2522 - We Forgot the Lessons of Iraq and the ’08 Recession in One Week w/ David Dayen

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Majority Report with Sam Seder Episode: 2522 - We Forgot the Lessons of Iraq and the ’08 Recession in One Week w/ David Dayen
Release Date: June 20, 2025
Host: Sam Cedar
Guest: David Dayen, Executive Editor of The American Prospect and Host of the Weekly Roundup

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1. Introduction

In this episode of The Majority Report, host Sam Cedar welcomes David Dayen to discuss the Democratic Party's current challenges, potential military conflicts involving Iran, significant legislative developments, and the upcoming New York City mayoral race.

2. Political Climate Overview

Sam Cedar opens the discussion by highlighting the exceptionally busy news cycle, questioning whether there has ever been a busier time in the news. David Dayen concurs, noting the overlap of multiple critical issues.

3. Democratic Party's Response to Iran Conflict

David Dayen emphasizes that the Democratic Party is seemingly neglecting the hard-earned lessons from the Iraq War and the 2008 financial crisis, especially in the context of the emerging tensions with Iran.

David Dayen (04:16): "The Democratic Party was in the midst of forgetting the lessons of the Iraq war and the global financial crisis in the same week."

4. Trump's Potential War with Iran

The conversation shifts to President Trump's ambiguous statements regarding a potential military action against Iran. Sam Cedar criticizes Trump's tendency to set indefinite timelines, likening it to a stalling tactic.

Sam Cedar (07:14): "Here is a compilation of Donald Trump and his leaning on two weeks... 'In about two weeks from now.'"

David Dayen discusses Trump's "madman strategy," suggesting that Trump's unpredictable rhetoric aims to pressure Iran into negotiations.

David Dayen (09:50): "Trump certainly believes in what was known under Nixon as the madman strategy."

5. AIPAC's Influence on Congress

Cedar and Dayen explore the influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on Democratic lawmakers, particularly in the wake of rising tensions between Israel and Iran. They point out coordinated efforts by AIPAC to ensure Congressional support for Israel's actions.

David Dayen (28:13): "AIPAC immediately contacted members of Congress... urging statements that align with their talking points."

6. The Genius Act and Crypto Regulation

The duo delves into the Genius Act, a legislative proposal concerning the regulation of stablecoins and the broader cryptocurrency market. They express concern over the potential for massive financial instability akin to the 2008 crisis due to lax regulations.

Sam Cedar (61:05): "It almost feels like this crypto stuff is going to spread in such a way that it will be almost impossible to get a handle on it."

David Dayen draws parallels between the Genius Act and previous deregulation efforts that led to financial turmoil, warning of similar consequences in the crypto space.

David Dayen (64:59): "We could see Silicon Valley Bank-like scenarios, but worse, if crypto is not properly regulated."

7. Senate Reconciliation Bill and Medicaid Cuts

The discussion turns to the Senate's reconciliation bill, which introduces significant cuts to Medicaid. Cedar and Dayen highlight the bill's potential to destabilize rural hospitals and the broader healthcare system.

David Dayen (41:32): "The Senate bill cuts the provider tax and state-directed payments, jeopardizing rural hospitals."

8. Implications for Rural Hospitals

David Dayen explains that cutting Medicaid would remove essential funding for rural hospitals, leading to closures that would have severe repercussions for local communities and healthcare accessibility.

David Dayen (44:17): "Rural hospitals are at risk of closure, forcing patients to travel hours for emergency care."

9. New York City Mayoral Race

Cedar and Dayen briefly discuss the upcoming New York City mayoral race between incumbent Andrew Cuomo and challenger Bill de Blasio. They touch on key issues such as universal pre-K programs and the impact of current political dynamics on voter turnout.

Sam Cedar (74:17): "Bill de Blasio’s Universal Pre-K is incredibly popular and has weakened Cuomo's stance."

10. Conclusion

In wrapping up, Sam Cedar reflects on the potential for looming conflicts and legislative changes, expressing concern over the Democratic Party's current trajectory and the broader implications for American society.

Sam Cedar (89:21): "We're waiting for July 4th and hoping Seymour Hersh is wrong about his sources saying it's gonna happen this weekend."

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Notable Quotes:

• David Dayen (04:16): "The Democratic Party was in the midst of forgetting the lessons of the Iraq war and the global financial crisis in the same week."

• Sam Cedar (07:14): "Here is a compilation of Donald Trump and his leaning on two weeks... 'In about two weeks from now.'"

• David Dayen (09:50): "Trump certainly believes in what was known under Nixon as the madman strategy."

• David Dayen (28:13): "AIPAC immediately contacted members of Congress... urging statements that align with their talking points."

• Sam Cedar (61:05): "It almost feels like this crypto stuff is going to spread in such a way that it will be almost impossible to get a handle on it."

• David Dayen (64:59): "We could see Silicon Valley Bank-like scenarios, but worse, if crypto is not properly regulated."

• David Dayen (44:17): "Rural hospitals are at risk of closure, forcing patients to travel hours for emergency care."

• Sam Cedar (74:17): "Bill de Blasio’s Universal Pre-K is incredibly popular and has weakened Cuomo's stance."

• Sam Cedar (89:21): "We're waiting for July 4th and hoping Seymour Hersh is wrong about his sources saying it's gonna happen this weekend."

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This episode provides a comprehensive analysis of the current political tensions involving Iran and Israel, the Democratic Party's strategic missteps, and the profound implications of upcoming legislative actions on healthcare and the financial sector. The discussion underscores the urgency for informed political leadership and the potential long-term consequences of ignoring historical lessons.

Transcript

[Sam Cedar]

The Majority Report with Sam Cedar. Where every day casual Friday.

[David Dayen]

That means Monday is casual.

[Sam Cedar]

Monday, Tuesday casual Tuesday, Wednesday casual Hump day Thursday casual Thirs, that's what we call it. And Friday casual Shabbat. The Majority Report with Sam Cedar. It is Friday, June 20, 2025. My name is Sam Ceder. This is the five time award winning Majority Report. We are broadcasting live steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, usa. On the program today in studio, executive editor of the American Prospect, David Dayen, also host of the weekly roundup.

[David Dayen]

For that weekly roundup, I'm competing with myself today.

[Sam Cedar]

Exactly.

[David Dayen]

We have somebody else on.

[Sam Cedar]

We'll, we'll talk about that in a moment. Also on the program today, wait a minute.

[David Dayen]

Also the co host of the Organized Money podcast, OrganizedMoney FM.

