The Young Turks - Pro Life Schills

Episode Date: May 14, 2022

The GOP claim that President Biden has caused a baby formula shortage by allegedly sending flats of formula across the southern border. Footage of Israeli soldiers assaulting Palestinian pallbearers holding the casket of a murdered journalist has leaked. While Republicans continue to blame the Democratic administration for inflation and surging gas prices, all signs really point to Donald Trump wrecking our economy. Organizations across the nation are finally starting to reward their employees by increasing their wages. Is crypto-cash really worth the hype, or is it really just destined to fail? Hosts: John Iadarola, Cenk Uygur, Jessica Burbank  ***  The largest online progressive news show in the world. Hosted by Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian. LIVE weekdays 6-8 pm ET.  Help support our mission and get perks. Membership protects TYT's independence from corporate ownership and allows us to provide free live shows that speak truth to power for people around the world. See Perks: ▶ https://www.youtube.com/TheYoungTurks/join SUBSCRIBE on YOUTUBE: ☞ http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=theyoungturks FACEBOOK: ☞ http://www.facebook.com/TheYoungTurks TWITTER: ☞ http://www.twitter.com/TheYoungTurks INSTAGRAM: ☞ http://www.instagram.com/TheYoungTurks TWITCH: ☞ http://www.twitch.com/tyt 👕 Merch: http://shoptyt.com ❤ Donate: http://www.tyt.com/go 🔗 Website: https://www.tyt.com 📱App: http://www.tyt.com/app 📬 Newsletters: https://www.tyt.com/newsletters/ If you want to watch more videos from TYT, consider subscribing to other channels in our network: The Damage Report ▶ https://www.youtube.com/thedamagereport TYT Sports ▶ https://www.youtube.com/tytsports The Conversation ▶ https://www.youtube.com/tytconversation Rebel HQ ▶ https://www.youtube.com/rebelhq TYT Investigates ▶ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwNJt9PYyN1uyw2XhNIQMMA 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. 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. to own it. Shop now at IKEA.ca.ca. Drop it!

Drop it! Drop it! Power, power panel, Jake Uger, John Iderola, Rebel headquarters contributor, Jessica Burbank. Okay, so Jessica, what a nice background. I like that a lot. I don't know what that is, but I like it. Thank you. It's all Grateful Dead posters.

Oh, I see. Okay, indeed. So, a big show ahead for you guys, how Trump caused inflation. I hope we get to the crypto crash. I hear the Republicans are pro-life. Are they? Okay. Democrats fall into another Republican trap.

Of course. Of course they do. Just as we predicted. So tons and tons of amazing stuff on the show today. And also, of course, if you remember, food for thought trivia is today. So make sure you're paying attention to the show. In the bonus episode for the members, we do the trivia question. And somebody wins, not somebody.

50 people win a $100 gift card to blue apron. True gift card. You don't have to enter your credit card information. Boom, $100 in free food. Today's the day. And of course, be a member t.com slash join to participate. And if you already are and want to know how to participate, it's super easy. Go to t.yot.com slash food.

All right. Iarola. That's me. Okay, let's talk about this. The U.S. is currently experiencing a shortage of a number of different products. for varying reasons. One of them, and one of the most critical ones, is baby formula. Now, we've already broken down on the show earlier this week. Some of the reasons that that's happening, much of it has to do with negligence of the corporations and concern that contaminated

baby formula could take the lives of more babies. But in any event, we're at the position right now where in some areas of the country, you can't find formula. Or you might have to drive for hours to get to it. If you try to find it online, It might be marked up several times, and that is very much an issue. But there's a new issue that the right has pounced on, and that is that they have found some formula that might in theory have been being given to migrants, and they are incensed over that, as Marjorie Green will make clear in this press conference. Here's what we know.

This government is failing the American people, the taxpayers and its citizens. Pictures are emerging today from the border where the Biden administration has been sending pallets of baby, baby formula for illegal mothers and their babies, while American mothers and babies cannot find baby formula. This is completely unacceptable, and this needs to end now. Now, just to start off the idea that a mother can be illegal is disgusting in every possible way. possible way. The idea that these babies having the formula are illegal is disgusting, but it's on brand for Marjorie Green. Everything about this argument is disgusting. She is there referencing the fact that there are photos of baby formula at a border facility. There's a Washington Examiner article that has gone into this. Immigrants being detained

at the border received baby formula, and yes, that was at the same time that there is a nationwide shortage. So there's of course some facts about this that you need to understand. The thing about being a migrant detained in a border facility is that you can't leave. And so if there's a baby in a cell there, they can't get formula. They can't go to the store, they can't drive hours, they can't go online and order it. Either it's there or it's not. And the baby can't go like you'll go into hibernation. Now she would, she's not actually saying what she wants to be done there.

She's not explicitly saying that she wants to see more of these migrant babies. literally starve to death when the U.S. government has the capacity to stop that from happening. But what she does want to do is get white conservatives to feel like something is being taken from them. Brown people are taking something that they want or need, and that is a major problem. You can see this photo, by the way, this is one of the things that's sparking it. As with so many things in American politics, a conservative took a photo of a shelf, and that's pretty much the whole story, no critical thought necessary. So anyway, as ridiculous as all this is, as heartless as the core of this is, stated or unstated, it is likely in America to be a problem for the

Biden administration. Okay, so this is a great story for you to understand how framing works and how lies in the media works and certainly lies in politics. So you know how much of the formula goes down to those detention centers when you take the whole country into account? About 0.001%. So if we said, okay, you illegal mothers, we're taking that baby formula from you and gave it to other people. First of all, how, where would we give it? Would we just bring it to the closest grocery stores and give it away to random people? What do you mean take that? Sounds like socialism.

