The Majority Report with Sam Seder - 3633 - New Fed Chair; Building Political solidarity w/ Liz Pancotti, Yuh-Line Niou

Episode Date: April 29, 2026

It's Hump Day on The Majority Report   On today's program:   Marco Rubio goes on Fox News to justify the war with Iran. Pete Hegseth defends it while testifying before Congress on the budget. It appears that the administration has spent more time figuring out how to sell the war than how to execute it.   Liz Pancotti, managing director of policy & advocacy at the Groundwork Collaborative, joins the program to discuss Kevin Warsh's likely nomination as Fed chair and Jerome Powell's last FOMC meeting.   Yuh-Line Niou, running for New York State Senate in District 27 in Lower Manhattan, joins the show for a conversation about her campaign.   In the Fun Half:   On Pod Save America, Jon Favreau does a great job of relentlessly pushing DNC chair Ken Martin on his failure to make good on his promise of releasing the autopsy of the 2024 elections.   AOC dog walks EPA commissioner Lee Zeldin right into admitting he lied previously when he claimed to not have any meetings with Bayer concerning legal issues surrounding glyphosate.   In an exchange between Lee Zeldin and Rep. Josh Harder (D-CA) over the government raising the allowed amount of mercury pollution coming from coal plants, Zeldin loses his temper and acts out like a toddler.   All that and more.   To connect and organize with your local ICE rapid response team visit ICERRT.com The Congress switchboard number is [phone]. You can use this number to connect with either the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives. Follow us on TikTok here: https://www.tiktok.com/@majorityreportfm Check us out on Twitch here: https://www.twitch.tv/themajorityreport Find our Rumble stream here: https://rumble.com/user/majorityreport Check out our alt YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/majorityreportlive Gift a Majority Report subscription here: https://fans.fm/majority/gift Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! https://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: https://majority.fm/app Go to https://JustCoffee.coop and use coupon code majority to get 10% off your purchase Check out today's sponsors: FAST GROWING TREES: Get 20% off your first purchase.  FastGrowingTrees.com/majority AURA FRAMES: Exclusive $25-off Carver Mat at https://on.auraframes.com/MAJORITY. Promo Code MAJORITY SUNSET LAKE CBD: Use coupon code "Left Is Best" for 20% off of your entire order at SunsetLakeCBD.com Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech On Instagram: @MrBryanVokey Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on YouTube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out Ava Raiza's music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.  

You are listening to a free version of the Majority Report with Sam Cedar. To support this show and get another 15 minutes of daily program, go to Majority.fm. Please. The Majority Report with Sam Cedar. It is Wednesday. April 29, 2006. My name is Sam Cedar. This is the five-time award-winning majority report.

We are broadcasting live steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, USA. On the program today, Liz Pancati, managing director of policy and advocacy at the groundwork collaborative on the new Fed chair, or likely new Fed chair. also on the program today you line new running for new york state senate in district 27 in lower manhattan meanwhile supreme court strikes another death blow to the voting rights act trump signaling longer or moose uh blockade as gas prices hit record peak highs and oil supplies dwindle it's always good to be a superlative but trump hits another

record low for his second term. Republican House still in disarrays Johnson panics over FISA reauthorization and DHS funding. FBI now unclear who shot Secret Service officer at the White House Correspondence dinner. DOJ secures a new indictment of James Comey, this time for his seashell post on Instagram. That's not a joke. FCC orders a review of all station licenses owned by ABC as the Trump's continue to fume over late-night jokes. Unions prepping for May Day actions across the country, the Trump regime looking to roll back that Biden rule, which extends eligibility for, for supplemental

Social Security income to adult children with Down syndrome living with low-income parents. All this and more on today's majority report. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. It is...

Hump Day. Yes, that's right, says Emma Vigland. Humph day, which, of course, in few normies, that means Wednesday. Yes. Yes. If you haven't been listening to the show,

you may have not heard that term before. Correct. Because I coined it when I joined the show. Correct. So the uninitiated, that means Wednesday. We like to educate you here. That's right. We're pretty hip as we're coming from Brooklyn,

so we call it hump day. And you may just notice Wednesday. I just want to just make it clear because it was tough to headline that. think. During the Biden administration, as they were talking about, and I cannot remember exactly when this went through if it was part of the sort of the second buildback better, you know, the sort of the skinny buildback better, or if it was just simply propagated as a law. But on tomorrow,

oh, okay. Yeah, no, I mean, I didn't realize that. Well, no, you. You're not, you can keep going. It's just tomorrow, for people that are more, want to hear more about the story, we're going to have a guest on to discuss this. Yeah, the short of it is that it used to be, if you were on SNAP benefits and your child, your adult child who had a disability was living with you,

they would almost count that apartment rental, if you will, or, you know, living situation as a benefit in, that would be cut from your supplemental Social Security payments. And absurd, and the amount of savings is ridiculous. You'll hear more about it tomorrow when that pro-publica writer, who is on top of this, is on the program tomorrow. In the meantime, it's not hard to find. commodity traders or people who follow these things with their hair on fire about diminishing

stockpiles and inventory of oil as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz drags on. We're probably only a couple weeks out, according to reports from several weeks ago, for major jet fuel shortages in Europe. And it's quite possible we'll start to see greater fuel shortages in Asia in the coming weeks. Ultimately, it might come to the states, but it certainly showed up in terms of gas prices, which are at a high since essentially following the COVID shutdown era. Remember, what happened with COVID was when nobody's going out, they're not driving, there's a lot less economic activity. Refiner's cut back because they don't want to create a glut of oil.

But then the problem is, is that all of a sudden one day everybody starts to go out and drive. That increases demand in relation to supply because supply has been cut back. and it takes a while for essentially everything to all the lights to come back on. I don't know how else to explain that. I mean, we had the capacity, yet, you know, parts of it had been shut down because nobody wants excess inventory. So that was the reason then. In this instance, we have a bigger problem because there's only so much more, you know, You can only so much at an increased rate, you can pull this stuff out of the ground.

And so they're not, they're not pulling it out of the ground in these Middle Eastern countries because they can't, there's nowhere to put it. Their docks are full. The ships are stuck. And in addition, we're getting more and more reports that Iran had done much more damage than, we had anticipated. So these, we're going to see increased prices, as we already are. And then down the road, perhaps more oil shocks, we could start to ramp it up here, but there's only so much that we can do here, too, in terms of refining capacity. But here is, and now what we're hearing is just basically rumors that it appears that Trump, although, who knows, I mean, to put up a, let's put this up as a

indication of maybe this is what foreign policy is uh the this is what we're uh having to go on in terms of a u.s stated foreign policy. What's a non-nuclear deal? Iran can't get their act together. They don't know how to sign a non-nuclear deal. I think that's a deal that means that you won't do nukes or something. Oh like the JCPOA which you pulled out of after uh Obama negotiated it successfully in once you got into office in 2017, and that was at the behest of Benjamin Netanyahu, once again, who also dragged us into this war with Iran, because Israel doesn't like diplomacy with Iran because they want to undercut the state.