[Sam Cedar]

Organize Money FM. Also on the program today, Trump supposedly decide Iran attack within two weeks as US Spy agencies say Iran not even decided yet on pursuing nuclear weapons. Iran responds as missiles land in Israel as its Iron Dome becomes more porous. Gaza meanwhile suffering an Israeli made drought. According to UNICEF appeals court rules, Trump can keep the National Guard in LA for now. Trump's Medicaid gutting reconciliation bill gets a bird bath. Meanwhile, DHS puts new limits on congressional oversight visits to detention centers. James Clyburn joins Palantir right wing billionaires and Michael Bloomberg in endorsing Andrew Cuomo. The New York mayor's race is only four days away. ICE denied access to Dodger Stadium. As Trump gears up for war, Democrats wonder, wondering at which remote desert island are Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer vacationing? All this and more on today's Majority Report. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, Emma Vigland out today and not necessarily filling in for her. I mean, he would have been here anyways.

[David Dayen]

I was planning on it, but David.

[Sam Cedar]

Dayan, the executive editor of the American Prospect. David, your camera's right in front of me.

[David Dayen]

Where am I? Where am I looking?

[Sam Cedar]

Right there.

[David Dayen]

Hey, how you doing? Hey, what's up? How's it going?

[Sam Cedar]

Welcome. Is this your first, not your first time in studio?

[David Dayen]

No, I've been in studio a few times.

[Sam Cedar]

It's the first time you've been sitting in that seat.

[David Dayen]

Well, there you go. So there's a first time for everything.

[Sam Cedar]

And we coordinated today.

[David Dayen]

It's Casual Friday and it's always Casual Friday as what I was just told in the open.

[Sam Cedar]

There you go.

[David Dayen]

For me it is.

[Sam Cedar]

But in terms of the way that.

[David Dayen]

This is dressed up Friday, for me, it really is.

[Sam Cedar]

And we've sort of crossed paths. Let's get right into this because we've got a lot to talk about, obviously. Was there ever a busier time in the news?

[David Dayen]

I mean, my goodness, yeah, it's there. There's a lot going on.

[Sam Cedar]

I mean, I remember the days when you would do the news briefs for Fire Dog Lake that was like different life many, many, many moons ago. But we never had anything with like these many sort of competing stories simultaneously.

[David Dayen]

Well, one thing I said or saw said this week was that the Democratic Party was in the midst of forgetting the lessons of the Iraq war and the global financial crisis in the same week. Right. So, you know, compressing that time along with everything else that's going on, obviously, is quite stunning.

[Sam Cedar]

And we're going to talk about that genius act and we're going to be talking about obviously Democrats or at least Democratic leadership and maybe even just broadly speaking, the Democrats response to the potential for imminent war with Iran. But first, let's get a sense of what the timing is of what. And in Iraq we had the fu, which was the Friedman unit.

[David Dayen]

Right.

[Sam Cedar]

That was six months when everything was going to become clear at any given point.

[David Dayen]

The next six months are crucial, lurching. Tom Friedman New York Times COLUMNIST that was his, his ever present and it literally went on for about five years. He would say at periodic times, the next six months in Iraq are crucial.

[Sam Cedar]

And the amazing thing too about it is you would think if it's just five years, that would be only 10 Friedman units.

[David Dayen]

That's right.

[Sam Cedar]

But they overlapped many times.

[David Dayen]

Right. Every couple of months.

[Sam Cedar]

Every couple of months he reset another six months. So there could have been something like 25 or 30 fuse during the course of that Iraq war. Donald Trump has something a little bit more. Donald Trump has sped up the.

[David Dayen]

It's more like what my contractor tells me is that. Right, Right. Like we're going to finish your, your, your kitchen in two weeks. There's no question we're going to have it done completely in two weeks.

[Sam Cedar]

And you're still there off of paper plates three months, months later.

[David Dayen]

Yeah.

[Sam Cedar]

Here is Caroline. Is it Caroline? Caroline Levitt, at the White House briefing room or press briefing yesterday regarding the ongoing situation in Iran.

[David Dayen]

I know there has been a lot of speculation amongst all of you in the media regarding the President's decision making and whether or not the United States.

[Sam Cedar]

Will be directly involved in light of that news.

[David Dayen]

I have a message directly from the.

[Sam Cedar]

President and I quote, based on the.

[David Dayen]

Fact that there's a substantial chance of.

[Sam Cedar]

Negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future. I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks. That's a quote directly from the president for all of you today. There's about 45 different qualifiers in that.

[David Dayen]

Right. I, you know, concept of a plan.

[Sam Cedar]

There's a concept of a plan there. And we have heard the, the use of two weeks many times by Donald Trump. In fact, here is a, here is a compilation.

[David Dayen]

There it is. That was doing this Daily show style.

[Sam Cedar]

Yeah. Who was put, who put this together? We found it somewhere online. Here it is. This is a, maybe it's Blue Georgia that did this compilation of, of Donald Trump and his leaning on two weeks. You trust President Putin, you know, in about two weeks. In your mind, is Ukraine doing enough to get this, to get this? I'd rather tell you in about two weeks from now.

[David Dayen]

Do you still believe that Putin actually.

[Sam Cedar]

Wants to end the war? I can't tell you that, but I'll let you know in about two weeks. I think you're going to find some very interesting items coming to the forefront over the next two. Got the plan largely completed and we'll be filing it over the next two or three weeks. We're going to be having a news conference in about two weeks. I will make that decision, I would say, over the next two weeks. And I'll be making a big decision on the Paris accord over the next two weeks. At some point in the next two weeks or three weeks, I'm going to be setting the deal over the next two, three weeks. In about two weeks. Within two weeks. In two weeks. In two weeks. You'll be hearing about it a lot more in the next two weeks. Maybe in 100 years from now, now, maybe in two weeks.

[David Dayen]

I will make my decision whether or.

[Sam Cedar]

Not to go within the next two weeks. It's, it's a stalling tactic. And more often than not, people forget that he had said two weeks and it gets reset. But there are, in this instance, there is a lot of movement in terms of naval activity and in terms of Air Force activity getting set up. I would imagine Marines too, getting set up so that in the event that there is a strike, protecting the many, many bases, military assets, commercial assets that the United States has around the world. That's, that's what he could be setting up for.

[David Dayen]

I mean, the, well, I mean, I think also, you know, Trump certainly believes in what was known under Nixon as the madman strategy. Right. You have to believe that I'm so Crazy that I'm going to drop a bunker buster bomb, a nuclear bomb, whatever it is, on you so that you'll come to the table and negotiate. And so, you know, there's a bit of gunboat diplomacy here where he's setting up the guns and he wants you to think that he's crazy enough to do it. So I think that's certainly part of this.