And give it, right? And so the mechanics behind it are near impossible anyway, but it wouldn't make any difference. It's a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage, right? And if, as John pointed out, the moms can't leave the detention center. Now, if you're having shortage issues in America, I hate that that's happening. I'm going to tell you why it's happening, the actual reason in a second, okay, but you have some set of options. You can go online, you can go to different drive further.

There's a bunch of things you can do. But if you're in a detention center and you cannot nurse and you do not get the baby formula, there is no other option, your baby will starve and die. And this is the pro-life party. You understand, total and utter lie. They don't care about babies at all. They're like, oh, it's the illegals. Kill their babies.

Kill them. Who cares? Don't give it to them. Well, then you got to let them leave, right? You got to let them leave the detention center. Otherwise, the kid is literally going to start. And they say, I don't care. It's not just Marjorie Taylor Green.

There's tons of other Republicans that are tweeting about it today. Kill the babies, kill the babies, kill the babies, the Republicans say. But that is literal in this case. It's literal because they're saying, do not give them the one thing that will allow them to survive. They never cared about life. They never, ever cared about it. All they care about is controlling women's bodies. I get to tell you what to do with your body, said the Freedom Party.

You see how everything Republicans say is a lie? I'm not kidding. And you would all know this if the mainstream media didn't constantly call everything even. It's not even. Those babies would actually die. That's an actual issue. Now, why did the baby formula shortage happen in the first place? We did a long segment on it earlier in the week.

Summised super quick. There was a plant in Michigan, one of the major distributors, Abbott, turns out they didn't like regulation. It cost them a nickel, it costs them a dime. That's hyperbole, right? But it cost them a tiny amount of money to fix their machines. They hid it from the FDA. They didn't fix the machines.

And guess what? Babies died because they had toxic material in their. bacteria in their baby food. So what do you want us to do? Do you want us to sell, have them sell the toxic baby food that's actually killing babies? As Republicans chant, kill the babies, kill the babies. Who cares? Money, profit, right? Okay, so we had to shut the goddamn factory down. Lack of regulation. Whose fault is that? Unquestionably, the Republicans. Donald Trump said, don't do any regulation. If you do one piece of regulation, you have to take two away. Make sure that the babies are not protected, right? And by the way, why is there only three major baby food companies?

That's why when one of them can't produce baby formula, we have this massive shortage. Because of corporate consolidation, which both corporate Republicans and corporate Democrats allowed to happen and celebrate it because they were bribed by those same corporations in the form of campaign contributions. So that's the reality. Now, by the way, if you go to right wing media, they'll pretend that all the baby. formula went down to the detention centers and that it's all the illegal's fault when it's reality when they're actually protecting their corporate buddies who are the ones that created the problem in the first place you turn out on mainstream media

you'll hear like oh are the Democrats going to apologize for sending the formula to the babies who would starve otherwise and they'll have a legitimate debate over that all right jessica yeah as of earlier today no one had even confirmed that that photo of the supposed stocked palettes of baby formula was actually at an immigrant detention center. And if you look closely at that image, the top shelf and the bottom shelf are applesauce. Only the middle shelf is baby formula. And I'm pretty sure you cannot give a baby apple sauce as a substitute for breast milk. And it's go go squeeze. That's a great apple sauce. I eat it. If I could produce applesau, that would be amazing. But like I said,

you cannot give this to a baby. And Marjorie Taylor Green is to to women across the country that they need to start breastfeeding again, which is something that's really difficult to do once you stop. Also at the immigrant detention centers, there's still family separation. So babies aren't even with their mothers. The mothers there probably couldn't breastfeed if they want to. The earliest baby that was found separated at an immigrant detention center was four months old. And we've got confirmation this is still happening under Biden.

And so Marjorie Taylor Green's brilliant solution also, solution also ties into what Republicans are doing right now by suggesting that women should just breastfeed. You're making the assumption they have the time to do it. They have the energy to do it. They have the calories to do it instead of giving them the baby formula. And this is suggesting that women's bodies should be used for childbearing. Again, this narrative is coming up from the right, taking away women's freedoms. Marjorie Taylor Green is talking about this like women are at disposable, are at disposal just ready to breastfeed their kids whenever, you know, they need to. And they really can't. That's not a, that's not a good

solution to offer as a public official. Well, look, I will say, Jessica, as a person who shares certain characteristics with Republican men who are tweeting a lot about this, I think it's kind of disgusting that you think we should understand women's bodies. They're to be controlled and not to understood. To the extent that I understand them, they're generally gross. I don't like what I already know and I wish I could forget it. But anyway, yeah, they're making all these claims about, no, instantly, it's like a McDonald's Pepsi dispenser. You just turn it on and you make the milk. No, the entire thing is ridiculous. They don't care. Fundamentally, Marjorie Green doesn't care about any bit of this. She doesn't want to release them so they can go track

down the formula themselves. She doesn't want them to get the formula obviously, even though she would say, I think, that if we're going to be locking up people in all of these different prisons throughout the country, that in theory we shouldn't let them die in there? None of that or the trying to let these babies die seems particularly like anything Jesus would do, but she's the Christian. What would I know? I'm a godless atheist. What I do know is that they are running with this. And I think we have a bit of a montage of just yesterday's commentary on Fox News about this very specific photo. illegals get baby formula from border agents, but we can't get it at Walgreens. Does any of this makes sense? Of our border children, the illegal immigrant children are getting formula. So American families, there's a shortage, but if you're a micron, don't worry because Uncle Sam

has a stash of that. We reached out to Customs and Border Protection to find out how much baby formula the agency has purchased, they would not tell us. It's not their duty to respond to the public, apparently, but they didn't deny that they had bought it. The spokesman told us that, Quote, ensuring migrants have formula is in line with this administration's commitments. So how much more this people are going to take, you wonder? It's too humiliating. Palates and pallets of baby formula for illegal immigrants and their families. Even as hardworking American families, we're now suffering a massive, a nationwide formula shortage.

