Morally AND Literally Bankrupt!
The government may be shutting down – again! Thanks to fatuous GOP concern about the debt ceiling, the government may be shutting down by Friday and the Treasury may be out of money by October 18. This is part of a long and destructive pattern that we’ve discussed previously on this show. The last shutdown, which happened under Trump and went from Dec 2018-Jan 2019, felt like a test run for a broader destruction of infrastructure, basic goods and services, and anything else that relies on a functional government. The 2018-2019 shutdown was a sequel to the January 2018 shutdown, which was a sequel to the 2013 shutdown, which itself felt like a test of how much hardship Americans would put up with and how many resources they would do without.
What’s new now? It’s happening under a plague! We discuss the political manipulation behind the possible shutdown, the torpedoing of the Build Back Better plan and other Biden proposals, how the shutdown will affect the midterms (along with voter suppression!) and the snapping of the social safety net under the pandemic. Andrea explains what the debt ceiling is and the economic disasters that will occur if the government shuts down and the Treasury does not function. Sarah wonders what the hell happened with the infiltration of the Treasury in 2015 by the Kremlin and the hacking of multiple government institutions (including the Treasury!) by Russia in 2020. Seems like it might be relevant as we run out of money. So many mysteries to explore!
Intro Music: “A New Time” by The Paula Kelley Orchestra
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the bestselling books, The View from Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight.
Andrea Chalupa:
I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker, and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones, about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the United States and rising autocracy around the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
Every week we do two shows, including the early show for our listeners at the Truth Teller level and higher on Patreon. This week’s show, we're going to be answering questions submitted by our listeners at the Democracy Defender level and higher. That's always an interesting time because the questions are widely ranging in scope and they are reading our minds, often. And it's just a big support group for all of us navigating this strange time together. So, if you want to get it on that, become a subscriber on Patreon.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yes. And we will answer absolutely anything. I think our listeners will attest to this. So, like absolutely anything. If you subscribe at the Democracy Defender level or higher.
Andrea Chalupa:
It's fun. And for more fun, we are celebrating art, as we always do, because art is so essential. It's an oxygen mask against authoritarianism. It resets your energy, which allows you to keep fighting and stay engaged. It resets the culture in so many ways and it plants extremely important, powerful seeds. So please make art and check out our Action Guide where we discuss more about that. In celebration of the power of making art, we are featuring—as we always do at the end of the month—a song submitted by a listener. The song you heard at the start of this show is called “A New Time” by The Paula Kelley Orchestra. And this is what they submitted to us. “After riding a wave of college press hype and European touring with American shoegaze group, The Drop Nineteens, Kelley left the band before their demise in 1994 to pursue vehicles for her own songwriting.”
Andrea Chalupa:
“By Y2K, she was ready to fully indulge her pop muse in the less confining role of solo performer. Kelley has released several infectious studio albums, scored films, and done orchestral arrangements for other artists. She penned an acapella arrangement for Matt Nathanson performed by the San Francisco Gay Men's Choir, The Homophones, and her music has appeared in many film and TV productions, including Shrill, Fever Pitch, Fresh Off the Boat, and Steven Spielberg's Taken. Kelley continues to write and release her own records, including the darkly orchestral Airports EP and an odds and sods collection entitled Some Suckers Life, Vol. One. A new album is in progress, which will feature songs about navigating sobriety as a cranky, middle-aged lady in the end times.”—Hmm—From Paula: “Why do I create? It's just what I do. I started playing piano when I was three and knew from when I was aware of the existence of vocations that mine would be making music.”
Andrea Chalupa:
“I'd love to say that it's for emotional release so that creativity is what gets me through hard times. The emotion and pain will show up in my music, but it doesn't always help me feel better. Sometimes it's too hard to write because it hurts too much. God, that sounds so pretentious, but I've been doing this a long time and I'm too old to lie about this shit. So, there it is. Thanks for listening.” Thank you! And so if you want to check out more of her music, go to Twitter @divine_PK and @divinepk on Instagram. And check out her SoundCloud: Divine PK. So, thank you so much to The Paula Kelley Orchestra.
Sarah Kendzior:
Alright, on with the show. So, this week's big news is that—once again—the US government may shut down. We have covered this topic before. Even though we are a show that is only three years old, we have gone through a government shutdown and I feel like at this point I could probably dig up the old transcripts from 2018/2019 and just do a dramatic reading of our previous episodes. Maybe Andrea and I can reverse roles just to make it more interesting. So, I'm going to be re-raising some of the points that I made in that earlier episode, which basically argued that the shutdown was a prelude to a greater goal of the GOP and the transnational crime syndicate that backs it that has long wanted to strip America down and sell it for parts.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is both a foreign operation and a domestic one. For my entire life, since the Reagan ‘80s, this has been a goal: to shrink government down and drown it in a bathtub. I think it was Grover Norquist who said that. And so every time there's a shutdown, they use it—or in olden times, in the long, long ago before COVID, they would use it as this kind of pretext for, “Well, you know, like we all got through that. Clearly, we don't really need this government branch or this government function or officials who are rational and can get along with each other. It's all unnecessary.” So it's like a gradual chipping away at the apparatus itself. But what is distinguishing this shutdown from all other shutdowns is the pandemic. This is America's first pandemic shut down. And so just to kind of give a brief recap of shutdowns over the last decade, we had one from 2018 to 2019.
