Gaslit Nation Transcript 10 March 2021 “Why Does The GOP Vote To Hurt Their Own Base?” https://www.patreon.com/posts/why-does-gop-to-48562987 Reverend William Barber: Billionaires have made nearly a trillion dollars in the midst of this pandemic and when I see people who are dying from poverty, and people who are poor and low wealth workers are the last to get any help, but the first to suffer. For over nine years, we haven't raised the minimum wage, it was $7.25 now, $2.13 for tip workers, and these politicians want to hold poor and low wealth people captive in poverty and play games. Republicans want to block, because many have never seen a wage hike they like, and Democrats run on one thing, and then when they get in office, too scared to run on what they said they were going to do, worried more about some kind of false notion of compromise. Don't you remember the three fifths compromise kept us in trouble for 250 years and we still haven't gotten over? We need a change. Sarah Kendzior: I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the best selling 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. Over the weekend, the Senate passed the American Rescue Plan Act, a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus meant to help Americans recover from the public health and economic disaster of COVID-19. It was passed one year after the virus prompted worldwide shutdowns and upended American life as we knew it. Sarah Kendzior: So, I urge you to look back at where we were one year ago. The Democratic primaries had not yet ended, both Warren and Sanders were still in the race, and voters were making demands to fix the deep structural flaws that had allowed Trump to rise to power in 2016. As we’ve said many times, Trump was not an aberration, but a culmination. While much of his rise and ultimate installation was abetted by illegal activity, it was also made possible by the exploitation of American pain and injustice. Sarah Kendzior: A very obvious way to prevent that kind of exploitation, a way that is also morally sound in its own right, is to simply pass policies that strengthen the rights and opportunities of ordinary Americans and protect them from falling off the fiscal cliff at which most Americans reside. One year ago, mainstream political campaigns were demanding policies like a higher minimum wage, student debt relief, affordable health care, and an end to the dependency on gas station dictatorships—like Saudi Arabia and Russia—that are also affronts to human life. Sarah Kendzior: Then COVID-19 came, and the attempted coup came, and the violence came. It came over and over again, in waves of disease, in waves of desperation, in waves of deception that exhausted this country's capacity to fight for itself. People are still fighting—you heard Reverend William Barber, the co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, still fighting for a fair wage in our opening clip—but they are also settling for scraps, because scraps are what they are being offered. Their representatives who swore to stand by the American people are often settling as well. Sarah Kendzior: Some of this is a result of negotiation with the GOP, which has refashioned itself as an apocalyptic cult seeking one-party rule, and which has been reliably apathetic to both mass death and treason for the past four years and beyond. It is worth noting that not a single Republican voted for the stimulus plan, not because they thought it didn't help enough, but because they thought this long delayed and stripped down bailout still provided too much. Sarah Kendzior: In other words, much of this is not the Democrats fault, but some of this painful situation is due to the fact that the Democrats know that many Americans will settle for scraps instead of settling the score, and that they will convince themselves that this is what they were promised, even when it objectively is not. They will tell themselves that $1,400 is really $2,000. They will tell themselves that something is better than nothing, and they tell themselves this out of fear, because the alternative—that few officials really have the back of the American people—is too painful to contemplate after this year of profound grief and loss. Sarah Kendzior: But as I've said many times, keep your standards high, even if you do not think that they will be met. I said that during the Obama era, during the Trump era, and now I'm saying it during the Biden era, because while presidents may come and go, your fundamental value as a human being does not. The American political and economic system is designed to make you feel like you are worthless. But you are worth more than they tell you, and part of the struggle of the next few years is resisting the cult mentality in groupthink that tells you to not ask for what you deserve. It's time to reverse the old JFK maxim and ask what your country can do for you, because lord knows that in 2020, we all did more than our share. Sarah Kendzior: So Andrea, what are your thoughts on the stimulus package? Andrea Chalupa: I think that's the North Star that we all need to follow, is demand better—always push for better—because that's how you get progress. I, like so many, was disheartened that we did not get $2,000 checks, but $1,400 checks. Of course, there was the big vote against raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, which is where it needs to be. The federal minimum wage hasn't been raised since something like 2009 and it's one of the contributing factors to why we have crisis levels of income inequality that we haven't seen since just before the Great Depression. Andrea Chalupa: If you look at the senators, the eight on the Democratic side that voted against raising the minimum wage, their states have—with the exception of Arizona, which we'll get into later in this discussion—with the exception of Arizona, those Democratic senators from New Hampshire, Delaware, they have low state-mandated minimum wages for those states. So it goes to show that they're just out of touch with this larger crisis of income inequality that is a real human rights crisis. Andrea Chalupa: People should not be making poverty wages. People should not be having to juggle several jobs and work constantly just to put food on the table. Poverty gets inherited generation after generation. We do not live in a meritocracy. We live in a growing corporate oligarch-driven power structure where we're dependent on an oligarch—Elon Musk, to drive our space exploration, now. We're dependent on oligarch Jeff Bezos to own the Washington Post and keep those journalism jobs in business at a time when newsrooms are shrinking. Andrea Chalupa: We shouldn't have an economy and a democracy that is dependent on oligarchs being benevolent. That's the danger here. We need to bring back the middle class, we need to expand the middle class, we need greater fairness. If you look at the countries that have strong social safety nets—like Denmark, famously—they also have high levels of happiness, they have high levels of education (because university and higher education are free), and they also have extremely low levels of corruption. Andrea Chalupa: While we're not there by any means, we need to make that our standard and push for greater equality and fairness in our economy, because it translates to greater equality and fairness in our democracy. You see that again and again in examples where we’re fighting to become like Denmark. I do want to say, if you stay grounded in the reality that America is a far-right country—we have our systems so skewed towards benefiting that minority slave-owning, property-owning class. The Senate was established, for instance, to be like the House of Lords in the UK. Andrea Chalupa: If you stay grounded in that reality that America is largely a far-right country in terms of how the power structure is skewed, and that we're still dealing with the fallout of the Reagan revolution, which sold everybody on the gaslighting of trickle-down economics, that the more wealth that the top makes, the more comes down to us bottom feeders, which simply isn't true. Instead, it's exploded income inequality levels in the US. Andrea Chalupa: On top of that, the Reagan revolution also got rid of the Fairness Doctrine which exploded the far-right propaganda machine in America, which is trying to continue to gaslight people into thinking that everything is fine. As a result, you get Republicans voting against the Rescue Plan. That's what you get. The reality of Republicans doing that is so abnormal. We're going to go into that in this discussion. Andrea Chalupa: A major American party that holds so much power in our country—that could easily come back to power in Congress in 2022, that could take the White House in 2024—the fact that they voted against the American Rescue Plan is a massive, massive red flag for the rest of us, because all things considered, now that I've listed off the disappointments and the larger context of what we're up against in America, all things considered, the American Rescue Plan is historic.