2460 - Neoliberalism's Abundance Gambit w/ Paul Glastris

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Majority Report with Sam Seder
Episode: 2460 - Neoliberalism's Abundance Gambit
Guest: Paul Glastris, Editor-in-Chief of the Washington Monthly
Release Date: March 24, 2025

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Introduction

In episode 2460 of The Majority Report with Sam Seder, host Sam Seder engages in a profound discussion with Paul Glastris, the Editor-in-Chief of the Washington Monthly. The episode delves into the concept of neoliberalism's "Abundance Gambit," critically analyzing its proposals and implications within the current political and economic landscape.

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The Abundance Agenda: An Overview

Sam Seder opens the conversation by seeking to understand the foundational beliefs of Paul Glastris regarding the "Abundance Agenda." Glastris explains that the Abundance Agenda posits that government red tape—such as local zoning laws, federal environmental statutes, and bureaucratic processes—hinders the production of essential goods and services like affordable housing, renewable energy infrastructure, and lower-cost healthcare.

Paul Glastris (27:21): "Their argument is essentially various kinds of government red tape. Local zoning ordinances, federal environmental statutes, processes within bureaucracies. This red tape is holding back the production of goods that we all need."

Glastris acknowledges that while some aspects of the Abundance Agenda are valid, such as the impact of overregulation, he contends that proponents overlook more significant barriers like the consolidation of industries and the rise of oligarchies that stifle competition and innovation.

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Housing: The Frontline of the Abundance Debate

The discussion shifts to housing, a primary focus of the Abundance Agenda. Glastris critiques the movement, particularly the YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) faction, which advocates for eliminating zoning restrictions to increase housing availability.

Paul Glastris (40:15): "If somebody wanted to build a 2 flat or a 4 flat in my neighborhood, I'd be fine with that. The problem is, after trying reforms in places like California and Minneapolis, we've only seen a trickle of new housing and significant backlash from local residents."

Sam Seder probes the efficacy of these measures, questioning whether the removal of zoning laws genuinely leads to substantial housing development or merely provokes resistance from existing communities. Glastris responds by highlighting that while some cities like Minneapolis have seen modest increases in housing units, the expected large-scale transformation remains elusive.

Paul Glastris (43:25): "The backlash is enormous because nine out of ten residents would oppose additional housing units in their neighborhoods due to concerns about parking, school capacities, and increased traffic."

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Regulatory Red Tape vs. Corporate Consolidation

Glastris argues that the Abundance Agenda's emphasis on deregulation is often misplaced, as previous decades have seen significant deregulation leading to increased corporate consolidation rather than the intended boost in production and efficiency.

Paul Glastris (35:21): "We've had more deregulation than regulation over the last 40 years. And what has that gotten us? Increased concentration of wealth and corporate monopolies."

He emphasizes that addressing the root causes of economic stagnation requires tackling the monopolistic practices of large corporations rather than solely focusing on eliminating bureaucratic obstacles.

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Infrastructure and Health Care: Beyond Surface-Level Reforms

The conversation extends to infrastructure and healthcare, where Glastris critiques the Abundance Agenda's solutions as insufficient for the systemic issues at play. Specifically, he points out that simply removing regulations won't counteract the monopolistic tendencies in sectors like electric utilities and healthcare providers.

Paul Glastris (69:00): "Investor-owned electric utility monopolies resist clean energy initiatives because they threaten their profit margins. Antitrust isn't the right tool here; we need to create government agencies like the Tennessee Valley Authority to drive these changes."

Regarding healthcare, Glastris dismisses the idea that increasing the number of doctors would lower costs, citing the monopolistic control of hospitals and healthcare providers over pricing.

Paul Glastris (60:20): "Even if we add more doctors, hospitals owning practices and labs means they can still impose high costs. The real issue is consolidation, not just the number of providers."

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Political Implications: A Divided Democratic Party

Glastris discusses the internal dynamics of the Democratic Party, contrasting the Abundance Agenda’s focus on deregulation with the populist approaches advocated by figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC).

Paul Glastris (37:51): "While Bernie and AOC focus on dismantling the oligarchy and addressing wealth concentration, the donor class within the Democratic Party is pushing for the Abundance Agenda to address housing and economic issues."

He expresses concern that the Abundance Agenda, driven by the donor class, may not resonate with average voters who are more concerned about corporate monopolies and wealth inequality. Glastris suggests that this internal conflict could impact the party’s future direction and electoral success.

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Critique of Abundance Liberalism

Paul Glastris articulates several critical points against Abundance Liberalism:

1. Ineffectiveness in Achieving Goals: The removal of zoning laws and other regulatory reforms has yielded minimal impact on housing availability, often stalling due to local opposition.

2. Neglect of Corporate Concentration: By focusing on bureaucratic red tape, the movement overlooks the more pressing issue of corporate monopolies that restrict competition and inflate prices across various sectors.

3. Political Viability: The Abundance Agenda may not align with voter priorities, potentially undermining the Democratic Party's appeal to a broader electorate concerned with economic inequality and corporate power.

Paul Glastris (54:58): "These are not new problems. We've been dealing with exclusionary zoning for over a century, and deregulation hasn't solved the core issues of wealth concentration and corporate oligarchy."

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Conclusion: Navigating the Future of Democratism

In wrapping up, Sam Seder and Paul Glastris discuss the potential paths forward for the Democratic Party. Glastris advocates for a balanced approach that addresses both regulatory inefficiencies and corporate consolidation to foster genuine economic and social progress.

Paul Glastris (70:14): "Antitrust is an important tool, but we also need to create new government agencies to tackle monopolistic practices and ensure competitive markets."

Seder concurs, emphasizing the need for comprehensive reforms that not only streamline government processes but also dismantle the entrenched power structures that impede equitable growth and innovation.

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Notable Quotes

• Paul Glastris (27:21): "This red tape is holding back the production of goods that we all need."
• Paul Glastris (40:15): "If somebody wanted to build a 2 flat or a 4 flat in my neighborhood, I'd be fine with that."
• Paul Glastris (43:25): "The backlash is enormous because nine out of ten residents would oppose additional housing units in their neighborhoods."
• Paul Glastris (54:58): "We've been dealing with exclusionary zoning for over a century, and deregulation hasn't solved the core issues."
• Paul Glastris (70:14): "Antitrust is an important tool, but we also need to create new government agencies to tackle monopolistic practices."

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Final Thoughts

Episode 2460 offers a critical examination of neoliberal policies under the guise of the Abundance Agenda, highlighting the need for a more nuanced approach that addresses both bureaucratic inefficiencies and the pervasive issue of corporate consolidation. Paul Glastris provides insightful critiques, urging policymakers and the Democratic Party to recalibrate their strategies to better serve the needs of the populace and foster a more equitable economic landscape.

For more in-depth analysis, listeners are encouraged to read Paul Glastris's work published in the Washington Monthly and explore additional resources linked in the podcast's description.

Transcript

[Sam Seder]

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[Emma Vigeland]

I had one of those and they were. It was a phenomenal red. Caps off.

[Sam Seder]

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[Emma Vigeland]

We're adding a question mark to the end.

[Sam Seder]

Not Sunday, Monday. I'm just, I'm spitballing now, folks. I was just like looking for something better than Funday Monday. I just don't feel like we could hit that bar.