Illegals pouring across and being flown all across America, crowding our schools, spreading illness and disease, working for undermarket pay. Democrats just don't care. No one is convinced by today's staged White House baby formula event either that Biden did. Okay, so they want to know what the Biden administration is going to do about the formula shortage. So they did a whole press conference specifically about that. No one's going to be convinced about that. And the earlier clip, by the way, was part of her monologue about the formula. It wasn't directly about it.

I just want you to know that if you tune into Fox News, it will literally just be this white woman shouting at you that immigrants are dirty. They're taking pleasure cruises around the country to spread disease and then work for undermarket wages, which is their fault. They're the bad guy that corporations will hire them for less money. And she certainly doesn't want regulations that would either punish those employers or make sure that there is a higher minimum wage that they would have to abide by. The entire thing is political opportunism. And that's it.

And the final thing I will say is, I mentioned this on the damage report, if Fox News is apparently just discovered that there are some people that are having difficulty feeding their children, I'm going to blow their minds right now. That was true yesterday. And the week before and the month before and the year before that, food insecurity is a very common thing in the United States because we don't care about our people. But she'll note that if some white family in West Virginia has kids that are going to sleep hungry every night, do you think, Roger Green wants to help them pay for that food. You think she wants like recurring payments to make sure that they can afford that? The Republican Party had been fighting against food stamps and all those programs for literally years. So it's very convenient for them to come at the end and suddenly declare that they care if babies are on the brink of starvation.

Yeah, so here's my last couple of thoughts. The right wing loves any story where there's a shortage of resources because it makes people more tribal. And their side is tribal. So they go, oh my God, we got a grab to stop before somebody else does. Oh, God damn it. The others, the others are coming to grabbing our food, right? And that makes them panic. It triggers them more than anything.

And Fox News knows that. And then Marjorie Taylor Green and that's why they're pressing on that wound, right? Now, the second reason, as I said earlier, is a distraction. Because the literally 99.999% of the problem was created by a corporation, Abbott. Fox News, you're going to talk about the majority of the problem? No, they're going to distract the whole country into thinking the real problem is the point 0.001%. That's exactly how distractions work. And why do they do that distraction?

It's a two-for. One is get you to hate the others. By the way, calling them disease and saying that they're spreading disease across the country, it is classic Nazi propaganda. That's exactly what they said about Jews and outside. They're spreading disease, and we've got to make sure we stop them, because they're all diseased. So Laura Ingram, very literally using Nazi propaganda there, okay?

Why? One is to blame the others and rally your tribalistic Neanderthals to your side. And the other is to say, do whatever you do, do not look at the real problem, which is corporations like us at Fox News. Remember Fox News is a multi-billion dollar corporation. And who are all their advertisers? Multi-billion-dollar corporations. That is literally how they make their money, marketing for corporations. So they don't want you to know what's actually causing the baby formula shortage.

You can look it up. These are verifiable facts. They are definitely lying to you. But I'll end on a fun note. Nevinix, one of our members, wrote in, so life begins at naturalization ceremony. Apparently, that's the new right wing ideology. life only matters if it's an American life, and maybe, and especially if it's a male, but if you're a mom that isn't American and you made the mistake of coming here with your baby,

there's a good chance we're going to kill your baby if the Republicans get their way, because they're pro life. It's absolutely so backwards. I mean, the Republicans always tell us that we have to get the government out of the market. The government shouldn't intervene, but yet you blame the Biden administration. for something that was sourced in a corporation. They're not even holding the FDA accountable if you want to point to somewhere in the government to look at in this.

And they're never going to make that argument about antitrust laws in regard to baby formula. Baby formula is already so expensive because the market is so consolidated. The price went up 18% over the past year. And baby formula is just dehydrated milk, sugar and vitamins. And it costs a family $428 a month. We see people stealing baby formula on a regular basis, but they want to sensationalize this because the Republican Party operates on mobilizing fear. Yeah, well, we should definitely take our first break. I will give one tip to the right.

We've been very critical of the right. I'll give a tip though. Before we go to the break, if there are all of these undocumented immigrants being flown to every community across American spreading disease, shouldn't you get vaccinated? Shouldn't you wear a mask if there's all these like plague bears coming to your community? Nope, that would be too much of an imposition. Okay, interesting. Anyway, we're going to take a break. We come back. We're going to be talking about just horrible footage coming out of, out of Israel and Palestine. We'll have that for you after this. And Jessica, with you guys. All right, John's got food in his name. So Johnny Pye, take it away.

There's a shortage of pie. What is John done with it? He's giving it to the illegals. There are good conservatives going without pie, and that progressive just has it in his name. Anyway, well, with that said, I have now provided a really awkward setup for an incredibly serious and disturbing story.

So it is what it is. Let's transition into this. Okay, so if it's not clear from what you just saw right there. Those are mourners carrying the coffin of the recently slain journalist Shereen Abu Ackle, who are being charged by Israeli forces being knocked into by them and nearly losing control of the coffin. We're going to explain the rationale that's been given by Israel as to why what you just saw had to happen. But first, I want you to see more of the footage. If you're only

not have heard what then have seen then have seen a massive crowd of full riot gear equipped security forces running around and wildly having at the mourners. who had gathered to take the coffin from a hospital in East Jerusalem to a church for Abu Aucle's funeral. That's all it was. And I personally cannot conceive of what possible rationale you could have for what we just saw. But they're going to try to justify it. They said that the crowd was chanting nationalist incitement. Okay? The officers had given them a warning. So if you give them a warning, then it is justified to do what they did.

They said they were forced to act because rioters began throwing stones towards the policemen. Now, they wanted to demonstrate that. That is being presented as evidence. So they distributed video showing an empty plastic bottle and two other bottle-shaped objects being thrown in the direction of officers. They had undated video showing several stones on the ground. So I'm convinced, no, but seriously, like the issue that the forces had was the that they could not take the fact that these mourners were chanting nationalist incitement. They thought that, well, we just can't abide that.

