or you imply the new no-till farming strategy, or you apply a strategy where you're retrofitting the buildings, some carbon may have to have been expended in order to accomplish

the goal. But then as long as it all nets up at zero, we're okay. And so we'll be flexible in terms of how you get there, but inflexible in terms of getting there. And in that context, you can still have an ice cream cone or a hamburger if you want. Although impossible burgers, if you haven't had one, you should have one. I mean, look, I live in L.A. You're lucky if you can find an impossible burger on the shelves while you have pounds and pounds of regular burgers just sitting there. So I don't think there's any short of that. I will tell you. I think Burger King last year showed a 6% increase in revenues because of the impossible burger. Yeah. And that's just in the first couple of years. So how does it taste? Great. There's so many red herrings that the

Republicans throw out there that we need to build an aquarium. Right. And you've got to explain it one by one. in each instance, how the whole thing works. And ultimately, I actually, I had them come in and serve impossible burgers. So all the members of the Democratic Caucus, and they were like, is this a real hamburger? And because you have to, you have to explain to people how the world is changing. But even with agriculture, we can subsidize farming so they move to no-kill farming. So that there's a dramatic reduction in carbon, which goes up. to the atmosphere. So it's not out of the realm of the possible. That once we win, and then we pass

our climate legislation, which we will, that when people look back in 10 years, they're going to look back now the same way they look at black rotary dial phones and they say, how did we, how do we have that same thing for 75 years? Why didn't we move? And there's a certain power of stasis that controls the universe. But once you break out and you create this new perspective, then I think everyone is going to move there very rapidly. By the way, the same thing happened with smoking. Like half of Americans smoked, you know, in 1950, and now we're down to like 18%.

Yeah. I think it's actually one of the lowest rates in the developed world. Yeah. So a lot of it was that the tobacco companies had a great strategy. And then we, on the progressive side, we had a counter strategy. And we didn't begin it until years later. But once we explained it to people that is better for them, then that's now the default position, not totally. And there's a lot of things that the industry does to try to up the percentage of views.

The same thing's going to be true with solar, with wind, with all electric vehicles. There was one report I was talking to Gina McCarthy today, who was ahead of the EPA. And she told me today that there's a study she just read where by 2024, an all-electric vehicle is going to be equally competitive with the internal combustion engine. And when it was at that point, well, then there's no price differential at all. Which car are young people going to buy? Yeah, totally. And we deploy the charging stations all across the country. we make them ubiquitous so people are plugging in the battery life expectancy just gets higher and higher

and before you know it people look back and they say no there was a time when people used to pull into a gas station and put with gasoline in the tank of the car and the kids are going to go come on no one ever did that not only that there's a time when when you know half of our governments uh half of our government representatives we're digging in their heels to entrench that system. Yeah, when I was a kid in the phone rang, or anyone in America when I was a kid, you know, people would go, hurry, hurry, it's long distance. Grandma's on the phone.

Like it's a buck and it's like a buck a minute, right? Today, kids are on the phone calling their cousins in Montana, you know, like it's nothing because the technology just changed. And we're going to see the same thing in the car. of energy technologies, and the revolution is going to take a lot less time that anyone thinks. It's going to be just like moving from dial up to broadband. We moved from nothing to Google, eBay, Amazon, Hulu, YouTube in about 10 years. We branded it, went global, and now half the people in Africa are walking around with an iPhone, and it's because it was invented

in the United States. And that's the optimistic view of the future, which I have, that we have done it before. We can do it again and we just got to get the fossil fuel industry politically out of the way. Right. And you know what? What's most tragic about this is that in places like West Virginia and Appalachia and just coal country in general, instead of using this time wisely, instead of using it to transition to renewables so that these communities can set themselves up for success when we inevitably transition away from coal and fossil fuels, the Republicans in charge are just digging in their heels and sticking with fossil fuels. And it's their own constituents who are going to get hurt most by this.

