The Young Turks - Fili-bluster

Episode Date: January 23, 2021

Senator Ron Johnson tells Joe Biden to choose between impeachment and a cabinet. Meanwhile, Trump’s impeachment is being sent to the Senate on Monday, with a potential trial to begin next week. In vaccine news, Dallas County axes plan to prioritize vaccinating communities of color after the state threatens to slash allocations. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to The Young Turks, the online news show. Make sure to follow and rate our show with not one, not two, not three, not four, but five stars. You're awesome. Thank you. On July 18th, get excited. This is big! For the summer's biggest adventure. I think I just smurf my pants. That's a little too excited.

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3rdi Primati MADC Drop it. Drop it. really aged animation. I'm John Orola, very excited to be leading you through this first hour, but even more excited for our guests in the first hour. Starting with Zander Schultz, social impact entrepreneur and host of What We Don't Know podcast,

Zander, welcome to the show. We spoke a while back on my show on The Damage Report, excited to have you on The Young Turks. Yeah, thanks for having me over here, John, appreciate it. And we're joined once again by David Dayan, executive editor of the American Prospect and the author of Monopolized, Life in the Age of Corporate of corporate power. As always, welcome back to the show. What's up, John? How you doing? I'm okay. I'm cautiously optimistic, recovering a little bit in anticipation of the fights to come. And we've got a good hour for people. We're going to be talking a little bit about some sort of things that have just been brewing for the last few weeks, including the Senate

trial of Donald Trump. We have some updates on the pandemic, some pretty dark ones, some horrific ones, but also perhaps a little bit of progress. Some more Biden executive orders. This first few days have been pretty eventful in that area. But in like the latter half of the show, we're gonna have a big conversation about tax policy. I know sexy as always, but there were some pretty big claims made during the election by Biden about what he's gonna do in regard to the Trump tax cuts. And I don't know exactly what I expect. So I'm excited to talk to both of you about that and get a feel for what you think in that area. So big first hour, but you're also going to want to stick around for the second hour because Anna will of course

be here. She's got Ramesh and Adrian and they're going to have an awesome hour of news as well. And with that, why don't we launch into this thing? We didn't know exactly when the Senate trial of Donald Trump would begin, but apparently it's coming soon according to Chuck Schumer. Make no mistake, there will be a trial, and when that trial ends, senators will have to decide if they believe Donald John Trump incited the erection, insurrection against the United States. This is a serious matter, buddy. What are you doing over there? Chuck Schumer, jokester. But anyway, erection or not, Donald Trump is potential. going to have to answer for what he did. That transmission that he referred to there of the documents from the House of the Senate will trigger preparations for a trial that could start as early as next week. But Senate leaders indicated that they may delay it, potentially for

a few weeks so that Trump can organize his defense, which in the end I'm sure is going to be amazing. Remember, as we talk about this, that a conviction requires a two-thirds majority, which means at least 17 Republicans would have to join all of the Democrats. which would be something, you know, because there were 10 Republicans that joined the Democrats in the House, and that was the most bipartisan effort ever. There were way more Republicans in the House to turn over. And so I don't know about the 17. What do both of you think about this, both about the schedule that it is going to be happening relatively soon and also the prospects that it might actually go somewhere? One, I don't know if this is derailing this too much, but it's incredible that we're looking at Pelosi and Schumer again,

the leaders of the Democratic Party, it's just, it's just amazing. We keep doubling down with this old guard. Look, the Republicans in office are disingenuous and they're opportunists. So they'll do whatever's in their best interests. And that's always been their calculus. And, you know, that probably will be a non-event. And, you know, a lot of them are hoping to pick up a lot of these Trump supporters along the way. But that's been their calculus for a long time. There's no one so smart. They're a U.S. senator and so dumb that they don't believe in climate change or they believe that, you know, there's widespread voter fraud. It's not a real thing. And so you can almost insert any, any topic, any issue, and say they'll do whatever best suits them in that, in that, you know,

particular environment. David, what do you think? Yeah, I mean, what's in the best interest of the Republican Party and what's in the best interest of individual Republican senators might be at odds here. So it's at the best interest of the party, maybe to break free of Donald Trump who was unable to win the presidency and got progressively less popular as he contested a free and fair election. And so finding those votes and ensuring that he can't run again in 24 is maybe of interest to the party as a whole and may even be of interest to individual senators who want to run in 24. Why wouldn't a Tom Cotton or a Ted Cruz vote to convict and knock out their leading challenger for their Republican nomination? However, if they do want to pick

up what is still a very large, overwhelming majority of Republicans who support Donald Trump, then it's not in their interest. As Cruz made very clear and Josh Hawley made very clear when they went ahead with objecting to the electoral college count. So that's the thing that has to be managed here. And everyone's looking at Mitch McConnell. I mean, McConnell has sort of floated out this idea that he may vote to convict. And if he does, he might be able to bring enough with him to actually make it happen. I'm a little skeptical, but I think McConnell is the key here. As far as what this means, this whole trial, it means that you're not going to really get a whole lot done in the U.S. Senate. Now, there already is this question of when there will be an agreement on the sharing of power

in a 50-50 Senate. McConnell and Schumer are discussing this. McConnell wants a guarantee that the Democrats will never abolish the filibuster. And Schumer has said, go pound sand, we're not doing that. But this only increases the delay. And right now the committees are set up under the old system. So nobody new has been added to a committee, which means Republicans are in charge of all the committees in the Senate right now. So it's in McConnell's favor to delay on this and to just

