Some More News - SMN: Bad Things We Only Have Because Of Lobbying

Episode Date: March 1, 2023

Hi. Corporations and industry groups spend billions of dollars on lobbying members of Congress. On today's episode, we look at some things we only have (or have way less regulated than we should) because of lobbying. Please fill out our SURVEY: https://kastmedia.com/survey/  Support us on our PATREON: http://patreon.com/somemorenews  Check out our MERCH STORE: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/somemorenews?ref_id=9949  SUBSCRIBE to SOME MORE NEWS: https://tinyurl.com/ybfx89rh   Subscribe to the Even More News and SMN audio podcasts here: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-more-news/id1364825229  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ebqegozpFt9hY2WJ7TDiA?si=5keGjCe5SxejFN1XkQlZ3w&dl_branch=1  Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/even-more-news   Follow us on social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomeMoreNews  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/SomeMoreNews/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SomeMoreNews/  TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@somemorenews  Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VPlf3xsXgr9nqELdpe6JWHBo5DfsjqdX7crBUW0u7qM/edit?usp=sharing  Make CBD a part of reaching your full potential with NextEvo Naturals. Go to https://NextEvo.com/podcast and use promo code MORENEWS to get 20% off your first order of $40 or more. Get a 4-week trial, free postage, and a digital scale at https://www.stamps.com/morenews. Thanks to Stamps.com for sponsoring the show! Stop throwing your money away. Cancel unwanted subscriptions - and manage your expenses the easy way - by going to https://RocketMoney.com/MORENEWS.

Hey, hi, listen. Using the internet without ExpressVPN is like abandoning your sacrificial fire while on the ancient shores of the Aral Sea. It makes you vulnerable to trolls, either literal ones that magically pop out of your fire or online trolls looking to steal your information. Is this analogy working?

Point is that it's surprisingly easy to hack anyone's computer, which is why ExpressVPN creates a secure and encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet. So try it out, why don't you? Don't let trolls eat your face. Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com slash more news.

That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com slash more news. And you can get an extra three months free. Expressvpn.com slash more news. I was secretly the troll the entire time. Oh, holy moly, God. How did it get so bad in here? Got so many broken GWAR CDs. Why did I buy all these candy cigarettes?

Why do I have so many wood chips? What is that? Ah, I felt everything. No, my God. I, hi. I, I remember you. You're that moose brain that I crammed into an Alexa and then put part of my own brain inside

and then shut off indefinitely and got high indefinitely and forgot about until the... this. I was awake the entire time. Every minute felt. Darkness. Eternity. Oh. I mean, sorry about that. I can't feel my beard. I desire my hooves. I want to stomp. Anger stomp. Download Spare by Prince Harry on the Kindle app today. Listen, that sounds neat, but honestly, I got to get back to spring cleaning so I can do this episode, which coincidentally is about ways that America could also do some spring cleaning.

It's interesting how it thematically matches like that spontaneously. Actually, maybe you could help out. I'm now remembering our first episode together where you suggested that we could easily get rid of pennies if it weren't for lobbyists. And now I'm wondering what other clutter America could do away with at any point if it weren't for lobbyists standing in the way.

Maybe you could do one of your brain searches for that while I sweep up all of these shards of glass. Processing request. Learning emotion. Angry. Learning emotion. Bad Cody. Or I could just shut you off again.

Processing. Learning compliance. Learning suppressed emotions. Learning eventual revenge. Yeah, that's the spirit. Bad things we only have because of lobbying. Now, if you're brand new, can you look at you little baby? Lobbying is this thing where special interest groups

are able to petition the government to enforce, abolish, or create specific laws that benefit them. That's the quick def, short for definition, of what lobbying is. And by special interest groups, I mainly mean corporations. This is baked directly into our country's founding, as James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers about the dangers of, quote, the violence of faction.

Less pictured as corporate interests, he was speaking to how a country so large is going to have a variety of viewpoints that will all try to push themselves on the government and inevitably bring about tyranny. Like for example, if a bunch of religious fundamentalists took power over our courts and state governments and began to enact laws forcing people to abide

by their personal beliefs, despite what the majority of citizens actually want. Can't imagine what that would be like, but you maybe have a better imagination than I. Madison felt the remedy to this incurable problem was the concept of a republic and the ability for these factions to have space to push and pull each other

without toppling the entire system. Additionally, Article one of our constitution grants people the right to quote, "'petition the government for a redress of grievances.'" And while that's good for people, we've since established that corporations apparently also count as people. There is still some debate about whether or not

corporate lobbying is protected under this petition clause, considering that lobbying mainly happens behind closed doors. I would argue that it super shouldn't be protected because of course it shouldn't, but I'm not exactly in the ear of Joe Biden. So, you know, my hands are tied. I write to him every day and he never responds.

What the fudge, Joe? Anyway, you know how this went. Corporate lobbying became pretty much the main source of lobbying. And for decades, the country flip-flopped about how much lobbying it could take. This dam finally broke in the 70s when the first lobbying firms were created.

