Category: Transcripts

The GOP’s Racist Past And Future

June 15, 2014 - Top Stories, Transcripts

Republicans are never exactly clear why we need more guns. Sometimes Republicans say we need guns because civilization is breaking down and there’s nobody left to protect us. Other times Republicans say we need more guns because there’s too many people protecting us, those protectors being the police, and so we need guns to protect ourselves from the people protecting us. Republicans can’t agree on why we need more guns, they only agree we need more of them.

Laura Ingraham has a history of racism dating back to her days over at the Dartmouth Review.

Republicans pull off this conflicted narrative by draping themselves in the flag. They just can’t seem to agree on which flag. Most Republicans love the American flag. That’s the flag we’re never supposed to burn because American soldiers died for that flag, killed by soldiers brandishing the Nazi and Confederate flags, two flags which, sadly, more and more Republicans seem to be embracing these days.

Take for example the married couple that killed those two Las Vegas police officers last weekend and left a swastika as their calling card. Before committing this act of domestic terrorism they lived with Fox News darling Cliven Bundy who earlier this year engaged in an armed standoff with federal agents coming to collect grazing fees in excess of one million dollars Bundy owed our Bureau of Land Management. Outgunned, our federal agents backed away. And so Hannity, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham let out a rebel yell embracing this act of treason and celebrated Bundy as an American folk hero. That is until Bundy had a few choice words to say about the Negro. That rebel yell of Hannity’s, Beck’s, Limbaugh’s and Ingraham’s immediately dissipated even though they all shared Bundy’s long shameful history of choice words about the Negro.

Never forget Eric Cantor hunter Laura Ingraham first came to the right wing’s attention while she was an undergraduate penning articles for the Dartmouth Review savagely mocking affirmative action, Ebonics and black music professors with “words about the Negro” most of her black targets considered racist. Whether right-wingers want to admit it, that swastika left at the Las Vegas crime scene with the two dead cops has found a cozy little home inside the Republican Party. Sean Hannity is always quick to point out that the Democratic Party played host to the Southern segregationists. But all that changed in 1964 when LBJ launched his Great Society. And so by the late ‘80s when Grand Wizard of the KKK David Duke ran for political office, he did it as a Republican. It’s been that way ever since.

Republican Speaker Boehner has complained privately about the Tea Party.

Not all Republicans are racist, but most Tea Partiers are. Despite efforts by moderate Republicans earlier in the year to marginalize the Tea Party, the GOP is being hijacked by gun toting secessionists who hate our government, hate our police, and hate anyone who isn’t a white Christian. In private Republican Speaker John Boehner despises the Tea Party, but is too frightened to do anything about them.

Consider the plight of Laura Ingraham’s target Eric Cantor who was Majority Leader until he was defeated Tuesday by a Tea Party candidate even though Cantor did everything to placate the Tea Party except convert to Christianity. Eric Cantor’s a Jew, who discovered Tuesday there’s no place at the Tea Party for somebody who isn’t Christian.

The loudest voices in the GOP these days hate government, hate blacks, and hate anyone who isn’t Christian and at the same time are demanding their constitutional right to both privacy and guns. I don’t know where this all heading. I do know America is left with a choice: privacy or guns. We can no longer have both because the GOP has gone bat guano crazy. Just like after 911 America is under attack, this time by domestic right wing extremists demanding two things, guns and privacy. And they deserve neither.

Like most law abiding Americans if I have to choose between the police tapping our phones in order to keep an eye on America’s right wing lunatic fringe or these crazy ammo-toting Republicans with swastikas and Confederate flags who insist on their privacy—I’ll chose the police. Snoop away Big Brother. And while you’re in there, take away their guns.

GOP No Longer The Party Of Law And Order

June 13, 2014 - Transcripts

Originally broadcast June 14, 2014

When President Obama first took office the Department of Homeland Security issued a report warning about dangers of home grown right wing domestic terrorism. Republicans quickly took offense accusing Homeland Security of playing politics. So the report was shredded. Because how dare anybody accuse someone of being a domestic terrorist just because they’re stockpiling ammunition in order to overthrow our government.