elongate the timeline. Biden needs to get his nominees through. We have legislation on the table, a $1.9 trillion a COVID relief bill that is harder to get through when the Senate is not organized. And you have this impeachment trial. So if McConnell's ideas to just gum up the works and delay and delay, then he's all for having an impeachment trial right now, just as long as it can possibly go and elongate out this power sharing agreement as much as he can possibly do. Yeah, I wonder, I mean, obviously the question of what is going to end up happening, if anything with the filibuster is one of the most important questions for the next, you know, well, for the rest of American history. But for the next two years, especially if the Democrats want

to actually accomplish anything. Look, personally, as someone who thinks that it, needs to be abolished for the Democrats to accomplish anything or for the federal government to actually function. I want Mitch McConnell to be as much of a D as he can and really cause a lot of problems and put a lot of pressure on Schumer to move on this immediately, to not wait six months of reaching out your hand, wasted time. I hope that that might happen. Now, and the pressure doesn't need to only be on Schumer, right? The pressure needs to be on Joe Mansion, on Kirsten Cinema, on John Tester, on these members of the Democratic caucus who have expressed opposition to abolishing the filibuster. I mean, there is a sense, it's amazing that you

still have to do this, but there is a sense that Schumer needs McConnell to obstruct so he can go back to those people and say, see, if you want to get anything done in the next two years, if you want to keep the gavels that you have, we have to do this because McConnell is showing his hand. It's incredible that you even have to do that at this point though. Yeah, that that is definitely true. The question will be for some of them, how much like does Manchin really feel a fire to make sure that a lot is done? Maybe, maybe, we'll see, maybe not. In terms of the actual like whether, convicting Trump and barring him from running, I think that your read is right.

Like theoretically for some of the most ambitious Republican senators, it's in their interest the most to block him, except that they don't want to be the ones to do it because then he might turn his cannons on them in a year and a half. All of them are interested in it happening. None of them want to be in the 17 that make it happen. But one extra wrinkle that I would throw out is I think that you're right that from Mitch McConnell's point of view, the Republicans who are a little bit maybe more interested in the future of the Republican Party than in their own political aspirations, they might want to block him out because they don't want him running again. And I get that. But there's also this, you know, sort of very early talk about him forming a third party, I would imagine that that might even

be more horrifying from the Republican point of view. If he were to pull a sort of foe populist Ross Perrault sort of situation in a few years, that could make it incredibly difficult for Josh Hawley to win as the Republican nominee. So I wonder if that might be a consideration that they'll be thinking about. Zander, did you want to take that or? No, I think I think your calculus is correct in that there's folks who could really benefit from Trump not being a force in the Republican Party anymore, but the blowback is just probably too much for a lot of those people. And so I think I think you're dead on there. And I don't

think maybe in the Republican Party of old, right, the John McCain, Mitt Romney, Republican Party, there was enough there there in terms of allegiance to the party. But I just think a lot of those folks have been washed out. And it really is just opportunists who have, you know, rode this wave to get in. I just don't, I don't see a lot of those folks really actually caring that much about, you know, the collective. Yeah. Well, we also know that Donald Trump in this interim period is assembling his defense team. Technically, he's been playing golf every day, but someone is assembling his defense team. Really, he has actually been golfing.

I would too, honestly, I don't even golf, I would golf right now. Those last four years of God have been stressful for him. But anyway, he's hiring South Carolina-based lawyer, Butch Bowers, who I think is the alter eager of someone in the MCU. But anyway, Bowers was counseled Governor Mark Sanford when he faced impeachment in the South Carolina House in 2009. He also served in the Justice Department and President George W. Bush's administration. So like with virtually every lawyer in the country, I'm not familiar with this person.

But the question I have for you is, does Trump's defense in this matter? Or is it just each individual senator is going to make a calculation based on what effect having voting for him to be convicted or not? Like, do we think that there is some narrative that they could push in this defense, some big thing to draw attention? Like, does it actually matter what they do? Or is that sort of a side show to, do I want to convict the guy who might wreck my career? I think it's a side show.

You know, this played out on television. It was one of the most watched events of the last several years. Everybody knows what happened. The president spoke. And not just what he did on that day on January 6th, but what he did for the preceding two months. that was a very public process of contesting the results, you know, inciting the flames of and the passions of his supporters culminating in January 6th. So if you don't have an opinion on this by now, I don't know what's wrong with you. So yeah, this is, and ultimately impeachment

is political matter. I mean, and we saw that. We saw that in the House, in the House vote. it was a political matter. And most House Republicans decided to stick with the president. And the ones that didn't, I mean, Liz Cheney is being kind of sent a message right now that her leadership is not wanted in the Republican Party because she voted against Donald Trump. And that must be weighing on senators right now who are ambitious, as you said, and maybe see themselves rising through the ranks of the Republican Party. they have to contend with the fact that the one person that was in a leadership position that went against Trump is now seeing the potential for her leadership powers to be stripped.