But they're in a situation where the incident you just saw could have gone one of a couple different ways. They could have chanted the national incitement at you. And then there was no violence. And everybody goes on about their day dealing with this incredibly difficult situation as the best they can. Now imagine if you just had that play out for years and years where you actually used restraint. and you didn't brutalize these people. Is it possible that there would be less nationalist incitement being chanted at you? No, instead, there was a chant, and they immediately began to beat people, masses of people,

dozens of people knocking a coffin to the ground. Is it possible that that will lead to more nationalist incitement? This is all incredibly simple, nobody should have to explain this. And nobody should have to demonstrate it, considering that we are many, many, many decades into. this same cycle being played out on a daily basis. But what do I know? I didn't have a bottle thrown at me, I guess. So maybe I don't understand the situation.

Yeah, so there's the short term problems here in the long term problems. In terms of short term issues. So our right wing will of course say Israel's right about everything. Forgetting all theoretical principles that they have. Now Israel's a different country, they have different laws on freedom of speech. But our right wing says freedom of speech is the most important thing in the world. They were beaten for a chant. Oh, it was a nationalistic chant.

Wait, I thought the right wing loved nationalism. Oh, nationalism for you, but not for anyone else, right? And so that was right to beat them over a chant. Oh, to be fair, there was an empty plastic bottle. And by the way, the right wing would say that's self-defense. Kyle Rittenhouse killed someone over because they threw an empty plastic bag at him. plastic bag at him. So to the right wing, they're like, oh, why don't they just kill everybody at the funeral?

Maybe the easier way to go. And so, look, the journalist herself was killed, and it looks like likely Israeli terrorism. Wait, I just called the terrorism. You're not allowed to do that. No, when random people kill civilians, we call that terrorism. Or a non-state actor kills someone, we call that terrorism. But when a state kills someone, that's awesome. That's just, that's called freedom.

Is it? No, it's still terrorism, right? Killing a civilian, killing a civilian. And why? Why do they do it? Oh, well, because we have to imprison all the Palestinians. We have to keep them in occupied territories and never give them a state. That's your justification.

But why? Well, they're savages. You know, if we gave them a state, they're so violent by nature. They would definitely attack us. Is that right? I mean, is that your real ideology? No, no, but seriously, I've heard this my entire life as if it wasn't racist. Well, the Palestinians would attack Israel.

Why would they attack Israel? Well, you know, Muslims, you know how they are. In this case, by the way, the reporter is Christian. But it doesn't matter, Palestinian savages. Savages. No, the people actually doing the violence, the state violence, which is much more significant, kills much more civilians, and has held millions of people hostage. For now what, over 50 years, are we past 60 years now?

How long are you going to keep them hostage because of your racism? I know that hurts a lot of people's feelings, I do. You know what hurts people's feelings more, being murdered? And then as they're carrying your coffin, attacking the pallbearers, that hurts feelings a little bit more. But I know they're Palestinians, they don't count, do they? Jessica. This is hard to talk about this, I swear I'm gonna connect it to what we just showed, but Nina Turner's loss last week had I think me and a lot of people on the left

thinking about the influence of Israel on the mindset in the United States about the apartheid in Palestine and the treatment of the Palestinian people by Israel. Nina Turner's opponent, Chantelle Brown, was bankrolled by the American Israel pack and the Democratic majority for Israel. And of course, key progressives decided to endorse Chantelle Brown through the CPC see while we had aOC and Bernie Sanders endorsing Nina Turner, of course, AOC endorsed pretty last minute. But I think this signaled that progressives were afraid to get involved, not because they believe they were outspent, because we've always said that we believe organized people beats organized money. So that can't be what was going on here. But it is the case that

progressives still don't condemn what's happening in Palestine. And I think a lot of this is because, of the spending of groups like APAC and because American mainstream media is so one-sided and so pro-Israel that Americans have a hard time making up their mind about this when they're just getting one side of this. So the type of organizing we need to do as progressives to win in races where DMFIs bankrolling opponents is going to have to involve a conversation around Israel and Palestine. And that's a really hard conversation. But we're at the point where we have people like the president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, saying that what he sees happening in Palestine reminds him of their own history of apartheid. So if you think that if apartheid in

South Africa was happening today and you would be against it, but you're not condemning what's going on in Palestine, you're probably, you're probably wrong. And that's hard to say. But it is the case that the United States never has a good track record on this stuff. When the United nations was condemning apartheid in South Africa or when the United Nations did that, the United States didn't join in for 30 years later. And so we've really been behind on a lot of international issues like this. And it's going to have to involve really tough organizing if we're going to beat out these packs because they're going to keep spending money.

Okay, I'll just clarify one thing. It sucks, and I hate it, but I know for a fact that the progressives were scared of the money. And so, Democratic majority for Israel and a couple of other packs that are right-wing Israeli packs, or if acts that support Israel, are, didn't want to just defeat Nina Turner because she, they said she believed in Palestinian rights. Of course not. It's, how dare she? How dare she believe that Palestinians are actually human beings like the rest of us? And they say they're not racist. Okay, but that, it wasn't just to defeat her. It was to send a message. If you dare oppose Israel, our lobbyists and our PACs, will come spend millions and millions and millions of

dollars against you. Now, that's a super uncomfortable fact, especially because the history of anti-Semitism connects to Jews in different countries controlling the politicians. And that was not the case, and that is not the case here in America today. It wasn't true in the past. It's not true today. And some of the best progressives in the country are Jewish. And they're all, and they're battling the right wing Israeli packs, okay? But is it true that those packs spent millions of dollars to send a message? Of course it is. Of course, what do you think they just did it for fun?