[Emma Vigeland]

I don't think we can hit that bar either. But I just have no idea what you just said. So we'll work on it.

[Sam Seder]

Not Sunday, but Monday. Monday.

[Emma Vigeland]

Glum day.

[Sam Seder]

Glum day.

[Emma Vigeland]

Glum day. Thank you.

[Sam Seder]

That also may not be smart. We got to check that with the PR department. We got a lot to get to. There was a flight of about 200 Venezuelans who were sent who were deported to Venezuela, not to a prison. The Trump administration still has the ability to deport people, but their ability to do so without any checks, without any requirements of due process. And let's be clear. What does due process, why do we have due process in this country? Why does anybody have due process? Due process simply means making sure that the subjects who are being charged or accused of something are in fact those people.

[Emma Vigeland]

Right?

[Sam Seder]

Due process prevents things like mistaken Identity or things like, hey, we say you did something, but you didn't. And so aside from the fact that you're sending multiple planes full of people when a judge has said you cannot do this, you're sending them to one of the worst prisons in the hemisphere and you're doing so on grounds that nobody knows if it's even true. And we should say we got a clip of Tom Homan here. He oversees an agency and if you believe that there is a fish rots from the head down, there is no reason to believe that. We're dealing with a huge amount of confidence when it comes to ICE agents. A lot of these people are, would be cops but couldn't make it through the police academies or they washed out or whatever it is.

[Emma Vigeland]

I mean, that guy in that Marvel T shirt that was arresting Mahmoud Khalil didn't really look like he was, you know, the highest level law enforcement officer in the country. I mean, it looked like a guy that just had strolled off the street and just was really eager to be a fascist bootlicker.

[Sam Seder]

It's goons. And here is Tom Homan on this Week. And I don't know if you have even the most rudimentary understanding of non authoritarian government structures, democracies, any places that provides any type of due process. Again, due process can be many different things, but what it's supposed to do is that it's supposed to provide a requisite amount of processing to make sure that the decision you're making is justified on the premise that you're making that decision. Let's see if you can see what's problematic with Tom Holman's response in this exchange on ABC's this Week, 140 terrorists.

[Paul Glassaris]

From the United States.

[Sam Seder]

So how do you determine or how do your people in the field determine that somebody is a gang member?

[Paul Glassaris]

Look, there's various methods I've noticed in the media. A lot of them don't have criminal histories. Well, a lot of gay members don't have criminal history.

[Sam Seder]

Okay, pause it.

[Paul Glassaris]

For sure.

[Sam Seder]

Let me just translate because I think this guy's from Massachusetts. What are you saying was, I don't know, everything. He's talking to himself, but he's trying to go through. Is there, there is no way they don't make these assessments. They see a tattoo and they're like.

[Emma Vigeland]

Well, I like that. Like the new evolution of Trump surrogates lying on, on TV is just like gargle noises to fill the space instead of just like having to do actual words. I mean, why bother Garbage disposal. Yeah.

[Sam Seder]

What he's going to launch into here, though, is not in any way. It is basically saying I've. He's saying, I've heard the critique that none of these people have criminal records. Now I want you to contemplate the idea that if not having a criminal record was part of the requirements to be deported, we would. There would be a lot of people, probably. So he never affirmatively says what, how they determine that someone's in a gang. All they did, they say is, well, a lot of gang members don't have criminal records. This is just astonishing in the media.

[Paul Glassaris]

A lot of them don't have criminal histories. Well, a lot of gang members don't have criminal histories. Just like a lot of terrorists in this world. They're not in any terrorist database. Right. We only know the information within databases based on, for instance, most terrorists we arrest that are identified, US government are later identified through a Title 3 investigation or through an undercover operation. They're not in any terror screening basket screening database. We know that a lot of gang members. I started as a cop in 1984. Many gang members don't have a criminal history. We have a count on social media. We have a count on surveillance techniques. We had a count on sworn statements from other gang members. We had to count on, you know, Wiretaps and Title 3s. Everything involved with criminal investigations come into play. So just because someone hasn't been arrested and charged with a crime yet doesn't mean they're a member of a gang.

[Sam Seder]

Positive. I just want to make it clear again, he said nothing affirmatively as to how they. They determine that someone's in a gang. The only thing he said is not having a criminal record is not evidence that you're not in a gang. Now, you're all suspect. Suspect here because as far as I know, none of you have a criminal record. Just want to put that on.

[Caller]

Just because I'm not in the database doesn't mean I'm not a terrorist.

[Sam Seder]

Exactly.

[Paul Glassaris]

Hasn't been arrested and charged with a crime yet. Doesn't mean they're a member of a gang.

[Sam Seder]

But how do you. I mean, what we've heard from lawyers representing some of these people is that they deny that they're members of this gang or either, you know, Trent de Aragua or MS.13. Do they get a chance to prove that before you take them out of the country and put them into a notorious prison in a country that they're not even from? I mean, do they have any due process at all?

[Paul Glassaris]

Due process? Where was Lake and Ronnie's due process? Where were all these young women that were killed and raped by members of tda? Where was their due process? Well, the people that did that should be prosecuted by the subway. Where's her due process? The bottom line is that plan was full of people designated as terrorists, number one. Number two, every. Every Venezuelan migrant on that flight was a TDA member. Based on numerous criminal investigations, on intelligence reports, and a lot of work by ICE officers. Matter of fact, two days after that flight took off, I even had a discussion with the acting director, ice, and he reiterated that every person, every resident went on that plane was a known member of the tda. So a lot of officers, a lot of criminal investigators, special agents who've done this for decades, looked at the intelligence, intelligence information, the criminal investigation information, all the various social media and surveillance and government records and public records, and they are confident that they're all members of the tda. I'm not surprised that a member of the family sent a non member of the tda, but they were given due process according to the laws on the books. That's the difference between the Trump administration and by the administration. We're actually using the laws on the books to enforce immigration law and secure the border at the highest level it's ever been. The Biden administration.

[Sam Seder]

Look, there's no reason to continue to play because John Carl does not get back to his answer. I mean, the answer to the question of did Lake and Riley or anybody else, any victim of. Not these people. Of people like these people. Right. Like, he's not. These, these are nobody's. Nobody's been. This is not those people. These are people sort of like that he claims are associated with those people. The answer. If you're in media and you found yourself interviewing a fascist like this, the answer to the retort, did Lake and Riley get her due process? Is no, she didn't. And that's how we can tell the difference between the bad guys and the good guys. And you are now basically saying, if that our standard is at the same level as a murderer's standard.

