The Young Turks - Pentagon Leaker

Episode Date: April 14, 2023

Episode summary: Leaker of U.S. secret documents worked on military base, friend says. Alex Wagner airs secret recordings showing Giuliani and Trump aide telling Fox News they couldn’t prove voter fraud. Appeals court temporarily keeps abortion pill available but limits access. Ro Khanna calls for Feinstein's resignation: "It is obvious she can no longer fulfill her duties." In surprising turnaround, Tennessee’s Republican governor is pushing gun reform. HOSTS: Cenk Uygur (@CenkUygur) & Ana Kasparian (@AnaKasparian) SUBSCRIBE on YOUTUBE: ☞ https://www.youtube.com/user/theyoungturks FACEBOOK: ☞ https://www.facebook.com/theyoungturks TWITTER: ☞ https://www.twitter.com/theyoungturks INSTAGRAM: ☞ https://www.instagram.com/theyoungturks TIKTOK: ☞ https://www.tiktok.com/@theyoungturks 👕 Merch: https://shoptyt.com 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. Woo! It's up! Welcome to TYT. I'm your host, Anna Kasperian, and we have a massive and fantastic show ahead for you today. I'm super excited for an interview we're going to have later in the first hour.

My good friend, Ben Burgess, will be joining to talk about a strike currently taking place at Rutgers University. He is an adjunct professor there, and so he has a lot to share with us about why the workers there are striking and why it's important to show some solidarity with them. So that'll be later in the first hour. We're going to talk about the price of financing a car and how much of an economic burden that has become for ordinary Americans. That's also later in the first hour of the show. And in the second hour, oh my God, there's a lot to get to, including the latest revelations from Gabriel Sherman in regard to Rupert Murdoch and how he is panicking over potentially losing this defamation lawsuit that has been filed against Fox News by Dominion. voting systems. There's also some hot goss in regard to how he treats his wives and people that he wants to divorce. We'll get to all of that second hour of the show with John Iderolo,

of course. But as always, if you're watching us live, you can always help support the show by liking and sharing the stream. You can also become a member by going to t.com slash join. With that said, let's get to the first story, which involves a little bit of egg on my face. Last week, several of our viewers had tagged me along with other TYT network hosts on a Twitter thread about Rebecca Jones. Now Rebecca Jones tweeted that thread and for those of you who are unfamiliar with her or maybe forgot about who she is, she was the woman who claimed that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had retaliated against her for refusing to manipulate data about the number of COVID cases and deaths in the state. We reported on that story at the time, and we have some major corrections to make. But before I get to that, I want to talk about her Twitter thread from last week and also, more importantly, address why I refused to talk about her claims on the show.

Last week, Jones tweeted this. My family is not safe. My son has been taken on the governor's orders, and I've had to send my husband and daughter out of state for their safety. This is the reality of living in DeSantis's Florida. There is no freedom here, only retaliatory rule by a fascist who wishes to be king. In a subsequent tweet, she writes, A week after we filed our lawsuit against the state,

a kid claiming to be the cousin of one of my son's classmates joined their Snapchat group. They recorded their conversations and anonymously reported my son to police for sharing a popular internet meme. Wow. I mean, that sounds pretty serious. What was the popular internet meme? Well, Jones shared it in her next tweet. It's a man sleeping in a chair in a messy room with text reading, cops in their car waiting for the school shooter to kill himself so they can go in. Now Jones also says that the authorities said they had to complete a threat assessment since they received an anonymous complaint, which both the local cops and the school signed off on as not being a threat.

Finally, Jones says that the state had essentially kidnapped her son and that Ron DeSantis was engaging in political retaliation once again. She tweeted that an officer told me the state issued a warrant for my son's arrest for digital threats of terrorism. I asked on whose orders. The officer said it was the state. They aren't letting him come home tonight. They kidnapped my son.

These are obviously serious claims, and even though we had covered stories involving Jones on TYT that casted her in a positive light, I had recently come across some information that made me pause on taking her claims at face value. And I'm really happy that I did. Jones unfortunately has a pretty tumultuous history, especially on domestic matters. In July of 2019, prior to the pandemic, Jones had been charged with stalking a former boyfriend, who happened to be a student of hers at Florida State University. WUFT, which is an NPR PBS affiliate in Florida, reported at the time that police said she published a 68 page document

online discussing private details of her relationship with her former boyfriend including explicit texts and nude photographs and shared the link with him. The two had sex in a classroom in 2017 when Jones was his married professor at Florida State University, the man told police. She was fired from the university after threatening to give a failing grade to his roommate as revenge, she said. Jones said the two had a six-month affair until October of 2017, and the man is the father of her daughter born in July of 2018. Now, according to police, Jones wrote in emails to the man,

quote, you're going to be famous, we're going to destroy each other. This is never going to end. Jones was also charged with sexual cyber harassment and cyber stalking in the same incident, but prosecutors dropped those charges weeks later. There were other issues too. Jones was also previously charged in March of 2018 with felony robbery trespass and contempt of court for violating a domestic violence injunction in cases involved. the same ex-boyfriend.