Friedrich Mears, he is the German chancellor. Not a lefty. No. Yesterday said something to the effect of, or maybe it was two days ago, they don't seem to have a plan, speaking in the United States. And Iran is humiliating them because they have a plan. But here is Marco Rubio. The plan only seems to be to be justifying their lack of a plan and they're sort of meandering around.

And here's Marco Rubio saying like, this is a big deal. It begs the question, well, if this is a big deal, why didn't you come up with a better plan? And see if you can follow the logic of how he tries to tie this together, because it really is just confounding. These questions. Reports do indicate Iran has offered to open the straits, but they want to delay conversations about their nuclear program. Would this be acceptable to the Trump administration? Well, again, I'm not going to speculate about the president's decision making on this matter. Suffice it to say that the nuclear question is the reason why we're in this in the first place.

If Iran was just a radical country run by radical people. want to make it clear. When he says, I'm not going to speculate on the president's thinking, he's saying, we don't have a plan. We're not operating like an actual government where we will hash these things out and have an idea of where we're going. It is really just depends on, you know, if he wakes up this morning and he's constipated, it may be this. If he wakes up this morning and has no idea where he is and had peed his pants, it may be that. And I also, just want to make it clear that I got nothing to do with this even though I'm Secretary of State. First place. If Iran was just a radical country run by radical people, but, you know,

it'd still be a problem. But they are revolutionary. In essence, they seek to expand and export their revolution, not just what they do in Iran. That's why they're with Hezbollah and Lebanon. That's why they've supported Hamas. That's why they've supported the militias in Iraq. They don't just seek to dominate Iran. They seek to dominate the region. And imagine that with a nuclear weapon. Look what they've done with the Straits. Great example. The Straits is basically the equivalent of an economic nuclear weapon that they're trying to use against the world. And they're bragging about it. They're putting up billboards in Tehran bragging about how they can hold 25% or 20% of the world's energy hostage. Imagine if those same people had access to a nuclear weapon. They would hold the whole region hostage.

Do you believe the— So, I mean, I just want to break down that logic there. Well, one, when he's talking about Iran and the fact that it supports Hezbollah and Hamas, yes, Iran is trying. to make sure that Israel doesn't complete its greater Israel project of dominating the region and by extension the West as we have these corrupt relationships with these autocrats in some of these other Gulf states, Iran is trying to make sure that their sphere of influence continues to be protected because the U.S. is trying to box them out entirely and allow Israel to expand. So everything he says there is applicable actually to Israel and not to Iran. Iran is funding those groups. Israel also very much supported Hamas. Right. And who also has a nuclear weapon, even though they

pretend they don't. Huh. Huh. It's Israel. Iran didn't have one. And the deal that we just mentioned was negotiated to make sure that they didn't have it and Trump pulled out of it for that very reason. But this is what's so insane is what he says there. The logic is that Iran has always, you know, Iran has this economic nuclear weapon, which functionally is just their geographic advantage over the Strait of Hormuz, which is a very narrow waterway. And Iran is able to flank it and with these very cheap drones and these mines, throttle it at will. And you could have understood that that economic nuclear weapon that he's referring to was always there if you went on Google and looked at like Google Maps, for example, because you didn't need third-party inspectors like the ones

that were coming in to determine the enrichment levels of their uranium as per the JCPOA. All you had to do was look at a map and know that, yeah, Iran has a significant advantage over the Strait of Hormuz. So he's saying to get rid of their theoretical nuclear weapon, we started an offensive war against them. And they use their economic nuclear weapon to cause us pain. And then it begs the question, why were you not prepared for said economic nuclear weapon to be utilized? because as I mentioned, all you got to do is look at a map and see how Iran is able to make the West feel a lot of pain right now. We should also add that we hear for a long time that Iran has been saying death to America 47 years. Over the course of that 47 years, the number of countries that Iran has invaded is zero.

So their expansive, supposed expansive revolutionary desires, Hezbollah was a function of exists today because of Israel's invasion of Lebanon. To the extent that Iran has more influence in Iraq, it is because of America's invasion of Iraq. Yeah. I mean, military industrial complex government. For a country, and we hear this all the time about Israel. Like, you know, they do a genocide. How come there's still Palestinians?

For a country, Iran, that supposedly has such expansive designs, it does not appear in the past 47 years that they have pursued that expansiveness. they have they have without a doubt supported um proxies that have been at various times engaged uh with Israel but that's very different than something expansive it's quite clearly they're on the defensive and they've been on the defensive we funded the Iraq Iran war on the side of Iraq I mean And they took over the straight of Hormuz after we started bombing them for the second time in eight months. It's just absurd. Here's Pete Hegseth.

Grinding his teeth at the hearings in the Senate. This is today. Sniffing out corruption. Yes. I'm sorry. This is in the House budget hearing. President Trump, unlike other president, has had the courage to ensure Iran. never gets a nuclear weapon and he's ironclad in that.

We have the best negotiator in the world driving that deal. The biggest challenge, the biggest adversary we face at this point are the reckless, feckless and defeatist words of congressional Democrats and some Republicans two months in, I remind you, two months in to a conflict. Paulson, can we repeat that, please? So it turns out that despite the fact that we're told that Iran is on the verge of a nuclear weapon, the biggest enemy we're facing are actually members of Congress who are saying what the F is going on. How come you have no plan?

It demoralizes the ships as they're trying to cross the Strait of Hormuz. The reason why those bombs, we've had to use so many bombs, is because they don't have the same impact unless like every member of Congress has signed them. with a smiley face. I have to pray for the bombs. Let's just listen to that again, please. Are the reckless, feckless and defeatist words we have the best negotiator in the world driving that deal?

The biggest challenge, the biggest adversary we face at this point, are the reckless, feckless and defeatist words of congressional Democrats and some Republicans. Two months in, I remind you, you two months in to a conflict, lest I remind you, and my generation understands how long we were in Iraq, how long we were in Afghanistan, how long we were in Vietnam. It's like he's bragging. Two months in on an existential fight for the safety of the American people, Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb. We are proud of this undertaking. No. Let's play this. Is it a war? Why did they keep comparing

this non-war, this excursion, this little jaunt, this vacation. It's an existential excursion. This, yeah, this staycation in Iran. I thought it was supposed to be some sort of of, you know, non-war war, but they keep comparing it to the deeply unpopular wars of the past. That we lost, and we still exist. Yes. Here he is, Hegset being questioned by Representative Adam Smith. One of the biggest

challenges to what we face in Iran would ostensibly be one of these congressmen the adversary happened how does it actually lead to that result well i would take issue with the premise of the question that nothing was done operation midnight hammer was a very effective i didn't say nothing was done i said in this war ultimately well this is this under this administration unlike other administrations, which cut bad deals and pallets of cash with no ability to oversee whether Iran is actually pursuing a nuclear program. We want to litigate JCPOA or the Iran deal. Our view, the president's views, that was a very bad deal.