[Emma Vigeland]

Yeah. And he's also very purposefully trying to use this brutal case and killing of Lake and Riley, as does the legislation that some Democrats signed on board for. They are using that case to broadly impugn and accuse all immigrants of basically being criminals. We're seeing this degradation. I mean, it's not really a degradation, but a lot of people in the media took it at face value. They're calling them criminals, so they must be I mean, how about the LGBTQ hairdresser that was profiled? This is just a paragraph from this great Time piece that was over the weekend about what happened when they got these migrants got to this El Salvador prison. The intake began with slaps. One young man sobbed when the guard pushed him to the floor. He said, I'm not a gang member. I'm gay. I'm a barber. I believed him, but maybe it's only because he didn't look like what I had expected. He wasn't a tattooed monster. The men were pulled from the buses so fast, the guards couldn't keep pace. Chains at their ankles and wrists. They stumbled and fell, some guards falling to the ground with them. With each fall came a kick, a slap, a shovel. I mean, people should read this whole piece. Some of the detainees were stripped naked. Their men are calling out for their mother. Another example was somebody who had a tattoo of a soccer team. He's a youth soccer coach, has no criminal record. These are the people that are being accused of being gang members without evidence by Homan. And this is how lynchings happened in the United States. When you don't have due process and you have this kind of like racialized, racially motivated attacks against wide swaths of people drawing them to this one brutal case, similarly to how Israel did it with Palestinians, by the way, you get extrajudicial killings because there is no due process. This is what they're advocating for.

[Caller]

That guy, they said he had a crown, and the crowns are associated with the gang tattoos. This is the tattoo. He had a real Madrid with the crown on it.

[Sam Seder]

Also, it's not a crime to be in a gang.

[Emma Vigeland]

Right?

[Sam Seder]

You know, they may have some type of attempting to do some type of special designation for. For these particular gangs, but the fact is, it's not a crime to be in a gang. A B, again, without due process. You can't say with any level of confidence, at least in the context of the way that we expect the government to prove things, that they're in this gang. We don't even know. We have no mechanism even to determine that they're here without documentation. And the whole point is why it's a problem for even those of you who are citizens. They're just going to get bolder and bolder if they're allowed to do this, and they're just going to get sloppier and sloppier. Well, let's play that other clip later in the program of Fox and friends attempting to justify why there should be no due process. But, you know, once there's no due process, there's no difference between a, an undocumented immigrant and a documented immigrant. And then there's no difference between a documented immigrant and a citizen. If there's no due process, none of the, no one's legal status can in any way be proven or disproven.

[Emma Vigeland]

And this, we're also just, this is the continuation of the erosion of our rights during the war on terror, too. I mean, like, no due process for the, for the people who were rounded up and detained at Guantanamo Bay, tortured there. And many of like the same excuses were kind of bandied about basically that they weren't Americans. Now some of these people have, have green cards, legal immigrants. Yeah, but they're not really Americans. So we can classify them as terrorists as we did under the war on terror, and do whatever we want to them. This is already an erosion from that. What's next?

[Sam Seder]

In a moment, we're going to talk to Paul Glassaris, editor in chief of the Washington Monthly. There is, and this has been brewing for some while, the, this abundance agenda, and I suspect a big part of it was anticipating Harris winning in an attempt to supplant, at the very least, the beachheads that have been made in attacking corporate power via antitrust under the Biden administration. And Glassros is an interesting guy to, to be taking this down because he is not, you know, I would consider him a fairly straightforward Democrat. And we'll talk about his critique. We'll probably be critiquing this later, too, because at one point, it's very, very hard to see in the future, frankly. At one point the Republicans hopefully will be out of power and it will be up to Democrats center, center left, left to change our economy. And how that changes is going to be a function of debates that are happening now. But before we get there, a couple of words from our sponsors. 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Fast growing trees.com code is majority offer valid for limited time terms and conditions may applied. Check out the podcast and YouTube description for those links. All right, quick break. Paul Gastrus, editor in chief of the Washington Monthly.

[Guest]

It's we are back.

[Sam Seder]

Sam Cedar and the Viglund on the Majority Report. I still am having trouble pronouncing your name now.

[Emma Vigeland]

She's new over four years.

[Sam Seder]

Yeah, I had it down for the first three and a half years. I want to welcome I think back because we must have you must have been on the show in one iteration or another. Paul Glasseris, editor in chief of the Washington Monthly. Paul, thanks so much for joining us.

[Guest]

Great to have great to be here.

[Sam Seder]

So, Paul, let's start with this. I mean, we're talking about the abundance agenda. Some people may not know what this is. Before we get there, let me do something that my religious one of my religious studies professors once told me to do. Always when I was approaching any type of anything I've read is like get a sense of what the priors are of this person and so much will make sense. So like place for us because this is both a sort of a policy prescription argument, but it's also there's a big political argument that's really at the heart of this as to like where we're going with the Democratic Party, place yourself in this ecosystem, if you will, so we get a sense of like where your critique is coming from because it's largely a technical critique in many ways, not an ideological one, but give us a sense of like, you know, where you are within that that spectrum of the broader Democratic Party.

[Guest]

So, you know, the Washington Monthly is kind of issue specific politically, as you said. We're we, you know, we're we focus on policy solutions and political reality, not ideology. And so on some things we're pretty you know, moderate or even conservative. Other things were quite wildly lofty. It all depends kind of on the issue. I would say that a lot of the abundance folks are a little bit the same way. They're not necessarily doctrinaire, old fashioned liberals or progressives or whatever. I guess we come at it with the idea that yes, abundance is a good thing. We want. We do think that there's a problem in the world, in America of people having given up on the idea that we can have progress, better lives and so forth, and that there are certainly ways that are constraining the economy, constraining the society from achieving those ends. They are kind of, I mean, to sum up their argument, their argument is essentially various kinds of government red tape. Local zoning ordinances, federal environmental statutes, processes within bureaucracies. This red tape is holding back the production of goods that we all need. Affordable housing, transmission lines to move electricity from solar and wind farms into the metro areas where the power is needed, lower cost health care, that, that, that the way to get the, all of these good things is to get rid of, to sort of deregulate, to get rid of these bottlenecks. And in some ways they're right. Or on some of their points, they're right. On some of them, I think they're wrong. But fundamentally, I think our argument is it's kind of small potatoes and that if what you want is abundance, that provides new technologies, new jobs, greater income, less poverty, a cleaner earth, there are bigger bottlenecks than government regulations, specifically the consolidation of industry and the rise of oligarchy that we see around us.

[Sam Seder]

All right, so I want to just sort of examine this just a little bit more from their perspective and we'll go through. Because I think you've, in your piece in the Washington Monthly, I think you steel man their arguments pretty well and then we can go through the various sectors, I think relatively quickly in terms of what they're proposing and how I think the small boar potatoes, it's not just you're not seeing the forest for the trees. It's like you're taking a tree and it's as if you're taking a small, I don't know, a small seedling and making it into a redwood. But with that said, when you're talking about getting rid of like greasing the wheels of government, and I know you were a Clinton speech writer way back when the first administration, I guess the only in retrospect, the idea of big government being over was from the early 90s, the idea of cutting government waste and getting rid of extra regulation. I think of Cass Sunstein during the Obama years. This does not seem particularly new in terms of an idea. I mean, just the, the only thing that's new is that it's gotten a fresh injection of, you know, the Nikken center has moved, you know, or our politics have moved to the right sufficiently that Nikken is now in the, in the center. This used to be like a. But there's a lot of libertarian money involved in this. The Koch brothers, the, the tech sort of like people. I mean, it, it's just. It seems like it's just a rebrand in many respects, broadly speaking. Then we can go through the specifics.