They've just like PACs and lobbyists are not interested in their cause when the cause is called Democratic majority for Israel. We have mainstream media that just like says absurd things like, no, they're not for Israel. Then why did they call it for Israel? They're for Cleveland. Are they? Are they? Because they didn't, it's not called that. So it's of course the lobbyists matter. Of course, of course millions of dollars matter. Did it intimidate progressives and other Democrats in Congress? I can tell you for a fact. Yes, the money did intimidate them. And yes, the money is real no matter what Jake Tapper tells you. No, politicians are great. But lobbyists are great. Pacts are great. Ignore it. Ignore it. Ignore the reality. Ignore the facts. So no, nobody in America is going to do anything. They defeat the. didn't need a Turner. They are scared to death of these packs. So now Israel has carte blanche.

They could kill people. And then when they're at their funeral, they could beat the living crap out of the people who came to mourn. There'd be no consequences. The American government has given them a blank check. And by the way, the other countries in the world, you idiots, politicians are for sale. You could all buy them. It's not about Jews or non-Jews. That's crazy talk. can come by all of our politicians. They're all for sale, it's so easy. You just spent a couple of million dollars in one prominent race.

And then all the American politicians since everything is about bribery in America, you could be Norwegian, you could be. I mean, by the way, the Palestinians, your best shot is collect all of your money and buy bribe American politicians. Maybe you could bribe them more than the other side. It doesn't matter, Iran, by the way, Saudi Arabia does do it.

United Arab Emirates does do it. They bribe almost all of our politicians. through PACs and lobbyists. Oh, I didn't give directly. They can't coordinate, Jank. Well, they're not coordinating at all. Nobody had any idea what happened in that Cleveland election. Just because Democratic majority for Israel spent the most amount of money,

no one has any idea who did it. No, we know what happened. And by the way, it wasn't just them. Guys, do not get into demagoguing and anti-semitism. There was the oil lobby in there. There was drug companies in there. Chantel Browns put up a giant sign that, said for sale. And everybody who wanted to buy a politician and came and gave her

cousin and tons of money. So look, coming back to Israel for one second, I know what good people who love Israel are going to say, Jake, it's not, you're not being unfair. It's not just racism. The Palestinians have done terrorism all these years. But what do you think Israel did? You don't think it's violence to keep them occupied for 60 years? You don't think that's false? Oh, well, if you cross the border, we kill you without permission. We covered that years, a couple of years ago. Remember when they were starting to do protests near the border, not even up to the border? They were like a huge distance away from the border. Anyone who came close, boom, murdered. Doctors, murdered, nurses murdered, journalists, murdered. Yes, I'm sorry,

I know it hurts your feelings, but they were murdered by the state. And that is also terrorism. That is also mass violence. And you know it's true. Because imagine you could fill in any blanks here, but I'm going to go historic here. Imagine if the Germans had kept the Jews occupied for 60 years. They said, what, what, what? We're worried about the Jews. We're worried about their nature. So we're just going to keep them occupied for 60 years.

And if the Jews ever resist, we're going to call them terrorists. And we're going to see, see, that's why we can't give the Jews freedom, because they're all terrorists because they resist it. Now, in reality, of course, the Germans did far worse. kill them, okay? So I, that's why it's important to be clear. Yes, it's a historical analogy, but the Nazis were far, far worse. They set up gas chambers and they killed those poor people. Now, but you don't want, I don't know, any decent person doesn't want to go one percent of the way there. There's not one single logical and non-racist explanation for why you have kept

the Palestinians imprisoned, beaten, and killed for this many decades. God, Damn it, let him go already. I agree. Yeah, when we have videos. We'll continue. Yeah, when we have videos like this, I think it's useful, but it's so rare that we see videos like this in mainstream American media, but you can find them online everywhere. And it's pretty easy to decide where you fall on the issue when it's on video.

You can see the atrocities, you can see what's going wrong. And so a lot of people say the issue is so complicated, that's fine. It can be complicated, but you can still clearly see when something wrong is going on. Yeah, and by the way, it is not at all complicated. That is nothing but an excuse. Millions of people are imprisoned and not allowed to have their own government and their own freedom. It's not remotely complicated. Oh, but somebody did a bombing 17 years ago, three years ago, oh, wow, they sent a missile over three months ago.

They're occupied, how basically, I swear to you, I love you guys, but you're literally saying how dare they want their freedom. Don't they know their place? Their place is to be our prisoners. Look, and for the anti-Semites, no, I, I want there to be a wonderful, strong, healthy Israel. But this ain't it. And as long as you keep those people occupied, you're never going to get to feel great. about Israel. You're never going to have the moral high ground. You've got to change. Otherwise, I can't believe you've become the bad guys. And if guys, not everybody thinks the same.

Do not think it's the Jews. It's not. Okay, there's right wing and left wing in every country. And everybody's, and if you're not in Israel, you're not responsible for Israel. So please, for God's sake, use normal judgment. And don't counter the occupation. with your own racism and your own bigotry. Okay, we've got to take another break. We'll be back with more likely passion. I do, and I'm going to do my best to walk us through that. So let's do it. We know that inflation is high, that the prices of certain commodities like oil are very high.

In fact, for oil specifically, it hit a record price earlier this week on Tuesday. But why is that? Well, there's a lot of different explanations for it, depending on who you ask. And there's probably truth to all of these. A few of the explanations that have been given include Republicans blaming just Joe Biden like in general or rising wages, of course, because workers have to be responsible for all of society's ills. Democrats blame corporate price gouging or in the case of oil, Vladimir Putin, and there's probably a little bit of all of that in there somewhere. But there is one explanation that certainly is influencing this that basically nobody at this point is talking about. And Jonathan Larson did a write-up about this on t.com. And we're doing our best to give you

at least an intro to this idea. Basically, what is happening is that internationally, people with tons of money are betting on the price of these commodities. And they're able to do so and get away with it and influence inflation on these commodities thanks to a little bit of a loophole in the law that came about after the financial breakdown of a decade and a half ago. And let me walk you through how we got to this point and how Donald Trump specifically has made sure that that loophole remains and that it is able to continue to influence inflation here in the U.S. So back in 2010, you had the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act. And as specific regulations were starting to be made in response to that, Wall Street got involved. Of course

they're going to. They're not going to allow them to be regulated one inch more than needs to be from their point of view. So they tried to create these loopholes that would allow them to do things like do these swaps and derivatives and keep those out of the new regulations. And they were successful. So let's talk about these swaps and I'll give you a very basic idea of what those are. So unlike futures contracts, which are a whole big other topic, which are ostensibly just promises to buy or sell commodities at a later date. Swaps aren't traded on one of the big commodity exchanges. Swaps are one-to-one deals. Almost all of them involve a big Wall Street or private equity firm. These are not things regular people generally do.