[Sam Cedar]

The irony is, of course, that they were in the middle of negotiations when Israel, I mean, so it's not, it's unclear to me what it is. Like, I have not heard what the.

[David Dayen]

Well, and also an articulation of what.

[Sam Cedar]

The roadblock was in coming to.

[David Dayen]

I don't know that there was one because it was.

[Sam Cedar]

Well, that's my point. It's like what is the.

[David Dayen]

But it's clear what happened is that Israel kind of jumped the gun. They didn't, they don't want this negotiation to happen at all. And so they started bombing. And Trump saw his buddies on Fox News, put a lot of neocons on saying, isn't this great? And thought, hey, I want to take credit for that, so maybe I'll get involved. And so, you know, I don't know that it was, I don't think the, the sequence was there's an impasse and therefore I'm going to start bombing. The sequence was we're negotiating, Israel disrupts the negotiation and Trump, who has the brain of a gnat, like move to.

[Sam Cedar]

Israel side and then. But what is the Ask if the theory is. It's the madman theory. I'm using this madman tactic as a way of attempting to.

[David Dayen]

Well, I mean, I think there were some impasse, not full impasses, but maybe things that were holding up the negotiation. One is, I think, enriching the uranium on Iranian soil. I think that was one of the things that the US Wanted that Iran was not willing to give up. So, I mean, certainly there are points within the negotiation wasn't over. And so having the most leverage in the negotiation, if you believe that this is what this does to Trump, means that if you start threatening, then maybe you get a better deal.

[Sam Cedar]

What also strikes me is the idea, I mean, people have compared this obviously to the Iraq invasion. And what strikes me is that, and you recall this, I'm sure it was a two year project. I mean, literally maybe a year and a half from December of 2001 to February, March, March, I guess ultimately of 2003.

[David Dayen]

Right.

[Sam Cedar]

And the machinations to build support for invading Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9, 11, you know, there were Dick Cheney's leaking through Scooter Libby to the New York Times and then going back and citing the New York Times on television to build support. You had Colin Powell essentially destroy his credibility for you know, really the rest of his career he spent trying to make up for this. Going up and lying and holding a volume of anthrax at the UN Condi Rice talking. You don't want the.

[David Dayen]

Smoking gun to.

[Sam Cedar]

Be a mushroom cloud to be a mushroom cloud. And you know, you had Thomas Friedman going out there talking about how we were going to bring free.

[David Dayen]

I mean the liberal hawks, you know, they were building bipartisan support. You had Kenneth Pollack, the Case for War. And you know, there was all this other discussion. But I think, I think you have to see this as almost cumulative. Right. Because you know, part of that was how David Frum, David Frum, our friend now. Right. David Frum writing.

[Sam Cedar]

I'm glad you a State of the.

[David Dayen]

Union address calling, talking about an axis of evil. And that axis of evil included Iran, included North Korea, Iraq, Iran, North Korea and Iran. And so all of this sort of built in suppositions that animated the war with Iraq are still active, particularly around we have to stop it's an existential threat if Iran gets a nuclear weapon. That is an unstated premise that has, has gone through the last 20 years. So when this flares up again, you can just pick that talking point right off the top of the top of the pile.

[Sam Cedar]

The difference is, is that the ENTIRE it seems U.S. intelligence apparatus, like across whatever it is, the 18 agencies have said they have no nuclear weapon program and haven't since 2003.

[David Dayen]

Right.

[Sam Cedar]

And, and, and so seems like it would be a hard sell. And, but it also feels like it's completely almost irrelevant. Put up this poll. You can see Democrats, Independents, Republicans. No most this is. Do you think the US military should get involved in the conflict between Israel and Iran? There is no party, no demographic that is a FULL yes beyond 23 points for Republicans. It's 15 for Democrats and 11 for independents and then overwhelming majorities for the answer being no. And yet it doesn't seem like it mean will make a difference per se.

[David Dayen]

I mean it's certainly we'll tell. It certainly doesn't make a difference on the Republican side and we shouldn't let them off the hook for that. Massie, Tom Massie, the congressman, Libertarian congressman from Kentucky has a war powers resolution to say that only Congress can determine, you know, whether or not the US goes to war. And no Republicans have signed on zero. So the realignment, the Republican realignment is one guy on this issue. And then on the Democratic side you.

[Sam Cedar]

Have that seems almost like not a realignment.

[David Dayen]

It's not. And on the Democratic side you have a few dozen who have said both in the House and the Senate, Tim Kaine is doing a more powers resolution. Bernie Sanders put out a no war with Iran act and many House Democrats have signed on to Massie's resolution. But at the top level of the party, that's certainly not what you're seeing among Democrats.

[Sam Cedar]

Yeah. And I want to talk about that because you and Ryan Grim from Dropsite News and a couple other folks that you both work with did some great reporting on the dynamic that exists in Congress right now in terms of whether they're getting out there and articulating an anti Iran war essentially narrative. But first, let me read a couple of things from our sponsors, David, if you will.

[David Dayen]

First off, you don't want me to read these because I'll just butcher them completely. So why don't you do it?

[Sam Cedar]

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[David Dayen]

I don't need to talk about that. I do qualify for that.

[Sam Cedar]

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[David Dayen]

I have not.

[Sam Cedar]

Yeah well you got to be careful about how you.

[David Dayen]

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[Sam Cedar]

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[David Dayen]

And it, it turned her in. She basically sat in a room motionless for about two hours.

[Sam Cedar]

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[David Dayen]

Is that the French version? Saba day?

[Sam Cedar]

Well the YouTube French version.

[David Dayen]

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[Sam Cedar]

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[David Dayen]

Well, we actually know explicitly now because Jeffries, as we were going live here, Jeffries, released a new statement on developments in the Middle east is what he calls it. And it starts off with the boilerplate that you hear from a lot of members of Congress, particularly, you know, supporters of Israel. Iran is a sworn enemy of the US can never be permitted to become a nuclear capable power. Israel has a right to defend itself against escalating Iranian aggression. And our commitment to Israel's security remains ironclad. Now, he goes on to say that the authority to declare war belongs solely to the US Congress, and that Trump should refrain from engaging in military action without the explicit approval of the House. And that aggressive diplomacy resulting in an agreement that permanently halts Iran's nuclear aspirations is the most appropriate course of action at this time. That is a statement that came out literally at around noon today. But you see how the sequencing is of it, that it starts with everything that Israel kind of wants you to know about this situation, that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon, and that the US Is steadfast in its alignment, its stance with Israel. And then it gets into sort of, you know, the process stuff. But what it sounds to me like is that, you know, there. There is this sense that because of war powers, that, that the Congress should be the one to authorize war with Iran, not the president. And it seems like Jefferies would be fully willing to do that as long as he has the opportunity.