Sarah Kendzior:
I think that was the longest in US history. That's also when Trump and his crew did a bunch of shady shit, like sneaking in Bill Barr. I believe that was when Mattis left as well. We had a lot of administrative shake-ups. So we were kind of, at that point, watching the Trump administration to see, Alright, well, what else are they going to get away with?
Andrea Chalupa:
And Trump was being impeached during the last shutdown.
Sarah Kendzior:
Not yet, not yet. I mean, he was doing impeachable shit, but nobody had bothered to do anything about it. But what had happened—and this is important, actually—is that the Democrats had won the midterms. They had won the House and they were talking about impeachment.
Andrea Chalupa:
Which was supposed to be impeachment. Right? We all went to the polls that year to get him impeached.
Sarah Kendzior:
Mmmhmm (affirmative). They ran on accountability. They ran on impeachment. And at that point, the Democrats were saying, you know, “Yeah, we're coming in.” If you are a Patreon bonus subscriber, you will have heard our four-part series that we did over the summer looking back at the list of 81 names that the House Democrats came up with in the beginning of 2019, saying they were going to subpoena all of these individuals connected to Trump because they were engaged in criminal or illicit activity. It was all the big players of The Mueller Report. It was a lot of people associated with the Russian mafia and the Trump administration. Basically, at this point, just to bring you back, the Mueller probe was still ongoing. Impeachment seemed to be looming over the horizon related both to what was being investigated by Mueller, but also broader illicit offenses that were all happening—as I say in my book, Hiding in Plain Sight—in plain sight.
Sarah Kendzior:
So, it seemed very possible. So, there was a reason, politically, for Trump and the Republicans to want the government to be shut down. The way it ended, or the way it was presented to us at the time, was “Oh, master negotiator, Nancy Pelosi, averted disaster and brought us back from the brink of death by ending the shutdown, so that she could then go on and enforce accountability on all of these criminal actors that have infiltrated or have been part of the United States government.” I don't know about the first part of that, but she certainly did not follow through on the latter. Anyway, so, there's that shutdown. And you could go back and just listen to any episode from December 2018 to January 2019, or go to our transcript site at gaslitnationpod.com. Read through. Just wonderful, wonderful to relive that time. That shutdown was the second shutdown of the Trump administration. There was also a briefer shutdown in January 2018.
Sarah Kendzior:
That one was essentially a sequel to the 2013 government shutdown, which was basically like a Tea Party shutdown. It was the first kind of, “We're going off the rails. We've become an openly apocalyptic death cult” shutdown of the Republican Party, where there wasn't even a pretense of bipartisanship, of actually working together, or of caring about the American public, or of valuing government. It was like the veil was fully lifted. And I remember during that shutdown really wondering, Is the government going to come back? Because if you're young, you don't know that this used to be a very uncommon occurrence. Before the 2013 shutdown, the last shutdown that happened was in late 1995, basically initiated by Newt Gingrich as kind of a precursor, again, to the Tea Party. It was this very partisan, very much like, “We're just doing this to drag Bill Clinton down” kind of shutdown.
Sarah Kendzior:
It was presented in the media with great distaste. I think there's a famous Daily News cover of Newt Gingrich wearing a diaper and screaming like a little baby. It was thought of as very unusual, very destructive, and very bad. And now, it's just become standardized and kind of normal and expected, which is why I think a lot of people don't even realize that this is happening this week. The previous shutdowns felt like a test of how much hardship Americans would put up with and how many resources they would do without. And I kind of wonder about the equation here, you know, the sense of expectation or of leverage, because the pandemic has just ripped apart any assumption we have of what a functional society looks like, a functional government looks like. I mean, we were hanging by a thread by the time that COVID rolled along and COVID snapped that thread.
Sarah Kendzior:
And we are now, I mean… We're not in the aftermath because the pandemic is still ongoing. We're still seeing roughly 2,000 deaths per day and we're also seeing the cumulative effect of 18 months of mass death, of destruction, of... I don't know, I’ll just go through briefly some of the changes the pandemic has wrought and then just sort of ask you and also ask Andrea, What does this mean in terms of a shutdown? What is the government going to do next? How are people going to react? We have a much more economically vulnerable population. And again, the population was already economically vulnerable. For the majority of this country, there was no recovery from the Great Recession of 2008, especially for younger generations. And then the pandemic went and exacerbated that. So you have people struggling with jobs, struggling with soaring housing costs and rent, and companies like Zillow that are coming in as predatory buyers and just, you know, purchasing whole neighborhoods and ratcheting up the price, making it impossible for people to find a place to live.