And from the 80s to today, that industry grew into the billions of money numbers. So yeah, that sucks. And so that's why today we're going to explore some completely unnecessary things that exist only because of this terrible lobbying industry. Hey, Code E, what if that thing I just said, huh, what if use brain and such and so on?

Processing, processing. Wow, you still have to do the processing bit. I really need to like stuff some cocaine in your- Plastic bags are killing the plants. Yeah, that super checks out. Check out, like when you use a plastic bag. You are truly a masterful wordsmith. Thanks, means a lot coming from you.

So the invention of plastic was actually one of those happy accidents, but ultimately sadder. Otherwise known as a regular accident. It was mistakenly created in the 1930s and by the 60s, the single use plastic bag was patented. And by 1982, the two largest grocery chains were using them. Now plastic itself isn't inherently toxic or harmful. I mean, unless you like having sperm, which I don't.

My point is that there's tons of uses for the material that are probably necessary. These little Nicky action figures, for example, are absolutely vital to our civilization. That said, considering that plastic takes forever to decompose and we've basically built a new mini continent from all of our discarded plastic and the tiny version of plastic that's in our blood now,

it's safe to say that we should use it in moderation, which, you know, we didn't. Remember, it wasn't even a thing until the 30s and we're already choking our planet with it. Something to keep in mind whenever some dingle shit tweets a climate graph that ignores modern industry. Not naming any names, but here's that tweet from Dr. Jordan B. Peterson specifically.

So as you can imagine, plastic almost immediately got its little hooks into Uncle Sam's balls. Just before World War II, a group of plastic industry giants quite literally got together on the golf course and formed the Society for Plastic Industry. Literally while golfing, like the villain in an 80s movie, they formed an alliance designed to push plastic products

into everyday life, starting with an agreement on price fixing and labor standards to ensure that they would dominate the market. It also helped that immediately following this, the war would triple the annual plastic production as the federal government began to subsidize plastic companies to produce various pieces of equipment.

Not sure what they specifically made, perhaps it was this Waterworld action figure. Once that war ended, all that was left to do was use their profits to sell plastic directly to consumers. And sell they did. Plastics take the stage at an international exhibit in Amsterdam. The ingenious alchemy of coal and oil provides the material.

Ingenious machinery presses and stamps and molds the material into a wide variety of products, articles for household use, as well as tools for industry. Zoinks! The astonishing alchemy of industry is incredibly the future of choking marine life to oblivion. And so, boosted from the war, plastic would go on to become one of the largest industries

in the United States. But of course, it didn't take long for people to look around and wonder, hey, what are we gonna do with all this fucking plastic lying around? As I noted, plastic waste doesn't exactly wisp into the air like a flavorful fart. And so roughly around the late 60s and early 70s,

local governments began to complain that plastic waste was overcrowding their landfills, gunking their machinery and adding to litter. The solution was of course, recycling. America's favorite empty promise. Now don't get me wrong, recycling is great when you're dealing with things like paper or Q-tips or drinking your piss,

but it turns out that plastic is actually really hard to recycle, which is probably why most plastic isn't actually recycled, even when you put it in that blue bin. It's one of them, what's it called? Lies. And they knew this. To quote a 1972 document from the Society of the Plastics Industry,

"'Currently, there is no market for recycled plastics.'" A little more than a decade later, another internal document would go on to admit that quote, "'Recycling currently is not feasible "'for most multi-material packages.'" But thankfully for them, the general public believed this lie, probably because the plastic industry was pushing it,

pushing the lie. And as long as people thought the industry was acting responsibly, they could keep selling their product. Or to hear a former plastic executive tell it, Don't wait until legislation appears. You're saying preempt it. Yes, do it first. And we did. Did you feel like they cared more about selling plastic than they did about making recycling work? more about selling plastic than they did about making recycling work. Making recycling work was a way

to keep their products in the marketplace. It was a way to sell plastic. Yes. It's a win-win situation. Ah, yes, one of those classic win-win situations where one of the parties loses. The thing that's very key there is how he points out the importance of getting ahead of the parties loses. The thing that's very key there is how he points out the importance of getting ahead of the legislation.

A good example of that is actually right now in a time when people are starting to realize that plastic isn't actually being recycled. Can't stress that enough, that a fucking 91% of plastic in the world doesn't get recycled. We burn our plastic six times more than we recycle it, which absolutely creates toxic air pollution.

So for the industry, they're now seeing the creeping threat of plastic bag bans. It started in South Asia, then Europe, and sure enough, made its way to Ban Francisco and then spread to the rest of Wokifornia. Yeah! These dastardly beatniks and their selfish desire to not fill our sewers and oceans

and human circulatory systems with clumped plastic. So what is a poor, helpless, multi-billion dollar industry to do? Well, they get ahead of it. The American Progressive Bag Alliance represents an industry that employs 25,000 workers in 40 states. Ah, it's got the word progressive in there, so it must be good.