Yeah, no doubt it's the latter. For all the reasons David stated, look, his last defense was what I did was in the best interest of the United States and therefore it's fine because me being in a leadership position is in the best interest of the United States. Like the defense was non-existent the last time around. So I don't know why I would play a bigger role this time. Yeah, that is certainly possible. It is also possible that as one of his defense tactics,

he might organize a massive crowd, which would sort of prove the point of the need for it. But anyway, okay, well with that, we are going to take our first break. When we come back, we're going to jump into the pandemic, how one area of the country is distributing their vaccines

and all the problems that's causing, as well as some of the Biden administration's executive orders that bear on the pandemic. We'll have that after this. We need to talk about a relatively new show called Un-F-The Republic or UNFTR. As a Young Turks fan, you already know that the government, the media, and corporations are constantly peddling lies that serve the interests of the rich and powerful. But now there's a podcast dedicated to unraveling those lies, debunking the conventional wisdom. In each episode of Un-B-The-Republic, or UNFTR, the host delves into a different historical

episode or topic that's generally misunderstood or purposely obfuscated by the so-called powers that be. Featuring in-depth research, razor-sharp commentary, and just the right amount of vulgarity, the UNFTR podcast takes a sledgehammer to what you thought you knew about some of the nation's most sacred historical cows. But don't just take my word for it. The New York Times described UNFTR as consistently compelling and educational, aiming to challenge conventional wisdom and upend the historical narratives that were taught in school.

For as the great philosopher Yoda once put it, you must unlearn what you have learned. And that's true whether you're in Jedi training or you're uprooting and exposing all the propaganda and disinformation you've been fed over the course of your lifetime. So search for UNFDR in your podcast app today. and get ready to get informed, angered, and entertained all at the same time. Thank you. Welcome back, everyone. You saw there, by the way, a promo for tonight's episode of The Common Room, which you can tune into at 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific time at Twitch.tv slash TYT, where I will be appearing with host, Brett Ehrlich, as well as Adiana Vega and Abilina Sabrina of the Republic of Twitch. They will be joining us as well. And it's a great way to close out the week. Have a little bit of fun. We drink a little bit. It should be great. You know what we also have for you. A couple of awesome new designs at ShopTYT.

You can see here the chairman of the budget committee design as well as unamused inauguration Bernie because we realized that shop TYT was the only place on the internet that did not have that Bernie. So it's been rectified, but it's awesome. I can't wait to get one, although I want one in black. We'd have to figure that out. But anyway, before we jump back into the news, let's see what's going on with the audience. We have on the member comments, nipple pierced jank in skinny jeans says, yes, it was dropped. Jack Nicholson nodding from from the departed GIF on the power panel intro. Thank you for that. Someone who likes Bernie Sanders says, I know there's a big push to demonize the cruises and the Holley's in the Senate,

but I think we need to put the screws more to the supposed moderate GOP senators from purple and blue states, paint them as crazy for siding with crazy, and hopefully with enough pressure we can get them to break towards cooperating with Dems. Any quick thoughts about that? I don't know about the second part. I like the first part. I don't know if anyone's going to break They're working with Dembs, but I like the first part where we shed a light on some of these folks. There's a number of folks like Ron Johnson up in Wisconsin coming up in 2022. I'd love to get out of there. It's amazing organizers and amazing potential Democratic candidates like Mandela Barnes up that way.

That would be fantastic to put in the Senate. I don't think they're going anywhere though. We're actually working on that. One of our colleagues is putting together a list of House Republicans who voted to object to the results. And we should have a guideline for folks pretty soon. If you want to go out them now, if you go to defeat treason.org, we already put up something. We pivoted defeat by tweet to defeat treason.

And so anytime what we're calling the seditious six tweet, so that's Cruz, Holly, you all know the bad actors. We send money to organizers that are working in the districts of all the Republican who vote to overturn the election. Awesome. That's an easy plug, I guess, if that's how you're feeling going at these guys. We've got something for you. I also want to thank our new YouTube members, Casey Grant, Ashton Vogelsberg, the Hindu Jackal Lanterns, and Charlie Ball. Thank you for signing on to membership

on YouTube and to new Twitch subs, Shatner Tupi, for two months, who says, so Trump won't be asking for trial by combat then. It looks like no. I would have loved to have seen Rudy Giuliani defending him. his honor, wielding a morning star. That was the most surreal part of a very surreal thing. It was Rudy Julia, I screaming trial by combat. Yeah. Oh, man.

Okay, we'll be right back. Welcome back, everyone to the first hour of the Young Turks here with David and Sander. And we're going to jump into a little bit of information about the pandemic. So let's do that. The initial rollout of the COVID vaccines has not been smooth in a number of different states. times through a complete lack of organization, terrible decisions in terms of the scheduling, and some, there are other motives that might bear into this. So let's talk about Dallas County. Dallas County court apparently voted recently to rescind an order that would have prioritized

doses of the vaccine for people living in the county's most vulnerable zip codes, but agreed to meet again later this week to design a vaccination plan that will be transparent and accountable. So here's what the original plan was. A divided Dallas County Commissioner's Court had voted Tuesday to prioritize vaccines at its fair park distribution center for individuals in mostly black and Latino neighborhoods, a reflection of increased vulnerability to the coronavirus in 11 Dallas County zip codes. In Dallas, as in other major Texas cities, distribution sites are more commonly located in white neighborhoods. And early data showed the North Texas County had distributed most of its shots to residents of whiter, wealthier neighborhoods. Now when they wanted

to fix that, Texas health officials pushed back on the proposal warning that it was not acceptable to the Department of State Health Services. I would love to have heard like extended questioning about that and exactly why a more just equitable distribution of the vaccines would have been a problem. But in any event, after that pushback, we now have this Dallas court decision. And so I am interested to see in the long run how this is adjudicated, both for Dallas County, but also across the country where I've read instances of distribution centers being set up in areas that are lower income, but then the actual analysis of the dose distribution found that they were mostly going to people living in a neighboring wealthier county that were crossing over and soaking

up those doses. And that for habitual viewers of the show is going to be the least surprising thing in the world that the rich are going to be jumping the lines. But I'm curious for both of your thoughts. David, do you want to go first? Sure. I mean, a couple things. Number one, I think this is a distribution issue, but it's also a demand issue. So people of color are, and probably rightfully so, more skeptical of large-scale immunization programs because of a very rich history of using communities of color for experiments.