That's a bunch of money up front. What's the future? You talked about negotiated deals. Allowed them to fund their proxies and spread Hamas and Hezbollah all around the region, build up nuclear capability. What are we going to do now? President Trump has been clear-eyed from the killing of Qasem Soleimani to the pulling out of the Iran deal to Midnight Hammer and now to this effort to recognize that you have to

stare down this kind of enemy who's hell bent on getting a nuclear weapon and get them to a point where they're at the table giving it up in a way that they haven't or have it. So they haven't broken yet. Okay, we haven't gotten there yet for all of the... Well, their nuclear facilities have been obliterated underground. They're buried and we're watching 24-7. So we know where any nuclear material be climbing my time for watching. A quick second here. We had to start this war, you just said, 60 days ago, because the nuclear weapon was an imminent threat. Now you're saying that it was completely obliterated. They had not given up their nuclear ambitions, and they had a conventional shield of thousands of...

The Operation Midnight Hammer or a common moment, nothing of substance. It left us at exactly the same place we were before. You're missing the point. I'm talking about what's in their hearts. The people that are still alive. Yeah. The ambition to be a football player. Exactly.

And I do think that like the racism of this administration can't be overstated. Isn't that more, that longer exchange with Rubio and Trey Yingsst on Fox News? It's just every other word is about how essentially they're religiously motivated and the implication is that they're such savages. And you see Pete Heggzeth in the past on Fox News talking about how the only thing these people, people know is this kind of violence. We've got to bomb their cultural sites. They have underestimated the Iranians from a very simple level, and a lot of that's incompetence, but incompetence and racism can go hand in hand. All right. In a moment, we're going to be talking to Liz Pankati, managing director of policy and advocacy at the groundwork collaborative

about the incoming, the likely incoming new Fed chair, and perhaps the outgoing one and what we face in terms of potential Fed action in the future. First, a word from our sponsor, it's spring. It's late spring, but it's still time to plant, ladies and gentlemen. Did you know fast-growing trees is America's largest and most trusted online nursery? They have thousands of trees and plants and over two million happy customers. And did you know that I was one of those two million happy customers? and I've been one of those, well, I'm a customer, and I'm happy with their product,

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managing director of policy and advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative. Liz, welcome back to the program. The Fed, I don't know if they've made their, had their, if Jerome Powell has had his last sort of press conference following the Fed meeting today, but this is his last as Fed chair. Yeah, it'll probably be his last here in about two hours. I guess it depends on how quickly the Senate moves, but I think widely expected to be Jay's last run.

Okay, so let's just characterize his run and where we're at. And then let's talk about the anticipated. new Fed chair, Kevin Warsh. Warsh, Warsh, Warsh, Warsh. I feel like we should really all have our Boston accents out and just say WASH, like that. I mean, that's the way I do it, but I keep being corrected for that. So, J. Pell had an interesting run. I mean, as you guys talked about extensively, he was originally a Trump pick. Biden renominated him. And I think there are two, like, sections of his time as Fed chair that there was a bit of an inflection point at COVID, and I guess we should be thankful that there was. But he came in, he was a non-economist, a business guy, a lawyer background,

who got a lot of ire for that there at the beginning. You know, in Trump's first term, he was supportive of bank deregulation that Trump pursued that rolled back a lot of the Dodd-Frank protections put into place after the Great Recession. There were certainly some kind of bank supervisory decisions he made during that first term that were pretty big handouts to Wall Street. He had a pretty outsized Fed balance sheet. Again, some would classify that as handouts to Wall Street. And then after the CARES Act, they're at the onset of the COVID pandemic when we also had a very different Treasury Secretary, he, you know, from the Fed's perspective or from the, from their tools, carried out some of the fiscal recovery. And I would say in all of that, you know, he moved very quickly to cut rates to

zero and really took the labor market risks there at the onset of the pandemic seriously. Even as stimulus flowed throughout the economy, he continued to characterize inflation as, you know, temporary. And then I would say over the past, you know, towards the end of Biden's term when inflation, we had been considerable progress on inflation in 2024. I think we had hoped that he might cut rates sooner, given some of the cracks we were seeing under the hood of the labor market. We were really starting to see wage growth slow down. And now, over the past year or so, as part of Trump's term, he's been quite critical of Trump's tariffs and their inflationary effect and, you know, the rest of the kind of economic calamity that Donald Trump has made Jay Powell deal with.

And, you know, over the weekend when Bob Bair died, he's a huge deadhead. It was also the same weekend that he found out on on Friday night that the DOJ was investigating him. And he came out with this video where it kind of in in not his normal fashion did a direct-to-camera appeal about the criminal investigation and ultimately you know kind of turned on on trump and has stayed pretty steady-handed over the past few months in the wake of political pressures. We are obviously getting a very new Fed chair who has indicated he will stay also very steady in the wake of political pressures but in that he will succumb to them no matter what. So a pretty big change in case. I don't know that I would say Jay Powell did a perfect job.

job. But I think that what we're getting with Kevin Warsh is so much worse. Okay. We'll get to work. What's that? Maybe we should call him worse. Kevin Worse. Yes, that works. So, okay, and I should just remind people that the Fed has a dual mandate, which is to both dampen inflation and to get as close to full employment as possible. Now, when I was younger, not that much younger, full employment was supposedly six. six and a half percent. And then suddenly we found out like, well, actually, it's close to like three and a half. And who knows? Maybe it's, it's, it's even less than that. Do we have a sense coming out

of COVID and then I want to get to Warsh, but just coming out of COVID, do we have a sense that like, because this is important to it when I look at what Warsh has written in the past about the, and he sort of has danced around a little bit as far as I can tell, that, that, that inflation was a function of too much stimulus by both on the, like on the fiscal side and perhaps on the monetary side, fiscal being what the government spends and monetary being what the policy is of the Fed in terms of essentially issuing new dollars. Was it a function of that ultimately? or was it that we had such an massive disruption in our economic activity that it inhibited

in certain instances supply and couldn't get ramped back up in time when demand came as we left sort of like the COVID lockdowns? Because, you know, compared to Europe, whatnot, and the rest of the world, we did pretty well in terms of inflation. I think it's an all of the above answer, which is maybe a cop-out, but I am quite intrigued by the, you know, there's been a couple of papers that looked at what if interest rates weren't held at zero for as long as they were in the wake of the COVID pandemic? What if they had hiked them back up to one or two percent sooner in the wake of all the fiscal stimulus? So as we, you know, as it happened, the Fed moved very quickly to cut to zero. We got the CARES Act stimulus. And then rates stayed at zero for a pretty long time as we continue. to get additional stimulus packages, which, you know, we've talked about here on the show before, and they were obviously very needed. I mean, we had people who were going to get kicked up unemployment insurance before vaccines were available. So, like, the fiscal response was, I think,

extremely necessary and at the scale that it should have been. And it is also true that it could have been moderately inflationary. But in light of additional fiscal response, I think it is fair to ask, should the Fed have adjusted sooner, right? It's a, it's a, ebb and flow. You have to kind of balance fiscal and monetary policy. And I think you could argue that maybe the Fed should have increased a little sooner and then gotten the balance right as it dealt with the labor market effects. The issue, I think, is you hit on in your third kind of scenario or explanation is that we had no idea that Putin was going to invade Ukraine, that Chinese factories were going to stay closed as long as they did, that global supply chains would say disrupted for as long as they

did and be disrupted on multiple fronts. I mean, there was a baby formula shortage, there was a chip shortage, there was a fertilizer and grain shortage. There was a shortage of just about everything. Shipping containers are in places they had never, ever been before. I mean, our economy was like a hibernating bear that woke up and like didn't have the storage of food it needed throughout that hibernation. And so things just kind of got messed up. And then you had fiscal and monetary pressures that weren't exactly calibrated. But I think like where we chose where where J Powell or the Fed, where Biden and Democrats chose to put their eggs in the basket of going a little too far,

case, which I think was a stark difference from how we responded to the Great Recession, where for really eight years, I mean, you didn't have unemployment bounce back. You had people still in like the depths of the Great Recession for two to three years after the kind of end of the recession officially. And as you noted, you know, as you and Emma were like in the beginning of your career or kind of getting those first couple jobs out of college, maybe forever. It was a little bit after that for me. I graduated in 2016, but that's all right. Yeah.