They're essentially bets on commodity prices. Now they've only been around for a few decades. They were sort of invented back in the 1980s and initially traders were wary of them. There was actually something that was too risky even for them. So in 1999, the international swaps and derivatives association made its standard practice for U.S. firms affiliates to back their swaps with a written guarantee that the parent company would stand behind them. Now this is important because these sorts of bets are way inflated over the actual price of these commodities. They are two or ten or a hundred times more in value. And so if they go bad, there needs to be somebody actually backing that.

Unfortunately, what happened is when there was going to be potentially regulation of this, Wall Street during the Dodd-Frank negotiations created this loophole. What they did was they got the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to do a policy that, only covered explicit guarantees. They're calling them explicit. So Wall Street could keep trading outside of the jurisdiction of the CFTC as long as its swaps were traded by ostensibly non-U.S. affiliates that have been guaranteed, not in writing, but with a wink and a nod.

So effectively, as long as technically the organizations or individuals that were doing this trading weren't US based, you could do it. Even if they were US based and the deals were being made in the United States, if they technically weren't, then you could get away with it. Now, what does this mean? What technically mean? Well, it's actually laughably easy to get around this. So back in 2013, the CFTC issued its guidance and policy statement, and they had a footnote, footnote 563, which is crucial to this entire thing. The CFTC noted that its regulations wouldn't apply if non-U.S. traders explicitly affirmed that they weren't financially backed or guaranteed by

a U.S. firm. And all you need to do to qualify for that effectively was take a look at this graphic, there's a little checkbox that you can mark saying it's not supported by the guarantee, it's not connected to the United States. So what this means in practice is that an American citizen who lives in Greenwich, Connecticut and works for a U.S. firm could go to their office in Manhattan, arrange and negotiate and execute and execute swaps all day long, and keep them all from the CFTC just by checking that box that you just saw. So they could get by all of the regulation, all of the requirements of backing that were designed to stop this from collapsing like a house of cards by checking that little box. Now look, this should have been got, it never should have been

instituted this loophole, but once it was, it should have been taken out under Obama. It wasn't, but it was actually set to be gotten rid of once Obama transitioned out of power. Unfortunately, Donald Trump succeeded him, and as we can get into, Donald Trump stopped this from happening. Him and people like Steve Mnuchin and others made sure that that loophole remained. And so we continue to be affected by it to today. Okay, so this has tons of ramifications. And let me just sum it up in normal speak. I tried.

I know. And the article is brilliant. It's now being passed around the internet and people are beginning to see, oh my God, this is what actually caused inflation. So the first summary is it was the bankers. So when you have a commodity like oil, and you're trading it, and somebody says, hey, you know what, I'm going to charge seven bucks for it, at some point, especially depending on the supply and demand situation, somebody, if they can, is going to undercut it at $6, right? Well, that's going to affect the entire market once people start undercutting. But the bankers are making bets on that commodity.

And it could be oil, it could be tomatoes, it could be sausages, it doesn't matter. In fact, it's most of those commodities. It's not just about oil. But the bankers are making bets that are a hundred times larger than the original price. So even when you go to undercut a price, it doesn't move the market at all because the bets they've made have basically taken over the market. And there's so much larger. And there's a reason why all of that betting leads to more volatility because the bankers make money when people trade. Okay, that's why you'll see prices going up and down sometimes in ways that doesn't make any sense.

And the more trading there is, the more pushes the price higher. Now, that's not a rock solid rule, but happens often and is happening now. So all the inflation where they're talking about, by the way, are the supply chain issues real? Yes. Is the Russian invasion affecting the oil market? Yes. But those are smaller factors. This is the larger factor, because whatever has happened.

to the actual commodities like oil and sugar, the bankers are betting a hundred times on top of that. So they're greatly amplifying the problem. And that's what's causing inflation. So Obama administration, as always, took forever and ever and ever to fix the goddamn loophole because they barely figured it out. As Jonathan explains in the story, by the time they figured it out, there's the bureaucracy and they got to ask permission. And it doesn't matter, they thought, because Hillary Clinton's going to win, she'll just finish it. Oops. Or maybe some of them didn't mind, really.

Oh, of course, because of the revolving door. You think Democrats, look, Trump definitely took away the regulations. And so is he primarily responsible? Yes, as you can see in the article. But Obama and Biden definitely get fault here as well. Obama could have fixed it, didn't move fast enough to fix it. And by the way, who's president now? Joe Biden, has he fixed it?