But prosecutors also dropped those charges. She was separately accused of kicking the door of the man's SUV in October of 2017, but prosecutors decided to drop that case as well. Now look, her past criminal charges do not necessarily mean that her claims on Twitter were false or made up. But given the chaos in her private life, I felt there was a possibility that we weren't getting the whole story. I just didn't know for sure and I didn't feel comfortable simply regurgitating her claims on this show until I had some form of corroborating evidence. But that evidence never came.

In fact, now it's become increasingly clear that her version of events is not necessarily based in reality. Multiple students contacted school resource officers, law enforcement, and said they saw social media posts by her son stating that he wanted to shoot up a school or do something like that. And at least two images allegedly from his Snapchat have come out. This one, I'm feeling so silly. I might shoot up a building full of people and reaching for the officer's gun. Me every time I see school security. And it's more than just that. These are at least allegedly statements that he had made over social media or in chats with people. Been like three or four weeks since I got my new antidepressants, they're not really working.

I had no hope in getting better, so why not kill the losers at school? A teenager told one of the friends that he planned to shoot up to school on Thursday after spring break. There were too many things going on, so he postponed it until March 31st. I just want to stop and give Tizzy a lot of credit for correcting the story after he had originally taking Jones claims at face value. Now, the Miami Herald also corrected their original reporting of the story, sort of. An updated article contained the headline, son of Rebecca Jones, Florida whistleblower, arrested in probe of threatening internet posts. Why am I saying that the Miami Herald only partly corrected their inaccurate reporting?

Because believe it or not, I think we really need to call into question whether Rebecca Jones should be considered a whistleblower in the first place. Turns out that the narrative she pushed about being a brave data scientist who just wanted to get people accurate COVID numbers is not an open and shut case after all. Let's back up and kind of remember what transpired in 2020. So in 2020, Jones was working as a data scientist for the Florida Department of Health. Her role was to update the coronavirus dashboard, which indicated how many new COVID cases and deaths the state. was dealing with. In May of 2020, she was fired for what she claimed was her unwillingness to manipulate

the state's raw COVID data so it was would look like DeSantis urging the state to reopen was actually safe and reasonable. We bought this, I bought this. We reported exactly what she said, and now I have some degree of regret for doing that. I'll explain why. DeSantis denies this version of events and said that she was actually fired for repeated insubordination. Here's how democracy now covered the story at the time. When armed police raided the home of data scientist Rebecca Jones, who was forced to resign in May as the lead software developer for Florida's coronavirus data portal after she refused

to censor information about Florida's COVID-19 outbreak, police seized her computers, pointed guns at her children. Jones posted video of the raid on Twitter. My children. My children. Rebecca Jones accused Florida's governor DeSantis of sending the Gestapo after her. She wrote on Twitter, quote, this is what happens to scientists who do their job, honestly. This is what happens to people who speak truth to power. Now, I don't want anyone to be too hard or harsh toward Democracy Now because our reporting was very similar to Democracy Now's reporting.

every major publication repeated the same claims. So the reality of the situation is actually far more complex. In a tweet that she had posted and immediately deleted, Jones admitted that deleting deaths was never something I was asked to do. I never claimed it was. But that's a lie. It absolutely was what she had claimed. In yet another tweet that has since been deleted,

Jones said that, quote, the woman who told me to delete cases and deaths is now blaming doctors for the death backlog. The woman that she was referring to was Florida's Deputy Secretary of Health, Dr. Shamariel Robertson. In fact, her claims about Robertson is at the center of her case against the state of Florida. She repeated the claim again in February of 2021, tweeting that on the day Secretary Robertson asked me to change numbers and delete records to present a rosier picture of Florida's pandemic than reality. My Department of Health dashboard hit 100 million views. I didn't think my new

dashboard would ever reach that, just hit 150 million. So what really happened? Apparently Jones had decided to use the state's emergency alert system to send out a political message that read, quote, it's time to speak up before another 17,000 people are dead. You know this is wrong. You don't have to be part of this. Be a hero. Speak up before it's too late. Florida authorities say that the message can be traced to Jones's IP address. She denies sending it, but I think one can totally understand how much of an issue it is for anyone to send out a message like that in the middle of a pandemic. I mean, it's an emergency alert system in Florida. It could lead to mass panic. And it turns out her home was also rated for that reason. It was not rated