Sarah Kendzior:
We're dealing with mass evictions. We're dealing with a very gender imbalanced workforce where women have basically been driven out because they had to do... I mean, obviously not all women, but disproportionately driven out.
Andrea Chalupa:
Oh, it's hell. It's hell to be a working mom right now in a pandemic with limited childcare.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, because we had to do the bulk of the childcare. And if you have young kids, this was particularly acute. If you had kids who were going to Zoom school, that posed a difficulty. Also, women tend to be—more so than men—the people who take care of elderly folks and elderly folks needed a lot of help during the pre-vaccine pandemic. They couldn't often leave the house. You had people running around trying to get groceries and basic goods. Anyway, that led to women disproportionately leaving the paid workforce.
Sarah Kendzior:
And so there's that. Then we have the effect on people's health. You obviously see a terrible effect on people's physical health, either because they got COVID and have long COVID or are recovering because they've been cooped up for 18 months and their whole routine has been disrupted, incredible mental health problems. I think, PTSD, grief, trauma. I think, what is it, like one out of every 500 Americans died of COVID? The odds that you know someone who died are pretty big, or that you know someone who lost someone. As much as they like to go on about how disconnected we all are, I think everyone—no matter who you voted for your political party, where you live, whatever—everyone is grieving and full of emotions that are very difficult to process right now. And you see a manifestation of this in that the pandemic is making people vicious.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's making people get into brawls. It's making people attack service workers. It's prompting people to laugh or rejoice or have schadenfreude over the deaths of people who die of COVID, which is incredibly ghoulish and horrible. And I don't care, you may think you're justified in acting that way, and I certainly understand the frustration and the anger at people who haven't gotten the vaccine. But I've said this before, remember, that person had a family, maybe children, loved ones and they will suffer. Other people will suffer. And this is just… I don't know. It's a cliche to say don't become what you hate, but truly, in this case, don't root for mass death. Don't root for grieving children. I'm at a loss for words, because I don't understand it. I don't understand it.
Sarah Kendzior:
I still feel sad when I read anyone's death from this disease, no matter how much I disagree with their behavior. And so, you know, all of this is being exploited by political parties. You see a lot of effort to move this into neatly demarcated party lines. This is, again, not the case. I kept saying in an episode we did in, I think, early August: Don't politicize the pandemic in a country where, one, about half of Americans that can vote, don't vote, and of the ones who do vote , less than half, I think, at this point are registered in the Republicans or the Democrats, are registered in a political party. The majority are independents. The majority are disillusioned. There may be abhorrent behavior out there. There certainly is abhorrent behavior out there, but it's not necessarily built on a partisan foundation.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's not people listening to Trump or any other Republican and being like, “Yes, yes, I will do what you say.” I mean, there is a cult out there for Trump. There's a cult around many politicians, but I think the number of Americans who subscribe to that and have that be the origin of how they make decisions in everyday life is small. People are trying to survive. People are just trying to make sense of the horror around them and just literally physically survive this terrible time. And so now we have yet another crisis looming on the horizon in the midst of mass trauma from an ongoing one and from the cumulative effect of the destructive Trump years and all of the things that led up to Trump being able to get into office in the first place. So, I don't know, Andrea, I've been talking for a very long time.
Andrea Chalupa:
Love it.
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Sarah Kendzior:
Do you want to explain to our audience why there is going to be a potential shutdown? What is the pretext this time for the Republicans?
Andrea Chalupa:
Because Mitch McConnell is a proud obstructionist and we have a political system grossly benefiting the neo-Confederate states and giving the minority way too much power over—veto power—over the majority of America. And that system simply cannot hold. Mitch McConnell, what he's doing, and the Republican Party, what they're doing, is they're blocking raising the debt ceiling—proudly blocking it— using the gaslighting that they've been shut out by Democrats, which is simply not true. The Republicans have no problem exploding the national debt. They did so with Bush’s two disastrous wars—Iraq and Afghanistan—that simply did not have to happen. They did so with Bush’s tax cuts followed by Trump's tax cuts, which added something like $1.8 trillion to the national debt. Suddenly, when the Democrats are in power, the Republican Party cares about debt all of a sudden, even though they love driving up the national debt. They're absolute gaslighters when it comes to that talking point. They use it on their base all the time and their base falls for it.