[Guest]

I think that's fair. And, you know, some of what Bill Clinton did with reinventing government, you know, is similar to some of what they're saying. And some of what Bill Clinton did actually worked. Right. He. He gave permission for bureaucrats to have more judgment to overcome some procedures. And under that umbrella, the Veterans Health Administration became the best health care in the country. Totally socialized health care, by the way, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, fema, went from a catastrophic laughing stock to, you know, a very effective agency. So. So there are things you can champion in government agency reform that are worth championing. And Niskin and Center and, you know, these other guys, Ezra Klein and the others, they champion some of that stuff, and we give them credit for that. But, you know, unfortunately, they, they also champion in some ideas that I, I don't think are going to achieve the goals that they themselves set out to achieve.

[Sam Seder]

I want to get to that part because we. You do it step by step. But I guess what I'm at is that, like, the idea of we should have more. We should look at how certain regulations function, and if we see that they're not effective, we should change them. Seems to be a. Just a very reasonable approach to anything. Right. I mean, like, we even do that. Everybody does that in their daily life.

[Emma Vigeland]

Right.

[Sam Seder]

I'm not getting to work on time. If I take this, you know, the number two bus, I should switch to the number three bust. But when you start to make it a. A prescription that is universally applicable, it seems to me, then it moves into an ideological project.

[Guest]

Yes. And that's the danger here.

[Emma Vigeland]

Yeah.

[Guest]

You know, my friend Mike Lofkin said that getting into a bidding war with Republicans over deregulation is kind of like getting into a hot dog eating contest with Joey Chestnut. You're just going to lose. And, you know, so much of what has gone wrong in this world in this country. So much of the problem they themselves, the abundance liberals lay out is the result of previous deregulation. Right. So, yes, some regulations need to be tweaked, eliminated, reformed. But, you know, we've had more deregulation than we've had regulation over the last 40 years. And what's that got us?

[Emma Vigeland]

Right. But, but that's what's. And I want to get into the specifics too. What's odd about this, to me, just to give people a perspective on it, is that progressive housing reforms already do talk about eliminating certain regulations. And again, we will get. But it feels like they're taking the, the fourth bullet point on what a lot of left wingers have already discussed and broadening it into making it the emphasis, which is that it should be. It's a, it's a libertarian framework. We should be cutting red tape. We should be making things more efficient. Agree. But for a lot of people who are looking at the consolidation of wealth as the biggest problem in this country, that's. Yeah, that's the, that's point E or point F. Right. On the bullet points. So I'm, I guess, a bit skeptical about the timing of this because as we're seeing Bernie Sanders and AOC go across the country and turn out tens of thousands of people with a economically populist agenda that puts workers and wages first and breaking up the oligarchy first. To have this presented as the alternative vision feels quite deliberate to me and not the best thing for our politics in this moment.

[Guest]

Well, it is. I think you've laid out the stakes and the battle quite precisely. On the one hand, you have Bernie and AOC out talking about the oligarchy and what it's doing to destroy government. And on the other hand, you have people in the Democratic Party, especially the donor class, especially those Democrats who really feel burned by the left. They think Democrats might have won if it hadn't been for the progressives and, you know, the, you know, the battle lines and they're glomming on to this, to, to this abundance liberalism thing with equal fervor, but, you know, they're doing it in op eds and, you know, sub stacks and, you know, in fundraising dinners. It's, it's not a math thing, whether it can be, you know, who knows? But that's kind of where the stakes are right now.

[Sam Seder]

Well, I wanna circle back to this because, you know, I don't know how broad the public support was for a reconstituting our antitrust regime that we had prior to Ronald Reagan and the Borkian antitrust. But what it was was a concerted effort over the course of almost a decade, in fact, a decade, I would say, of this kind of stuff. They didn't have someone who was that big of a champion that had the New York Times, you know, a big piece of a plot of land on real estate on the New York Times op ed. But it was this type of thing. So by the time Elizabeth Warren had influence in Biden's office, all of these people came in in the form of Lina Khan and Jonathan Kantor and whatnot. And this is how you get agendas into administrations by starting four or five years out because obviously nothing's going to happen for the next four years. So let's get to sort of like what I appreciate about your piece is it is completely a nuts and bolts, I don't want to say evisceration, but certainly a weakening of this sort of like factual basis of their arguments. I, I just have this one sort of like quote from, well, I'll read that quote from Ezra Klein on his book tour in a minute. But let's get to this. You start and they start with housing. This is where abundance, so walk. Their primary sort of like, I guess, focus on housing is in frankly like coastal elite areas, I guess, because they say it's the most productive these areas, which is probably true economically anyways, although I'm not sure that that should be the grounds for making sure that people can afford housing. But, but it's where it's also most expensive. So it's harder for people there, supposedly. I mean, I think, you know, those metro areas get bigger and bigger, it seems to me. But what do they get wrong in this or what do they propose and what's wrong about it?

[Guest]

So let's start with what they get right. Housing prices are extraordinarily high. Rents are high. We have underproduced housing for the last 10 years. We overproduced housing for the previous 10 years. And we got, you know, a collapse of the global financial system. Now we've underproduced housing. And it's part of what you see as the backlash that strengthened Trump. So they're right about the underproduction of housing. They are right that much of it is driven by local zoning ordinances and in particular zoning ordinances that prescribe only single family detached homes as opposed to apartments. And they have, are part of a movement, the Yimby movement, that is very strong among millennials, people living in these very high rent, high price coastal metro areas that said, look, I ought to have the right, as a libertarian idea, I have the right to build anything I want on my piece of property.

[Sam Seder]

Yes, in my backyard.

[Guest]

Yes, in my backyard. Exactly. And in theory, right. If you could eliminate all zoning and anybody could build anything anywhere, the mark, you know, market theory would say, yes, you would have a whole lot of housing. And you know, I grew up in suburbs, I live in the suburbs. I know the suburbs pretty well. If somebody wanted to build a 2 flat or a 4 flat in my neighborhood, I'd be fine with that. The problem with Ezra and Ezra Klein, Matt Iglesias, Yoni Applebaum and, and Jerusalem Demzes and some of the other thinkers here is we've already now tried these reforms for several years in California, in Oregon, in Minneapolis, and the end result is we've gotten a trickle of new houses in the form of sort of apartment buildings and granny flats. Not very much. But what we have also gotten is tremendous backlash against the people in these neighborhoods because nine out of ten of them would say, if you built a fourth flat in, you know, next to me, who knows what kind of low income people are going to come in and where are they going to park their cars and can the schools handle it in the traffic? People hate it. People just hate it. So it, it becomes an enormously difficult project to happen. And the backlash that you're likely to get is on just beyond what you can imagine. And so what these guys are doing is, is, is, is provoking senior Democratic elected officials and donors into an agenda that is going to have unbelievable blowback among voters. And what's really tragic is it doesn't need to happen. You don't have to fight that fight.

[Sam Seder]

Well, I just want to be clear. So A, we have evidence that they're achieved. Their stated goal is unachieved when you, because there are other problems. And we'll talk in a moment about what those problems are. But B, as a political matter, the return on investment is lousy because you know, there are going to be proposals that any political party pursues where there's going to be blowback and if the, if it sufficiently provides what it is supposedly going to provide. I think in certain situations, in many, frankly, I mean, depending on what the goals are, blowback is fine. Because if you give enough people, you know, what they need, those people who are going to be upset because it's somehow sort of like they perceive it as diminishes from them. That's, that's what politics are. I mean, that's what it Seems to me it's like the space is not going to grow on trees and sort of density doesn't grow on trees. They want to sell federal lands to put housing on there. The Trump administration said this. Well, there's a reason why there's no housing. There's a reason why federal, federal government has those lands. More often than not, it's because no one else wanted them. And the cost of both to like the individuals living there and society to sort of make those spaces habitable are, is incredibly extreme.