The more right wing extremists warn of America becoming a police state the more America is starting to look like one. I think it might have something to do with the police being more concerned about their own safety than ours.

Nixon was elected in 1968 on a platform of Law and Order.

Crime is way down in America, but you wouldn’t know it looking at our police. Local law enforcement agencies are now buying equipment once reserved for the pentagon. Police are being fitted with tanks, night vision goggles, drones, mine sweepers, M-16s, grenade launchers, the kind of tactical gear used on invading countries, not drivers doing 50 in a school zone.

America has lost its taste for war, which leaves the arms makers desperately searching for new markets, and it turns out those market are right here in the United States. There’s a mini arms races here in America as local politicians and police chiefs compete to prove they’re keeping us safer than the other guy. But because police have already done a great job keeping us safer, violent crime has been plummeting since the 70s, local SWAT teams are left with no choice but to use their new toys for kicking down doors to arrest Americans who have been delinquent paying their parking tickets. According to the New York Times, four years ago, a Miami SWAT team brandished military equipment similar to that being used in Afghanistan to crack down on barbershops cutting hair without a license. “Drop that nose hair clipper! Or I’ll shoot!”

Making weapons is a great business. As long as you keep selling guns to Americans, Americans get more scared so they buy more guns, which means the police have to buy more guns because now they’re scared.

If more cops have to get shot in order for police departments to buy more ammo that means more profit for the gun manufacturers. And if the cops are heavily armed then right wing extremists who fear a police state have to buy more ammo which means more profits for the gun manufacturers. I’d say it’s like our cold war with the Russians but in a cold war you never actually fire your weapons.

Cliven-Bundy-press-conference-042414-NBC-News

Cliven Bundy was hailed as a GOP hero after he and his followers put BLM officials in their rifle scopes.

I wouldn’t call it a “hot” war but weapons are being discharged. Last weekend two Las Vegas police officers eating pizza were shot point blank by two followers of Fox News darling Cliven Bundy. 2014 is on track to being one of the deadliest in recent memory for cops. Sixty-two police officers have been killed in the line of duty so far this year, an increase of 38 percent over last year.

According to the Anti Defamation League, since Barack Obama took office there’s been a dramatic increase in right wing extremists targeting police. During the past five years there have been 40 deadly encounters in which right wing extremists singled out police officers to kill them.

Republicans were once the party of law and order. But now the NRA controls Republicans, and arms manufacturers who want to sell Americans more weapons control the NRA. The Republicans used to demand more cops on the street. Now they side with the people who want to take cops off the street, one bullet at a time.

There is a growing strain within the GOP that hates our government, hates our police, hates anybody who isn’t white and they’re being manipulated by the people who profit from all this: politicians, right wing talk show hosts, and the people who sell ammunition. Terrorism isn’t about how many people you kill. It’s about creating fear. The police are now frightened. Its time Republicans did something about their ultra right wing constituents, and the people who sell them guns.

Kitten Has Jazz Hands

June 10, 2014 - The News From Around The World, Transcripts

Kitten has Jazz hands! All life is precious, instead of eating an animal adopt one.

Liberals can talk all they want to about war, poverty, climate change and blame President Obama’s inaction, or greedy Wall Street, but the brutal reality is until you change the cells comprising your body, and by that I mean switching to a plant based diet, you have no right to complain about global warming, Wall Street avarice or America’s predilection towards violence. When you eat meat, beef, chicken, turkey fish, dairy, and dairy is my weakness, I sometimes eat cheese, when you eat something that was once alive you ingest the greed, the hate and the pollution that, more than oil, is destroying our planet. Even worse you provide financial succor to the nefarious people and corporations who have turned America over to the plutocrats who believe they can destroy everything just because they own it.– David Feldman.