Andrea Chalupa:
What they're really trying to do is to obstruct Biden's agenda to build back better, to improve people's lives on the ground by providing social programs like childcare, which would be huge, huge, huge in not only creating jobs, but boosting the workforce, allowing people to get back to work and putting money in people's pockets, essentially. Already what we've seen from Biden with his big pandemic package has cut child poverty in America significantly. So this new $3.5 trillion reconciliation package the Democrats are trying to push through, which is currently being blocked by Sinema and Manchin, of course, and Gottheimer in the House and the Republicans (that goes out saying), that would significantly improve people's jobs and take people out of crisis levels of poverty. And it would also put us on an aggressive track to finally confronting the climate crisis as a nation. It would do all these wonderful things.
Andrea Chalupa:
It would be like in a Disney movie where the fairies come in and give you a big, sparkly new dress. It would really transform our country and people's lives from the ground up. And Republicans don't want that because it's paid for, essentially, by a wealth tax. We're living in a time where income inequality has far exceeded the level it was at in the Gilded Age. Right now in America, we're not just a new Gilded Age, we've surpassed the Gilded Age. And so Republicans, being essentially corporate lobbyists for America's corporate giants, namely Big Oil, they want to not only block this because it would please their corporate benefactors whom they serve as corporate lobbyists in the US Senate, but they would also make Biden look bad because by not raising the debt ceiling, the government then goes into default and suddenly people stopped getting their social security checks and the military stops being paid.
Andrea Chalupa:
And you see a lot of people on the national news being interviewed about how they're not getting their social security checks, and you have veterans and military spouses talking about how they're not getting the money they need to survive. That's going to be the big news story and who is going to get blamed for that? The party in power. So that narrative will stink on Democrats and stay on them if nothing is done, or it could create enough damage in people's real lives that it's remembered when it comes time for the midterms. So, simply put, the name of the game for Mitch McConnell is to be so obstructionist towards the Biden agenda to prevent people from getting good, necessary help that will transform their lives and promote this whole idea that Congress is gridlocked, that Congress does nothing and nothing's getting done, and everything's inefficient and broken.
Andrea Chalupa:
And so people then take their anger out when they vote in the midterms. And who do they take it out on? The midterms are always a referendum on the President of the United States. Right now, the President of the United States is a Democrat. So, Mitch McConnell is banking on trying to be so obstructionist that he hurts the Democrats to the point where his party comes back into power in Congress in the midterms in 2022. That's what this is about. This is about Mitch McConnell being such an asshole that he ruins enough lives and people take their anger out in the polls against Biden.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, I have one quick thing to say on that. I think the key word there is “narrative” because they want to create a narrative of failure for Biden. They want to have a pretext and excuse for why voters maybe had some surprise wins or, you know, voted the way they did if the GOP takes the House—which I believe they will—in 2022, but the mechanism by which they plan to “win the midterm election” is voter suppression, which, of course, the Democrats are not doing anything about. They're not yet passing voter rights laws, voter protection laws. We have not only a continuation of the disenfranchisement that's been at play since the Supreme Court partially overturned the VRA in 2013, we have brand new voter suppression laws in Georgia and Texas and other states, some of which allow Republican state legislatures to simply throw out the outcome of the vote if it goes for the Democrats.
Sarah Kendzior:
That's how the GOP—if they take the election, if they get into office, I don't even want to use the word win—that's how they'll do it. But then they'll have a narrative. They're going to say, “Oh, it was because people were upset about the government shutdown, which was caused by Biden. And people were upset by the mass deaths from COVID and hospital services being unavailable.” And then they'll pin that on Biden. That's much more complicated, but obviously we see a concerted right-wing effort to tell people not to get vaccinated coming from Tucker Carlson and other major players on the Right. And so that will be the way that they package an improbable win. This is going to be the new “economic anxiety” narrative like when Trump “won”. All sorts of reasons were given.
Sarah Kendzior:
I think some of them were valid. Of course there was economic anxiety, it's just Black people also had economic anxiety. Latino people had economic anxiety and strangely they did not come out and vote in droves to vote for Trump in 2016. So, you know, that one doesn't really wash. And the same phenomenon is going to happen. So yes, I agree, but what they need to do—assuming the government does not shut down and that if it shuts down, it comes back—is again, immediately pass voter rights legislation. We have been screaming this for years on end, but particularly since the Democrats took the presidency, the Senate and the House. This was the most important thing to do. This is from where all other policies derive. Get rid of the filibuster and pass voter rights protection legislation. Anyway, you were saying stuff and maybe you should explain what the debt ceiling is. I think that was your task.
Andrea Chalupa:
[laughs] Yeah, that was my chore for this episode. Thank you, Sarah. You get all the fun stuff of just bashing the racists and I have to be the CNBC reporter on the street. Alright, everyone. So, I did, back in the day, work at a business magazine. So let me just dust off that beret.
Sarah Kendzior:
[laughs] That's what you wore at the business magazine.