due to the COVID data dispute at all. Now let's go to May of 2022. In May of 2022, Florida's Office of Inspector General exonerated the state health officials, finding her claims against the Department of Health to be unsubstantiated. In December of 2022, she signed a deferred prosecution agreement admitting guilt to unauthorized use of the state's emergency alert system on November 10th of 2020, which again had resulted in her home being searched under warrant by state police in December of 2020. Now, after the raid, which Jones deceived everyone into thinking was carried out over COVID reporting, she started a GoFundMe page for her legal defense, and she raised hundreds

of thousands of dollars. Finally, right before Jones was fired in May of 2020, there was an internal complaint by her supervisor because she was publishing data from the dashboard and talking to the press, without permission. Jones's bad behavior was first formally reported May 6th of 2020 when the IT director at the Florida Department of Health, Craig Curry, emailed the department's labor relations consultant Tiffany Hicks looking for guidance on properly documenting actions of one of my employees and to get guidance on proper preparation in case action needs to be taken.

Oh, what's the insubordination? What did she do? Is it the accurate COVID reporting? No, actually not. Among the actions that Curry sought to document were that the employee Rebecca Jones had written posts on websites and social media regarding data and web product owned by the department that she works on without permission of management or communications, that she had released infographics that should have been identical to data published by our communication department, but were not. and most seriously that she had possibly exposed personal or personnel data in the process. Now as to clarify the problem by Hicks, Curry confirmed that between April 9th and April 30th of 2020, he had verbally told Jones to stop talking to the press without permission and more specifically that he had told her to stop releasing health department data or representing her employer without consent. I mean, look, as a state employee, you can't just go speak to the press when you are

not authorized to do so. And then you can't get surprised when you're reprimanded for doing so. But she wasn't even fired for that. She was told, hey, you know what, this is becoming a problem. You're misrepresenting some stuff here. You're talking to the press without authorization. You can no longer work on the COVID dashboard. Now, the next day, she explicitly violated. the instruction and locked out other DOH officials from having any access to it. She was the only person who had access to the coronavirus dashboard. Without telling a single person what she was doing, Jones created a new account within the GIS system and moved a tranche of data into it. This both broke the setup and

sincerely confused the department's IT staff. By 1.35 p.m. on the same day, Jones had been instructed to restore duck lows, that's one of the Department of Health's employees, full administrative access. Six and a half hours later, at 808, she responded by saying that she would, and then at 828, added that she intended to leave Florida to spend some time with her family in Mississippi, except she didn't. Turns out that Jones decided to stay working at the Florida Department of Health. Mind you, she hasn't even been fired yet or anything like that. And started playing nice. Encouraged by her improved behavior, Curry reported on May 15th of 2020

that the entire team seemed to be getting along and moving forward. But that didn't last long. At 146 p.m., Jones sent a mass email to everyone who used the dashboard, many of whom were external to the department explaining that she was no longer assigned to the dashboard and suggesting that she had been removed because she had refused to manipulate data. Within minutes, the press began crawling all over the story. Three days later, Jones was fired. Now look, she has decided to sue the state of Florida over this, and maybe through that lawsuit we will learn more details that vindicate Rebecca Jones.

and her version of events. But considering the documentation of her conduct within the Florida Department of Health, it's very detailed, we just shared it with you. There are a lot of details that she was deceptive about toward the public, a lot of details that she withheld or omitted in her retelling of the story. She made it seem as though Ron DeSantis ordered her home to be raided over her refusal to manipulate COVID data when the fact. fact of the matter was it had everything to do with her abuse of the state's emergency alert

system. And so I want to correct all of those errors that we had previously reported. And I want to be clear that out of everyone who works on the main show, the only person who should be held responsible for that is me. I'm the executive producer of the show and I screwed up royally. And part of the reason why I screwed up is because I had all these biases, of course, against Ron DeSantis. And I don't, I don't really feel bad about that because I think Ron DeSantis has done some pretty terrible things in the state of Florida. But it becomes a problem when that bias blinds you to what the facts of various stories happen to be. And I should have done my due diligence. I fail to do so. And by failing to do so, I feel like I've misled

the audience into thinking that Rebecca Jones is some sort of hero. Now, to be fair to myself, and to be fair to other independent media sources, if you're not doing your own original reporting, you're relying on the mainstream media narrative a lot of the time. And if they're not doing their due diligence, if they're allowing their personal biases to stand in the way of actual, factual reporting, well, that's unfortunately going to trickle into the way independent news sources