The Science Is Still Out On Science

May 31, 2014 - David Feldman Show, Transcripts

Originally broadcast May 30, 2014

Next week President Obama is expected to unveil the strictest coal emission regulations in American history. Obama will demand that coal-firing plants reduce carbon emissions by 20 percent. Most experts predict this will close hundreds of power plants that run on coal, which is the primary source of greenhouse gases. All this after last month’s Supreme Court decision to uphold the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to enforce key provisions of the Clean Air Act. So maybe there’s still hope in Scalia Land.

There is the possibility that President Obama is attacking coal to greenwash his plans to go ahead with the Keystone Pipeline, which would transport crude oil from Canada’s tar sands through some of America’s most important farms and fresh water aquifers. The renowned NASA Climate Scientist James Hansen warns that should the world’s second largest consumer of energy, America, approve the Keystone Pipeline, the mere extraction of that tar sand oil would mean it’s “game over” for our planet.

Alcoholic John Boehner.

The Keystone Pipeline may be a red herring since Alberta’s tar sand oil is already coming to America via train, which the oil industry is starting to favor over pipelines because rail is cheaper and more efficient. Just not safer. Oil Change International reports that since President Obama took office, crude oil transported by rail has grown from virtually nothing to one million barrels per day. Last year America witnessed 117 crude oil rail spills, and expect that number to increase geometrically as America opens up more and more of it’s own land for fracking.

Warren Buffet owns BNSF, which is responsible for nearly three quarters of all the crude oil in North America transported by train. So beware anyone who opposes the Keystone Pipeline, they might own a railroad.

These two are possibly the only people covered in less oil than the House Science Committee.

Thanks to fracking America’s oil industry says we can drill our way to energy independence, and that in ten years we will run a trade surplus as the world buys our oil and natural gas. We’re promised fracking offers us a peace dividend. America can avoid Middle East conflicts when we no longer need OPEC. Not so fast. While the science isn’t still out on Climate Change, the science definitely appears to be missing as to just how much oil America actually sits on. Those promises of vast oil reserves underneath California’s Central Valley now appear to be grossly exaggerated.

The Department of Energy reports this week that the oil industry’s promise of nearly 14 billion barrels of recoverable oil underneath California’s Monterey Formation is really only 600 million barrels. That’s not stopping the oil industry’s plan to frack underneath some of the world’s most fertile farmland here in California, wasting 127,127 gallons of precious water to drill a single well in a part of the world known as Earthquake Country.

Meanwhile last Thursday hearings on Climate Change were held by the Republican led House Science Committee. Committee Chair Texas Republican Lamar Smith said, “When assessing climate change, we need to make sure that findings are driven by science, not an alarmist, partisan agenda.”

Stephen Sayle, the current head of the House Science Committee, seen here at his old job.

So who did Mr. Smith put in charge of his Science Committee? Stephen Sayle, who has generously agreed to walk away from his six figure job as a lobbyist for Chevron so he can help the House Science Committee get to the bottom of climate change. Something tells me when he gets to that bottom he’ll strike barrels of oil money.

But before those hearings were even over Speaker of the House John Boehner warned that attempts to regulate greenhouse gases would kill jobs. When asked if any carbon controls were necessary, Speaker Boehner, who five years ago opined that carbon dioxide is not a carcinogen, replied, “How the hell would I know? I’m not a climate scientist.” And either is the man running your Science Committee.

Originally broadcast May 30, 2014

Children Of The Corn & All The Other Crops

May 28, 2014 - David Feldman Show, Reading List, The News From Around The World, Transcripts

Time to take a break from worrying about the plight of child actors and start worrying about the plight of child farm laborers.

Originally broadcast May 29, 2014

All Americans agree children need to stay away from tobacco. Apparently it’s still up for discussion when it comes to kids staying away from tobacco farms.

Human Rights Watch says American children work forty to sixty hours a week in the fields of North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky helping America remain the fourth biggest producer of Tobacco in the world.