Andrea Chalupa:
I did. Of course. It was a fancy one. It was a fancy one. So, the Secretary of the Treasury, Janet Yellen, is like, “Guys, the money's going to stop. We need to raise the debt ceiling so we can continue to borrow money.” Obviously, the debt has gone up in recent years, thanks to Trump's tax cuts for the ultra wealthy which added, as I mentioned, $1.8 trillion to the debt. Then, when Biden came in, they had to pass these emergency pandemic measures to boost the economy which, of course, added more to the debt. So, with our spending exploding, we need to increase our ability to borrow. That's what the debt ceiling does. By blocking it, we simply run out of money. It's like basically going to your credit card company and saying, “Hey, I need to increase my amount of borrowing. I've got a lot of bills coming in and I have good credit with you, so please increase it.”
Andrea:
And the credit card company, being Congress, goes, “Sure, we’ll increase your limit so you can continue to borrow and keep your bills being paid on time.” That’s what we're looking at here. Republicans are, of course, blocking it. They came up with some minor measure, but it doesn't look like anything has been agreed to yet, and what means in a very real sense is that financial markets could crash. A couple examples I gave already; social security checks could dry up, our military won't be receiving their paychecks. Here's another example: Let's say you work at a startup and you're about to close funding to keep your company going, and suddenly that investment dries up because of market jitters or a straight up market crash. Then, next thing you know, your startup is out of money and you're closing down. You're laying off people.
Andrea Chalupa:
You've lost your job. That's one example of an outcome that could stem from this if things don't get fixed soon. Janet Yellen predicts that the U S government will run out of money and lose its ability to borrow around October 18. But, of course, that data's fluid because our cash flows are fluid, so far. This could reverberate around the world. This could send markets crashing around the world because, as we saw from the 2008 crash, we're all interconnected worldwide. This would also raise the cost of borrowing. It hurts confidence in the US. And what makes things more complicated is that it's coming at a time when the markets are already jittery with China experiencing its own version of the too-big-to-fail potential big crash with a big property developer giant called China Evergrande, which has around $300 billion in liabilities and is highly indebted.
Andrea Chalupa:
A crash of that company could cause a systemic crisis as seen with the crash of Lehman Brothers in 2008. So that has, as I mentioned, created some tremors in the market already and added to the US defaulting on its debt. China and the US—the two big giants—together, essentially, crashing, that's going to be felt worldwide. But China will likely prop up it's too-big-to-fail situation. So, possibly, that situation might not be as catastrophic as feared. So, there's hope there, potentially. Just to make sure that we're landing all of these points correctly, because it is a very big issue, what I just described was giving sort of like an overview of how this could impact you personally, if you work in any area, or if you depend on social security or your parents do or so forth. This is one of those things where you're like, “Hmm, this sounds complicated. I wonder how it could come back to me.”
Andrea Chalupa:
Yes, it can come back to you in a very real way. Just to sort of drive this point home, I'm going to read from Reuters now an overview of the story and what's at stake: “Democrats and Republicans in the US Senate are locked in a partisan standoff over how to remove temporarily the $28.4 trillion debt ceiling, a political drama that could pose risks to the US government's credit rating, financial markets, and the economy. The current debt ceiling, which took effect on August 1, sets the borrowing limit for the US Treasury. The Treasury Department will exhaust its borrowing authority some time in October unless the debt limit is raised, posing the danger of a default.” So again, with Reuters: “A grim fate could be in store for the US economy if the impasse leads to default. The government relies on continued borrowing to service its debt and without authority to borrow more, the Treasury could default. A report by Moody's Analytics warns of a nearly 4% decline in economic activity, the loss of almost 6 million jobs, an unemployment rate of close to 9%, a sell off in stocks that could wipe out $15 trillion in household wealth, and a spike in interest rates on mortgages, consumer loans, and business debts.”
Andrea Chalupa:
Alright, so, that's a lot. That's a lot that can come back, circle around, and hit you in some way, shape or form. Obviously, when it comes down to that (if it should get there), that takes us into the midterms. And Mitch McConnell is having a field day. He set this up intentionally to hurt Biden because, again, the midterms are a referendum on the president. What's going to happen is you're going to have a lot of those independents that the Democrats need in order to stay in power swing the other way and vote for Republicans because they're angry and they just want to get this done. And should Republicans take back Congress, both the House and the Senate, what do you think they're going to do? They're going to join with Democrats to raise the debt ceiling because that's what they've always done.