[Guest]

So no, it's a cr. It's not a good idea. But there are good ideas that are adjacent to what these abundance liberals are saying. In fact, some of them have been, you know, have agreed with us for 15 years to do this and that is don't lift zoning restrictions on residential neighborhoods, lift them on commercial property near transit. When cities and suburbs have done that, they've gotten an explosion of what they call walkable communities, apartment buildings, condos, tall buildings where people can find restaurants and grocery stores and hop on a bus or hop on a metro. That really works. If you walk around D.C. you see it everywhere. To give you an example in Minneapolis, which is a, a city that kind of epitomizes the great abundance liberal experiment, they eliminated zoning in single family residential neighborhoods and they got very, very little in the last few years that they've tried it, new new permits for new apartment buildings, but they also lifted the size restrictions from six stories to 30 in commercial properties near transit and they got 20,000 housing units. And that made the rent increases in Minneapolis a fraction of what they were. They have been in the state and actually lowered the homeless population in Minneapolis even as it went up in the state as a whole. And you know, there are other examples of that around the country. So again, abundance liberals aren't against what I just said. It's that they're also for unnecessary, provocative and you know, fights that aren't literally going to deliver what they say they're going to deliver.

[Sam Seder]

When I, when characterize this at a, at a 30,000 foot level, because when I hear that the solution is just a blanket get rid of regulations and invite the, you know, the supply side to come in and make profits off of this, the thing that just rattles around in my head is the way that Barack Obama dealt with the banks in the wake of the financial crisis. Right. You have a choice. Very explicit was outlined and supposedly, you know, we've, we've talked on this program many, many times. Barney Frank telling the story about Paul. I can't it's the Paulson. Was it Paulson or Geithner? No, it wasn't Geithner. I think it was Paulson.

[Guest]

But.

[Sam Seder]

But Obama was, you know, faced with a choice. In fact, Bush was on some level, too. I guess at the end I can either go to the supply side, which is the banks providing the mortgages, and bail them out and hope they do the right thing, or I can take the hope out of the equation and just bail out the homeowners. They already have an obligation to pay the money to the banks. So if I give the money to the homeowners, I know where that money's going to go. It's going to go to the banks because the pipes are already there. But if I give the money to the banks, I'm just hoping that I've guessed their incentive structure. Right. And it sounds like, at least in terms of, like the housing, they're just hoping that they understand that the incentive structure. And it's clear they don't. I'm not saying I do, but we can determine. We can. It seems to me that we as a government regulation, non regulation in many respects is always the same thing. It's a government action you deregulate or regulate. It's just a question of are you doing it in a way where you have less guesswork as to what's going to happen?

[Guest]

Yeah. And another way of looking at it is who writes the rules, the abundance. Liberals are angry at local governments for writing rules that have excluded people from their suburbs, from their cities, from their neighborhoods through, you know, this strict zoning. And I understand there are whole wings of libraries full of books about how bad exclusionary zoning is. Racist classes, it's terrible. But we've been doing it for 100 years.

[Sam Seder]

Right?

[Guest]

It's not a new problem. And, and so you can, so you can go to war with local governments, which more or less reflect the voters who live there and side with, you know, the state government or the mayor or the federal government and say, we're going to come in and we're going to, we're going to take away your regulatory power and we're going to impose our regulatory power. Either way, it's regulation. And I can make a moral argument either way. I can make a practical argument either way, but somebody's got to write the rules. So to your point, you know, there are smart rules and dumb rules. There are rules that are written with democratic input and rules that are written by private entities. Right. Some work out, some don't. There's not an ideological thing here, but.

[Sam Seder]

Deeply practical, it seems to me. And let's go, let's move on to let's say, infrastructure. But the thing is I, you know, and I will admit that I have yet to get very far in the abundance books whatsoever. For the most part. It's all been, I've been reading reviews. But there is, even as you tell this story of, there is one consistent sort of player in this that doesn't seem to ever get pinpointed. It does in your critique. On some level, in terms we're talking about monopolies, we're talking about corporate power. But at the end of the day, to the extent that there's any distortion in the regulatory frameworks of localities or states or in any other place, to the extent there's any, you know, what they would call distortion or shortsightedness insofar as it's not supporting a broader population, it's because of concentration of wealth. It's because of money. Always.

[Guest]

Yeah. Look, one of the reasons housing is unaffordable in say San Francisco or New York is that so many people with so much money have bid up the prices to the point where nobody else can afford it. Right. This is an inequality argument. Right. You can get rid of the zoning tomorrow and you have that problem, you know, so here's the thing, Sam and Emma. If, if somehow we take this problem on and we eliminate, we try to go after local single family zoning, do you think the wealthy neighborhoods are going to let apartments in? Right. You think they're going to use, they're not going to use their money and their lawyers to keep it out? Where are the apartment buildings going to go? They're going to go to middle class neighborhoods, they're going to go to lower middle class neighborhoods. Those are the people that don't have the lawyers to keep them out. Those are the people who don't control their, their local officials the way the wealthy do. So what, what? The abundance liberal, the abundance liberals kind of agree with you. They say, yes, this is rich progressives who are hypocrites who care, say they care about the poor but then won't let housing be built in their neighborhoods. Well, sure, but you know, I would.

[Sam Seder]

Argue it's rich people broadly. It's, it's rich people broadly. Some of the progressives may be hypocrites, but it's rich people broadly. They're not doing that.

[Guest]

Conservatives with big fancy McMansions don't want, you know, apartment buildings in their neighborhood as much or more than progressives. You know, in big McMansions.

[Emma Vigeland]

But, but, but I guess my question is here, like the, the, is there any discussion of like what. I mean, Sheldon Whitehouse, I think, introduced a housing bill just last year to fund via the low income housing tax credit expanding that there's not really doesn't seem to be a focus on that. Or last year there was legislation in the House and then the Senate that would bar hedge funds from buying up a bunch of homes, which has also driving up the cost of housing. Like, it seems to me that there's a lot of free market solutions and very little taking on of the corporate interest in the commodification of housing. And like, it just feels extremely out of date. Like it feels like this conversation could have been had, as Sam was saying earlier in the 90s.

[Guest]

Yeah.

[Emma Vigeland]

Where I'm sorry, at minimum we need a Keynesian economic model if not a broad de. Commodification of housing. And I think almost the entire Democratic Party is there. So the question is, what is this book about if not just to reify, frankly, the focus on suburban disaffected Republicans that has killed Democrats in this last election cycle?