Growing, harvesting and curing tobacco is labor intensive. Children confront heavy machinery, sharp knives, toxic fertilizers, poor sanitary conditions, and abusive supervisors. Even more disturbing is that the physical act of picking tobacco, touching the plant, results in acute nicotine poisoning for 75 percent of these children who complain of nausea, rashes, headaches and difficulty breathing. Then there are the pesticides, which cause long term neurological diseases and worse.

All this is going on in North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky. States that spend more time protecting Big Tobacco than they do a woman’s reproductive rights. Makes you wonder if these people really see a woman’s uterus as the source of life or just cheap labor.

Sadly the problem of child farm labor is not limited to tobacco here in America.

Human Rights Watch reports that when it comes to child farm labor America is no better than any developing nation. Deputy director of the Children’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch Zama Coursen-Neff says,

“The United States spends over $25 million a year – more than all other countries combined – to eliminate child labor abroad, yet is tolerating exploitative child labor in its own backyard.”

Not counting family farms, more than 200,000 children work our fields, constituting 9 percent of all American farm workers. Roughly 80 percent are Hispanic, and 40 percent are migrant, which means these children move from farm to farm. We’re talking about American children, who should be in the classroom. Maybe all those rich hedge fund managers touting the benefits of charter schools would like to start one for the children of migrant workers. Oh wait, there’s no government money to skim off the top and make exorbitant profits doing that.

Meanwhile a 17-year-old boy who had been working North Carolina fields harvesting Christmas trees and picking tomatoes since he was 12 tells Human Rights Watch,

“I really didn’t have a childhood.”

And many of these children sacrifice more than just their childhood. Human Rights Watch says American children toiling the fields are four times as likely to die on the job than any other work that permits child labor.

No place for children.

American farms operate under obsolete Depression era child labor laws written when we were still a rural society. FDR’s Fair Labor Standards Act, still applicable today, exempted family farms from work rules other industries take for granted. So Big Ag hires American children as young as 12 to pick our fruits and vegetables. And, when Big Ag convinces government inspectors they’re just running a small family farm, children can be out there working the fields at any age.

Picking fruits and vegetables, just like tobacco, is highly competitive. That means American children are exposed to excessive heat, sexual and physical abuse, often working 14 hour days 7 days a week lacking potable water, toilets, and of course an education. And let’s not forget the pesticides.

American children. That’s who is touching your fruits and vegetables. Children. These Children earn below minimum wage and are often charged for gloves, tools, and water.

One day the media might take a break from wringing their hands over the plight of Macaulay Culkin, Miley Cyrus and Lindsay Lohan to conclude that it’s not just acting, it’s dangerous putting a child to work in any field. Especially an actual field.

Let’s stop worrying about American children eating their fruits and vegetables and start figuring out a way to get American children to stop picking them.

War Is Not A Sport

May 21, 2014 - The News From Around The World, Transcripts

Andrew J. Bacevich, Jr. is an American political scientist specializing in international relations, security studies, American foreign policy, and American diplomatic and military history. He is currently Professor of International Relations and History at Boston University. He is also a retired career officer in the Armor Branch of the United States Army, retiring with the rank of Colonel. Professor Bacevich is author of several books, including American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy (2002), The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War (2005) and The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008). He has also appeared on television shows such as The Colbert Report and the Bill Moyers Report and has written op-eds which have appeared in papers such as The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and Financial Times. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Professor Bacevich has been “a persistent, vocal critic of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, calling the conflict a catastrophic failure.” In March 2007, he described George W. Bush’s endorsement of such “preventive wars” as “immoral, illicit, and imprudent.”

We spoke with Andrew Bacevich earlier.

DAVID: Tying sports to war. Lyndon Baines Johnson has been caught on tape saying he didn’t want to be the first US president to lose a war. Americans… and this is, again, this is on sports. We refuse to admit defeat. We love sports. It’s a metaphor for war. And we often think about the win/loss column. Nixon and even George W. Bush wanted to know how many of the other guys were we getting.