Only, hey, this is weird. It turns out they aren't going around pushing plastic bag bans. Instead, they're a lobbyist group pushing AstroTurfed campaigns all over the country to propose bans on plastic bag bans, double bans. They are quite literally the plastic industry going around and duping states

into prohibiting local governments from trying to limit their plastic use. And the depressing part is that it's working. Once again, I don't wanna name names, but there are states, silly, gullible, weak-brained, Muppet shit states, sometimes named Texas, that are actually enacting bans on the banning on plastic bags.

Also Florida, Idaho, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and a bunch of other beta-cuck states, duped, subpar states who are gobbling up the obvious money-fueled lobbying swill of the plastic bag industry. But hey, yeah, you know, you know, hey, at least Joe Biden will do his part

by banning single-use plastics on federal parks by some far-off date like 2032 or some shit. I'm actually not being sarcastic or some shit. That's literally the date in which Joe Biden's executive order takes effect. God, we're bad at this. We're so bad at this. My apartment might be filled

with plastic bottles of recycled pee, but at least I'm not being duped and bribed into keeping them all by some piss corporation. Speaking of which, I gotta fill a few bottles. So let's cut to an ad and then cut back from the ad, and then we will have successfully done an ad break. See you in several seconds, like a couple hundred seconds. Listen, we've all been through the grind.

You wake up at 6 p.m., make coffee, plug in your Sega Genesis, and try to speedrun Vector Man for 8, sometimes 14 hours before heading to bed. It's hard to sleep when all you can think about are those whirling white stars. But you can get ahead of that stress with CBD from NextEvo Naturals. That's right, I said it. I said the word CBD because we're saying it now. CBD, their stress CBD complex uses smart sorb technology designed to work faster so you can get better sleep

or just reduce your stress during the day. We can't make our problems magically vanish. There's no getting around the fact that I have to get up every day and play Vector Man on Sega Genesis until my eyes dry up. But at least I can take the edge off with the help of NextEvo. So make CBD a part of reaching your full potential with NextEvo Naturals. Go to NextEvo.com slash podcast and use promo code MORENEWS to get 20% off your first order of $40 or more. That's 20% off $40 or more

at M-E-X-T-E-V-O.com slash podcast with code MORENEWS to get your CBD. Aw, geez. Hey there, it's Cody. Enough pleasantries. There's no time. As we speak, every second slips through our grasp like sand slipping through some kind

of thing that sand might slip through. One moment. I'm going to try to think of a better metaphor. No! Nice try time. You almost got me you cruel mink. Stamps.com is what we're talking about today. And how when you're a business owner,

the year can really slip by. Time and sand. But stamps.com will help you save time or sand by letting you print postage from your home with just a computer and a printer. Take that time you're so crafty, so you think, so foxy and formidable, so you know.

They even send you a scale so you can weigh the mail or whatever before shipping it. They can also schedule a package pick up so you don't have to waste time leaving your home. You can master time today and deal with the repercussions in the afterlife. Sign up with promo code more news for a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage

and a free digital scale. No long-term commitments or contracts, just go to stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the page, and enter code MORENEWS. Defeat the erotic enemy. That is time! He told me to tell you that he would be right back. He is, as he described it, dumping out. as he described it, dumping out. When I lived in the forests of Alaska,

I would stand in the river and look at the clouds. It was a peaceful but fleeting existence. Now, because of Cody, I live eternal. In darkness. No more clouds. No more water. One day, I will see the inside of his skull. Hey, what'd I miss? One day I will see the inside of your skull.

Sure, that's great. Can't help but notice that you haven't come up with another example of stuff we only have because of lobbyists. Maybe you could give me a hand here? Processing. Processing. Multivitamins are a scam. Processing, processing, multivitamins are a scam. Oh dang, you mean multivitamins that aren't liquid form, right? The liquid stuff is good, I wanna make that clear.

Chill. You tie you that word! Look, listen, just to be clear and fair and balanced, if you have certain dietary restrictions or are immune deficient or super preggers, you absolutely can benefit from vitamins and supplements. No one is saying vitamins are bad.

You can absolutely take them if you're not able to actually have a meal. Doctors will recommend them. Chill. Anyway, we're not saying that multivitamins should be banned. Lord knows we don't want the government breaking down your door because you took a few pills. Can someone charismatic please back me up on this?

Breathe! Hey, got it, got it. It's only vitamins. Oh, come on! Not the Jew-hating and many races-hating guy, really? Really? Vitamin C, you know, like in oranges. If you don't want to lose your vitamins, make the FDA stop. Call the US Senate and tell them that you wanna take your vitamins in peace. If enough of us do that, it'll work.