for lack of a better word. And I think that's a history that is only really going to be counteracted with an education campaign. And that has been extremely lacking, especially at the federal level where there's been no messaging. It's just they've been dumping vaccines on the states and saying, hey, have at it. There's been no real messaging for why this is so important. the steps that were taken to ensure safety and things of that nature. So I think there's a demand issue.

It's pretty interesting when you see Bloomberg has these great charts about where the vaccine is being distributed and who's doing a good job and who's not doing such a good job. And the worst states right now for vaccine distribution are California and a bunch of states in the deep south. And you'd think that they have no connection to one another whatsoever in terms of tax. policy in terms of the type of government and things. But you have California state with a heavily diverse population, and you have the Deep South, which has pockets of heavy black communities. And the states that are actually getting the vaccines out are states like small states,

like West Virginia and North and South Dakota, which are very homogenous in terms of their race. So I think there are some interesting things to draw from that, but I think early on in the vaccine process, we got very hung up on prioritization and trying to construct the most perfect equitable kind of way in which to get these shots out. And we forgot about the fact that when you get a shot into somebody's arm, that helps everybody. Because it means that less people are using the health system. It means that it's one step. step closer to herd immunity and that protects all of us. So we just need to get these things out at some level. We do need to make particular care on populations, particularly around the demand side to make sure that black communities, Latino communities actually want to get this virus. But we just need to actually get this thing out because the faster that we do it and return to normalcy, the better off will be from a public health.

standpoint from an economic standpoint from every standpoint. Really interesting insights on the demand sign, David. You know, my first thought is, look, inequities have existed in this country long before COVID. I think education, policing, you know, we're all familiar with them. I think what, you know, we should be grateful for this thing in some ways because I think what it's revealed is that maybe with the inequities around education or policing, we could write them off as the remnants of a past that was intentionally inequitable. And we were, you know, trying to rebuild them to a more equitable state. And what we've seen is that we'll

willingly rebuild inequitable systems like the COVID vaccination in this day and age. Between that and, you know, this resurgence of white supremacy, we're just seeing there's more cultural work to be done there, which I think is important. I think the other thing that maybe hits home about this is there was a moment there during the beginning stages. of the pandemic where we were all vulnerable in a way where we thought, or at least many of us thought we might be reliant on systems. Many of us who aren't typically reliant on systems thought we may be reliant on systems, whether that's, you know, eviction memoritiums or, you know, welfare or whatnot. And so because of that shared, shared vulnerability, these inequities seem more intolerable because we can empathize with them. We saw ourselves as someone who would also have to rely on those same systems, which I think at the end of the day, I don't know how long we carry that with us, but I think at the end of the day, it's making us more empathetic and more upset when we see our social systems fail to live up to what I think we'd like them to be.

Yeah. Yeah. Look, as both of you pointed out, it is complicated. I can't help but think that over the past, you know, the past month or two months or so that since the vaccines have been approved for distribution or even hypothetically in the months leading up to it, the federal government caring at all to get involved might have helped in some way. But why would they have? That would have been so inconsistent with the overall federal response to the pandemic. And he's out, you know, he's already he's already paid the electoral price for not giving a damn about this. But it's just another, it's like add that to the pile of things that needlessly caused more loss of life. You know, you never know, when new administrations come in and then they say, you know,

here's what was left for us. You never know exactly how much of that you can trust. But when they say that there was no vaccine distribution plan, I kind of believe them. I think that there was probably nothing. I think like their fantasies for tax reform, I think it could have fit on a postcard, probably. And people will die as a result of it, potentially. eventually thousands or tens of thousands. I also wanted to just throw out there. There's going to be a lot of these sorts of anniversaries coming, but here's a fun one. It is the one year anniversary of Donald Trump telling CNBC, we have it totally under control. It's one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It's going to be just fine. And that is because

the first person crossed over to America from China that was infected with COVID, or at least the first person that we knew of at that point since we weren't testing for it. Fact check shows that was not true. It was not going to be just fine. It wasn't just one. More than a half million will die. No. Well, you know, look, John, he didn't want to panic people, you know, he didn't want to give people the wrong impression that this might be problematic. What's so upsetting hearing that is that 10 months later he got 74 million votes. You know what I'm saying? There is to a degree, it's acceptable if you're watching