So for our sports fans, did we lose Vietnam? Did we lose Iraq? Are we losing in Afghanistan? And would America be better off if we could admit defeat? Is there a benefit to saying we lost? Or does admitting defeat in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, does that dishonor our troops?

President Lyndon Johnson said he didn’t want to go down in history as the first U.S. President to lose a war.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I don’t think it dishonors our troops. I mean, my argument would be that we need to be realistic, pragmatic, and deal with reality. And the reality is… first of all, war is not a sport. War is, as Carl von Clausewitz said, a continuation of politics by other means. It’s using violence in order to achieve political purposes. And we need to be honest enough to recognize that in Vietnam, we failed to achieve our political purposes. In Iraq, we failed to achieve our political purposes. In Afghanistan, in all likelihood, we will fail.

And you face up to that, and you act accordingly. I mean, we need to recognize that the notion that using military power can somehow fix the Middle East in ways that will serve our interest — it is not going to happen. We’ve been trying to do that for 30 years now, and we have met with one failure and frustration after another. And…

DAVID: I’m going to interrupt you. I’m going to interrupt you. You’re a colonel.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I was, long ago.

DAVID: Okay. 25 years in the military. West Point. Vietnam. Does it make you feel uncomfortable to say, “We lost?”

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, no, it doesn’t. I mean, I’m… and when I was a captain just coming back from Vietnam, I might have had a different view at that time. I was a different person in a different circumstance. But at this stage of my life, I think we do a disservice to our military, and we do a disservice to our country, if we basically lie to ourselves about what our military involvement in recent decades has yielded. I think we owe it to those who served and sacrificed to call a spade a spade.

DAVID: Mm-hmm. Which brings us to more of the sports theme: spectators. War is not a spectator sport. And yet in your book, you kind of say it has become a spectator sport for Americans. We got rid of the draft in 1973, and we’ve converted to an all-volunteer military. And within seven years of that, Ronald Reagan was elected president. For the next 30 years, our political system lay waste to the middle class. Unions. We’ve witnessed unprecedented homelessness and a celebration of excess that would make Caligula cringe.

What toll has this all-volunteer army taken on the common man? On… not the soldier, but on us, the people who don’t volunteer. Who stay home? What’s the toll?

ANDREW BACEVICH: We, the people, forfeited any ownership of our military. It’s not America’s military. It’s Washington’s military. Washington has used that military as it has seen fit, and, I think, with mostly negative consequences. So the militarization of US policy, which had already begun during the Cold War, but which was accelerated by the move to the all-volunteer force and then the end of the Cold War, has not made us more secure. It’s not made us more prosperous. It’s not made us more free. I think that the militarization of policy since the creation of the all-volunteer force has hurt the country, meaning its hurt us.

President George W. Bush, former owner of the Texas Rangers, tried to fight two wars without a draft and by gifting the American people with a series of tax cuts.

DAVID: They ask why is Washington, DC, why are our politicians so out of touch? They have so much contempt for us? I think a lot of that is rooted in the all-volunteer army. It’s gotten easier, if you’re a politician or a bureaucrat in Washington, surrounded by soldiers in Washington, DC, guys who actually volunteer and make a sacrifice. If I were a politician, I would have nothing but contempt for the rest of America, because they don’t make a sacrifice.

And under Bush, W. Bush, he was handing out tax cuts during a time of war.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Right.

DAVID: Now we don’t sacrifice ourselves, our family, or money. Why wouldn’t Washington have nothing but contempt? If I were living in Washington, if I were… I would look at all Americans as welfare cheats.

ANDREW BACEVICH: I’m with you, but I think I’d point my finger at us, at the American people who have allowed this circumstance to develop. We have chosen a definition of citizenship that is paper-thin. And we have not been willing to consider the possibility that citizenship should entail collective obligation. And therefore, to see wars as not simply Washington’s business, but as the people’s business.

The David Feldman Show