[Guest]

Yeah, you know, they, when you bring up with these folks the issue of hedge funds purchasing housing in middle and lower middle class neighborhoods and turning into rental units and then companies, you know, being charged with it, in some cases, you know, successfully prosecuted on price fixing, they're going to say that's an excuse, not something you want to talk about because you don't want to talk about the importance of building new housing and market solutions. So they, they kind of deflect the other thing that they absolutely don't talk about until you push them and then they have a different. Is one of the big problems with housing costs today is, is the shrinkage in the number of house homebuilders. It's, you know, since the financial collapse, the number of home builders in any particular metro area has, has shrunk remarkably. And there's data that show that the fewer competing home builders, the fewer units, the higher the price. And you know, they'll come back with, with, you know, arguments that, well, they're, the big ones can handle the zoning, the little ones can't. Maybe true, maybe not. But, but they really, they, they don't really believe in that. They don't disbelieve in the low income housing credit or you know, but that's not where they think the problem is and that's not where they want to put the emphasis.

[Sam Seder]

Let's get to, let's take one More topic because we've, you know, vaguely, but you really sort of like section by section go through infrastructure. We saw this, you know, you talk about the high speed rail in California that ostensibly was, you know, environmentally reviewed to death. It seems to me we always have the same problem that is sort of like there's this, this poltergeist in all of these things. Like who is environmentally the implication, as if it's like it's just the people who love the spotted owls, they're stopping this high speed train, et cetera, et cetera, as opposed to. And I think they would argue, well, this is what's problematic with regulations being weaponized by wealthy interests. Whether it's the Koch brothers who don't want, you know, the purple line and where is it?

[Guest]

In Maryland.

[Sam Seder]

Yeah, they don't want the purple line. They don't want broad based public transport. From an ideological perspective, their idea is one that is so libertarian in its structure that it's almost shocking to me because I would have these arguments back in the tens where it was like, you have corporations, corporations who are corrupting our government. And the solution from libertarians is you need to shrink government so that it doesn't have the ability to impact these areas. That way corporations will come in and corrupt it. It's like, yeah, of course. And it's sort of like you're basically saying shoot the cancer victim as a way of killing the cancer. And that's not, that doesn't make sense. You need to shrink the cancer with maintaining the health of the host. And so again, it's like a almost a pathological desire to hide the ball in terms of like what, what are regulations set up to do? Where is this friction happening? There are surely times where it's like this regulation is stupid, but more often than not it is the exploitation of people who have so much money that for them at the end of the day it just becomes like a, you know, a balancing test as to where to, you know, extend their resources. Let's talk about health care, because I thought this was also sort of like an interesting sort of avoidance of what is the most obvious way to constrain and provide health care benefits to as many people as possible. But talk about their ideas when it comes to health care.

[Guest]

So you're right that they have this sort of libertarian attitude that it's, it's constraint imposed by government regulation that is the root cause of our inability to have nice things in health care. Their argument is the doctors lobby.

[Sam Seder]

Constricts.

[Guest]

The number of physicians and the number of residential posts that are funded by the government in order to keep their incomes up. Which is true, they do that. And so it follows that they say that if we increase the number of doctors in various ways that will lower healthcare costs and if we lived in a, if health care were a proper, functioning market economy, that might, there might be some truth to that, but we don't. Right. The health care markets are not as the textbooks describe, for a whole lot of reasons, but most recently because the providers of health care, the hospitals, have become monopolies. In 75% of metro areas, a local hospital has 50% monopoly or more of the beds. And the hospitals don't just control the beds, they own the doctor's practices, they own the blood labs. In many cases, they own the insurance companies. So they're imposing prices. Right. You can add all the doctors you want and it's going to have no real effect on bringing down the cost of health care. And for reasons I don't understand, because I know these folks, I've, they've written for my magazine. I've known them for years. They're very reluctant to talk about concentration of industry the way I just did. And, and they're just much more comfortable, you know, with these imaginary tweaks that they can make, you know, to supply and mark and regulation. And it's frustrating.

[Sam Seder]

It's interesting because the health care dynamic is very, it is odd. Like you write about, you know, hammer, you know, when everything's, when you have a hammer, everything's a nail. And I still remember this piece by Atul Gawande, which must have been now, 15 years ago, where he compared Medicare reimbursement rates in two different towns in Texas and found that like, you know, doctors who own their own MRIs, for instance, they're, they use the MRI a lot more than maybe other doctors did who didn't have it. Because you have it there, you use it. You've already, you know, got a loan on it, you're paying it off. And so you're going to use it as much as you can. You're going to bill your, your, your clients that way. And without a sort of the cost constraints of the reimbursements.

[Guest]

Yes.

[Sam Seder]

So that nationally we can assess like, oh, in this instance, the MRI was not warranted. They're just using it because they have the machine. Yeah, it's the opposite on some level when you talk about this consolidation, because we could let in a lot of doctors from, you know, from India, from around the world who are trained doctors. Just as competent as any doctor coming out of a US school. And we could have a lot more doctors in here without having the capital that could come from a government essentially whose interest is to provide health care as opposed to make profit. They would have no ability to set up a practice or have an ability to serve. Maybe like very basic general practitioner stuff. But we need to have an investment and a protection within the system where profit is not. The primary motive of owning a hospital was a lonely goat herd that was apropos, but it wasn't on purpose. But that isn't that like. I mean, there's a complete. It's as if that, that concept is completely not even on the table for them.

[Guest]

Yeah, you bring in more doctors, you get more knee surgeries, you raise costs, you don't lower costs. I mean, not always, but that's kind of the tendency of health care, as you said.

[Sam Seder]

But that's a function of like our inability to have a cohesive system. It's just because it's a profit motive business.

[Guest]

Why The Washington Monthly has been proposing for a number of years a health care reform called Medicare Prices for All. It's not Medicare for All. It's not an expansion of health care. It's, it's at government imposition of prices. Because we no longer have a market that sets prices. We have monopoly institutions that give us prices with no ability to push back. And if, if you work, you know, if you're in, in the, in the workforce, you 99 chance you get your, or 95 chance you get your health care from your employer. Right. You're paying double, triple what somebody on Medicare is paying. And doctors who make, take Medicare, they make plenty of money. The hospitals that take Medicare, they make money, but those who are on commercial care, they make tons of money. That's why every hospital is building multiple wings. If the government says from now on, every knee surgery, same price, every doctor visit to your primary care, same price, you get the Medicare price. The end result of that is thousands of dollars in the pocket of the average family because so much of what would have been their wage increases has been going to pay for their health care coverage and then being siphoned off into this giant consolidated developer hospital industrial complex. Now if you're talking to a Democratic donor about things like that, they're gonna, they're gonna be horrified, especially if they're doctors. But for the average person that's gonna give them direct benefit much quicker than, and more with more certainty than anything that the abundance liberals talking about.

[Sam Seder]

And it also Seems to be that when you impose in this instance, you're basically talking about cost controls and it's basically price fixing based upon a lot of data as to, you know, what these things should cost. What it also does in my mind, which it gives it durability, is it begins to decrease the concentration of wealth on the supply side and therefore diminishes the political power of these people to further extract from our government and our public, kitty, as it were. I mean, personally, I also can't stand the paperwork. And so like, you know, the fact that we're getting a slightly, you know, it's costing me less is great, but I also don't want to have to work for this. I don't want to have a second job as filling out and making sure that I'm getting my reimbursements or you know, keep up with the latest, like are people in network or out of network? I just want everybody be in network. But I guess as an interim step for me, one of the biggest features of antitrust is that it begins to decrease wealth concentration and political power concentration and then it opens up the opportunity to do things in a much more efficient way. It seems to me the thing about.