But 2016 was like not that easy. No, it wasn't great either. Yeah. And then I think you, as you noted, you know, what is full employment? We had like an okay labor market by 2019, but it took that long to get there. And then immediately almost you had the COVID shock. And then we like, you know, told everybody that they should stay home because there was a global health emergency. And I think the difference I would point to with respect to Europe is that, yes, they, you know,

there are some European countries that face much higher inflation than the U.S. and different labor market outcomes, certainly. One, they had different tools at their disposal, and they were much more exposed to the Ukraine crisis, so that those looked in different directions, right? Some countries were able to use price controls to kind of mitigate some of those effects. We saw Mexico do that. We saw Spain do that effectively. But I think the real thing is that the U.S. had certain tools that were available to it in the physical and monetary space that, of course, did not include price controls. and maybe that would have changed the inflationary scenario. But the big difference to me in looking retrospectively at all of that is we learned from the mistakes of the Great Recession. And the thing that worries me the most about Kevin Warsh is that in 2010, 2011, when unemployment

was still 10%, Kevin Warsh was pushing for higher interest rates, completely ignoring the other side of really ignoring both sides of the Fed mandate, given that we had very low inflation and we had high unemployment. And he said, you know, neither of those really matter to me. I think we should hike. I'm looking at a Wall Street Journal compilation of some of his best, his greatest hits in terms of like some of these op-eds. And he's all over the place, it seems to me. And it's almost like a reverse weather vein, I guess, depending on who is in office. And I'm looking at like his most recent, I guess, was in November of 2025, or at the very least, I should say, this is him applying for a job. And he says, there are four things that need to be done. One is the Fed should

really not worry about stagflation, which of course is anemic growth and rising inflation, which coincidentally, it's sort of what we have now. And then he says, second, inflation is a choice. the Fred's track record under Jerome Powell is one of unwise choices. That also seems to be, you know, you've just given us a breakdown. Like you say, maybe the Fed could have risen rates a little bit quicker, but there was a lot of logistical issues that were driving inflation. Third, the Fed should take responsibility for its regulatory failures. I mean, I have no problem with that.

I feel like there's a lot of people who should take responsibility for their failures and never do. And then he's complaining that Yellen and Powell spent more than a decade negotiating bank regulatory standards with Swiss banks. And I also read that he was a critic of quantitative easing in the past, which is a little bit surprising. But if it's kind of what Sam's saying, it's about the audience and he's kind of going where he can to get into power, that would make. sense too. Yeah, I am feeling there's going to be easing once he gets into office. Yeah. And just I want to let you go with this and tell us more. I just want to remind people that we played a clip the other day of Kevin Warsh being asked, who won the 2020 election has nothing to do with the Fed, but it has everything to do with his willingness to say something that Donald

Trump doesn't like or and God knows do something. And so what's your sense of what he's going to do when he gets into uh because he also complaining about the the amount of communication the fed does i want you to explain that in a minute too i mean kevin warsh has made it very clear that he will be whatever puppet donald trump wants him to be i mean what trump said he came out of a casting call which i think was a comment about his looks but really should be that like trump got to hand select exactly who he wanted to play the exact part he wrote for kevin warsh's character as fed chair um on his comments about you know, quantitative easing, the things he has said about the Federal Reserve's balance sheet,

which, you know, progressives, I think have a lot of bones to pick about the Federal Reserve's balance sheet are so incoherent that we had like our nerdiest research assistant doing deep dive. And like, he was like, I don't know what he's saying here. Like, I have truly no idea. It is not only at odds with things he has said in the past and like recently, but it is just so incoherent. It makes no sense. He has this whole plan to like coordinate with the Treasury, yada, yada.

It just makes no sense. I think like the big thing that I noticed in looking at that Wall Street Journal article that you read off of, but also just if you look at the history of his statements, he has pendulum swung not only with kind of political weather, but literally just the weather outside. Like if it's raining one day, he says this and if it's raining a next day, he says this. Like he says umbrellas are bad today and umbrellas are good tomorrow and it just doesn't have a lot of coherence. And I think the issue is, as you pointed out on the stagflationary economy that he's inheriting, the risks right now macroeconomically are great. This is a really difficult macroeconomic picture to inherit. We have extremely slow growth.

We have a potential AI bubble. We have massive cracks in the labor market, very volatile things, the risk of AI in the labor market, but also just, you know, generally they're canceling all these clean energy projects and interest rates are high and lots of risk to the labor market. You obviously have persistently high inflation driven by Trump's tax. tariffs that is now being stoked by his war in Iran. And again, you have these supply chain issues that, like, cannot be managed by monetary policy, but can certainly be made worse by monetary policy and other actions controlled by the Fed. And I think that like by installing Kevin Moore, you are just saying, eh, like, here's, here's a piece of China to a third, to a three year old.

Like, don't break it, but, you know, we'll see what happens. And it's pretty clear that, that China's going to shatter all over the floor. How much can he do? Like when the Fed beats to decide to raise interest rates or not raise interest rates, just explain to us the process in which that happens and how much he can influence it? It's a good question. I mean, the Fed is a storied institution that is generally one of consensus. In fact, prior to Lael Brainer, who was Biden's National Economic Council head at the end, She was on the Fed prior to that. And she was like the one lone dissenter and was really kind of the, I think if you look at the share of dissents over the past 30 years, like she has quite a few tallied up under hers. And it's like maybe five. Like it's not that many. People just really, they come to an FOMC meeting. They have consensus and then they finish. And the dissents we've seen over the past few months are just from the other people that Trump has installed in like an interim basis. Again, auditioning for a job. I think the real thing is not, you know, will worship.