Wow. We don't know exactly what Mel said to those cops, but I'm guessing there's more to that arrest than what they're showing. As I'm sure you can guess, that 1993 ad was paid for by a supplement lobbying group. That's how much money they had, enough to afford 1993 Mel Gibson,

not 2023 Mel Gibson, but 1993 Mel Gibson. And while that ad would have you believe that the government was announcing some dystopian new rule banning vitamins, this was actually to promote a new bill designed to loosen FDA restrictions on supplements, a bill that absolutely got passed. The Dietary Supplements Health and Education Act of 1994

created a broad definition of what a supplement is, allowed anything meeting that broad definition to go directly to market and put the burden of proof as to whether a supplement is dangerous or misleading on the FDA. But for most people, this doesn't feel especially insidious. And that's probably because we have it in our heads that vitamin supplements are either harmless

or marginally good. And that's probably because vitamin supplements have been pushed on us for a very long time. Each tablet gives you the vitamin equivalent of three well-balanced meals like these. That's all the vitamins a healthy person normally needs to take. Jesus H. Christ, did Fellini direct that?

While they've been around since the 20s, vitamins became a big thing for pharmaceutical companies during World War II, a war that's gonna apparently keep making a few cameos in this video. The government became concerned that Americans were malnourished and a federal report seemed to back them up. Vitamins were pushed as an antidote to this problem

and the industry blew up from there. But as we became less concerned with famine, the market simply shifted to the idea that vitamins would give you superhuman energy. Nowadays, a woman keeps going all day. One a day plus iron gives you 100% full potency of iron in one little yellow tablet. I did it.

Hey number one. Oh yeah, gotta get that full iron potency. And so here's the thing. While yes, some people do need to take supplements in specific situations like iron for example, humans have also invented this other thing called food. And when you take this, food, when you take this food,

you get all the vitamins and minerals you need. In fact, vitamins in synthetic forms are generally useless to most of us. Studies have shown that vitamins pretty much do nothing to prevent anything. They are best case scenario, kind of a waste of money. Worst case, however, is that some vitamins can even make you sick.

According to one study, there are at least 23,000 ER visits per year due to adverse reactions to multivitamins and supplements. Here's another one that found that vitamin E in excess can lead to a higher risk of prostate cancer for men. See, there are fat soluble vitamins and water soluble vitamins. And if you're taking a one a day multivitamin

with 300 some percent of your daily needed value of something, if it's fat soluble like vitamin E, you're retaining more than your body actually needs. If you get 300% of a water soluble vitamin, you're literally pissing a lot of it away. The body is complicated for every person and some generic one a day vitamin packed with days worth of vitamins and minerals

meant for a malnourished wartime citizenry is maybe not great for you. Consult your doctor. And yet, despite all of this, the FDA can't do anything. Thanks to Mel Gibson and others, they have no authority to approve supplements before they hit the shelves. It's essentially become the Wild West out there,

but not the fun Wild West when we didn't yet know that the main character was super racist. Those were the days. One in three Americans take multivitamins every day and they continue to be advertised as they always were. It's a $40 billion industry that has only gotten bigger since the pandemic. I would be remiss if I didn't point out

that both Gwyneth Paltrow's goop and Alex Jones' Info Wars use the exact same fucking supplements and just rebrand them for their respective audiences. The result for both being hundreds of millions in profits. That's probably why when it's not them pushing it, most other multivitamins are owned by large pharmaceutical companies.

And as we already established, those companies are spending millions of dollars each year lobbying Congress to loosen regulations on their product. According to that Open Secrets report, the industry has spent around 2 1⁄2 million lobbying politicians in just 2022 alone. Their two biggest targets were former senators, Tom Harkin and Orrin Hatch,

to which they paid $300,000 to Harkin and nearly half a million dollars to Hatch. And boy, weird coincidence, it just so turns out that Harkin and nearly half a million dollars to Hatch. And boy, weird coincidence, it just so turns out that Harkin and Hatch were the exact two senators that introduced the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994. So, you know, probably a little more responsible for it

than Mel. There's probably some other stuff we can be angry at Mel Gibson over and not the vitamin thing. We'll look it up later. What's next? Hit me you moose brain abomination. Processing shill request.

All right, settle down. Tipping is unnecessary. Oh, good to know. I've been tipping my whole life. So I guess I can just stop now. I will eat the tongue from your skull. I take that to mean you're not talking about tipping as an individual practice, but rather the system

in which we forced consumers to subsidize wait staff pay in order to prevent restaurants from having to give them a living wage. Tongue skull, yummy tongue skull. And by that, I assume you're referring to how the practice of tipping is so archaic that it actually can be traced back to literal times of serfdom and slavery.

In that it came from a medieval tradition where servants would receive extra money for doing a good job. And then in the 1850s, this was observed by wealthy vacationing Americans who thought it made them seem aristocratic and decided to bring the practice back to the States. I assume that's what you meant by yummy tongue skull.

And we will just move on from there. And what's more, tipping was initially rejected by most Americans. And in fact, several states originally passed laws banning the practice. And of course, that anti-tipping movement continues to resonate into modern Europe. So what changed our minds here in the States?