cover these types of stories as well. Fact of the matter is I want to make sure that I correct my errors. I get you guys accurate information and I avoid helping someone who might be a grifter from fundraising off of our own audience members. But I wanted to give you guys those corrections. I do apologize for those mistakes and I will do better moving forward. For now, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about the insanely astronomical price associated with financing

auto loans. What's up guys? Welcome back to the show. Wow, my hair's really messy right now. We've got a lot more news to get to. The next story is something that I've been wanting to talk about on the show for a while. now. And I think we're starting to see the impact of just how expensive it is to finance a car. And a lot of people need a car to get to and from work. So let's talk about it.

The Federal Reserve is continuing to put their foot on. Why just survive back to school when you can thrive by creating a space that does it all for you, no matter the size. Whether you're taking over your parents' basement or moving to campus, IKEA has hundreds of design ideas and affordable options to complement any budget. After all, you're in your small space era. It's time to own it. Shop now at IKEA.ca. The gas pedal when it comes to raising interest rates. And that means more Americans are dealing with the financial headaches associated with the high cost of borrowing.

Look, that's terrible enough for those who need to finance basic necessities like housing, food, or transportation. and consumer debt is already at an all time high, which is a testament to just how little Trump's $2 trillion tax cuts for the rich trickled down on us. But there are growing concerns regarding subprime loans in the auto industry, which could translate to borrowers finding themselves unable to cover their monthly car payments. In order to fully understand the gravity of this issue, we need to dive into the numbers and see just how much car debt Americans have racked up over the years. When the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates in response to the economic collapse of 2008, which made it far cheaper to borrow, Americans took on greater amounts of debt in order

to buy cars. In 2000, Americans had less than $600 billion in motor vehicle loans outstanding, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. By the third quarter of 2022, Americans owed just shy of $1.4 trillion on car and SUV debt, a full doubling in barely a decade. Soon Americans started taking out pricier car loans that could be paid off in a longer period of time, which is not a good thing. For example, according to Edmonds, in 2010, the average auto loan was around $26,000. But that figure jumped to 32,000 by 2019.

And while it was far more common to finance cars with five-year terms back in the day, Americans started signing up for six-year terms even before the pandemic. Some loans today have terms as long as nine years, believe it or not. And I know what you're all thinking. Obviously Americans started borrowing more for their cars due to inflationary pressure. The price of vehicles likely rose over the years, right? But believe it or not, that wasn't the case until the pandemic squeezed the supply of available vehicles.

From the mid-1990s until 2010, the price of a new vehicle remained flat. After 2010, the price rose by about 8% in total until 2020. So as with many facets of society, the pandemic disrupted and changed things. The shortage of car parts and semiconductors severely limited the supply of cars, and the Fed's ongoing fiscal policy of low interest rates, meaning cheap money, drove car prices way up. The price of new cars rose 20% between 2020 and November of 2022, the sharpest increase on record. The average price is now pushing $50,000. dollars. The price of used cars rose by an even steeper 56% through early mid-2020.

Another record. Things started to change, but not necessarily for the better. Since the beginning of 2022, the central bank reversed course on easy money and began raising interest rates to tamp down on inflation. That means that the cost of borrowing for a car has gone up significantly. The average auto loan interest rate was 5.66% in March of 2022. But by March of this year, the average cost of borrowing rose to nearly 9%. This data, which we received from Edmonds, we asked them to crunch the numbers in terms of how many people, what they're buying, what they're financing. Now, here's the average in the third quarter, financing a little over 41 grand, average rate, just under 6%. And the average, average new car monthly payment on a loan was $703.

Well, look what's happened in the last year and a half. The percentage of new vehicle buyers who are financing their auto loan with a payment of at least $1,000 a month, it's gone from 6% all the way up to 14% in September, 14.3% to be exact. But for some, a $700 monthly car payment is actually a bargain. Get a load of what the owner of Scott Adams, Toyota, which is located just outside of Kansas City, says about what he's personally experiencing at his own dealership. What we've noticed, especially here in the last 45 days with the Federal Reserve raising rates, that at least 50% of our customers are having payments over $1,000 a month.