come in and cut rates to zero. Like, no, he won't get the vote from the FOMC for that. Will he, I don't even know that he is the votes to cut next time. But what the Fed chair does every six or so weeks when they go out and give a press conference, which by the way, he has not committed to regular press conferences the way that J. Powell has done for the past, nearly 10 years, they go out and they, they ensure both Wall Street and also businesses who are employers and consumers to the extent that this stuff, you know, actually reaches a mainstream Monions that like everything is going to be okay and we are steady-handed and like your mortgage rate is not going to go up and we have inflation under control and we are going to make sure that like your

job security is taking care of and yes companies if you want to build a factory you have certainty about the economic conditions and I think that Jay Powell has been imperfect in providing that and so have many many other fed chairs going back I don't know decades but Kevin Warsh has signaled he will not go out there and provide any of that certainty he will instead provide certainty to Trump that he is fulfilling his political agenda. And what's Trump's agenda, though, right? We should probably clarify what do you think Trump wants of him? And, you know, also, I just, there's a, it's kind of a secondary question, but in terms of

how he might handle the labor market, you know, the, the underemployment piece and the gig economy, I think, has really impacted, hopefully, I guess, the perception of what, what that rate should be. But I wonder what you anticipate his actions will be, what Trump wants from him, and how it will impact the labor market as, yes, maybe unemployment is lower than you would anticipate, but so many people are underemployed. Yeah, I mean, this is sort of the issue Trump has floated both 2% and 0% interest rates. Like he wants, he wants massive cuts to interest rate. Where interest rates are right now is probably too high for like the health of the economy. Like mortgages are too expensive.

we are certainly handicapping the ability for businesses to invest in manufacturing and other capital intensive things. Part of the issue, though, is that those businesses are also burdened by tariffs. And so home builders are dealing with tariffs on building supplies, manufacturers are dealing with tariffs on steel casings that they use in their factories to then stand new ones up, right? And so should interest rates be cut from where they are currently? I don't know. It's tough to say that literally this week looking at where we are with gas prices and energy prices. inflation. But had you asked me eight weeks ago prior to Iran, I would have told you we could probably have a little bit of downward movement on interest rates with not a lot of upside

risks on inflation and certainly help to the labor market, which coming out of last year was really dire and I think could use some juice from an interest rate cut. What Trump is proposing, it's unclear how much, you know, Warsh will do this is like having or taking them to zero. Like right now the federal funds rate is around 4%. And he would cut that in half. that overnight could stoke massive inflation, which I think American families are already grappling with, certainly at the gas pump, definitely at the grocery store in, you know, gearing up for summer travel, and just filling your gas tank up to get to work is like, will you be able to? You might have to choose between doing that or filling a prescription or signing your kid up for

soccer camp this summer, right? On the labor market risks, like the thing that I am concerned with is that would rate cuts potentially help the labor market? it, yes. The issue is, I think, for an employer to think about hiring a full-time worker, which, as you said, is certainly more desirable than, like, a patchwork of gig jobs for a worker, they need certainty that, like, that job will be around longer than the investment it takes to hire and train them. And given the situation with tariffs, I don't think that even interest rate cuts would really make the difference for a lot of these employers. I think they're looking at the

effects of AI, certainly, which, you know, maybe you could argue that's out of the Fed's hands. And we should probably be looking at a lot more physical responses in preparation for that potential disruption. That's out of Kevin Worsh's hands, but certainly something I don't anticipate the Trump administration taking it all seriously. They would rather just give handouts to the AI companies. And I think that the problem is that if you're a company evaluating whether or not you're going to add to your employment roles, which right now they are basically not changing them, it's a very low fire and low higher economy, you're just still going to be frozen, right? Like, even if there's an interest rate reduction that might lower your debt payment on something you're

trying to do, one, maybe you invest in automation because you think capital investments will be cheaper than labor ones in the long run. But I don't know that you really change course here. And I think that is just a limitation of monetary policy, given where Trump's fiscal policy is on, you know, the tax bill and cutting health care and SNAP benefits and whatnot. But I think just the economic calamity that he has created at the macro level is one you cannot get out of with only sound monetary policy. And I also do not, I don't expect Kevin Moore to pursue sound monetary policy. And I mean, it's just so that people are clear, if I own a bakery and I want to expand, it may be cheaper for me to get a loan to expand that bakery. But if I get the sense that

people aren't able to come in and afford my, you know, $8 croissants and they're not going to be more people coming in, I'm not going to do it. Even if it's, you know, cheaper for me to expand in that way. So just what and and the problem, obviously, from an inflationary standpoint is all that cheap money, you're going to get people who are going to go and grab that money in what? Like how does that drive inflation in that scenario when we already have all these other forces, you know, interest rates have nothing to do with the price of gas because we just there's just we don't have the gas that we had six weeks ago. I mean, we're at homes.

Like, I think the housing market is illustrative here, right? I don't know about you guys. I was not one of the lucky ones that got a 2.5% interest rate during COVID. And I'm like kicking myself now. Like, wow, I should have figured out how to scrap together a down payment with my like three stimulus checks or something. But there are all of these people who are locked into their house at a 3% or sub 3% interest rate who maybe they've had a kid since then and they would like to.

to get a bigger place. Maybe they've retired since then and they'd like to downsize, but because they are locked into that three-person interest rate, they're not leaving, right? Home prices have continued to appreciate. And so they also need more money to put down on the new house. And maybe they have more equity tied up in their home. But like the interest rate lock-in is very real. They're the average existing home. Sort of like golden handcuffs in a way. Yeah, exactly. And so if you were to plummet interest rates and mortgage rates followed, which again, they're not a one, it's not a one to one movement given like broader macroeconomic things. If interest rates for a mortgage came down, people would flood the housing market, which would do

exactly what was happening in 2022, where you had people bidding $100,000 over asking price on a $600,000 townhouse, right? Because their monthly payments are that much lower because of the interest rates cut. Right. And the person who's going to buy the house that they're selling is going to pay, they're going to get overbid for their house, right? you just have this price spiral throughout the entire economy. Or let's say you cut interest rates and you don't sell your home.

You just refinanced, right? And you can lop off $1,000 from your mortgage. Then you've got $1,000 to go spend on, you know, whatever at Target. Again, I think what we're seeing with consumer spending, as you outlined in your bakery example, is like consumer spending right now is quite constrained. Saving rates are falling. People are very worried about they're trying to save what they have. They don't have much to save.

And prices are going up so much that, like, like they're just spending everything that comes in the door to make sure that they have health insurance and can put groceries on the table. And the American consumer is resilient. I mean, people will continue to like Karna, whatever, your $8 croissant. But I think that like we are seeing real cracks. We've seen a lot of the airline CEOs note, even before the war in Iran, note that people are really pulling back on travel. The Walmart CEO, in fact, told us that people are pulling back on discretionary food, like snacks and they're only buying the basics at Walmart. You know, we saw record sales on Black Friday and Cyber Monday last year and a holiday spending was up,

but like people were doing that only because they could find a discount. And so I think we are really under the hood seeing a lot of cracks in consumer spending. And if the labor market deteriorates any further, we will see even more cracks because people's tricks will go down. Last question. Warsh has said that he's not going to do these press conferences. so you mentioned that Jerome Powell did. And this is a way of signaling so that people have a sense, I guess, business is more often than not than anybody else, what they can anticipate in the future in terms of like, okay, if we're inclined to ease rates down the road,

maybe somebody says, okay, in three months is when I'm going to expand my bakery and sell my croissants or not. Or they're not going to ease. And so I get to figure out a different way to maximize. how everybody loves my quassons. But does it really matter in this environment? Because Trump is so unpredictable. Like tomorrow he could say, we're done with Iran and let the oil flow. Or we could be there for months and months and months.