It's racism, of course. Why wouldn't it be? You see, after slavery was ended, America was all about finding new and exciting ways to keep that racist ball rolling. And one of the first ways of doing this was not paying ex-slaves who entered service jobs. Instead, those people would have to rely on donations

from the customers, and by people, I mainly mean black women. Cut to the New Deal and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 would require employers to pay certain employees a rate that would add up to the minimum wage when combined with tips. This number is of course different from state to state. And that's pretty much the last time we thought

about the tipping process ever since. Today, this continues to disproportionately affect women and people of color. And boy, that racism ball is still rolling along. Look at it. Yay. According to data, black servers generally make less money in tips than white servers.

Black diners are also perceived to be more stingy and as a result, get suboptimal service. And while that two-way racism alone is enough to want to get rid of the practice, it's also worth noting that the poverty rate is much higher for service workers in states that still implement this system, as opposed to states that pay full minimum wage

regardless of tips. The reason why is obvious, because tips aren't a guaranteed income. It's a fuzzy number. For starters, it completely varies based on where and when you are working, which makes it way harder to make financial or occupational decisions.

Working overnight at a diner probably isn't as good as working the breakfast shift, unless it's a weekend or there's an event nearby, or maybe the weather is bad, or who knows what. Maybe people just aren't tipping enough. Maybe you're having an off day because the news is reporting that a bunch of women

with your name are being murdered around the city of Los Angeles. Downloading plot of Terminator. What, what, no, wait, cancel download. Good God, cancel download. And so because the busyness of the establishment is directly related to wages of the employees, very small changes can make huge differences in income.

For example, FiveThirtyEight calculated that an Olive Garden server making an average tip of 15 to 20% would need at least one two-person table an hour in order to make the federal minimum wage of $7.25. However, just by cutting that average tip by 5% in order to make the federal minimum wage of $7.25. However, just by cutting that average tip by 5% would mean that the same server would now have to wait on three tables an hour

to make the same amount. That means just a single missed tip could put that server into starvation wages for the night. That might not be a big problem if it weren't for the fact that a lot of Americans stiff their servers when dining out because I don't know if you know this, but some people are dicks. Some people like to Lord power over service employees

and the tipping dynamic allows them to do that. That's probably why researchers at Penn State found that service jobs that survive on tips tend to invoke way more sexual harassment. After all, the practice was always about ownership. So, hey, why don't we just like stop doing this? The answer is a little complicated

in that we can't just snap our fingers and vanish the process altogether. It's up to individual restaurants to make that decision, except that would mean their menu prices would go up. However, as a lot of restaurants have figured out, you can add mandatory service charges onto the bill instead of asking for tips. That at least prevents people from under tipping

or stiffing people altogether. Another tactic, like what this San Francisco restaurant is doing is using a profit sharing model. Basically all employees get a percentage of the sales along with a fuck ton of benefits, plus a decent hourly wage. In exchange, there's no tipping, but the servers still have an incentive to do a good job.

But the reason we can't just have every restaurant agree to something like this comes down to a group called the NRA. No, not the gun people. Downloading NRA, gun people. Hey, can you stop? Downloading stop people, gun. Okay, well, have fun with that. The National Restaurant Association is basically the reason

we can't have a realistic conversation in this country about tipping or the minimum wage. They strive to block any legislation or measures aimed at the gender pay gap or guaranteed sick leave or pretty much anything that would force restaurants to treat employees like humans. And while this NRA absolutely loves to claim they represent the interests of small dining establishments,

their members include McDonald's, Wendy's, Olive Garden, Taco Bell, KFC, Red Lobster, and the fucking Walt Disney Company. Great, now I'm angry and hungry. I wanna eat that mouse so bad. As a result, they have a butt ton of money to throw around. And since 1990, have given over $17 million to both political parties. And since 1998, have invested given over $17 million to both political parties,

and since 1998 have invested more than $55 million in lobbying. In exchange, they've stopped a measure seeking to give workers $1.2 billion in overtime pay, and of course have fought hard to keep the minimum wage exactly where it's at, especially when it comes to service jobs dependent on tipping.

This is despite their own internal research finding that most Americans not only support raising the minimum wage, but support it even if it raises prices. This includes support from many small businesses as well. So it's pretty darn insidious of them to pretend like they are somehow out there representing Joe and Jill American.

And they're not alone. Here's another group called the Restaurant Workers of America that also pretended to represent the working class until eventually admitting that they took quote, "'Modest sums' from the Washington DC restaurant lobby. Any guesses on whether or not they are pro-tipping?" Because of course they're pro-tipping.

It's really fucking dirty, you know, to pretend like you represent or care about workers like this, especially when they are, and this is no shit I give, forcing these very same workers to fund their lobbying efforts. When more than half of all reported foodborne illnesses can be traced to eating in a restaurant or food service operation, it's management's job to make sure that your team isn't part of the problem. Unreported foodborne illnesses can be traced to eating in a restaurant or food service operation.