Fox News all day and you're being told certain things and you get whipped up. That's fine. But this guy said things that kind of, you know, were contradicted, you know, the next week by himself. It's remembering those type of things, to be honest, that makes me realize what a hole we're in with a certain decent percentage of our base and how, how, you know, someone who, you know, was so, so wrong still, still garnered that many votes from folks who followed him. There's just so much work to be done with that base. It's confusing how to cross that bridge with those folks. One thing I'm thinking about is we know that, and we knew this well before the Biden team had to tell us, that there was no distribution plan at the federal level. They told us very specifically,

like, we give the vaccines to the states and they figure it out. We knew that. And that was certainly a problem, especially in the early going, when you were relying on these states that were already dealing with the pandemic and the health consequences of that to actually throw a mass immunization program that's one of the largest logistical processes in American history. On top of that was too much for these states to ask. Yeah. The states are trying, sort of figuring it out, though. So, you know, Biden has this benchmark of 100 million shots in the first 100 days. days, we are almost at that level right now. And we were since the beginning, like the end of the Trump presidency, we were at about 900,000 a day. You don't have to get that much more

to get to one million shots a day and be on that level. The problem is that that 100 million and 100 days isn't enough. I mean, if we want to actually get to something resembling normalcy by summer, we have to do much better than 100 million in 100 days. And, the problem that we're running up against is the problem that the Trump administration had that they don't talk about, which is the problem of production. We don't know if there's going to be enough vaccine to get everybody who wants a shot to have one in a timely fashion. And the fact that we didn't spend every available dollar to pre-position all of these vaccines to build the factories that we had to build, even if we built factories for vaccines that ended up not being

approved by the FDA. So what if you wasted a little bit of money on that to be able to get all these things through? And then when you did approve one like Pfizer, Moderna, to re-convert all of the other facilities that are working on vaccines and say, nope, we got two. We'll pay you here, we'll just give you, here's the formula, just go make some for us. That is almost a bigger problem right now, because we're rapidly moving from a time when the problem was distribution to now the problem is supply. David John, not to hold us up too much on this point, but I just wonder, you know, as these, as these things are kind of become more and more apparent, the lack of Trump's willingness to ensure that we can get past this pandemic as quickly as possible,

do you think this will have, and I know it's so hard to predict, but any blowback from his base as like this becomes more apparent that we just didn't have the infrastructure in place to help, is something as core as like literal health? Or is it zero? Is there, is there anything that impacts. I mean, he lost the election, right? And I think without a pandemic, he probably would not have lost the election. That's right. That's my actual. And I don't think it's likely to more now that they could say it's Biden's fault. But it did have some effect, sure. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, you know, they lost in Georgia. And the reason I think they lost in Georgia was more economic and the issue of the $2,000 checks.

But that also is a reaction to the pandemic as well that caused a blowback. So where Democrats were able to rather skillfully and unexpectedly go with populism in a way that managed to turn out voters. So, you know, I think, yeah, it's a problem that 74 million people voted for Trump. But let's not forget that 81 million people voted for Joe Biden, who's not exactly a stirring political figure, but he was not Trump. And that's what ended up succeeding. So, you know, we got to keep focus on that too. I agree. So let's transition now to what is being done. Biden over the last 24 hours, Biden over the last 24 hours has a new set of executive orders aimed to deal with the pandemic, with the first one being something that a lot of people

both in and outside of government have been calling for, it would have been a great thing for President Trump to have done like six months ago. But President Joe Biden will use the Defense Production Act to boost production of vaccines, testing, and personal equipment to help ensure the US will have enough vaccines testing and protective equipment to withstand the coronavirus pandemic. It took like a year. And so one of Biden's orders would increase the production of a syringe that pharmacists have discovered allows them to extract an extra dose of the vaccine from vials. Another would establish the pandemic testing board. The aim of the new board is to increase COVID testing, not to slow it down, just to be clear. I know a lot of people

have been led to believe that slowing down the testing is a good thing during a pandemic. It turns out it's not. So another of executive orders mandates the wearing of masks on intercity buses and trains as well as in airports and on airplanes. So there's a lot there. The Defense Production Act, increased testing, and to the limited extent that the president can unilaterally mandate mask wearing, mandating it in those areas. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I think it's all good stuff. The syringe thing is a way to increase capacity without having to build factories or reconfigure factories to make these very complex vaccines. The issue is that when you get a shot, there's always some wasted amount of medication.

And there's a difference in a syringe between what they call low dead space and high dead space. And the difference there is one dose. So you're instantly, if you have a dose, you know, you have a vial that has five doses in it. And you can get six out of it if you use this particular type of syringe, you're increasing. the production, the supply of vaccine by 20%, just by doing that. So it's unclear exactly how many, how much wasted vaccine we ended up with because we gave syringes that weren't specified in this manner. But that's like a cheat.

That's like an easy way to get a lot more vaccines out into the population. So it's great that they're thinking at that granular level about how to get this done. So, you know, a plan beats no plan. So I think it will be better than the Trump version of this. The question is, are we too far into this now that, you know, being able to reconfigure factories or add capacity is just going to take months that we don't really have? They might, they might. By the way, a little bit of breaking news or news from 30 minutes ago that bears exactly on what

we were talking about. So we have the current rollout of the vaccine, the amount that we've distributed all of that. Obviously it has not been good enough. So then we find out, hey, specialty syringes we can extract an extra dose. That puts us a little bit ahead. Well, not so fast because New York Times is now reporting that Pfizer has lobbied for the US government to count those extra doses against the amount that they have pledged 200 million doses by the end of July. So no, we're not ahead because now they're going to ship less, the less vials of the vaccine to us. So I'm starting to think that this lobbying isn't good for the American people. That's an under the radar problem that Pfizer and Moderna made very big promises about how much

vaccine they were going to get to the American people in these orders. And it doesn't look like they're going to meet that production level. And so for Pfizer, this is an easy way for them to say, oh, that counts. And so now we hit our goal when they were never going to hit their goal. And it's the same thing with modernist. So this is, there's a problem on the production side of this that needs to be figured out. Now, one of the things Biden did in the Defense Production Act was increase some of the ingredients, mandate production of some of the ingredients that go into a vaccine because there were supply chain problems. They couldn't get enough of a particular enzyme or a particular ingredient that is needed

in production. But that doesn't happen by snapping your fingers. This is stuff that should have been figured out six months ago, nine months ago. I mean, it should have been figured out as soon as someone went into a stage three trial, the production process should have started at a much higher level than it did. I mean, we did have some pre-produced vaccine that rolled out immediately after, you know, it got FDA approval, but not nearly enough. Yep, 100%.