[Guest]

The abundance liberal folks is I think all of their books went to press before Donald Trump was inaugurated.

[Sam Seder]

100%. 100%.

[Guest]

They come out with what really has been a years long kind of campaign to raise the salience. And they're very open about it. And again, these are friends of mine. They want abundance liberalism to be a, if not the defining faction of the Democratic party. And they're doing it at a time when the oligarchs have taken control of the federal government and destroying the agencies which they claim to want to fix.

[Sam Seder]

Right.

[Guest]

And we're about to find out if.

[Sam Seder]

It'S helpful to have no regulation, you know, in the USDA and the FDA and whatnot. I mean, there's either an ideology that we can leave this up to corporate America or there's one in which we need to have, you know, government constraining corporate power and corporate accumulation of wealth.

[Guest]

And can I just say, it's not just antitrust. Antitrust is an important tool. But when you look at what's keeping us from building the electric transmissions infrastructure that can bring us a clean energy future. The abundance liberals people point to federal environmental statutes that have been weaponized to stop these things and they're not wrong. This is one of those occasions where we need to have some reform of federal statute. But the biggest constraint is investor owned Electric utility monopolies. They make their money burning fossil fuels and getting a percentage. Solar doesn't cost anything once you build it. It has high upfront costs but virtually zero fuel costs. And so they're under the model we have now for private electric utilities. They see solar as a threat to their business model. So, you know, antitrust isn't the right tool for that. You know what the right tool is? Create a Tennessee Valley Authority.

[Sam Seder]

Yeah, nationalize. Nationalize in some form or another. Yes, yes.

[Guest]

What did FDR do to force the electric companies to wire the poor parts of the country? He created a government agency that said, we're going to do it. If you don't, we'll steal your business.

[Sam Seder]

Right.

[Guest]

Not their attention. FDR called it the birch rod in the cupboard. You pull it out and you threaten. And we, we. So we need to create new agencies to go after this corporate power. And you know, to me that is just a practical step that most Americans can understand.

[Emma Vigeland]

And I guess my. Maybe it's a good place for us to wrap here. Just the political implications of this, Paul, if you have a sense, because it's hard to discern, is this just a book tour and a poorly timed one. But when I see Josh Shapiro tweeting out I'm doing the abundance agenda, I am concerned about the Democratic Party going in this direction once again when we could be drawing a very explicit contrast with Donald Trump right now and advocating for government. This is largely an anti. Anti government, but it's a critique of government regulations. And I just can't think of a time when it would be worse to make that argument and have the party embrace parts of that argument.

[Guest]

You know, it is a hard question and I don't have a crystal ball. If you look at the. Ezra Klein himself did an interview with a pollster named Daniel Shore who tested all of Kamala Harris ads. And the ad that moved voters the most was the one that said we're going to go after the landlords for high prices and we're going to go after the price gougers for high grocery prices. Right. That's what voters care about. And the abundance levels are. They're tapping into that energy on the housing front. But. But are there means going to be ones that average voters care about? You know, it seems to me no. And that average voters are much more likely to be to understand that large corporations jack up prices because they can, because they have power and they have power in the government and they're corrupting everything. That's an easier sell to Me not a politician then saying we're going to come after your zoning and put buildings there. You did when you moved in. You didn't. Weren't there. So we'll see. But I will tell you this is hot, hot, hot in the donor class among I know those Democrats who don't want to confront corporate power. This is a built in way to be for something that voters want without, you know, going after having to address.

[Sam Seder]

All right, so one, one really last question about the timing because I really, it feels to me there is an analogy between the abundance, sort of like intellectual movement, if you will, and where antitrust was in 2015 and a half or 2016, which is, I think the antitrust people thought there was going to be an opportunity to inject antitrust people into the Clinton administration. Hillary Clinton administration. That never happened. And I suspect this was the same thing that this was. We've got the people. I mean, in fact, you can look at the, you know, donor class memos, third way memos. Like this is what they were intending on pushing. I suspect that there was an idea that we're going to put the personnel into the Harris administration. And here is the sort of blueprint for that, you know, ideological. They claim it's non, but it is an ideology thrust. So, you know, this is the, I.

[Guest]

Think, I think that's right. I, you know, who were the people. About the only outfit that was pushing antitrust in 2015 was the Washington Monthly and one or two tiny think tanks. We, we had nothing like the donor support. Of course, you know, you did have.

[Sam Seder]

But, but, but the antitrust people did have Warren using, you know, the, you know, using. She plays an inside game and she's very.

[Guest]

And a Khan who started out writing for the Washington Monthly as somebody that they could, I think that's your point, put into key posts, Tim Wu and other people like that and, and spark a kind of revolution. Yes, I think, I think. Who are those people?

[Sam Seder]

Do you have a sense that those people prior to the election outcome were gearing up? Like what on the transition teams. Like who. You know, I could have pointed to Elizabeth Warren in 2015 or 16 and say like, you know, this is maybe it's much clearer in hindsight, but there was a sense of like there is a Warren, you know, universe. And I think we probably interviewed Lena Khan sometime around there in 2015, multiple times and Barry Lynn and the installer and the whole crew. But who, who are those people outside of like, you know, Ezra Klein and like, are there. Do you see those people or no.

[Guest]

Are they I think you, you mentioned the Niskoden Center. It's, it's my friend Steve Tallis is a leading light among these abundance liberals. He's written whole long essays, you know, being very explicit about his political aims. He wants to capture the Democratic Party for these ideas and again, some of them aren't bad. His stuff on building the capacity of bureaucracies is very, very good. But you know, and they have, I'm sure, people in mind who would have staffed a Kamala Harris administration. And remember Kamala Harris came out in favor of abundance liberalism. She talked about building more housing. Barack Obama talked about it. So they had already made, you know, pretty, pretty good progress in, you know, insinuating themselves into the leadership of the Democratic Party.

[Sam Seder]

Paul Glassar, the We will link to your piece the Meager Agenda of Abundance Liberals at Majority FM and in the podcast and YouTube description. Thanks so much for your time today. I really appreciate it it, I really.

[Guest]

Appreciate you having me on.

[Emma Vigeland]

Thanks so much.

[Sam Seder]

All right folks, going to take a quick break. Head into the fun half. It was David Shore, I think he said, oh yeah, but it doesn't matter. But the piece is really good in terms of like on its own terms from a non ideological perspective, pulling apart the efficacy of these suggestions, which I think is important because we need to both be able to say from just a meat and potatoes perspective this is not going to work. And as well from a sort of a larger and it's not just to service an ideology, but the fact of the matter is, is that if you do not address the outsize power of money in our society, which is a function of its concentration, which is a function of things that should be nationalized and don't need to be. We don't need private energy companies. We do not need that. We do not even need private cable companies. We don't need, we don't need private companies doing refineries.

[Emma Vigeland]

Right.

[Sam Seder]

We could have a holistic, we don't need private health insurance. We, we, you know, in these areas we could have a holistic approach. And it would in fact, I mean obviously wouldn't be regulation. It would be, that would constrain private businesses. It would be an overall holistic approach as to what is going to make this system more effective.