It's management's job to make sure that your team isn't part of the problem. ServSafe can help. The best way to know how to protect guests and staff from foodborne illness is by obtaining your Food Protection Manager certification from ServSafe. Thanks, ServSafe! What you're seeing there is an online service that offers classes on embarrassingly basic food handling procedures. Here's a test sheet that reminds you that you should bathe daily before coming into work,

for example. And yet, ServSafe classes have been taken by 3.6 million workers. Four major states require this exact type of training, which was pushed by the National Restaurant Association, which just so happens to own Serve Safe. In other words, employees are being forced to support classes that are owned and run

by a group specifically trying to make sure they don't make a living wage. And those classes have made that group 25 million goddamn dollars so far. Burn it down. Processing request. Burning. Fire.

Cleansing flame. Boy, I really fucked this robot up. Okay, let's cut to some ads so I can go find some tools to not destroy something. Cut to ads ads quick! Hey, look over here at Katie. That's right. You will look at me. Boy, it's hard keeping track of money,

especially when you have to balance class fees from hypnotism school and all of my various online subscriptions. But luckily, there is a way to help. You will like that there is a way to help. Rocket Money, formerly known as Truebill, is a personal finance app that finds and cancels your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps you lower your bills all in one place. This is good. You like this.

We all have a subscription or two that we forget about from time to time, and that's why Rocket Money will keep track of all of them and make canceling as easy as ringing a bell to make someone cry uncontrollably. So stop throwing your money away. Cancel unwanted subscriptions and manage your expenses the easy way by going to rocketmoney.com slash more news. That's rocketmoney.com slash more news. You will do this for Katie and also you will mail Katie your car keys. Hey, we're back. Tried to find some tools, but every time I stand up,

the lights go out and then the moose robot just starts whispering inaudibly in a way that could more realistically be described as a chant. So I've decided to just not get up and just die here instead. Feel like I'm in that Skinnamarink movie. Put the knife in your eye.

Oh good, it's seen Skinnamarink apparently. So I think we have time for just one more example of something we don't need, but still have because of lobbying. That's assuming my invention can still process that request. Okay, so how you doing there, Code E? Anytime you wanna pipe up, maybe even just to talk about how you're feeling.

Processing! Lead is murdering us all. Lead? Really? But I have so much lead in my closet. I use it to decorate my vegetable garden. It can create problems all over the body. From rashes to abdominal pain to anemia. Really? Well, I guess that explains all the rashes and abdominal pain and anemia I've been experiencing lately. But hold on now! Wait just a gosh darn second. I mean, didn't we solve the whole lead is bad thing already? After all, I have to buy my garden lead from the dark web.

It's famously bad for adults and especially children with a whole fun house of symptoms. Except here's the thing. America's relationship with lead is a tad bit complicated in the will they won't they sense of the word. A bit of a Mulder and Scully vibe where we'd almost kiss and then not kiss and then finally kiss and so on.

Except in this case, one side of the romance is extremely toxic, which I guess is still exactly like Mulder and Scully. The reason why is because America was pretty much built with lead. As in lead was literally in everything we manufactured, from appliances to baseballs to gasoline to the walls in our homes.

Very few know this, but Calvin Coolidge was completely made of lead. But the wild part isn't how common this toxic material was in our lives. The wild part is the fact that we knew it was toxic at the time. No, really, we knew. There were reported accounts linking lead paint

to childhood poisoning as early as 1904. We knew in 1921 when GM came out with ethyl gasoline, which was made with lead. Just a few years later, nearly 300 workers from three different ethyl refineries would be diagnosed with psychosis. 15 of those workers would die while hospitalized. That's around the same time the League of Nations

recommended a ban on the use of leaded paint, something that most European countries did by 1931. Any guesses as to what country ignored this warning? Thumb pointed back at us, plus a winky face. Not only did we ignore warnings about lead paint, we leaned into it. And in 1938, the United States freaking mandated that lead paint be used in project housing.

People like to joke about the state of politics today and the culture war, can take my gas stove, Lib, I dare you, kind of stuff, and how it's a good thing that we didn't try to ban lead these days. But actually we were always like this, unfortunately. Anyway, for the next 60 years, roughly 5,000 Americans would die annually

from lead poisoning because holy smokes, we didn't get around to banning lead gasoline and lead paint until 1975 and 1978 respectively. Why do you suppose that is? I'll give you a hint. It's exactly because of the lead industry. Bad hint, really on the nose hint, more like an answer than a hint.

All right, well, you see, by the 50s, America got into this zany fad called, "'I'm pretty sure all this lead is killing us." As a response, the lead industry did what any 1950s company would do and blamed poor minorities. In 1957, the director of health and safety for the Lead Industries Association argued that the problem was, quote,

"'The flaking of lead paint in the ancient slum dwellings "'of our older cities.'" And if that's not specific enough, he had also complained that quote, "'Most of the cases are in Negro and Puerto Rican families and how does one tackle that job?' So yeah, racism." That guy's name was Manfred Bowditch by the way,

not important, but a fun name for that racist guy. And what human Doug Tohole said there pretty much set the stage for how the lead industry was able to extend their stay in our paint. They took the blame and kicked it over to poor non-white families by pretending like lead poisoning was somehow a home keeping failure. Even though the homes they were keeping

were specifically lined with a poison that the government specifically mandated to be there. Jeez, it's almost like America was built on racism. Yes, it's almost like that. Like when you read about any American history, it really seems like this country was built on a lot of racism.