Of course not. because nothing will fundamentally change. When we saw the U.S. First put sanctions on Russia, we were formally getting a lot of oil from Russia, like 672,000 barrels a day, a lot of oil. And so the oil market was in backward agents. So the spot price of a barrel of oil was higher than a futures price,

which means like if you buy a barrel of oil today, you're going to pay more than if you buy one six months from now. And typically we see the price of a commodity go up over time. And people were explaining this in a bunch of different ways that a new variant could come out. And maybe people would be sent home again and they would stop driving. And so maybe the price for gas would go back down like it did at the beginning of the pandemic. But another explanation is exactly this, that they inflated the price of oil through Wall Street treating the economy,

like a casino essentially. And what this led to was American oil company saying, well, if it's likely that the price for a barrel of oil is going to go back down. We're not increasing supply. We're not going to invest in building new rigs and drilling new wells because we would much rather profit from the high prices instead of making initial investments now on that growth, cutting our profits when the price for a barrel of oil could go back down, which means that now Biden has decided to tap our emergency petroleum reserves. So now we're decreasing domestic supply. We're we're using our emergency reserves, which in the long run, this is going to make the U.S. more dependent

on foreign oil. So this is Donald Trump, America first, and now we're becoming more dependent on foreign oil, and we're raising gas prices for people within the United States. He's doing the exact opposite of what he said he would do by allowing this to happen in Wall Street. And so I'm going to read Graphic 11 here so you know whose fingerprints are on the crime. Steve Mnuchin, that's the Treasury Secretary for Trump, and his count, Craig Phillips, write that the CFTC should, quote, reconsider trying to regulate swaps between foreign U.S. affiliates, quote, merely on the basis that the U.S. located personnel arranged, negotiate, or execute the swap. So what that means is, yeah, the footnote

stands, keep the loophole, it doesn't matter that they're actually doing the trades in America, let them pretend that they're doing it outside the country, do not regulate the swap. By the way, Mnuchin was a banker who took advantage of another loophole that caused another collapse. And that was the housing collapse. Mnuchin was an enormous player in that housing collapse. He was rewarded for his failure, which of course was not a failure on his part in the bankers parts. They made millions upon millions of dollars. But the world economy collapsed and Donald Trump thought, oh, someone who robs from everyone else to give.

to the rich, he'd make a perfect treasury secretary for the elites. And he did, and he did this. Guys, it's causing inflation now. And the way that the article is being received online as, oh my God, that's definitely true. Holy cow, right, is showing you that you've got the inflation problem, but you also have a second giant problem that now everybody's nervous about. Once these guys start doing unregulated gambling, which is exactly what this is.

A global economic collapse is pretty much guaranteed. It's exactly what happened last time. It's just that in that case, they were doing all the gambling on housing. They have now moved the gambling to commodities, oil, food products, etc. But it's gambling either way. There is no known scenario in the world history where you have. unregulated gambling where people didn't lose all their money. Okay, so buckle up, brace for impact.

When they took away regulations, those are the laws that are meant to protect everyone. They turned into a bad word, the Republicans said, oh, they're over regulating. Can you believe they're regulating the poor corporations? The corporations are the most angelic figures in the world, our beloved corporations. You can't regulate them. You don't want to regulate bankers. You want to let them make massive uncontrolled bets. Some of those guys are going to lose those bets.

And then they're not going to have the money. And then they're going to come to the government and say, give me another goddamn bailout. And guess what they're going to do? And on this one, it doesn't matter if it's Biden or Trump. They're definitely going to give them our money. You can take that, ironically, to the bank. Okay, we got one more story.

I gotta get to it real quick, okay? And this is the most shocking story of the day. You know why? It's good news. Wait, what? I'll do it. When it's good news, I've decided I'm going to do the good news stories. Okay, so here we go. Shocking development today, there are several good news items and they are brought to you by rich people. Wait, what just happened?

Okay, this is unbelievable. So there's two of them. One of them involves Blackstone and Las Vegas and casinos doing the right thing. Unheard of. Okay, we'll get to that next. First one is in California. There's something called the Living Wage Act. They're trying to get a ballot measure to move California.

It's already a $15 minimum wage. They're like, it's way too low. We're going to move it to $18. Okay, you know how popular that is? Intensely popular. If it just gets on the ballot, it's almost certainly going to pass. Well, here's your first piece of good news. It got on the ballot.

But wait a minute, getting on the ballot, you need like a million signatures. It is so hard, so expensive. How the hell did that happen? Well, it happened because one guy decided, no, just going to do it. The Democrats aren't doing it. Nobody's doing it. Nobody's looking out for the workers. So the guy in this case is Joe Sandberg.

And you might have heard him before. on the show before he gives these unbelievable amounts from time to time. Why? He's like, I don't know, somebody should help people. And Joe grew up poor. He explained that on the show, and his house was foreclosed on. So he's like, no, I'm just going to pay it back. Okay, so what did he do in this case? You know how many people are going to get a raise in California if this ballot measure passes? And now that it's on the ballot, like I said, his chance of passing is incredibly high. So this raise is coming your way if you live in California. Oh, by the way, all the right wingers who moved out of California, ah, yeah, no, California. It doesn't do anything

for its citizens. Five million workers are going to get a raise of about $6,420. That's every year. That's every year. Okay. Now, I said it was expensive. I looked it up. I went to ballot video and looked it up. You know how much they had to spend to get the signatures? 10.8. $88 million. And then I looked to see who funded it. I already knew that Sandberg was involved. We already covered that story. Turns out he put in 99.9.9% of the money.

Okay, so pretty much 100%. The dude put in $11 million so you guys can get a race. Look, that's Joe right there. Joe Sandberg, he's, by the way, also the founder of aspiration. That's a sponsor of ours. And bless their hearts, he runs a progressive company and the proof is in the pudding. Now, let me tell you, total benefit to California workers every year. That's a stunning number.

$32 billion. $32 billion every year. So now the Republicans in the right wing will cry and scream. That's wealth redistribution. You took it from the richest executives and you gave it to the average worker. You goddamn right he did. Okay. And in this case, it literally is he.

And you guys got a vote on it. So if you're in California, make sure you vote yes. because that's over $6,000 raise. And so by the way, when they moved it to $15 in California, all the right wingers are like, oh, that's California's going to be bankrupt. Totally bankrupt, can't afford it. Today they announced $100 billion surplus.

California is entirely unbankrupt. The $15 minute wage did not move Silicon Valley or Hollywood or any of the major industries out of California. It was always a lie. Okay. So now, that's gigantic. That's amazing. That's wonderful.