[Sam Cedar]

As long as he has the opportunity to vote for it. We should also say, and there's a couple of things that in that statement that I find sort of fascinating, one being Israel has the right to defend itself against escalating Iranian aggression. I. It is so hard to wrap my head around that, like how is, how is escalating Iranian aggression defined here? When Israel attacked them, presumably preemptively, but according to them. But of course it was not preemptively because there's been zero evidence that they were preempting anything at all. I mean, and.

[David Dayen]

Well, I mean, the idea that Iran.

[Sam Cedar]

Must never have a nuclear weapon, if anything, this is encouraging Iran to get a nuclear weapon, something that, that our own intelligence agencies have been saying. They don't seem to be terribly interested in doing it.

[David Dayen]

The interesting corollary to Trump saying, I'll make this decision in two weeks is Benjamin Netanyahu saying that Iran is three months away from delivering a nuclear weapon.

[Sam Cedar]

Starting in the early 90s.

[David Dayen]

That's right. He said, for 30 years, Iran has been a few weeks or a few months away from having a nuclear weapon. And so you can define escalating aggression as their alleged activities towards granting getting a nuclear weapon, which they've apparently been doing for 30 years. They're just not very good at it. They're going to get there, but it's monkeys on keyboards, apparently, over in Iran. So, you know, you have to believe the kind of mania that Netanyahu has about Iran's activities in order to believe that there is any escalating aggression.

[Sam Cedar]

And can we talk about Chuck Schumer? It couldn't have been more than two weeks ago.

[David Dayen]

Yeah.

[Sam Cedar]

Putting out a video, I mean, of all the issues that the Democrats should be expending their energies on, putting out a video complaining that Trump was too close to a deal with Iran, what.

[David Dayen]

Kind of bull is this?

[Sam Cedar]

And that it involved a side Deal and no side deals. Yeah, no side deals. That's the problem. I mean, we will win.

[David Dayen]

I didn't know you were going to go full Schumer there.

[Sam Cedar]

Believe me, I'm going full Schumer. This is just. It is borderline insane. And you guys at the Prospect with drop site did some amazing reporting here on what AIPAC has been involved in over the past, I guess, couple of weeks.

[David Dayen]

Well, really, since the first bombs were falling in Tehran, no side deals. So. So since that time, apac, aipac, which is, you know, the large political action committee, they really got to work immediately contacting members of Congress and telling them, you have to put out a statement that says that you stand with Israel, that, you know, Iran must never have all the things kind of that Jeffrey said in his preamble, Iran must never have a nuclear weapon. Israel has a right to defend itself against escalating aggression, and we stand with Israel. Those are kind of the talking points that Iran wanted members of Congress to get out. And my sources tell me that they were bombarding members of Congress with these messages, particularly House Democrats. And one of them got 100 calls from AIPAC saying, you have to put out a message. You have to put out a message. You have to put out a message.

[Sam Cedar]

So what is it when AIPAC calls a member of Congress 100 times? What, like, is that. Like, is that on their personal cell phone? Like, is it. Is it a text? Like, how does that.

[David Dayen]

It could be any number of things. Yeah, I mean, I think. I think on the cell phone, I think text of members, you know, maybe there's chief of staff, maybe to people in their office, their legislative director, but giving the overwhelming sensation. And it might not be from the same person. It might be from allies, it might be from donors who are allied with apac. But this overwhelming sense that you have to do this, you have to do this. And so, you know, when I heard about that, we put a bunch of people to work and said, all right, let's go to every House Democrat, let's look at their website, let's look at their social media. Did they do this? Did they align themselves with AIPAC and Israel by saying, you know, by using these talking points. And what we found was that 28 members of Congress, House Democrats in particular, issued statements exactly saying, I stand with Israel.

[Sam Cedar]

That's an incredible coincidence.

[David Dayen]

28.

[Sam Cedar]

But they would use those exact words at that exact time, those exact words.

[David Dayen]

Another 35 expressed unequivocal support for Israel without using those magic words, stam with Israel. But. But giving the same sentiment. And then another 16 expressed what I would call softer support with Israel. Maybe not the same inflammatory language, maybe not exactly the same talking points, but giving the sense that they stand with Israel. So that's, that's almost 100 members of the House caucus and was within a few days, sometimes with, by the next day, the day after the bombing started, that was AIPAC's basically having a metric to say, see, the Democrats stand with us, they stand with Israel.

[Sam Cedar]

There's another way of expressing that. And it seems to me it's like, well, there are some side deals are. Okay, that's crazy side deals and the Cuban missile crisis side deals. I mean, we're talking about Iranian ones. So.

[David Dayen]

And I think, I think there are two things to say here. Number one, this is AIPAC wanting to maintain their dominance in the Democratic Party. One of the things they did on the member statements that did not follow their talking points, that, that blamed Trump for his failure of diplomacy or that said that, you know, the Congress is the one who determines whether or not the US Goes to war or whatever, that, that, you know, AIPAC would put out a state statement in response to any, any of those statements that fell short of those, you know, their expectations basically saying consistent pattern. J Street endorses issue anti Israel statements. J Street is the pro Israel, pro peace organization and they are jockeying for power with. They don't want J Street to get too much of a foothold in the Democratic Party. And so AIPAC not only wants a bunch of statements they can point to and say, see, they're following our lead here, but they also want to cut off the idea that there would be any support for J Street within the Democratic Party.

[Sam Cedar]

I mean, I think this is, I think on some level the classic roadrunner thing where the coyote runs off the cliff and makes it out about 40ft or whatever it is and is still running and doesn't realize there's no road there anymore. And I think we are, I don't know if it's a year or two away, maybe less, maybe more of that happening in the Democratic Party. And a lot of. I think there's going to be a lot, I think that's going to end up being a lot more difficult for Democrats to be able to sort of kowtow to aipac, regardless of how much money they bring in down the road.

[David Dayen]

And especially if, if an actual strike happens and it's as catastrophic as we think.

[Sam Cedar]

And because, you know, the, this, it's almost guaranteed, it seems to me that you the, if the United States explicitly attacks Iran, because frankly, you know, it's, I think it's, it's very hard to imagine that US has not been involved in these attacks in some fashion or another, but they have enough deniability that Iran can also deny to itself that the US Is involved. But in the event that there is an explicit involvement by the US it seems to me there's no way to avoid at least significantly more involvement. And I don't know what that looks like. I can't imagine it involves any type of ground invasion. That would be absurd. But the idea of a protracted like, you know, bombing and then, you know, some form of like international terrorism seems to be, you know, I would imagine is on the table if the United States start getting involved in that. And you know, who knows what they.