You know, that's the tragic part, that it's them who are going to get left behind. Right. The next coal executive who orders a coal burning plant, the next utility executive orders a coal burning plant, he will have failed that test that Trump is trying to pass. Remembering those five words, they'll just put a butterfly net over them, just say, you're the last utility executive in America who has ordered a coal burning plant because wind is now less expensive, solar is less expensive, energy efficiency is less expensive, and ultimately the marketplace controls, and for years the utilities did not allow the marketplace

to work because they denied access to the renewables. They denied, you know, the efficiency from new technologies. But because of democratic progressive states, because of some of the laws we were able to get on the books, we've transformed how people view these technologies just in the last 10 years, and now we're ready to take the big leap. We're ready to go deploy five times, ten times greater than we have right now. And we can do it in a decade, actually. And once it happens, people are not going to want to go back to the old days.

My father used to say, Eddie, you know, when people say, let's go back to the good old days, tell them to give back their car, give back the washing machine, give back to dryer, give back the phone. Yeah, we'll send you back to the good old days. He says, you know how many people want to go back? no one will go back and that's what it's going to be like in 10 years there'll be an iPhone in your hand as you turn down the air conditioning from a thousand miles away to make sure that you're you're saving energy and it's all going to happen with the younger generation the sunrise movement which is to me just like water on the desert they're like the army coming over the hill

to rescue the country. And these young people are going to be looked back at as the revolutionaries that created this dramatic change on our country needs. So speaking of change, let's talk about Vice President Biden. He released his climate plan. It's a $2 trillion plan. It calls for net zero emissions by 2035 for wind and solar, carbon capture, electric vehicles, how to protect communities of color in the process. You're an original co-sponsor of the Green New Deal. You're the, you know, the OG GND guy. So, you know, as the champion for climate change in the Senate, how do you feel about this plan?

It's a lot better than what the vice president was talking about eight months ago. Right. And again, the point of the Green New Deal is just to continue to up the ante in terms of the ambition we're trying to extract out of the system. So I applaud the vice president for putting that plan out. I applaud the vice president for asking AOC to come in as one of his advisors in crafting it.

And at the same time, I'm going to continue to advocate for 100% within 10 years. No, because I ultimately believe that the magnitude of the problem, the fact that our own scientists in the Trump administration have concluded that without change, with business as usual, the planet warms by 8 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit in the next 80 years. 8 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer. And along the East Coast, we see sea rise 8 to 10 feet high, 8 to 10 feet higher than where we are right. There's an urgency to it that we just have to keep challenging the system,

and I know it can happen because I believe in the future. I believe in our ability to invent and deploy our way to a transformation of our energy sector. And as you're saying, to do it in a way that is infused with social. justice with intersectionality, with a recognition that in the original New Deal, racist Southern Senate has made sure that sharecroppers weren't in Social Security. Domestic workers weren't in Social Security. So we just have to rectify that historic problem, make sure this time that poor people, frontline communities are given all the protections which they need. Right. I think we, you know, it's ironic because now those people are called essential, and yet

They're, you know, those are the ones who have the least protections of anybody. And again, they're more vulnerable to asthma because they live in more polluted environments. And then they're more vulnerable to the coronavirus. And from my perspective, we can see them. We see they're taking risk. We see that they're more exposed. We know that their families are more exposed. They can't zoom to work the way a lot of people can.

And we're going to owe them big time next year, which is why I think it's an FDR moment in January of 2021. let's give them the childcare. Let's give them the paid sick leave. Let's give them the incomes which they deserve. Let's give them the protection. Let's make many of them immigrants. Let's create a pathway to citizenship for 11 million immigrants in our country. Let's make sure that they get the reward they deserve for the risks that they're taking on behalf of all the rest of us right now. Well said. So let's talk about you for a second. I want to talk about your sneakers. They've kind of taken on a life of their own. You have these Nike Air Revolutions from the 90s. What's the deal with these sneakers? Well, you know, when I was a kid, I really wanted to be a

basketball player. I mean, in the worst way. The Boston Celtics, we won the title every year. You know, and then you have these dreams of your greatness. And so I would play basketball three hours, four hours, five hours a day, all day, every day, seven days a week, school year, summer. And my mother would say, Eddie, your father and I were going to donate your brain to Harvard Medical School as a completely unused human organ. Will you spend more time on trigonometry? Will you spend more time on calculus here, please? And I couldn't find the relevance to my life of calculus or trigonometry. But shooting a basket, which is basketball, which is key to my life. So I just kept practicing and practicing and practicing. And it did affect my grades