Andrea Chalupa:
This is just Mitch McConnell doing political kamikaze where he's just flying a plane into the U S government to try to crash our economy for political points. There are some ways around this, of course. The good old filibuster that Manchin and Sinema hold so dear, that could be altered in order to do a standalone bill to raise the debt ceiling by the Democrats by simple majority. There could also be a reconciliation bill. A reconciliation bill is filibuster-proof and that could be a simple majority. The problem is the Democrats already have one reconciliation bill that they're pushing through currently, which is, again, that $3.5 trillion package that's going to transform people's lives greatly through all of these wonderful social programs that are going to lift so many people out of poverty and alleviate a lot of stress and pressures for working families. And also, of course, better prepare us for the climate crisis.
Andrea Chalupa:
So that is already a reconciliation bill. Typically you only get one a year, so to do a second one just to raise the debt ceiling, you're going to get that annoying Parliamentarian wagging her fingers saying, “No, no, no.” It's going to be outside the normal protocol and Democrats have an apparent allergy to doing things that are seemingly unorthodox. So, we might not see that. Again, the two solutions are filibuster reform, a second reconciliation package and, who knows, I mean, this is really driving things to a crisis point in Congress. There's sort of this O.K. Corral shootout where everybody's got their guns fixed on each other, and it's sort of who blinks first. That includes Democrats who are on the progressive side facing off with Democrats who are essentially corporate lobbyists, Republican plants—like Gottheimer from New Jersey—who are trying to tank and sabotage Biden's agenda to build back better.
Andrea Chalupa:
We're close to unity on the Democratic side, it’s just there's such a thin majority, of course, of Democrats in both the House and the Senate that those few holdouts that are sabotaging Biden's really good, desperately needed agenda are the ones that are really ruining it. And again, that's Gottheimer, Sinema and Manchin. They were elected by a tiny, tiny, tiny sliver of the US population and the way our system is set up is that they have veto power over the majority of Americans who desperately want to see this relief go through because it would be a game changer for our country. Remember, it's not only something that's going to be good for people's pocketbooks, that's going to alleviate a ton of pressure from their lives and pull countless people out of poverty, it's also essential in beating back the growing threat of authoritarianism in America, because one of the breeding grounds of authoritarianism is economic instability, economic crisis and that's what we're currently experiencing now.
Andrea Chalupa:
So the more you can prop up the economy through these really wonderful social programs that literally put money in people's pockets and create jobs, the better you are, the stronger you are, to face the threat of Republican authoritarianism in America. So this has so many benefits that it's just mind boggling that our system continues to be the way it is. I do not see how, with our population growing, with the so-called blue states being such big money earners in propping up our GDP, with the demographics in America changing the way it is where white people in a generation or so will soon be the minority, I don't see how the current system where the minority and these Republican plants in the Democratic Party can have such veto power over the majority of the American people.
Andrea Chalupa:
That system simply cannot hold. It's going to break eventually in some way, shape or form, because it's nonsensical. It's destroying lives. It's making us less safe. And when such a huge economy and a giant military country as the United States is left unstable through its political structure, the whole world is clearly left unsafe, as we've seen with Bush coming to power and Trump coming to power and so forth. Our current system simply cannot hold given all the crises we're being hit with, from the climate crisis to the economic crisis, and yes, a pandemic which has already created great economic instability and vulnerabilities worldwide. All of these factors combined mean that it is simply time for something to snap into place with all of these pressures that are building. So, it's going to be a dramatic October in Congress. We've been anticipating this and discussing it for some weeks now.
Andrea Chalupa:
The hope is that Nancy Pelosi, for all the criticism we rightfully discuss when it comes to her handling of the impeachment, dragging her feet on that and minimizing that and spreading disinformation around that by just shrugging it off as “not worth it” when it very much was necessary to force simple accountability on the most corrupt president the United States has ever had, you know all those episodes from back in the day. But Nancy Pelosi, in this case, one of her great gifts that we will give credit to where credit is due, she is a very good dealmaker and the Progressives wield a lot of power now because where Nancy Pelosi's coalition shrunk in the last election, the Squad expanded. So Nancy Pelosi lost—or nearly lost—some close allies in the House in the last election. And the Squad—the Progressives— strengthened their hand. The Progressives, overall, came together full force for Biden.
Andrea Chalupa:
Bernie Sanders spoke beautifully about the threat of authoritarianism in rallying his base for his friend Biden. So there was a lot of progressive and so-called moderate unity going into 2020. When the dust all settled, there was a narrative being pushed that the whole Progressive's Defund the Police thing hurt the moderates. That was because the moderates didn't have a good counter to what they had to offer. There was a lot of, again, that foot dragging of, “he's just not worth it.” They didn't have a good message to rally around, whereas Progressives were like, “If you vote for us, we'll give you accountability. If you vote for us, we'll give you these social programs that are going to transform your lives.” And the so-called moderates—the Nancy Pelosi wing of the party—need to also have their own Come to Jesus moment where they need to speak plainly to the American people and offer their own clear alternatives and messages.