[David Dayen]

But there's, I mean, you were there in 2002 when the majority of Democratic senators, and I believe a substantial number of House members, House Democrats gave President Bush the authority to go into Iraq. And then the next year in those presidential primary races, you had Howard Dean come out very early and said, what I want to know is that was the speech. It was the. Why I want to know his speech. It was at the California Democratic Party convention. He said, what I want to know is why are the Democrats the ones who are cheerleading for this war in Iraq?

[Sam Cedar]

Yep.

[David Dayen]

Why, why, why is our party collaborating with Republicans? And that, that really, I think, set the stage for about 15 years or 20 years of a sea change among at least a substantial faction of the Democratic Party. And of course, in 2008, who wins the Democratic nomination? Someone who was early out in front as a state senator of Iraq. Yeah, as a state senator in the. At the end of the day, you are going to look back at what you did here as a Democrat in elected office in Washington. And if you kind of oppose this rush to war, you're gonna find that the public really supports you and you're gonna look pretty good for a long time. And if you were in favor of it, you're gonna find yourself having to explain yourself for the next number of years.

[Sam Cedar]

Yeah, it's interesting. If we have time, we should touch on the New York mayorality race. Cuz I know you guys are doing some real coverage actually with Whitney Wimbush is coming out with a piece and she of course writes for our AM Quickie as well as.

[David Dayen]

And now she's our new staff writer doing. And yeah, she's been focused on the, I mean it's GEO TV Weekend here yes. What do you think's gonna happen?

[Sam Cedar]

Well, wait, we'll get to that in a moment because I want to talk about the big bill. But I do think the interesting thing we should also say about the invasion of Iraq is that starting as early as the Clinton administration there was that similar buildup in terms of providing all of the sort of like sales pitches and whatnot that you would need to invade Iraq. But even, but, but it took the Bush administration, you know, 14 months to do it in this instance. I think like, you know, we have now been trained that like, oh, the idea of the US Unilaterally doing this with Iran and you know, we, I haven't seen, you know, we're not having large anti war protests at this point, like, you know, in the way that we did with Irma. It took months for that stuff to happen. Last time this could happen so quickly that, you know, we're already involved before we know it.

[David Dayen]

Yeah, I mean that's where you started this, that it was a year and a half, like build up sales pitch effort, a real sales pitch effort. And here it's just sort of a given. Oh, we're gonna bomb Iran.

[Sam Cedar]

Yep.

[David Dayen]

And.

[Sam Cedar]

Yeah, well, we shall see. In the meantime, there's also like another bomb essentially and it is winding its way through the Senate, this reconciliation bill.

[David Dayen]

Yeah.

[Sam Cedar]

And you have a piece out just I think yesterday about what it's just going to do to, not just to Medicaid and never. I don't even know if you touch on Medicare in there because of the sequestration that could potentially follow from it.

[David Dayen]

There are actually a couple things with Medicare, but yeah.

[Sam Cedar]

The entire sort of like medical system that's going to be like. I don't know if there's ever been a single bill that I remember at least in the 20 years that I've been doing this that has such dramatic implications for daily life for so many millions of Americans in a negative way.

[David Dayen]

It's gonna affect every American at some level. And as you have talked about, the fact that we're in this news vortex going on right now where we have immigration stuff and protests and this Iran situation with Israel, it's not getting a lot of attention and it's hard to get traction on it. We're doing a daily, or almost daily newsletter called Trump's Beautiful Disaster because bill's called the Big Beautiful Bill. So we went back to the 90s with 311 reference beautiful disaster song by. But anyway, so, and you know, we're covering it because, because of this Impact, but it's been hard to break through. And I don't think people realize the extent to which this will have such a massive amount of disruption, particularly in the health system. So right now, the situation is that a number of rural hospitals in particular are struggling to survive. There is a report that says one third of all rural hospitals, and that's about 700 hospitals across the country are at risk of closure right now. And if. If you take a trillion dollars out of the health care system, which is kind of what this will do, mainly by cutting Medicaid, that's the primary thing, and moving 11 million people off the Medicaid rolls, you're gonna get a situation where suddenly the budgets of these rural hospitals will just go into the toilet. I mean, Medicaid is often the biggest line item in these budgets. You're talking about a program that has 73 million people for revenue. For revenue. And, you know, I mean, some hospitals complain about low reimbursement rates in Medicaid, but there are programs that boost that that are also being attacked in this bill. There's this program where the federal government will kick in extra money so that doctors will accept Medicaid and hospitals will accept Medicaid. And that was cut in the Senate bill.

[Sam Cedar]

That is the provider tax. Right.

[David Dayen]

It's not quite. The provider tax is a different thing called state directed payments, but those have been attacked in the. In the Senate.

[Sam Cedar]

Don't those provider taxes pay for those state directed payments?

[David Dayen]

No, the state directed payments come from the federal government. The provider tax is a separate thing that is a way for states to get more resources in Medicaid. And what happens is the state taxes a hospital. Let's say the state taxes a hospital $100. But what they say is also, we'll reimburse you more through our Medicaid program by $100. So the hospital is held harmless. They're paying a tax, but they're getting the money back. But when you add. When you increase those rates and the state pays $100, Medicaid is a federal state program. So the federal government is kicking in some of that money. So by doing this circulation, it's a way to get the federal government to pay a little bit more.

[Sam Cedar]

Right, okay.

[David Dayen]

And the state direct payments are supplements on top of that. So there's two things going on here. Right. And both of those are being cut by this. The Senate bill in particular. There are other cuts in the House.

[Sam Cedar]

Being more egregious than the House bill, which is sort of shocking.

[David Dayen]

It's Crazy. It's crazy. And so what does this mean? There are hundreds of rural hospitals that are likely to have to close because of what happens in this bill. And what does it mean when a hospital closes, there are sick people in the hospital that have to be moved. And if you're talking about a rural hospital, it's probably have to be moved an hour, two hours, three hours away. And that could be life threatening in and of itself. The second part, if you have a city, a rural town, and they lose their hospital, it's an anchor for the community. These are often the biggest employers in that community. You could obliterate an entire town by losing their rural hospital and then three for patients. Now my, the nearest hospital to where I live is three hours away. If you have a heart attack, if you have an emergency situation, you might not be able to get to the hospital in time. If you have a loved one that has to stay in a, in a hospital somewhere else, you might have to pay to like go to a hotel so you can see your loved one and help them through a time when they're sick. There are real burdens for patients. And then think about the burden on the remaining hospitals. So all of a sudden they're getting patients from a larger area.