Let me give you a little bit more of the developments, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Biden's current chief medical advisor, told the Executive Board of the World Health Organization Thursday that the U.S. is going to join the COVID-19 vaccine's global access facility, an international alliance led by WHO that seeks to provide COVID vaccines to the world's poorest countries. And we talked about this last week on the damage report, but the reason that there needs to be this international push to provide access to the vaccines in some of these poor countries is because in the vast, vast majority of them, there has been none. I don't mean like a little bit. I mean literally no doses across dozens of countries. And you can see here a little infographic put together

by the BBC, huge regions of the world. At TYT, we frequently talk about all the ways that big tech companies are taking control of our online lives, constantly monitoring us and storing and selling our data. But that doesn't mean we have to let them. It's possible to stay anonymous online and hide your data from the prying eyes of big tech. And one of the best ways is with ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN hides your IP address, making your active ID more difficult to trace and sell the advertisers.

ExpressVPN also encrypts 100% of your network data to protect. you from eavesdroppers and cybercriminals. And it's also easy to install. A single mouse click protects all your devices. But listen, guys, this is important. ExpressVPN is rated number one by CNET and Wired magazine. So take back control of your life online and secure your data with a top VPN solution available, ExpressVPN.

And if you go to ExpressVPN.com slash TYT, you can get three extra months for free with this exclusive link just for TYT fans. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash T-YT. Check it out today. Currently have none or effectively none. I think Guinea got 25 doses, I think it was, for members of their government. And many countries would have considered themselves lucky to get those 25. So a little bit of U.S. involvement, perhaps leadership in making sure that it's distributed,

around the globe would be a great thing, especially considering that we don't live in a walled off or bubbled off country. If you want, you know, even if you're setting aside the massive human toll of allowing the deaths to continue to spiral out of control in so many parts of the world, if you want our economy to recover, if you're that sort of person, that's the only thing you care about, that sort of relies on the world actually being able to travel and trade and all of that. And so I understand for a lot of people, this isn't going to be one of the first priorities, but it certainly needs to be up there. Most definitely, I think you hit the nail on the head.

We're living in a connected world, isolationist policies, or, you know, only me policies just don't work anymore. They just don't. And, you know, maybe in the near future, we need things like the UN to have some more teeth and WHO to have some more teeth. And maybe while we have some competent leadership, we can institutionalize that in some ways because obviously there's just going to be more and more things that come up that require global coordination on top of, you know, the refugee crisis and the climate crisis that

are currently spiraling around the world. Well, the international issue is huge, and it's entirely a consequence of the way that we handle medical development and drug development in the world. We grant these patents to companies companies like Pfizer and companies like Moderna for exclusivity for a period of time. In this case, Moderna got all of their research and development money from the United States. Pfizer was in, they had a partnership with a German firm called Bioentech, which got all of its money from Germany. So these are publicly developed drugs, but we still gave a patent. patent to these companies to exclusively provide the drug. And these countries abroad could make

generic versions of it. I mean, a stunning amount of generic manufacturing is done in India, for example. They could definitely do it if they were able to be, to grant the technology and the formula to these pharmaceutical facilities. But, you know, they have a patent. And it hasn't been done. And usually the U.S. is a great supporter of its pharmaceutical industry in maintaining those and denying generic production for the developing world. It's a huge issue in the HIV situation in terms of drugs for HIV in the developing world, where the U.S. threatened sanctions on India and other countries who were producing generic

versions of HIV drugs. So this is a larger question. The way that this vaccine was developed with public money and public support should be the way we develop these things going forward. It should be a different model for how we produce prescription drugs in the world. And this is the test case for why we got something like this out in such a short period of time. And so hopefully we learn from this rather than falling back on the old habits of the patent monopoly system. Right, just another data point that healthcare and capitalism don't play well together more often than not. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I'm not gonna put a bunch of money on us learning the lesson though that you were talking about, but it's an opportunity. Look, there's a number of

other executive orders that Biden has released having to do with federal worker protections, minimum wage, things like that. These are all important, but unfortunately we are running very low on time. So we're going to go to our second break when we come back. Much more to talk about. Welcome back, everyone. Let's see what's going on with the audience. In the member comments, let's see. We have Vegas Wolf who says we have the unamused Bernie shirts and the dragon squad items. Could we get an unamused Bernie dragon? We could. I don't know that the means going to last long enough necessarily. It is possible. Let's see. Gabby says, I feel like this syringe plan is about equivalent with my plan for when I run out of toothpaste but somehow stretch out

the empty tube for another nine days. It is something like that actually. John, do you have any idea physically like what they're talking about? Yeah, so basically- What actually is the issue? So the idea is that they say that there's a certain number of doses inside of a vial of the vaccine, but in theory you can actually pull out a little bit more with certain syringes. That's the idea. Does they have better suction power because they go at a different angle? Do you know, like, what about the syringe allows for this?