When you include sales tax and sometimes property tax, it's even more than that. So it's at least 50% of the cars that and trucks that we are selling. And these astronomical car payments are causing some pretty serious issues. We're already starting to see the impact of these unaffordable loans. According to CNBC's reporting, while borrowers who are behind on their payments by more than 60 days represent a tiny portion of all outstanding auto loans at 1.84%. Their ranks are growing, according to a recent. report from Cox Automotive. The share was 26.7% higher in December than the year earlier,

and is largely concentrated among borrowers with low credit scores. And look, this is what I'm worried about. This might just be the tip of the iceberg, because some percentage of these outstanding loans are subprime and have rates that adjust along with the Federal Reserve's benchmark interest rate. Eight years of years ago, eight years ago, the New York Times reported on how banks and private equity firms fueled a boom in subprime auto loans to the most vulnerable car buyers. They wrote at the time that the New York Times had examined more than a hundred bankruptcy court cases, dozens of civil lawsuits against lenders, and hundreds of loan documents, and found that subprime auto loans

can come with interest rates that can exceed 23%. And they profiled some people like Rodney Durham. Rodney Durham stopped working in 1991, declared bankruptcy, and lives on Social Security. Nonetheless, Wells Fargo lent him $15,197 to buy a used Mitsubishi sedan. Durham's application said that he made $35,000 as a technician, at Lorde's Hospital in New York, according to a copy of the loan document. But he says, he told the dealer he didn't, he hadn't worked at the hospital for more than three decades. Now after months of Wells Fargo pressing him over missed payments, the bank has

repossessed his car. Durham is one of millions of Americans with unfortunately bad credit. And these are the people who were easily obtaining auto loans from used car dealers, including some who fabricate or ignore borrowers' abilities to pay. And the real question is how many of these subprime car loans exist? And how are these Americans making ends meet with rising interest rates that are making their loans way more expensive and difficult to pay on time? The problem is state and federal lawmakers allow banks and private equity firms to prey on working Americans, but once there's an economic hiccup, like pandemic induced inflation, these Americans

are on their own. That's what happened with Americans who lost their homes, who were foreclosed on as a result of predatory subprime mortgages during the 2008 collapse. And it's likely the same will happen again, only this time with cars. And keep in mind that cars lose value the second the driver, second the buyer, drives it off the lot. So even if the borrower tries to sell the car, it's very likely that they're underwater and owe more than what the car is worth. It's just one economic calamity after the next, after the other. And it's so incredibly frustrating because all of these pressures add up. We're all in this pressure cooker. And I think that explains a lot of the political violence we see in the country.

A lot of the anger that Americans feel gets redirected or misguided toward whatever imaginary scapegoats politicians want to direct them toward. And my heart breaks for these people. I mean, again, the New York Times reported on these subprime auto loans eight years ago. And nothing's really changed. And we're starting to see people default. on their car loans, and I gotta be honest, if people have $1,000 to pay every month just for their cars, I think the numbers that we're currently experiencing with auto loan defaults is only going to increase. And when these banks need help, because a huge portion of their clientele is now defaulting on loans that they have signed off on, are they gonna ask for help from

the federal government? We'll see how it plays out. But this is a story that I I think will explode in coming months. For now, we're gonna move on to one more story before we go to break and bring on our guest. I wanted to talk about, or more importantly, update you all on what Republicans are up to with these debt ceiling negotiations. The message from House Republicans to President Biden is clear.

There will be no increase in the debt limit in the absence of significant and meaningful spending cuts. Republican lawmakers are still planning to hold the debt ceiling hostage, Unless Democrats agree to cutting popular social safety net programs, which would be a bad idea. Luckily, the White House seems to reject this notion. We'll see how it actually plays out. But just to back up for a second, we all know this, right? Lawmakers absolutely need to raise the debt ceiling, and they need to do so as early as June or risk federal default. Federal default could basically just be a giant economic disaster.

It would be an economic disaster of epic proportions, and it could even tank the global economy. Now, their latest pitch is to require work requirements for the poorest Americans who rely on things like Medicaid and food stamps. So the House Budget Committee, according to the Washington Post, last week specifically called attention to what it does. described as a culture of government dependency, citing an uptick in spending in Medicaid and other federal programs, including food stamps, unemployment insurance, disability benefits, and tax credits for low income parents with children. Chi, I wonder what that could be about. I mean, did Americans really get a lot of assistance during the coronavirus pandemic?

Isn't it weird that there's an increase in the number of Americans who might need a little bit help might need to tap into our social safety net to make ends meet. I mean, have wages kept up with inflation? You hear Republicans talk about inflation all day, every day. Oh, it's all Biden's fault, inflation, inflation, inflation. So it's so weird to me that on one hand, they talk about how the cost of living has gone up rapidly. Wages have certainly not kept up with inflation. And then they turn around and say government dependency, we got to cut spending everybody.