[Sam Cedar]

And yeah, if you cut Medicaid, doesn't that mean that those 11 million people who, they get healthy and never have to go to the hospital? Right. Isn't that the theory?

[David Dayen]

Actually what happens is those 11 million people no longer have coverage. But if they're sick, they're still going to go to the hospital. And we have a law in this country that says if you are in an emergency and you go to the emergency room, that you have to get, you have to get treated. And that is called uncompensated care. So if that person can't afford it because, you know, they, they don't be on Medicaid and they don't have health insurance, they're going to basically go and get treatment without getting paid. And that's a burden on the hospitals.

[Sam Cedar]

And then it ends up being a cost that is picked up by insurance and private insurance and by essentially the.

[David Dayen]

Public dole, more by the hospitals. Right. Because the hospitals are the one giving the treatment, not getting paid.

[Sam Cedar]

But they passed that.

[David Dayen]

They asked for higher payments, but they might not be able to wrangle higher payments out of the insurance companies. And the other part of this is that more people are going to be coming in, whether they're insured or uninsured. They're gonna be coming into that hospital. Hospitals are already understaffed. They already need more physicians. They already need more nurses. If you had a week wait time to see a doctor before, maybe it's two weeks now. And the health care system is very interdependent. If you have something go down in one side of it, the other side's.

[Sam Cedar]

Going to be affected. Covid. I mean, we you know, we saw how supplies had to be moved within the hospital system. If you have shut down a bunch of public hospitals like Andrew Cuomo happened to have in the run up before. COVID there are hospitals get overrun in terms of the burden and in cost and whatnot. And so this is going to have and we should say that as as little attention as it has gotten relative to the implications of this look at the polling on this. Let's play this clip from Harry Anton on is that his name, HARRY yeah. On, on cnn. He's never seen polling on legislation look worse.

[David Dayen]

But it's it's a soft intensity, though, right, because people don't really know about it.

[Sam Cedar]

People don't know about it is clip number we have this. Yeah. Yep. And of course, there's other elements of of this bill. And but this is one of this is like sort of the where the biggest chunk of money in terms of cuts are coming from.

[David Dayen]

That's right. Where is support for this mega bill? You know, I'm really, really surprised when I look at polling data. I look at it every day. But the amount of disapproval for this bill, holy cow.

[Sam Cedar]

My goodness.

[David Dayen]

You know, you mentioned the KFF poll. We're talking about 29 points underwater on the net favorable rating. But that matches the Quinnipiac University poll from last week when it was 26 points underwater. Oh my God, you need Greg Louganis to get that far underwater. And I mean, we're Talking about a negative 41 net favorability rating among independence. You rarely ever see pieces of legislation or proposed pieces of legislation as unpopular as this. But here you see it in two polls, 26 points underwater and 29 points underwater. No good. Extra, extra. Read all about it. Mr. I know it's 26 points underwater. I mean, did this guy fight in World War II?

[Sam Cedar]

I don't see any one of the doughboys, but but I mean, this is pretty stunning, but also does not seem to have I mean, what are the prospects? Well, let's first talk about the birdbath stuff because there's a lot of stuff in this bill that came from the House that goes into Senate. It's a reconciliation process which means they only need 50 plus 1 to pass it. It is not subject to a filibuster. However, there's a set of rules named after Robert Byrd, a now long deceased former Democratic and former Dixie Cratic.

[David Dayen]

Yeah. Senator from West Virginia.

[Sam Cedar]

Yeah. And, and tell people about those, those Berg rules and the process in which it gets. It goes through what they call the bird bath.

[David Dayen]

So this is a budget reconciliation bill. Right. So in order to qualify for that special status where it gets it get it can be passed by 50 votes. Everything has to have a primary budgetary purpose. And it's not just that it has to have a budgetary purpose because if you cut $10 here, then that has a budgetary purpose. That has to be the primary reason why it's in the bill. It cannot be a policy that is sort of masquerading as a budget item. And because, you know, once this rule was established, senators got more clever about trying to reach their policy goals through budgetary means. And so the Senate sort of arbiter, the parliamentarian, the famed parliamentarian is the one who decides. Nope. That actually you're trying to do policy there. And that doesn't qualify under the 50 vote standard. So we're going to kick that part out of the.

[Sam Cedar]

And the parties, the two different parties basically go to the parliamentary and file almost like, well, this is weird brief.

[David Dayen]

They should put these on television. Democrats, in this case the Democrats say I raise a point of order about this part of the bill. And I say that this actually has a policy purpose and not a budgetary purpose. And then there's a debate between the Democratic staff and the Republican staff with the parliamentarian present. And then the parliamentarian eventually makes a ruling. And that ruling is that this either gets to stay in the bill or this has to go. And we actually got last night some early answers on some of this stuff with three of the, you know, every committee in the Senate has a different part of the bill. Three committees that have lesser parts of the bill, they, they got rulings. And the biggest thing is a, yet another kind of survival from a near death experience for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. So in the bill there, the way that the CFPB is structured is that they get their money from the Federal Reserve, they don't get their money from the budget. So the question is, well, how do we ding the CFPB if it's not budgetary? They're not on the budget. So what they did was they said, okay, we're going to put a cap on how much money The Fed can give the CFPB, and that cap will be the 0% of the Fed's available resources. In other words, we're going to zero out the budget of the cfpb. Well, the Democrats challenged this and said, you're just trying to kill the cfpb. You're not trying to save money for the budget because it doesn't save money for the budget, not directly. And the parliamentarian agreed with the Democrats and they kicked that part out of the bill. So the CFPB will still get its current complement. There is actually a cap on CFPB resources and it's like 8% of what the Fed has. I forget the exact numbers, like $600 billion or something. I'm sorry, $600 million. But anyway, so that's out of the bill. And to be clear, Congress can pass whatever it wants to. It's just about having the special rules.

[Sam Cedar]

Special rules that allow you to avoid the filibuster.

[David Dayen]

That's right.

[Sam Cedar]

And there are a couple there. I mean, a couple there. There are tens of these provisions, at least.

[David Dayen]

Right.

[Sam Cedar]

Within the.

[David Dayen]

So this. Yeah, CFPB is an. There was another artificial intelligence ban.

[Sam Cedar]

There's a whole array of.

[David Dayen]

There's another one that got thrown out last night, which was the Republicans tried to repeal the CAFE standards for cars, which is an emissions standard, tailpipe emissions for cars, and say, you know, cars have to have an average miles per gallon of 35 by X X year. They tried to repeal that and say that would save money. And the parliamentarian said, no, that's. You're trying to create policy.