in calculus and trigonometry. I'm not going to deny this. However, in the Congress, you know, this is Jim. So, and they have a shooting contest each year. Who can hit the most free throws out of 50? You get to shoot once. So about 12 years ago, I won. I shot 47 out of 50 free throws, wearing my air revolutions, which I've had for 30 years. And at that point, I said, I just said, hey, Ma, it's worth it, Ma. I did it. That's right. I won the contest.

I wasn't wasting my time. And so those air revolutions, yeah, they're vintage, no question about it. And they've had to be retooled a few times just to keep them going. And in this race, they're kind of like my lucky charm, my talent. that I'm using, no matter where I go. And actually, I think at some point, they might even announce for office themselves. That's how popular they're getting.

So, yeah, so that's my, those are my air revolutions. And I think every one of us kind of harbors some kind of childhood dream that still continues, you know, as to what you could have been. So I had no vertical game and no horizontal game. But if it's stationary and there was nobody on me, I was a dead eye. Unfortunately, real basketball.

Yeah, I'm just going to say, I don't know how well that's going to serve you in the NBA, but well, I for one, can say that at least I'm glad you settled for the Senate. I appreciate it. So one more thing. I was also told by your staff that, you know, that you used to be an ice cream truck driver and that your preferred ice cream is a scoop of coffee and a scoop of sherbert. and you eat them together. So my question is, when the Boston Globe endorsed you,

did they not know about this? You know, I know it sounds unusual, but I drove an ice cream truck. That's how I worked my way through Boston College. Mainly because, as my mother said to me, Eddie, if you had done better in calculus and trigonometry, you would have got a scholarship. So don't blame us that you're working, you know,

every day all summer driving an ice cream truck. jaw choice to play basketball. So she blamed everything that went wrong on basketball. But in an ice cream truck, you've got every ice cream. I mean, you've got chocolate cupboards and chocolate eclares and strawberry shockcakes and zingos and you name it. So, you know, congressional expert is kind of an oxymoron, like a contradiction in terms. You know, like Salt Lake City Nightlife or Jumbo shrimp.

And so one thing I did become an expert on though was, cream. And so over all those years, I don't know how I just, it just came to me. And somebody, you guys should try it out there. Try a scoop of orange sherbet and a scoop of when, you know, you know, now you, when you buy an ice cream cone now, it's almost like enough to feed a family. It's so big. Yeah. So that, just so they can extract more money out of it. But just try a double scoop. And if anyone want, just contact me and you can thank me personally, because I'm telling it'll work for you. Coffee and orange of it. A scoop of piece.

One more question. How can we help? Well, you've got millions of people who watch your podcast and because it's so inexpensive for people to use their wireless devices. If they want, they can just contact my campaign and they can be making calls for me no matter where they are. We're going to be in a big get-out-the-vote effort.

and if they want, they could send a nice contribution, modest, if necessary, to my campaign. You just have to go to my website, my campaign website, you know, Edmarkey.com, and there it is, and whatever help you can give me in either end, we only have a month left to go, and we're down to the wire. It's pretty much a dead heat at this point, but with the Boston Globe endorsing me and all the other progressive groups with me, We have a lot of momentum. And anyone who's out there who wants to help and just go to our campaign website and come on through. We'd love to put you to work. All right, Senator Markey, well, thank you so much for taking the time.

And thanks for, you know, your leadership through the decades since before I was born. And best luck in your election. Thank you. It's going great. Got a lot of momentum. And I really love being on with you, Brian. Thank you. Thanks again to Senator Markey.

That's it for this episode. Talk to you next week. You've been listening to No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen, produced by Sam Graber, music by Wellesie, and recorded in Los Angeles, California. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe on your preferred podcast app. Feel free to leave a five-star rating and a review, and check out Briantylercoen.com for links to all of my other channels.