Matt Gates is one of those Republicans, he was quoted as saying, I don't think hardworking Americans should be paying for all the social services for people who could make a broader contribution and instead are couch potatoes. You see, that is what the so-called populist Republicans really think about ordinary Americans. They're just couch potatoes. They're not struggling as a result of the high cost of living. They're not struggling with low wages. is they're just couch potatoes. But Matt Gates isn't the only Republican who said that.

There's Kevin McCarthy too. He published a letter in regard to the need to cut spending on these programs. But what would that look like? Well, in February, Matt Gates released legislation that would deny benefits to able-bodied adults unless they work for 120 hours per month, volunteer or participate in a work program for 80 hours, or participate in a combination of those activities. What's really interesting is these Republicans tend to avoid looking at any data that proves that most Americans who need to tap into social safety net programs are in fact working. It's just that their employers don't pay them enough, and so the federal government has

to subsidize their employer by providing these benefits. So if I were Matt Gates, first place I would look is how much Walmart pays its employees, how much these major corporations pay their employees. And if you have employees that are working full time jobs, but still are not making enough to make ends meet, maybe you do something to, I don't know, raise the federal minimum wage, for example. Let's get to McCarthy's letter, by the way. He also chimed in.

And he said, he called on the president to negotiate and spelled out his party's latest demands. That included steep spending cuts. Stop. Do you know how fast you were going? I'm going to have to write you a ticket to my new movie, The Naked Gun. Liam Nissan. Buy your tickets now. I get a free Tilly Dog.

Chilly Dog, not included. The Naked God. Tickets on sale now. August 1st. And new policies, strengthening work requirements for those without dependents. a reference to children, citing that the fact that Biden supported the welfare to work approach adopted under Clinton in the 1990s. So that is true. Biden supported a lot of really terrible policies. And so when Republicans cite Biden's past, it's pretty cringy for Biden, but it is true.

I want to be honest about that. Now, during the coronavirus crisis, lawmakers enacted temporary rules that essentially prevented states from pushing people out of the Medicaid rolls. But those prohibitions unfortunately expired on April 1st. And that opens the door for the state health officials to begin reevaluating eligibility. And here's what is likely to happen as a result of that. Approximately 15 million low income Americans are ultimately expected to lose their coverage as a result, including 6.8 million who still qualify for the program according to federal estimates in August. Look, luckily, so far, President Joe Biden, rhetorically at least, has made it seem as though he will reject any negotiation having to do with cutting social

spending, cutting these programs. He is not in favor of it. I'll give you a few examples. spokesperson for the White House said this, the president has been clear that he will oppose policies that push Americans into poverty or cause them to lose health care. That's why he opposes Republican proposals that would take food assistance and Medicaid away from millions of people by adding burdensome bureaucratic requirements. That last part's really important because it's not just about working or it's not just about the work requirements. It's also about the added bureaucracy that creates more obstacles in getting Americans the help they need. And I'm sorry, especially when it comes to things

like food stamps. Okay, so let's say that the dream case that Republicans have in their minds of some lazy parent who refuses to work is true. But that parent has children, You're really going to take food stamps away from that family over your your discomfort with a parent who refuses to work? Why should the children suffer the consequences of that? And when we consider how much money we waste every single year on corporate subsidies, the defense department, I mean, there's waste all around. But there's never any discussion about cutting defense spending, ever, ever, year after year. They consistently increase defense spending. But when it comes to feeding our own children, when it comes to taking care of our fellow

Americans, these so-called populist Republicans want to do away with it. I mean, it's just so incredibly gross. And this is what they do. This is what they want. And there is no reason that the Biden administration should engage in these types of negotiations. because there's no way that the Republican Party is going to want egg on its face by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. Refusing to raise the debt ceiling would mean that there would be a global economic collapse. That wouldn't just be bad for all of us, it would be bad for them

too. So, I mean, I guess it might be a game of chicken, but I think the Biden administration should call their bluff. I think the Democratic Party should call their bluff and refuse to cut any spending pertaining to the social safety net, whatever we have left of the social safety net. Really, the Republican Party has little to stand on here. And if I were a member of the Democratic Party, if I were a member of the Biden administration, I'd be talking about what Republicans want to do day in and day out. This is who they are. This is what they represent. Even Donald Trump, as buffoonish as he is, was smart enough to understand that attacking Ron DeSantis over his calls to cut Social Security and Medicare would bode well for

campaigning purposes. But where are the Democrats on this issue? They need to be raising hell over what Republicans are threatening to do. And I just haven't seen enough of it. All right, we got to take a break when we come back. Ben Burgess joins us. us to talk about a worker strike at Rutgers University. See you in a few. 94% of members who voted across both full and part-time faculty unions voted yes to authorize a strike. You made it clear, we are strike ready. Because we're fighting for a better record for our students, our communities, and ourselves as workers. We are strike ready because of the organizing work of hundreds of you, our members.