[Sam Cedar]

And that worth side note, the parliamentarian was sidestepped, essentially, when they essentially used the, the Congressional Review act in a sort of a misappropriated way.

[David Dayen]

But let's not think this is a key point, right. Because this is the first time things have been kicked out of the bill. And John Thune is the Senate Majority leader, has said, we're going to abide by the parliamentarian. However, as you just said, they sidestep the parliamentarian in one previous. Three weeks ago, just a few weeks ago on separate bill. They also did it for this bill when they were doing the budget resolution. And now we're going to get into real wonky stuff.

[Sam Cedar]

This is getting into very wonky stuff. But this is very important because we're talking about the baseline. Right. Of how we approach the tax cuts that are set to expire.

[David Dayen]

Right.

[Sam Cedar]

And before we get to that, let's. Let's explain this other dynamic that exists with the Byrd Rule, which is it needs to be deficit neutral 10 years out from the, from the bill. Right.

[David Dayen]

Basically, it cannot create deficits after the 10 year budget window. Everything has to pencil out after that first 10 years. You can, you can have it spend money or you know, be a deficit in those first 10 years, but after that it has to be neutral.

[Sam Cedar]

Which is why very often what we get is tax cuts that will expire right in 10 years.

[David Dayen]

Which is, which is what happened in the Trump tax cuts of 2017. The Trump tax cuts of 2017 actually expire at the end of this year. And that was to make it look cheaper and also to part, you know, pencil out the budget neutrality outside the budget window.

[Sam Cedar]

And but when we talk about baseline, right. Even though these tax cuts must expire.

[David Dayen]

Right.

[Sam Cedar]

So there's a virtue of their very existence. They could not exist if they weren't to expire at the end of this year. However, there's some.

[David Dayen]

So the way it goes is there are two baselines you could use. There's a current law baseline and the current policy baseline. The current law baseline is what does the law say? And the law says that these tax cuts expire in 2025, and therefore, if you extend them, it will cost the amount of the tax cuts in 2026 and 27 and 28 and 29 and so on. If you use the current policy baseline, the current policy is these tax cuts are in place. So if they just stay in place, that doesn't cost any money because it's just the same budget baseline as we have this year. And this is a really key point because of the rules of, not just the rules of budget reconciliation, but also what it looks like to the public. Does it look like these things cost $3 trillion or does it look like it's the difference between that and the bill looking like it saves money over the next 10 years. Right. So the, the Senate is really, really interested in doing a current policy baseline. The Republicans, the Republican Senate and the Democrats have said, well, that violates any standard because you could just pass a reconciliation bill saying Medicare for all, but we're only doing it for one year and then the next year pass a reconciliation bill that says Medicare for all permanently and that doesn't cost any money because it's current policy.

[Sam Cedar]

Right.

[David Dayen]

So is that really what you want to go for, Republicans? So when Senate Republicans came up against this on the budget resolution, which kind of sets the terms for the reconciliation bill, they said, well, we don't need to ask the parliamentarian about that. And they just ignored the parliamentarian, didn't even ask her.

[Sam Cedar]

And they left it up to Lindsey Graham, who is the.

[David Dayen]

Left it up to the budget chair, who is Lindsey Graham. And he said, yeah, sure, we'll do current policy baseline. Now we're in a position with the bill itself where Democrats are going to challenge that and they're going to have the same debate in front of the parliamentarian this time. And I think, you know, I think some of these other things like CFPB or CAFE rules, Senate Republicans will maybe probably not pick a fight over that. But if the parliamentarian says that the current policy baseline is out, this is the big.

[Sam Cedar]

This is that's biggest fight.

[David Dayen]

That's the biggest fight. And there may be a situation where they ignore the ruling of the chair, which they have the ability to do.

[Sam Cedar]

And then there's Thune promised they wouldn't do that.

[David Dayen]

Promised. But, you know, that's. We're gonna see the rubber hit the road once.

[Sam Cedar]

That's the big one. I mean, because like, the AI regulations, that could drop out. We already have dropouts.

[David Dayen]

I don't.

[Sam Cedar]

We already have a couple people in the House who already say, I regret voting for the bill with that.

[David Dayen]

Big, Big Tech is lobbying furiously for that because it would ban all state regulations of artificial intelligence for the next 10 years, and that includes a whole host of products. Because AI is, is in everything.

[Sam Cedar]

Now.

[David Dayen]

Suppose not that. Not only that, but it's defined very broadly in bill. So it could be, you know, Real Page uses an algorithm to, you know, make its recommendations on how landlords can jack up rents. That could be considered AI. And so states and cities cannot do regulations on RealPage. It has a huge implication. Set of implications.

[Sam Cedar]

And so those smaller things, they may drop out. We're going to, we're going to start seeing this. And this stuff is so byzantine that, you know, outside of like a couple of small podcasts, frankly, people are not aware of this. The big one being though, that what is the baseline? What are we going to determine the cuts? And. And, you know, the argument that I saw Stephen Miller make, I think it was on that on Ban and no, it was on with Kudlow, if you could believe it was. You know, there's no reason to expect that taxes are going to be any different tomorrow than they were today, which of course is like, what are you talking about? This entire, this entire bill, this tax regime was different than it was the day before you passed it.

[David Dayen]

They. If you extend this out, you just extend this logic out. There was a billboard on Fox News that said that this bill saved $8 trillion. And the way they got that is they said current policy baseline, that's $0. But also look at all the economic growth that this is going to spur if you extend the tax cut.

[Sam Cedar]

Well, that's the laugh.

[David Dayen]

Which costs zero DOL.

[Sam Cedar]

Right.

[David Dayen]

They said, oh, that's $3 trillion. That's going to. So. So that saves the government or adds revenue of $3 trillion to the government. And then they said, but also look at all the money we're collecting from tariffs, which isn't in the bill at all. But they said that's another $3 trillion. And so they put this thing together and it literally said that this bill saves $8 trillion.

[Sam Cedar]

I don't understand why they even bother to like to. Why not just put out a number and just instead of like trying to have to reverse engineer where you're getting these figures for. I mean, literally just numbers floating in the air and they just shove them in there and they're meaningless. It's just, it feels like we don't have a media, broadly speaking, that has the ability to push back on these sort of completely fake narratives that exist. All right, let's turn to one other thing that I know you've been following, the Genius Act. I feel like this is like you say, within two weeks, it feels like we may both unlearn the lessons of the Iraq War and of the financial crisis. This does feel like what it would feel like watching essentially the Clinton administration sign off on the repeal of Glass Steagall.

[David Dayen]

But almost, I mean, I think closely.