Well, he said that and the oil's not flowing. Well, that's my point is that like the predictability that a, a Fed chair would give is almost like the signal to noise ratio has diminished because there's so much other factors that are unpredictable that even if you had perfect knowledge as to what the Fed was going to do, you'd still be like, I don't trust any of this. Yes. I mean, like, sure, we've seen tons of macroeconomic calamity. you know, if you just, if you just like open the market next to when Trump gives his press conferences, to the extent he does it during market hours, or like tweets. Like he tweeted out what the jobs print

or something a couple months ago. I mean, like we cannot control for the whims of the president. That's like not a thing that is under anyone's control. Certainly not the people on the screen and definitely not the Fed share regardless of who it is. But two things I think are concerning. One, this is a democracy. The Federal Reserve should be a democratic institution. And I think Kevin Warsh and the other members of the Fed should have to answer for their actions, given that they affect real people's lives. And two, we have an election this year that could change the balance of at least one chamber of Congress. And what if a month before the election, Kevin Moore says, well, now I'm going to call a special meeting and I'm going to cut to zero or whatever it is to mess with the economy.

And I think that, like, again, you have to answer for the actions. It is effectively like creating the Supreme Court's shadow docket, right? Like the Supreme Court used to deliver these very long decisions about everything that they did. And over the past 10 years, they have increasingly moved to the shadow docket where with a stroke of a pen, they make sweeping policy decisions. And do I think that the Fed's actions are as, you know, large as some of the things we've seen come out of the shadow docket, maybe not. But it's really an unknown with Kevin Warsh and what he has signaled he's willing to do. Well, Liz Pankati, thank you for giving us at least a vague notion of what to expect to the extent that we can. And I also,

appreciate that you think that I graduated college in the century. That is also very kind of you. There was a recession then too. Don't worry. I graduated closer to the 87 recession, but that's for another story. Liz Pancoddy, managing director of policy and advocacy, groundwork, collaborative. Thanks so much for your time today. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much, Liz. All right, folks, we're going to take quick break. And when we come back, we're going to be talking to you, Lean New. She is running for New York. state senate in district 27 in lower manhattan you may recall uh that she really should have been it should be congressman uh new uh in lieu of my district yeah uh but um uh maybe we'll touch on that a

little bit but she's uh running for a new york state senate uh seat and um with with some great policy proposals that would be extremely helpful for New York City, New York State, and then hopefully what happens in New York does not stay in New York. We'll be right back after this. We are back, Sam Cedar, Emma Viglin on The Majority Report. A pleasure to welcome to the program. Eulene New. She is running for New York State Senate in District 27, which is Lower Manhattan.

But Eulene, it's great to see you. It's great to have you here. There's a lot of subtext to your race that I think, you know, makes it different the, you know, for our audience than a typical state Senate race. Let's talk about that because when New York 10, you, the, in the last cycle, the progressive vote, was split, like three ways, right? Yeah. And multiple ways, yeah. Multiple ways.

It was a couple of really great candidates, I think. Yes. And but the, um, then a bad candidate from my perspective, one, uh, being Dan Goldman. And there was, you know, uh, people were wondering whether you would end up running for that seat, uh, Brad Lander, uh, the seat that Brad Lander is running for against Dan Goldman. and a lot of people wondering if you were going to jump in. And I remember you, I think it was on Twitter or on Blue Sky, I can't remember, said, you know, what's important now is solidarity.

And certainly Lander, you know, was heavily involved in the Mom Donnie race. You, of course, were also advocating for Mom Donnie. Yeah. Yeah. So talk about that dynamic. And, you know, we can talk about the, the, the, the, the, policies that you're running on, which I think are also great in the state senate. But I want to talk about that dynamic first. Sure. So, I mean, I think that it's a, it's, it's, it's very

important to say this. I know what it is to run a split race. And I know what it is to wish, have wished for consolidation in order to make sure that we had, um, a progressive in the seat. And I think that right now it was important for me to make sure that I helped to consolidate the vote instead of split the vote with another progressive, right? And so I am supporting Brad Lander in this race, and I think that it's really important to make sure that we have the political will that we need to make sure that we have good representation. The only way that we can fight back on our current situation where I think that everybody in this country is feeling an urgency. I think that we can barely afford health care right now.

We can barely afford child care. I think that there's so many people who are feeling that stress. And then they're also afraid when their neighbors are being taken away, when folks are feeling this pressure. And I think that what UAW had tweeted out really struck home to me as the only way to fight back. is that working people have to run for every single level of government, for every seat that we can find. And so I think that it's really important for us to make sure that we are actually changing things so that we have the political will to be able to make the change that we want to see in government. Yeah, I got to tell you, I mean, again, just to reiterate, I was so impressed with your call for solidarity because we so rarely see that from our point. political class. I mean, Clyburn is running for re-election as somebody in his mid-80s just to hold

on to power. We've almost had a half a dozen Congresspeople die in office in the past two years. I mean, that's a huge difference. But the, the, even beyond sort of like, you know, hitting a certain age and not knowing when it's time to go, like the idea of, of, of personal. ambition, be subjugating that to the greater good, I think is just an incredible model for the rest of us. And so I just, so impressed by that. I mean, I really appreciated you, by the way, Sam, when you texted me and you were just like, you were the person that came 1.3% away. And, you know, it's true. I think that, but I think that that is also the reason why. you know, because I know what it takes to run against this guy and I know what it takes on the ground

and I know what it takes from folks, right? And I think that what we need is a consolidated effort. And that's the only way we can win. And I think that right now, right now in our country, we aren't seeing the solidarity from our party that we need to. And I think it is important for us to, to to basically grow and create power where we can. Let's talk about your specific race. And I should say, like, you and Lander are running, you have overlapping districts. And so in some ways, you will help each other

in terms of bringing out voters. Same election day this time, which is very good. It's the federal primary date as well for you. Same election day. And then the Manhattan side of the New York 10 district overlaps with the Senate district 100%. And so I am also the only candidate in this race that has run in this district. So, okay. So, I mean, you know, as you do, Lander is going to do in many respects.

But I also, I want to talk about sort of the, the, some of your platform that you're running on. Because my sense has always been that as, that New York as a state should be essentially a progressive model for the rest of the country. If it can't, if it can't happen here, it's hard to imagine it happening. in many other places around the country. And we have this huge beachhead now in terms of moving the state in a progressive direction with Mamdani in New York City. But this has been a project that has gone back since Zephyr Teachout ran against Andrew Cuomo, you know, now, I don't know, 15 years ago. And, you know, took a piece out of him. and then Cynthia Nixon took a bigger piece out of him

and really fun, got rid of the IDC, which was inhibiting, you know, progressive change in the state. So talk to me about, like, from your perspective, like when you think about, because you've got stuff about affordability, you've got stuff about fighting ice, obviously, and housing and minimum wage. But when you think about like sort of your, in your mind, agenda that is the most likely to happen in the short term in terms of like real fundamental