Now, the next story might be even more surprising. Cosmopolitan casino in Vegas. If you've been there, you know it. It's one of the larger casinos. So they did really well even after the pandemic. During the pandemic, they survived. Afterwards, they did great. Okay, so that's normal.

Everybody's flooding back to Vegas. Them doing really well is normal. But you know what they decided to do? Their CEO, presumably other executives as well, decided, you know what? we're going to give every employee at the company a $5,000 bonus. So the servers, the dealers, the cleaning ladies, everybody gets a $5,000 bonus. Okay, again, we never get good news. It's unbelievable that there's good news.

So we did the math on it. They have 5,400 employees times 5,000, comes out to $27 million. You know what? I'm going to show you that as a percentage of their profits in a second, and you're going to see. It's actually not that big a deal. I'll give them all the credit in the world. But hold on. So the CEO, by the way, is Bill McBeath.

He comes from Blackstone. Blackstone now has sold it to MGM. And they made a great profit. But as long as you're good to your employees, make a great profit. Awesome. Great, right? And doesn't it suck that most rich people in the country spend the money to make more money at our expense?

It only takes a couple of people to show it's actually fairly easy and doesn't cost them that much to do the right thing. So first of all, let me quote one of the workers. No, I'm sorry, the chief people officer, that's one of the executives, Daniel Espino at Cosmopol and said, it's you every single day that makes a difference. Whether you clean the rooms, cook the food, are dealing the cards, serving drinks at the front desk. And so that is them actually acknowledging the workers. See, it wasn't that hard.

By the way, the workers are ecstatic. They're like, I don't, oh my God, what are we going to do? This is amazing, right? So I looked up their profits. Pre-COVID, the 12 months period before that. They made $316 million. I also looked up their quarterly profits that is closer to today. And so we don't have the final numbers in the last year.

But it looks like based on the quarterly profits, they make around $400 million. That's in profit, okay? That's not revenue, that's profit. So I did the math on that. Now, this is an estimate on the $400 million because we don't have the hard numbers. But $27 million of $400 is 6.75% of their profits. So call it 7%. So with 7% of their profits, they were able to make all of their workers ecstatic.

And now everybody wants to work at Cosmopolitan. It's good for business and it's good for the employees. I set my resume. Okay, John, go ahead. Your thoughts. No, it's awesome. I mean, I almost, like I like that they're doing it as sort of a knee-jerk thing. When I see that it's less than 7%, I think couldn't they have done 10? I don't know.

I get it. It's a knee-jerk need. It's probably not necessary. I instantly wonder, like the oil companies, as incredibly profitable as they are, how they could afford to do that. They're doing the opposite. You know, we were showing you last week, them cracking down on strikes in California and all that. This is exactly the sort of thing that you should do and that some corporations do do. There are corporations that people love to work at, and it's not complicated.

Treat people with dignity, pay them for what they do for you, and they will be loyal. Most corporations don't care. They're there to ring blood out of their employees. That's effectively it. And so glad to see them doing this with Joe Sandberg. On the surface, I think it sounds good, but I don't know. I just, I don't think that he's a particularly, he's particularly good at being rich. Like, couldn't he have bought Twitter or something?

He's trying to, like, raise people's wages. You could have bought Napster or Myspace or something, he idiot. By the way, he also did California income tax credit. And that got California working poor $2 billion as well. So he just keeps wasting all of his money on helping other people. I'm sure that other rich people are like, what are you doing, Joe? And actually that does bother them because it's embarrassing when people find out. Rich people could actually help a lot.

Go ahead, Jessica. Yeah, your move, Elon Musk. And for the casinos, I mean, kind of crazy that casinos in Las Vegas are doing more for people than the casino known as Wall Street. Not actually that surprising, not actually that crazy. But I think two things, like, yeah, it's the right thing to do to share your profits with your workers. They're responsible for your success. It's the right thing to do. But I will also say there's a lot of power and labor right now.

And there's a lot of additional pressure for corporations and businesses to do the right thing. Because the same union that represents these guys just won a really big case with another casino. So it could be the type of situation. It is good. Like the net benefit is good. But it could be let's keep our workers happy before we. renegotiate this contract. Sure.

So I'm going to end on two things here. First of all, I want to show Bill McBeath because we beat up on the bad guys all the time. But hey, when you do something positive, wonderful. So that's the good guy in this case. Now, I don't want to look up his other records. I don't know what else he's done, but in this one, and I don't care that it's 7%. I know these days we're happy with the crumbs, but we'll take it because nobody else is doing it. So give him tremendous credit for that, even if it might be late.

labor putting pressure on, which by the way, yes, continue to put pressure on. So do both, do both. Finally, you know how the Democrats always say, oh, well, higher wages. They stated it at the national level just now. $15 million in wage. There was nothing we could do. There's nothing we could do. Well, it turns out there was something that they could do.

They just didn't want to do it. For an individual, $11 million is a ton of money. For the Democratic Party, it's nothing. Why didn't they do it in California? It's a good idea. That's because they serve their corporate donors and the corporate donors didn't want it. So sad day for them, Joe Zamburg's here, and he's like, you're going to get it anyway. Isn't that amazing what kind of a difference it could make?

Please, other wealthy folks copy these guys. You could be a hero. Don't you want to be a hero instead of constantly being the bad guy? And it doesn't take that much. So bless them. And I'm thrilled to finally have good news. Agreed. All right, we got to go.

everybody check out jessica on rebel headquarters or she's killing it john of course does damage report everybody check out all that out when we come back uh we're going to go back to beating up the right wing we'll be back thanks for listening to members only bonus content and more by thanks for listening to the full episode of the young turks support our work listen ad free access members only bonus content and more to Apple Podcasts at apple.com slash t-y-t. I'm your host, Shank Huger, and I'll see you soon.