I don't know, actually, but supposedly it does happen that you can get one or two extra doses out of them, something like that. Well, because the idea is that they have to err on the side of putting more into the vial rather than less because the natural variation from one vial to another, they can't have less than the listed number. And that's sort of how it works out. Although, unfortunately, you also can't combine different vials. Apparently that doesn't work. It wouldn't be safe. Interesting. Now, Dr. Zippy McSootz sent us a super chat that says, in the 1980s as a kid, we were vaccinated by the millions in school gyms. Why is it so difficult now? Well, I think there you had established protocols, established production, those sorts of things.

I think that in theory we will get to that at some point. There's just been, it's relatively new. They're trying out different things in different areas and not nearly enough work was done by the federal government to expedite the process. That's what it seems like anyway. Okay, over Twitch, depressed progressive gave us 10,000 bits, depressed progressive, thank you so much. Appreciate that. Makes me less depressed of a progressive, so thank you for that. Over on Twitch, Elise, who made the new Sprocket and Hilo emotes. I didn't, well thank you for that. I was delighted when I I saw my dog's face on Twitch and seeing Sprock, it always makes me happy. Gifted 10 subs as well.

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Thank you. And Obie Mom, if you end up seeing this, you know, our thoughts are going out to you. Hope that you're doing better. Chump Sui, subscribe for the fourth month. Thank you for that. And let's see, maybe one more comment, a member comment from Hillibilly Farmer who says, of course there was no plan. He touted his replacement for Obamacare for four years, lies in corruption and 400,000

and counting American lives lost. Yeah, we never did get those taxes or that health care plan. Maybe in two weeks or so, I don't know, if he's not busy with the impeachment trial. Anyway, we got a little bit more news for you, so stick around on the other side of this. So, I'm going to be able to be. You know, I'm going to be. So,

you know, Welcome back. here with Xander and David. And we got one more story at the very least that we're going to get to. And then in not much longer, Anna Kasparian is going to be here with Ramesh and Adrian. So that's going to be fun as well. You're not going to want to miss that. But before that, let's talk taxes. We know that Joe Biden has some big priorities and big promises that he has to deliver on. And one of them has to do with the big Trump tax cut, effectively the piece of legislation that was passed over the last four years. Now President Biden said during a presidential debate back in September that he was going

to eliminate the Trump tax cuts, yet he and his aides are committing to only a partial rollback of the law with their focus on provisions that help corporations in the very rich. It's a position that Mr. Biden held throughout the campaign and that he clarified in the September debate by promising to only partly repeal a corporate tax cut. He said, I'm going to get rid of the bulk of Trump's $2 trillion tax cut. And a lot of you may not like that, but I'm going to close closed loopholes like capital gains and stepped up basis. To give you a little bit of facts about what was changed in 2017, that law cut taxes for individuals and lowered the corporate tax rate to 21% from 35%. An amazing percentage drop there. He said, now he said he would

raise income taxes to pre-Trump levels. That's Biden. Only at the top bracket, an increase to 39.6% from 37. He called for raising the corporate tax rate to 28% from 21, notably shorter than the 35 that preceded it, which that was the most obvious prediction ever at the time that if it was ever raised, it ain't getting back up to what it was beforehand. So there's a lot here. He's made some big claims about the bulk of the tax cuts being repealed. But then when you look at the actual details, it really does cut down to a smaller and smaller portion of the overall tax cuts. I'm curious for both of you, though, what do you think in the end is going to make it through not only Biden's proposal, but actually being passed by Congress? I'm not sure anything's going to make it through. I mean, you know, that goes back to our filibuster question.

If it's a question of relying on Republicans to reverse a tax cut, ain't going to happen. So maybe in a budget reconciliation, which is a special process through the budget where you can do a 50 vote environment, maybe you get something through, you know, 28% is where Obama, frankly, wanted to take corporate taxes. So no surprise that that's where Biden wants to go. He said throughout the campaign that he didn't want to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year. But I mean, the other side of that is that we have such an unequal society that you can actually raise quite a bit of money on people only making over $400,000 a year. And the ways that he talks about this by, you know, the estate tax or, you know, what's called on the right, the death tax, the inheritance tax. If you do changes to the corporate tax cut and also the thing around S-Corps, which are these pass-through corporations that individuals set up for themselves to give themselves

a lower tax rate. So if you put those three things together and then you also do what he talked about, I know the most boring thing in the world is step up in basis, but let me explain just real quick. So like when Sheldon Adelson died just a few weeks ago, every investment that he had, even if he bought it at two and it was now at 400, as he gives it to his, heirs, it now is like it's at 400, as if they bought it at 400. In other words, all of the capital gains that he never realized in life get wiped out, get completely vanished as he passes that onto its airs. It's a huge amount of money that is saved that way.