change. What are those policies? I mean, so right now I'm going to tell you that I think that everything's interconnected, right? So all of our issues are interconnected. And I don't know if you guys just saw the news, but the ask on the federal government side, the president's ask for $1.4 trillion more in in in in money for war um we they already spent two point five billion apparently i think that's i think it's way higher than that no 25 billion is what they said but i think it's way higher than that um actually but i i'm i'm worried i'm worried um because i think that uh also you know trump has given um you know over three trillion dollars in tax breaks to the ultra wealthy. And our state has not yet even done anything to, you know, tax the ultra wealthy

in order to make sure that we are provided back the social services that we are going to be missing. I have elderly parents. I have an 18-month-old baby. I have seen that, you know, programs are harder and harder for folks. I personally am having to take a lesser plan for health care right now that is actually double the cost of what I used to pay. I think that a lot of people in America are actually having the same kind of, you know, hardship. My child, who is only 18 months, I'm worried about what she's going to be, you know, facing when she goes to school. I don't have an ability to pay for child care because child care is $32,000 plus $1,000 a year. I have my mom, luckily, to help me, right? But not everybody has their mom. And I think that it's really about,

it's really about making sure that we have a perspective on what people are facing right now. I think that it's important to have elected officials who can relate to the struggles that everyday New Yorkers are going through. And right now, the things that I'm fighting for, childcare, you know, making sure that we have more access, right? Because our transportation, our mass transit, our public transit, it's not accessible, right? We desperately, desperately need to make sure that we're not a body that shirks the, like the MTA's, you know, promises to fulfill the ADA that's so, so, so old now, right? And we're like grandfathering in stations.

We're not, like, fighting for things that are just basic things, like making sure that we have elevators that work, et cetera. Like, we need to make sure that we have, you know, accessible buses. We need my district right now, we have a transit desert up in the co-ops in the lower east side, right? Where we desperately need buses to run more often. So, like, 14A, I waited 45 minutes for the 14th. There were 14 Ds, like running, like, I'm telling you this because it is, it is the basic needs of our community that need fighting for. And like, it is the holistic needs of our communities of like making sure that we have more accessibility. We have, you know, folks fighting from a disability lens, understanding like that, hey, we need child care. We need to make sure that we're taxing the ultra-rich, that we're closing the corporate tax loopholes. We need to make sure that we have these basic things. And right now, we don't even have the political will to pass New York for all.

We don't have the political will to pass New York for all when our neighbors are literally in danger. I am on the Chinatown Defense Network and I'm part of it and I'm just watching as, you know, ice raids are coming into my neighborhood and it is it is so frightening to think that our state, which promises to be a sanctuary state, doesn't have the political will in the legislature to pass these basic things. as we are we should tell people the new york for all essentially says um that um municipal state employees cannot cooperate with ice not uh not obligated but you cannot are obligated not to cooperate as a way of protecting people and this is you know and the federal courthouse would be in your uh state senate district correct by the way right 26 federal plaza would be in the district

yeah and and and i will say that that we should go further. We should make it so that, you know, that ICE cannot enter hospitals. And we should make sure that ice cannot enter courtrooms. We should do that in order to make sure that people can comply with the law, that babies can be born safely, that seniors can, you know, actually have the care that they deserve and let, you know, people who have accidents still have to worry that they're going to be, you know, hauled off to some labor camp. You were in the State Assembly until you decided to run for Congress, and I guess that was from 2017 to 2022, and then you narrowly lost to Dan Goldman because of the dynamics that we spoke about the split race. And, you know, rank choice voting also kind of throws things.

Like people don't necessarily sometimes know how to maneuver that. But I'm just wondering if you could reflect on the changes to the New York, both. like state Senate and assembly since that time period. And like what you would do as a part of a broader left-wing DSA-aligned constituency as that has grown since you first got elected. Yeah. I mean, I think that when I first got elected, I will write, mine folks, I got elected the same day Trump did the first term that he served, right?

And I was talking actually on this show about state rights. I still remember I was just like, we need to. make sure that the state is protecting itself and like making sure that it's protecting its people and people, I still remember somebody had called and being like, you know, you kind of sound like a Republican about state rights, you remember? And it was interesting because I was talking about protecting

women's health, right? Because our choices, our bodies were under attack at the time and they are under attack and we lost a lot of rights in this country. And I think that, you know, our state actually codified Roe v. Wade before, you know, the Supreme Court actually overturned Roe v. Wade. And so it was really important that we took those steps. And, you know, I think I was very patient in the things that I was saying about what our state needed to do to protect all of our, you know, citizens. And I think that

it's really important for me to talk about the political will that I was talking about earlier, because I think that when I was in the legislature, you know, I saw that, you mentioned the no IDC movement, but I saw that, you know, Cuomo had made it so that the Senate and the Assembly would, you know, have this clash in order for him to become the, you know, the arbiter of an decider of all of the things, right? And also to have his hands off of stuff when it died. That's right. That's right. He could claim, right, that he had, you know, oh, they just couldn't agree or whatever. we got this instead, the executive did this, right?

And so it was really important for us to have people who were willing to stand up against, you know, some of his austerity budgeting, stand up against some of that messaging, and then on top of that, to fight, to vote in a group of folks that were able to overturn the IDC, right? So we were able to get back a real Senate majority. We were able to get back, you know, the political will that we built in then afterwards. with the new political reality that we were able to build, right? Because that was one of the first state electives at the time to be willing to endorse that entire slate,

go and work on trying to overturn the IDC. And when we won, we were able to, we saw the floodgates open up. We got the rent regulations from 2019. We saw, you know, the healthcare conversation move in a different direction. We started to see that, you know, we were. willing to put together a package for women's health, we were willing to, you know, pass the Child Victims Act. We were able to, you know, pass legislation that people had held up for 16, 20, 30 years, right? And so people who thought that certain things were impossible, we actually

got done. And I think that what we need to do now is to change the stagnation that we are seeing and feeling in the legislature and bring back that political will. And I think that we have a really, really, really good opportunity to do so. There's a huge changeover in the Senate that we are seeing already, and then there's going to be a huge changeover in the Assembly that we are seeing already. We have a lot of elections this cycle, and I think that that can determine what kind of political will and what kind of class that we are bringing into the legislature. We have an incredible opportunity politically, and I think that this is an opportunity for us to change Albany to more reflect the people that desperately need us to protect them.

I just want to remind people what the IDC was, was a caucus within the Democratic caucus. Yes. Democrats had won a majority time and time again, but Cuomo sort of midwife, this group of Democrats who broke off as independents and they would essentially function to be his veto on progressive policy by voting against it. They would vote with the Republicans, but they would be. Democrats and so their constituents, you know, a lot of people don't know, don't pay a lot of attention to what their state senators are doing. They would get voted in as Democrats. People didn't realize like all the stuff that you'd want as a Democrat.

These people are standing in the way. And really, you know, we would talk about it. But Cynthia Nixon really brought it to the four. And all those people got voted out. And like you say, that opened up the floodgates and because then all of a sudden, Cuomo, who had aspirations to be president, unfortunately, I think like, I think they've been stamped out. I hope. He realized he had to tack to the left because he no longer had the IDC to hide behind. Give us a sense of like, okay, there's a lot of people running. But before we go, like, how close? are we do you think? How close are we do you think to a, a Senate, let's say, that is willing to pass?