We made calls, we set texts, we knocked on doors. We've taken it to the streets to see. say that we are Rutgers because it's time for a fair contract now. Academic workers at Rutgers University are on strike to fight for better wages and better benefits. Here to talk to us about the strike is my good friend, Ben Burgess, who is also the host of Give Them an Argument and the author of Give Them an Argument, Logic for the Left. Ben, it's so good to have you on the show. I think this is the first time I've had you on TYT. I think so. I was trying to remember there was like a no filter thing back in like 2019 or something.

Yeah, I do remember that. You're right about that. Well, Ben is someone who has, well, he's part of the strike, which is why he's on here to talk about the strike itself. So Ben, I loved your piece in Jacobin because it touched on so many different arguments that I think people need to be cognizant. of in particular how oftentimes people think of professionals as something separate from workers. But when it comes to academic workers at Rutgers, while they might be professionals, they're still workers. And they're still dealing with a lot of the stuff that workers in other fields complain about, low pay, you know, terrible benefits. And I think that the higher education system is such a good example of the, as you mentioned, Uber, what do you say Uberization

of education? So talk about that a little bit. Yeah, I mean, I think that oftentimes when people think about professionals, what we really meet is people who like need advanced degrees to have a job or there's some kind of like social prestige associated with the job. But the problem is that you can't really eat social prestige or use it to pay. the bill, the co-pay, if you need to go see a doctor. And oftentimes, especially as higher education, gets Uber-ized. In other words, with an increasingly large section of the workforce that's actually teaching undergraduate classes, increasingly resemble the labor conditions, not of traditional cab drivers with benefits and pensions, but Uber drivers have to worry about getting

kicked off of the app at any time. Increasingly, people who are a cultural to think of them themselves this way, that they, you know, oh, I'm not like a worker, you know, I'm a, I'm a professional. I'm somebody who's like navigating the world in this different way. Actually, no, what they really need is the same kind of collective struggle for a better deal that everybody does, that Uber drivers themselves do, that the people who, you know, who might like make coffee that, you know, if you're going to, you know, walk into class, at Rutgers at the New Brunswick campus, you're taking a class at that College Avenue campus,

and you stop at Starbucks. Well, the people who are making your coffee at Starbucks, they need to stand up for a better deal at the workplace, and the people who are teaching classes do too. And I think that a lot of people just hear, well, somebody's a professor, and what they think of is like a tenure track professor who has a high salary and is going to retire from that.

And oftentimes that's really disconnected from the reality of what the working conditions are like for a lot of these people. Absolutely. I mean, I think that the tenured professor position is becoming rarer. It's becoming more a thing of the past. Of course, there's better pay, better benefits, more academic freedom when you're tenured. And instead of hiring tenured professors, universities are relying. more and more on adjunct professors, which I believe is your title at Rutgers. So can you talk a little bit about what it's like? Like, what are the differences in pay? What are the differences in terms of workplace protections when it comes to a tenured professor

versus a lecturer or an adjunct professor? Yeah, so adjunct professors or like part-time lectures is the job title, which is what I've been on and off since 2016 at Rutgers. don't have any meaningful job security at all that you could be have taught there for 20 years. And it's still a question on a semester by semester basis, whether you're going to continue to have a job there, which, as you say, whatever official assurances there are makes academic freedom a bit of a joke. Because, of course, you could always say, hey, you know, you're not being fired because of something you said. You know, we just don't need as many people this semester.

We're good. And one of the things that I really want to emphasize here is that one of the key demands in the strike is equal pay for equal work. So right now, yeah, I still teach a couple of classes for Rutgers, and it's still, you know, it's still a significant portion of my income. People think that like podcasted and freelance writing make a lot of money, you know, that I have sad news. for them, you know, but, but it used to be for years when I was living in New Jersey and I was, I was part of the, you know, elected board that ran the union. It used to be my only job. And back then, every, every year, I would either teach two classes in the fall and three in the spring or the other way around. And that wasn't unique to me. That was a very, very common setup

for people who were essentially full-time adjuncts. And the reason that it was always either three in the fall, two in the spring, or the other way around is that was one. class short of the line where they would be contractually obligated to reclassify me as full time, pay me way more money and give me health insurance. And so what we want is the phrase is fractional pay, which means that if you, okay, tenure professors, they're expected, they have research requirements, they serve on committees, the administration could argue that the pay difference reflects that, fair enough. But if you are a full-time NTT, non-tenuretrap professor, Whatever you're getting paid, if an adjunct is doing five, six of the workload, it's exactly the same job, they should be getting five, six of the pay.