[Emma Vigeland]

And if we were to have that option or that, that vision for our like a nationalized energy company, it would solve so many of the problems that are presented right now by the lack of like urgency to invest in renewables because oil and gas is so profitable. Because you burn it and you need more if you install solar panels or wind farms. It's not like the capitalists that would want to invest. The return on investment is not as high. So what would solve that? Maybe don't make it a profit motive.

[Sam Seder]

Exactly.

[Emma Vigeland]

Make it a nationalized, federalized service. That transition transitions us away from fossil fuels and makes it so that everybody across the country has access to this kind of energy source and isn't gouge at the gas pump or when their energy bill comes around.

[Sam Seder]

The, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, you had this problem where people were not evacuated from New Orleans. And Glasshurst mentioned that Bill Clinton had come in and because I think in part because he was from Arkansas, had a real feel for what needed to happen with fema. And FEMA went to become a very, very competent agency. And then the Bush administration came in and began to privatize all these things. And the reason why the buses never showed up to evacuate people from New Orleans is because of the private contracting that went on with FEMA and the sort of subsidiary amounts of private contracting. Yeah, they hired a contractor who subcontracted, who then subcontracted, who then subcontracted. And the problem with this is you need these buses. You don't want them just sitting around half an hour outside of New Orleans wondering whether they're going to be there. Because you've paid for all the bus drivers, you've paid to gas them up. You've, you've, you've taken them off of whatever routes they're going to be running in other places. You don't want to cut into your profit margin. But the problem is then it's like, you know, just in time, supply lines, it may save you money, maybe more efficient if at your, your goal is to make it as profitable as possible. But then all of a sudden, the buses that were sitting in those parking lots because they want, you wanted them to save money four hours away instead of half hour out on a highway out in front of New Orleans, just in case ends up abandoning all of these people in New Orleans, it would be more expensive to do it the other way. But the point of government is not to make a profit. The point of government is to serve as many people as possible and provide services that are not profitable to do. Right. You know, so when you're talking about an energy grid, it's not just about delivering of energy, although they also screw that up significantly in various places, the more privatized it is. But also to say, like, how does energy fit into the greater health of people both in terms of like, what they breathe and also their capacity to live in our climate.

[Emma Vigeland]

Right.

[Sam Seder]

And you could go sector to sector and make these assessments, housing being one of them. All right. We still haven't figured out the clock in this new era.

[Emma Vigeland]

That's all right, folks.

[Sam Seder]

It's your support that makes this show possible. You can become a member of join the Majority Report.com when you do, you not only get the fun half, but you also get the free show, free of commercials. And you support our work here every day. We got a lot of things that we're hoping to start getting into over the year and the years to come, and your support makes that possible. Every now and then we have a conversation of like, hey, what if, like, I mean, the most obvious one would be, what if YouTube gets.

[Emma Vigeland]

Yeah.

[Sam Seder]

Squeezed. I mean, we're watching these law firms, these big, powerful, wealthy firms essentially get picked off like in the words of, of Eric Weinstein, like an antelope, the weak antelope. They isolate an antelope and they take them out at one point. And now they're going after the immigration lawyers. We'll talk about that. Lawyers, obviously far more protected. Well, oh, not necessarily protected. More protecting in many respects then, then, you know, YouTube channels. Oh, but yeah, it's not inconceivable that someday down the road YouTube is like government cracking down on us or throttling this channel or that channel or, you know, whatever it is. So our members essentially inoculate us on some level from that. And you know, I think we're also making a bigger conscious effort. I know to some extent I am. I mean, I think, Emma, you've always made this to get out there on, on, on social media and whatnot. In the event that there is a problem, then we need to reach people in other ways Besides, let's say YouTube. Right. So if you, if you have a couple extra bucks, support the show. Join the MajorityReport.com Also get the app. It's a great way for us to stay in touch with you. We generally, although we have, we've gotten over the past couple of days, send out notices as to the show. But it's free. Majorityapp.com and as always, don't forget the AM quickie. AM quickie.com Matt left reckoning.

[Caller]

Yeah, tomorrow left reckoning at 7:00 Eastern. Jeet here will be joining us to talk about Chuck Schumer. Also we have an immigration lawyer talking about this case of Malika Mohammadi Ghazvar Olya who was a young woman from Iran who had to flee because of persecution after the protests and persecution of women there. And she's been stuck in ice detention for before Trump was elected. So this is a long going process. She seems like an ideal candidate who can't. She can't go back to Iran because she would be very clearly persecuted. And yet we're just keeping her in detention. She wants to be a doctor, you know, not like we have enough of those here, but let's just keep her in ice detention more. So a sort of horrific story there. A patreon.com left reckoning.

[Sam Seder]

Quick break. Fun half.

[Emma Vigeland]

We're still on.

[Sam Seder]

Left is best. Jamie and I may have a disagreement. Yeah, you can't just say whatever you.

[Emma Vigeland]

Want about people just cause you're rich.

[Sam Seder]

I have an absolute right to mock them on YouTube.

[Guest]

He's up there buggy whipping like he's the boss.

[Sam Seder]

I am not your employer. You know, I'm tired of the negativity. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to upset you. You're nervous. You're a little bit upset. You're riled up. Yeah, maybe you should rethink your defense of that, you fucking idiots. We're just going to get rid of you. All right, but dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude. You want to smoke this joint? Yes. Do you feel like you are a dinosaur? Good. Exactly. I'm happy now.

[Guest]

It's a win, win.

[Sam Seder]

It's a win, win, win.

[Emma Vigeland]

Oh, hell yeah.

[Sam Seder]

Now listen to me. 2, 3, 4, 5 times 8479-065014-57238, 56, 27, 1 half. 5, 8. 3.9 billion. Wow. He's the ultimate math nerd. Don't you see? Why don't you get a real job.

[Guest]

Instead of spewing vitriol and hatred, you left wing Limbaugh.

[Sam Seder]

Everybody's taking their dumb juice today. Come on, Sammy, dance, dance, dance.

[Guest]

Ooh.

[Sam Seder]

Grandpa. I had my first post coital scene with a woman. I'm hoping to add more moves to my repertoire. All I have is the dip and the swirl. Fine, we can double dip. Yes. This is a perfect moment. No, wait. What? You make under a million dollars a year.

[Guest]

You're scum.

[Sam Seder]

You're nothing. Excuse me? You, you liberal elite. I think you belong in jail. Thank you for saying that, Sam. You're a horrible, despicable person. All right, gonna take a quick break. I want to take a moment to talk to some of the libertarians out there. Take whatever vehicle you want to drive to the library. What you're talking about is jibber jab.

[Emma Vigeland]

Classic.

[Sam Seder]

I'm feeling more chill already. Good. Donald Trump can kiss all of our asses. Hey, Sam. Hey, Andy. Are you guys ready to do some evil? Hitler was such an idiot. That guy might be a Nazi. Agreed. No. Death to America.

[Caller]

You.

[Sam Seder]

Yes. Wow. Wow. That's weird. No way. Unbelievable. This guy's got a really good hook. Wow. No worries. I want to just flesh this out a little bit. I mean, look, it's a free speech issue. If you don't like me.

[Emma Vigeland]

Hey, hey, hey, hey.

[Guest]

Shut up. Thank you for calling into the majority report. Sam will be with you shortly.