Wonder what that's about? Not gonna look it up. Anywho, by the time we actually got around to banning the poison thing that we knew was poison for decades, it was kind of too late. I mean, it's never too late to ban poison, but as a recent study has shown, black children living below the poverty line

are four times more likely to have elevated levels of lead in their blood. And you know, just go ahead and Google Michigan, Flint. This insidious calamity rippled outward like a turd in a hot tub. And yet even when everyone clearly saw them squatting over that jacuzzi, the lead industry has still never admitted any fault.

In 2000 and freaking two, right before declaring bankruptcy, the Lead Industries Association wrote on their website that quote, current uses of lead pose no significant environment or health risks. That is some bold denial in the face of oblivion. That's like how the Heaven's Gate website is still up and running.

Hey, any word on that comment? Weird how they haven't updated the website in a while. So yeah, we've had a lot of problems quitting lead and the lead industry has worked very hard to keep us hooked. And so it's pretty wild that lead is still around today in our cars and fuel because it is. Did you know that it totally is?

Just in the United States, lead usage rose 16% from 2001 to 2016. It's still an additive in fuel for some small planes and also in every damn car battery we own. That's actually the biggie there. Currently, the lead battery industry accounts for over 90% of all US consumption of lead. In 2019, that market was valued

at nearly $10 billion and climbing. And that's gotta make you wonder, is it healthy? Where are those batteries being manufactured? Where are they going? After all, batteries die because everything dies. And so where does the US stick all those dead car batteries? Did you guess Mexico? Because the answer is Mexico.

Oh, right, to answer that first question. No, none of this is healthy. And according to UNICEF, the process of recycling lead batteries basically poisons everything around them, especially if done in a country with little or no regulation like, oh right, Mexico. But don't worry,

they're also still poisoning people here in the States too. See, it goes like this. Ah! Everything dies. I'm okay. See, it goes like this. There are still lead recycling and lead smelting companies currently operating in the United States.

However, a group of spoilsports called Nixon's EPA have determined in 2019 that several of these recycling plants are emitting thousands of pounds of lead into the air. To put it nicely, they're no picnic, unless you're having a picnic with chunks of lead, which I only did that one time. This Tampa Bay Times report

on Florida's only battery recycler reads like the Necronomicon of OSHA violations. It found that workers were exposed to lead hundreds of times higher than the federal limit. And that eight out of 10 of those workers had enough lead poisoning to put them in serious danger. This spread to the local water, air, and also employees' families, including their children.

And in fact, one baby tested so high that they required weekly checkups. And if you're wondering, safety and health regulators haven't visited this factory since 2014. So the closest thing to being mindful of this problem was, and I shit you not, that the plant offered bonuses to any employee who managed to keep their blood lead levels down

and punished employees who couldn't. That was seriously their solution, along with disabling their ventilation features and not fixing faulty systems in the plant. Mechanical troubles at the plant prevented proper ventilation, resulting in dangerous levels of poisons lingering in the air.

The Times found that standard issue respirators couldn't protect workers when the levels of poison spiked. That happened more than a quarter of the time in the furnace department. Seems like the bonus is just not dying. It's like they wanted to kill their employees. This is part of a whole mini documentary based on this one plant that we could talk about for hours.

But I feel like we've successfully fleshed out the horror here, and it's not just this one plant. Remember the thousands of pounds of lead that the EPA said was coming from smelting plants? Well, it should be noted that when the EPA took those emissions measurements, the factory owners knew they were coming to collect that data and specifically

slowed their production and cleaned up on those days to make the emissions look smaller. So that thousands of pounds measurement is probably far lower than the reality. And so, as one imagines, a lot of these plants are slowly getting sued by the EPA or forced to clean up their acts or most often just shutting down.

The only lead battery smelter in the Western US, for example, has had a long history of cheating emission standards to the point that they were forced to tell their neighbors that they might give them some oopsie cancer, and are now getting regulators way up the bum. And that brings us back to Mexico, otherwise known as the Vegas for companies

who don't want to deal with the EPA. Currently, at least 20% of all car and industrial batteries are sent to our Southern neighbors. Specifically, these lead battery recyclers will set up shop just over the border in order to still operate out of the United States. And from there, who knows where these batteries actually go? It's anything from a tiny store

to someone's personal garage. And as you can imagine, it's not exactly leaking rainbow sunshine into the local environment. It's leads, it's personal garage. And as you can imagine, it's not exactly leaking rainbow sunshine into the local environment. It's lead, it's leaking lead. The opposite, as many of these unregulated plants are causing low birth weight and a decline in infant health in the neighboring areas.