It's a way that the rich give money to their descendants without, you know, while avoiding tons of taxation. So you put that all together, and you are talking about trillions of dollars that you would raise. So while, you know, it's maybe not to the level that everybody might want, it is a lot of money. And it probably will be paired with a very large infrastructure program, because that's what Biden said is what he wants to do in the fall. He wants to pair taxes with infrastructure. There's no real argument anymore for not having very high corporate taxes, right? I think there was a thesis maybe when Ford was employing two million people that if you let

them keep more money, they'll hire more people. The big winners in our economy hardly employ anyone anymore. And so while yes, it's nice to get, you know, that 7% increase, I think like we definitely shouldn't be celebrating. We should look at even the logic of letting wealthy people or corporations. hold on to, you know, even a significant share of their profits or, you know, tax or having low taxes at all? Like, what is the core value in the 21st century of these people having more resources at this point? I think there was an argument at one point that, sure, they could

provide more jobs if they were able to, you know, hold on to more of their capital. Now it's all stock buybacks and, you know, Instagram when it was bought for billion dollars, had 20 people working at it. These companies don't employ people. Right. I mean, let me agree with Xander that there's no real argument that we shouldn't go back to the state of being in 2016. It's not like that was a hellscape for corporations. They weren't going to make any money or anything like that. So I completely agree with that. And progressives should push as much as they possibly can to maximize the amount of money that you can gain from that, because obviously it can be put to good use. All I'm saying is that because we have such an unequal society, that even a cutoff as high as $400,000 a year still yields a ton of money.

Although, at least based on the estimates that I've seen, not enough necessarily to account for the programs that Biden has said those repeals will pay for. Which we don't have to pay for, by the way. I mean, right? There's no need that we actually have to, you know, do the green eye shade and line up every dollar that's coming in on taxes with every dollar going out. We, you know, we've seen in the pandemic that we've put $3 trillion out there without having to pay for it. And this is a salutary thing that Democrats have stopped with their love of budget hawk.

that they're no longer saying that everything has to be paid for. So that's a good thing, I would say. That is a good thing. And let's also, sorry Zana. No, it should, this is just the downside of being stuck with someone like Biden. This is, this is it. This is what you fight for. That's what your North Star looks like is 28%. I think you're right. It was Obama's number. It's probably his North Star as well. Meantime, you know, every retail business in the United States learned how to utilize automation and won't be bringing back the same amount of people. we are going, they're going to be less and less, not only winners, obviously, because the corporations are getting bigger, but there's going to be less and less people even working for those winners. And so we, we kind of have these dual freight trains of climate change, but also automation bearing down upon us that requires us to build safety nets where people can live dignified lives, even when they're not employed. And it just feels like, you know, we're playing by the old rules here. And, and, and that, that's, That's why I worry most about kind of, you know, I talked about Pelosi and Schumer at the top of the hour and Biden too, is that they just don't, they're just not responding to those threats in the way that is becoming increasingly obvious that we need to respond to them.

Well, yeah, I mean, if the leadership across, you know, three, three areas is going to be Biden and Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, the fact that you're playing by the old rule seems like a literal truth. You're going to be doing that. And let's bear in mind, by the way, in terms of this, between the three of them, that 20%, like, pre-cut the overall percentage of the nation's tax burden that was taken up by corporate taxes had already been falling as a share for literally decades. And then they decided, let's cut it in half, basically. No corporation. No corporation pays 28%. No corporation paid 35%. That is a nominal rate. That is not the effective tax rate. And so there's an argument to be made that the rate, the nominal rate is important, but almost or just as important, if not more so, is getting rid of all the loopholes that allow corporations to dramatically lower themselves well beyond that 28% rate. Because as we know, scores of corporations paid zero in taxes throughout the last several years,

because of all the loopholes they were able to enjoy. Well, that's true, David, but that only includes some of the wealthiest companies in the history of our planet. So should we really be so worried about it? Yeah, but let's also, if we're, and this will probably be what we close out the hour on, if we're talking about the unfortunate things with having Biden as president, like, sure, he might take back some of those Trump-era tax cuts. But some of the conversations we were starting to have during the primary about the possibility of a wealth tax. We're miles away from something like that at this point.

And it's unlikely that any amount of pressure is going to get Biden, you know, in line with that it's possible that with a strong progressive president putting sort of persistent pressure on the Senate, it would still be a great, it would be a huge battle and maybe impossible. But at least it would have been a possibility. And we, that's one of the many things that we have unfortunately lost out on. 100%. Well, unfortunately, that is all. the time we have, but I want to thank you both of you for joining me. David and Zander, can

as we close out, starting with David, where can people see more of your work? Yeah, prospect.org and on the Twitters at D-D-D-D-A-Y-N. And I'm doing a new newsletter that is a chronicle of the first hundred days of the Biden presidency. It's called First 100. And you can get that in your email inbox. And you can also sign up and get everything about it at prospect.org slash first one zero zero. Awesome. And Sandra? Right on. Yeah, I have a podcast called What We Don't Know where I talk to leading activists and change makers. You can catch me there. If you feel like defeating these Republicans, like I said, go to defeat treason.org. We're going after everyone who voted to overturn

the election. If you happen to be wealthy, we have something called One for Democracy where you donate 1% of your net worth to democratic infrastructure, importantly black and brown led community organizers that are doing the hard work of protecting our democracy. So that's at 1 for democracy.org. John, thank you so much. Thank you. Glad to have both of you on. And for me, you can see me every day on the damage report. But thank you to everybody for watching this first hour. We're going to take a short break. We come back. Anna Kasperi is going to be here. Ramesh and Adrian are going to join us and join her. And so you're definitely not going to want to miss that. I'll see in a few.

Thanks for listening to the full episode of the Young Turks. Support our work, listen to ad-free, access members-only bonus content, and more by subscribing to Apple Podcasts at apple.co slash t-y-t. I'm your host, Shank Yugar, and I'll see you soon.