Like, even like something, you know, a Medicare for all within the state type of budget. Like, how close are we to being in that area of possibility? Well, it would take a lot from the voters to, make sure that we have people who are dedicated to fighting for New York for all and also for New York Health Act, right? I think that these are the folks that need to make sure that we actually have the things that can change our legislature's hesitancy. I still remember when we had the supermajority in the assembly and in the Senate, they had the IDC. every time we would vote, we would vote for the New York Health Act time and time and time again. We would pass it through. And then the minute that the IDC got it, you know, they would say no, right?

So the Republicans would vote no. The IDC would vote with them. And then there was no bill on the floor, right? And nothing would pass. And so then the assembly could then always blame the Senate. But then when we got rid of the IDC, the Senate passed the health. bill and the assembly held it. So it's really about political will on all levels, right? It's really about, you know, making sure that we don't have the excuse and that people aren't taking the

excuse, right, and accepting it. Because right now, if we don't have the health care bill, okay, so this is something that I was shocked by, but also not shocked by because I'm living in in reality. But right now, Vice Magazine just, they just had an article that talked about what the poverty line should be, right, in America. And the, there was a economist who had said, I believe his last name is green, but he had said that the poverty line for a family of four is at $140,000 a year. And for most New Yorkers, you would think that that would be higher. right? Because if that's for the rest of America, then that should be higher here. And that means that the majority of people that we know are living below the poverty line. And it's like we don't have enough,

you know, it means that, you know, we don't have the ability to have financial and economic stability if we don't make above six figures. And that is definitely not the median income of this district. It's definitely not the medium income of most people in New York. And when you're talking, about the pressure, it's healthcare. Health care is the biggest pressure. And it's childcare, that's the second. And of course, like, housing, right? So it's healthcare, childcare, and housing,

being the largest pressures on why we cannot have economic stability or financial stability and why it takes so much more for us to be able to even be able to make ends meet at all. And so the poverty line, you know, basically is saying like that's what people need to make right now in order to make sure that they're not on services, right? And I think that our government needs to really help to alleviate that pressure. We already know it's money saved if we can do health care for all. We already know that.

The administrative costs are way higher than what it would be. We can look at Medicare and we can see 3% administrative costs for $3.3 of every dollar is spent on administering the health insurance that almost a quarter of our country gets on Medicare and versus private health insurance where it's like, you know, closer to in the teens, high teens, nearly 20% of every 20 cents of every dollar it goes to that administration. Well, Eulene, where would people, if they want to help, if they want to volunteer, if they want to donate, where would people go online to do so? So it is Eulene for Senate, Y-U-H-L-I-N-E-E-F-R-S-E-N-A-T-E.com. Very simple. Ulean for Senate.com. All right. Well, we're going to link to that. Good luck.

The election is June 23rd in New York State. And this is, you know, this is the primary election across all races. So put it in your calendar now. And early voting should start just a week before. So there it'll be. Eulene, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Good luck.

Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for all your work. Good to see you. It's good to see you guys again. Yes. All right, folks. We're going to take quick break, and we're going to head into the fun half of the program, wherein we will have fun.

Yeah. Eritically, we'll take your IMs. So is possible. We'll take your phone calls. We will discuss some of the news items of the day. and perhaps mock some people and give an update on the Jillian Michaels challenge. Yes.

Is that her last name? Yes. It is. Her challenge to people of the left to finally debate her because everybody runs from her. Yes. And she's yelling at you. Run as fast as you can and take these caffeine pills while you run, run, run away from me. Exactly.

Just fired up the email machine. Still no word from her. Well, we're going to do that. I mean, you just, you tipped it. You tipped it. That was the big, that was the big suspense to pull people into the fun house. That Brian was going to refresh his email. You're doing radio teasers?

It's a teaser. Yeah, I'm sorry. Tune in to find out of crime got an email from Julian Michael. Yeah, but it's not like his email account's going to go away. In five minutes, we could get it. Could hear from her again. You never know. Good save.

Yeah, thanks. We'll go flush my head down a toilet. Make sure it's working. It's your support. Thursdays is the only day it doesn't work. I've arranged that with a building now. So excited for tomorrow. Does seem to be like that.

That's what I said to Brian the other day. I'm like, God, I really am on a streak now. Can't wait to go down to our friends at the coffee shop and be like, again. Join the Majority Report.com. Join the Majority Report.com. If you want to support the program, help this show, survive and thrive. Join the Majority Report.com. Also, don't forget the AM Quicky.

AMQuicky.com. Go sign up. You'll get three emails a week, free. In the morning, 9 a.m. with some of the top stories written by two great writers, Cory Pine and Whitney Wimbish. Monday, I don't know, it's three days a week. And then if you want five days a week,

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Yeah, new Left Reckoning yesterday with Dr. Salman Khan talking about being an infectious disease doctor in Gaza. Also, we talked about Russell Brand's biblical meltdown and David Cross on with Bill Marr. So check that out. Patreon.com, so left reckoning. Tim Poole called that an epic takedown on behalf of Bill Maher. When is Tim going to be in Club Random? him. He's open.

He's open. Meet up for the ages. Nicola, I am not going to read that. I am. That is not appropriate. All right, folks. We will see you in the fun half. Three months from now, six months from now, nine months from now.

And I don't think it's going to be the same as it looks like in six months from now. And I don't know if it's necessarily going to be better six months from now than it is three months from now. But I think around 18 months out, we're going to look back and go like, wow. What? What is that going on? It's nuts. Wait a second. Hold on for, hold on for a second. Emma, welcome to the program.

Hey. Fun pack. Matt. What is up, everyone? Fun pack. No me keen. You did it. Fun pack.

Let's go Brandon. Let's go Brandon. Bradley, you want to say hello? Sorry to disappoint. Everyone, I'm just a random guy. It's all the boys today. Fundamentally false. No, I'm sorry.

Stop talking for a second. Let me finish. Where is this coming from, dude? But dude, you want to smoke this? Seven, eight? Yes. Yes? It is you.

It hurts me. I think it is you. Who is you? No sound. Every single freaking day. What's on your mind? We can discuss free markets and we can discuss capitalism. I'm going to just know what.

Libertarians. They're so stupid though. Common sense. says of course. Gobbled e gook. We fucking nailed him. So what's 79 plus 21? Challenge met. I'm positively quivering. I believe 96, I want to say.

857. 210. 35. 5.01. 1⁄2.3-8s. 911 for instance. $3,900. $6.5,4.3 trillion dollars sold. It's a zero-sum game. Actually, you're making me think less. But let me stay this.

Hoop. You can call it satire. Sam goes, it. Satire. On top of it all? Yeah. My favorite part about you is just like every day, all day. Hey, buddy. We see you.

Obviously. Yeah. Sundow guns out. Don't know. But you should know. People just don't like to entertain ideas anymore. I have a question. Who cares?

Our chat is enabled, folks. I love it. I do love that. Got a jump. I got to be quick. I get a jump. I'm losing it. 15 o'clock, we're already late, and the guy's being a dick.

So screw him. Sent to a gulong? Outrage. Like, what is wrong with you? Love you, bye. Love you. Bye-bye.