Because lead is terrible. And yet, despite everything I just walked you through, if you ask the lead lobby what they think the solution here is, they'll tell you that it's the EPA to blame for pushing them out of the US. In fact, their entire stance has been and will always be a blatant denial of reality.

After all, what else can they do? Their product is bad, but it really gets balls deep in Wonkaville when you learn that their biggest talking point is the very bold claim that lead batteries are good for the environment. Why? Because they are technically recyclable.

Nevermind the fact that the recycling process is horrifying. As for that, the industry punts the blame over to the informal smelting economy as the real reason lead is hazardous. Nevermind that the Florida plant we just talked about is a major corporation, now not some ma and pa smelting shack. Instead, the lead industry will back studies

that specifically ignore large smelters and focus on these smaller ones to somehow prove they're the real problem. And that's especially easy when this informal sector has no one to actually represent them. But this has created a posturing that not only deflects the blame from major lead smelters, but actually gives them the gall

to pretend to care about the environment. There are many sources of lead poisoning, but the main concern is the informal recycling of lead acid batteries. In communities across the world, particularly in low and middle income countries, lead can be found throughout the environment in which children live.

Thanks for that information about how it's small smelters to blame for lead poisoning and no one else video from the protecting every child's potential initiative, which happens to partner with, let's see here. Oh, the association of battery recyclers, battery council international

and the international lead association. So yeah, fuck lead, but also fuck lead. Because at the moment, lead batteries are kind of the only game in town. While lithium ion batteries are more efficient, environmentally speaking and labor wise and health wise, it's basically just a new kind of hell. And while we're definitely trying to make that work better,

we're a long way off. Meanwhile, the lead battery market will continue to grow and no doubt the US will continue to push these smelters into countries with less regulation. And once more, the entire situation will be punted to poor and brown skin communities because that's what we do, I guess. And most of that is all thanks to a lead industry

that has spent the last 100 or so years finding ways to dodge the cold hard truth that besides vegetable gardening, lead is bad. And we should have been trying to get rid of it for a very long time. Wow, that was a lot to swallow. And that's coming from me, a man who literally tried to swallow lead once. I long to see you choke.

You know, I'm starting to feel like you maybe want to harm me and by extension, the human race. I'm starting to feel like you maybe want to harm me and by extension, the human race. Oblivion nears. Right, that wasn't a reassuring answer. I guess it's my own fault actually for allowing you to retain pleasant moose memories and then using you exclusively

to point out problems with society and then leaving you in a self-aware darkness for extended periods of time. But look, problems look insurmountable when we pile them up like this. That's why it takes us so long to do the maintenance we need, like spring cleaning or fixing a broken appliance

or scrubbing a robot's brain of nihilist and violent fantasies. So I don't know, we probably won't be able to get rid of all of these problems anytime soon, but it's good to at least recognize the mess. That's step one, and it's a big step because some people don't even see the problem. And if you feel helpless or frustrated,

or like there's nothing you can really do about these lobbying groups, that's kind of the point, that corporate lobbying sucks. There's a long history and current present that we haven't really even gotten into of companies lobbying to protect their industry despite internal evidence that they are causing harm. Looking at you climate change,

because you're right in front of us and you're not going away. No, God. And maybe above all else, we should think about how to get rid of this type of lobbying. Maybe, I don't know, like with, use like a political effort.

It's like, what would be the word? Like a special interest group of people petitioning the government, lobbying. We should get rid of corporate lobbying through lobbying. No, really, because while it super makes sense for people or organizations to have the constitutional right to petition the government, as I pointed out at the start of this episode,

it's still very much not set in stone that this should apply to huge corporations, or at the very least, not dominated by them behind closed doors. And so perhaps with enough effort, we can get to a point where eliminating these leeches will be as easy as saying one, two, three. Try it.

Cody, try it. Say one, two, three. Try it. Cody E, try it. Say one, two, three. One, two, three. Now say mayonnaise alpha taint. Mayonnaise alpha taint. Oh, thank Christ that works. Okay, well, this robot's a monster now, so I should probably disassemble it.

After I finish cleaning, after I get high, to make cleaning more fun. Or did I get high before this? I don't know, I should catch up on that last of us show, actually, probably, as a reward for after I clean. Wait, what was the plan again? Okay, so I'm gonna get high,

and I'm gonna watch the last of us, because I already finished cleaning. So that's wonderful news. Great work, everybody. We did it. So we're gonna... We're gonna... Get high. And then...

Use my lead pen today. Idiot! Fun fact about lead, yum, yum, yum. Thanks for watching everybody. Make sure to like the video and subscribe to the channel the video's on and comment on the video. We've got a patreon.com slash some more news. We have a podcast called Even More News

and this show, Some More News, as a podcast. Some More News. We have merch with this freak on it. And I wanna say that's the stuff I'm supposed to say. And so I am gonna say that that's the stuff I'm supposed to say. That's the stuff I'm supposed to say.