I think that that makes a lot of sense. Equal pay for equal work makes all the sense in the world. What has the response from the university been so far? Yeah, so so far they have totally rejected that idea of equal pay for equal work, which of course they do because their business model right now relies. on, uh, rejected that. And by the way, we could have a whole conversation about the amount of money that Rutgers administrators regularly pay themselves and bonuses because they thought they did such a good job. And, uh, please get into that. But after you finish this thought. Yeah, the previous, the previous year. But, um, but they have, uh, they, they want this more precarious workforce. Uh, they, they don't want to have to pay a lot for this. Uh, you know,

They don't want to have to spend a lot of money on the people who are actually making the university run. I mean, if you have no classes, there's no university. Everything else is built around that. They certainly don't want to give people health insurance, you know, let adjuncts buy into either the grad student or the normal faculty health insurance plan, which means that at best people are buying insurance off the exchanges, which I'm sure everybody watching this, knows how much of a joke that could often be in terms of what's actually covered and how much, you know, like it's like, it's like the health insurance equivalent of the kind of car insurance where you're essentially just paying a fee for being allowed to drive. It's not going to really,

it's not going to really help you that much if you get into an accident. And I should But Ben, I mean, sorry to interrupt you, but, you know, I want to give the university the benefit of the doubt. I mean, do they have the resources to provide these benefits and, you know, just provide all these, like, lavish pay, like the lavish pay, the benefits? I mean, it's, you know, it's a university that they've got to pay other staff. I mean, they're probably struggling, right? I mean, that's the reason why they're unable to do this for you. Yeah. What would think?

But if you look up, like, people just do a quick Google search for the Rutgers. A, A-A-U-P-A-F-T, that's the main union at Rutgers. By the way, one of the side issues in the strike is that one of the demands is to consolidate all three of the unions that represent faculty members of Rutgers, so they can't do the divide and conquer stuff. They have to negotiate with everybody at the same time. But if you look at any of the three faculty unions' websites, you can see detailed breakdowns of how much money Rutgers has in the bank, how much money Rutgers is spending.

on the ever-increasingly spiraled administration costs because administrators all think they're essential and they keep hiring more of themselves. And you can see the point-by-point comparisons and the how could we pay for this. And I guess the last point I would just make about this question of how to to pay for it is that let's say that the end result of this in a few years, that everything that happened, everything's been demanded in the strike was granted, and that maybe over the course of the coming years, Rutgers would end up hiring fewer adjunks, okay, on one level, that would be sad, you know, and certainly, you know, certainly it might be, you know, might even be for me,

let's say for the sake of argument, right? Although, honestly, they have more money than you'd think. They just don't want to spend it on this. But even if they did, I think that there's a much bigger trend in higher education here that I think at some point somebody has to say enough is enough. And if you can't afford to pay people to teach a class for decent pay, for benefit, so they can go to see the doctor if they get sick, that I'd say you can't really afford to pay somebody for that class.

So even if they were broke, which I think if you look at those breakdowns, they're absolutely not broke, then I would still say that we don't want the kind of future for Rutgers in particular, for higher education in general, that looks like this. We want one where, you know, we want one where people have equal pay for equal work, where people have dignity, where people have job security. And if we get all that and then like the next fight is for allocated more money for education in New Jersey, that I'm much happier to do this than just doing the status quo for here on out because, hey, at least you have a job stop complaining.

Yeah, absolutely. So currently there are around 9,000 workers who are on strike at Rutgers University. Ben, keep at it. I love that you guys are taking a stance and a strike is a great way to do it. You've got union representation. I think consolidating the unions makes a lot of sense as well. And you always look out for labor. If you guys are not familiar with Ben's show, definitely check him out.

Give them an argument, is the name of his show. You're just one of the most principled people on the left in my mind because you're always looking out for what matters the most, which is workers' rights, labor power, organizing, and hopefully you'll come on soon to tell us that you guys succeeded in getting what you wanted through the strike. But thank you for taking the time to come on, Ben. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I cannot tell you how much I always enjoy talking to you. Thank you, Ben. All right, have a good night. And everyone else, we're going to take a Quick break. When we come back, John Iderola will be joining us for the second hour,

which is chock full of pretty crazy stories, including new reporting about Rupert Murdoch, and how he's panicking about that Dominion lawsuit behind the scenes. That and more coming up. 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 Huger, and I'll see you soon.