Andrea Chalupa:
We did not see that in the 2020 race and that was also what hurt them. All of this is to say that I do believe that Nancy Pelosi will pull this off. I do believe that the Progressives will hold their ground in demanding the social programs urgently needed right now for the American people. And I do believe that the so-called moderate obstructionists…. And I don't call them moderate. I don't think anything about Manchin’s position, Sinema’s position, or Gottheimer’s position is at all moderate. They are working for the growing levels of income inequality in America. They're working for unchecked corporate greed in America. That is not moderate. That's an extremist position. And I do believe that they can ultimately be overcome because the American people are standing firmly against them. The Progressives are united against them and Nancy Pelosi has been fighting, so far—along with the Progressives—to get Biden's agenda passed. Remember, these wonderful social programs, it’s not just a progressive position, it's a President Biden position. So there's a lot of unity at the Democratic Party that I think will ultimately see this through.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. I mean, I'm a little torn on that because it is true that Pelosi is effective at bringing her caucus together by way of, you know, coercion and threats. The pattern with Pelosi, as we detailed over the last few years, is that often the majority of Democratic constituents, as well as members of Congress, want to do something like, say, impeach Trump and Pelosi doesn't want to do it. She's the one who has to be dragged. That was true of the first impeachment and it was true of the second impeachment. It is not seemingly true now, but the level of rancor she still exhibits toward progressive members of the House is much greater, it seems, than that which she demonstrates towards these fake moderates, these lobbyist obstructionists that you just mentioned.
Sarah Kendzior:
I mean, there's a video of her on the Congress floor (we can't hear it, it's from C-SPAN) and it was during a time where they were voting, where she seems to be screaming at Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. And Ocasio-Cortez, of course, as everyone saw, begins to cry and then went and changed her vote about funding Israel's military which, of course, had committed incredible acts of brutality in Gaza over the spring and is now getting an extra $1 billion. She was going to vote against that. Instead, she voted Present after being screamed at by Pelosi. And we don't know what exactly happened in that exchange, but I find it disturbing that Ocasio Cortez in a statement referenced her fear of repercussions, among them death threats. I'm not saying at all here that Pelosi is sending death threats to AOC.
Sarah Kendzior:
We know AOC gets death threats from all sorts of people. She's been getting death threats from the moment she got into office. We also know that people who oppose funding the Israeli military with US taxpayer dollars are often likely to get not necessarily death threats, although sometimes that, but, you know, threats to their career. There's a very powerful lobby. That's just the case. I mean, they're very open about it. If you go to AIPAC’s Twitter, it literally had a little thing saying “Text” and then some number, you know, like “Text IRON DOME” to some sort of number to show your support for the Iron Dome. They're doing what every lobby for any country does, which is they're acting on the behalf of that country. It's just that they're much more powerful and effective than the lobbies of other countries.
Sarah Kendzior:
And it seems that AOC was certainly under some kind of breaking point pressure and that Pelosi played some role in that. Although, again, I want to emphasize it's a lot more complicated than just these two women. So anyway, there's that. But I do think, of course, Pelosi is on the side of wanting this big Biden package to pass and the GOP, of course, is completely content to not just have it not pass and to deprive Americans of all of the things in the package, but to have it accelerate this broader breakdown that they have been shooting for decades and that Trump and his backers, mainly Kremlin and Russian mafia members or mafia adjacent actors—I'm sorry, I love that phrase, created by the lawyer of my publishing company so people don't get sued—anyway, you know, all of these mobsters and dirtbags and scumbags and members of the transnational crime syndicate, they want America to collapse for their own benefit to steal resources, to make money from chaos, et cetera, et cetera.
Sarah Kendzior:
Which then brings me to a question I have regarding Janet Yellen and the Treasury, and I've had this question the whole time but now that she's proclaimed the Treasury's about to run out of money it seems like a good time to bring this up again. It's actually a two-part question. And so my first question is, Is the treasury still infiltrated by Russia? Because you may recall in late 2018, at, in fact, the exact last time that the government shut down in December 2018, Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier of Buzzfeed released this giant exposé about how the Treasury had been infiltrated by Russia in 2015, which is to say under the Obama administration. It remained infiltrated by them throughout the Trump administration despite the effort of a whistleblower—Natalie Mayflower Edwards—to sound the alarm. I'm going to just read a little bit from this article to refresh you. A lot has happened since then, including the imprisonment of Natalie Mayflower Edwards, which just happened, I think, a couple months ago.
Sarah Kendzior:
They wrote back then... This is just a couple excerpts, I strongly recommend you read the whole thing to get all the details: “In March 2017, this official wrote to supervisors to warn that Russia was manipulating the system.” This is in the Treasury. “She said that the terrorist financing unit, which set up the collaboration with Russia, was not forthcoming about the extent of its relationship with that country and wouldn't let FinCEN”—that's the sort of accountability apparatus within the Treasury—”attend meetings with its representatives. At least 10 FinCEN employees have filed former whistleblower complaints about the department. The whistleblowers say they tried multiple times to raise concerns about issues they believed threatened national security, but that they faced retaliation instead of being heeded. Some of FinCEN’s top officials quit in anger. One senior advisor has been arrested and accused of releasing financial records to a journalist that advisor, a whistleblower named Natalie Mayflower Edwards first sounded the alarm in the summer of 2016.”
Sarah Kendzior:
“She went on to speak with six different Congressional Committee staffers to air her concerns. In July and August, 2018, she met again with staffers of one the Senate committees investigating Russian interference during the presidential campaign. In those meetings, she told the staffers that ‘FinCEN withheld documents revealing suspicious financial transactions of Trump associates that the committee had requested.’” There's a lot more where that came from, but basically, it's a fox in the henhouse situation. You've got complicity from within the Treasury. You've got people emailing back and forth using Google and Hotmail and other open, not formal, not government accounts back and forth with Russian operatives. This is something we’ve discussed a lot because it's a really big deal. When you look at the history of Trump as a career criminal, as somebody deeply tied to the Russian mafia who has undergone an enormous number of bankruptcies and had them bailed out by the Russian mafia.
Sarah Kendzior:
You had Steve Mnuchin as the Treasurer. He's somebody else who has a long history of corruption, a long history of letting oligarchs off the hook and allowing them to evade sanctions. The sort of natural conclusion here is Russia compromised the Treasury. It also hacked a number of government agencies before that, including the State Department, the White House, the DNC, the RNC, et cetera. This infiltration was deeper. This infiltration seemed to go to the heart of the accountability. The ability of the Treasury to police itself was in brave jeopardy and that, of course, was exacerbated by Trump and Mnuchin being in charge of it. So one of my key questions when Biden came in was like, Well, who's going to be overseeing the Treasury and how are they going to deal with this? Are they going to clean house? Are they going to further the investigation?
Sarah Kendzior:
Are they going to rectify the situation and assure the American public that a foreign government does not have some sort of control over our treasury? And the answer is, no, they're going to put the whistleblower in prison. That's what happened to Natalie Mayflower Edwards. And, of course, it was not Janet Yellen who could do that, but that is what happened. She, to my knowledge, has said nothing about Russian infiltration of the Treasury in 2015 and whether it's still going on. It's also worth noting that in December 2020, it was revealed—what we expected for some time—that the largest hack, the largest cyber attack, on the United States of America by a foreign power in the history of the US had happened, had been going on since March 2020—at least, possibly earlier—by Russia. And among the agencies that they hacked was the Treasury.
Sarah Kendzior:
So you have a two-fold attack here. You have the infiltration in 2015 and then you have a hacking, you know, the details of which we don't completely know since the Solar Winds hack throughout 2020. Did that stop? Early on in the Biden administration, they released kind of a cursory statement saying, you know, “Yes, we take the threat of Russia and the giant hack they just perpetrated on us very seriously. We're going to hold them to account. We're going to get everything back in order.” I have not heard a word about this then. This was during the brief fleeting period of the Biden administration, the first 100 days, where we thought they might actually, maybe, enforce accountability. And we certainly didn't think they were going to overlook and ignore the greatest cyber attack on the US in its history, which of course is also a grave national security threat. But that's what they've done. Now we're heading to a shutdown in which the Treasury plays a huge role, and you've got Janet Yellen putting out these kinds of emergency alert statements saying, “Yeah, we're not gonna have any money. We're not going to be able to pay the bills,” so on, so forth. How does anyone divorce that from what's already happened to the Treasury? What is the actual end game here? Those are questions that I have.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yes. I know things are looking bleak now. There’s still a lot of time between now and the midterms and there is no guarantee that Republicans will take back the House. There were a lot of pundits that were expecting the Republicans to win the Senate races in Georgia, for instance, when they went into a runoff. So, please understand that our smart organizing, our showing up for each other and refusing to abandon each other, we could always prove the pundits wrong. We do still have a chance to hold on to the House, to expand our power in the Senate, to push Sinema and Manchin out of power. We can do all that together. So don't lose hope. There is still work we can do. Join the communities where you live. You can find a community to join by going to the Gaslit Nation action guide. That's very important, signing up with a group like Indivisible where you live, where you can follow the issues, stay engaged, go where you're needed. And if we commit to that work, we could be living in a much different country for Biden’s second term with a lot more going through, without all this obstructionism. It can be done.
Outro Music: A New Time by The Paula Kelley Orchestra
[credits]
Andrea Chalupa:
Our discussion continues and you can get access to that by signing up on our Patreon at the Truth Teller level or higher.
Sarah Kendzior:
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Andrea Chalupa:
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Sarah Kendzior:
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Andrea Chalupa:
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