[Sam Cedar]

Worse. Yeah, it almost feels worse because it feels like this crypto stuff is going to spread in such a way that it will be almost impossible to get a handle on it. And it's just going to run like this feels like it could be super cataclysmic, maybe in five years, 10 years, 15 years, don't know when.

[David Dayen]

But look, I mean, we've been here before. We've seen this happen before at, at the end of the 90s, as you say, Clinton not only signed the repeal of Glass Steagall, but the Commodity Futures Modernization act, which basically says you can't have any regulations on derivatives. And within about seven, eight years, we had a financial crisis that was based on people using a lot of derivatives to make bets on the housing market. In 2017, 18, the only real bipartisan bill that passed in the first Trump term was a deregulation, basically a repeal of certain parts of the Dodd Frank act, particularly for large community banks or Large regional banks. Within five years, six years, you had Silicon Valley bank, which was a large regional bank, completely blow up. And if we didn't have crypto isolated from the regular financial system, that probably would have been worse. But, but that was a mini crisis that happened and several large regional banks went under because of that. Now you have this stablecoin bill, and the Genius act puts a regime together, a pretty light touch, regulatory regime for stablecoins. It'll. It will allow. I know you've had people on the show talking about this, but it will allow. You know, for companies, we've now seen Walmart and Amazon say that they might put their own stablecoin together, Wal Mart Bucks that you will use to have to pay for items at Walmart or items at Amazon. We could see that out of Metta. For Facebook, you want to use Facebook Marketplace, you got to use a meta stablecoin. You want to use X as a financial tool, you might have an X dollar that is a stablecoin. We're now seeing private currencies that are being set up across the economy. We're going to see that as a result of this bill when it passes. Because, by the way, the House hasn't passed it yet. There's still more to be done. The House probably will pass it, but they might also bundle their own ideas with it. And they want to do a market structure bill which would basically strip the SEC securities and Exchange Commission of regulation of a lot of digital coins and give it to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is smaller and also friendlier to crypto.

[Sam Cedar]

Right.

[David Dayen]

So, you know, there's still work to be done, and it remains to be seen, but the Senate passed the Genius act this week with, I believe, 18 Democrats that were in support, along with pretty much every Republican.

[Sam Cedar]

And that, of course, is because, I mean, almost explicitly because of the enormous crypto money. But it feels like, I mean, broadly speaking, what it feels like we have now is essentially like the problem we had with shadow banking, except for it's really just creating a whole new class of banks, but without any of the capital requirements essentially of actual banks. And I guess presumably allowing for all sorts of other derivatives and financial products that would come out of it on the back end and could theoretically be traded like you could have secondary tertiary markets trading on the Walmart dollar, whatever they call it. You know, the first of all, I'm.

[David Dayen]

So excited to have to go to every different place of business that I buy things at with a different kind of money.

[Sam Cedar]

Well, that's going to be Sort of like this. It's like, you know, it is as if, you know, I remember in college going to Jamaica for spring break, right? There were riots in Kingston at that time. So it was very, very inexpensive. But the, the, the hotel we stay at, you couldn't buy anything with cash. It all had to be these, like, plastic beads. And you would buy all these plastic beads, you wear it around your neck, and then you would just pull it off to buy, like, you know, rum punch.

[David Dayen]

And then it's like, it's a hop, skip and a jump to workers at Walmart being paid in these, of course. And now it's like cutting.

[Sam Cedar]

I couldn't take that anywhere else.

[David Dayen]

Yeah.

[Sam Cedar]

And the real problem is, is that these companies are so massive and they're dealing. They have their own, essentially, economies. It could be backed by nothing and could fall apart at any point because they could just.

[David Dayen]

What we've seen with the stablecoins that exist now is that there was one point a couple years ago where every single one of the major stablecoins was under investigation by the federal government for precisely that reason, not having enough disclosure of what they were actually backed by. And, you know, a lot of those investigations have been canceled out by the Trump administration, whose org, whose private organization has its own stablecoin, USD1 that's part of World Liberty Financial, which is part of the Trump Organization. And yet this level of corruption that we're seeing with Trump's forays into crypto did not move almost a single Democrat to head off this bill. And then you had, I think, maybe the funniest part of this, Adam Schiff, the senator from California, saying, I am introducing a bill to block Donald Trump from introducing a stablecoin. And he did it after voting to pass the Genius Act. He did not make it a condition of his vote.

[Sam Cedar]

I'm really shocked to hear that. So, I mean, what will happen to vanilla banks at that point? Like, what's the point of them? It seems to me they'll just move their operations into, like, they'll just. The bank will exist over here as this sort of some type of, like, side project, and their main business would be to be these sort of, like, unfettered by regulation.

[David Dayen]

One of the amazing things, in my view, is how community banks did exceedingly little to try to fight back against this bill. There were some community bankers in a couple states, Texas, Illinois, that actually opposed the bill and worked, you know, to lobby Congress against it. But the national group, the Independent Community Bankers association, did nothing on this bill.

[Sam Cedar]

Do you think they just didn't. Weren't aware of the implications.

[David Dayen]

No, I think they were fully aware of the implications implications but they took a dive and you know often the national ICBA is aligned with the big banks and the big banks don't have a problem with this because they can, you know, use, they can issue their own stablecoins and use.

[Sam Cedar]

They're big enough that they can, they're going to just do a lot of play.

[David Dayen]

They can profit off of trading from this. The, the independent banks are a really endangered species right now. The community banks because of what might happen if this bill passes.

[Sam Cedar]

Crazy.

[David Dayen]

What's going. Before I go, what's your call? What's your gut feel here on New York City mayors race?

[Sam Cedar]

I am going to check the weather and tell you I just saw some, I guess it was maybe over the past day or two. The early voting numbers look great from.

[David Dayen]

Rondani and that's because of where they're coming from.

[Sam Cedar]

Because where they're coming from they're coming from Brooklyn and Manhattan. His weakest boroughs are like the Bronx and this is off the top of my head but in Brooklyn it's like 132% more.

[David Dayen]

Yeah.

[Sam Cedar]

All the businesses have Zoron posters. It is, it's crazy. In Manhattan also 132% or something like.

[David Dayen]

That could just be pulling forward votes. You know there's a finite amount.

[Sam Cedar]

That is correct. Which is why I just checked the weather.

[David Dayen]

Right.

[Sam Cedar]

On Monday it's going to be in the high 90s. On Tuesday it's going to be 100 degrees at 2pm yeah. And my sense is that. But if we look at enthusiasm, banking.

[David Dayen]

Those votes is important.

[Sam Cedar]

Banking those votes are important particularly for Cuomo.

[David Dayen]

Right.

[Sam Cedar]

Because I do not have an older.

[David Dayen]

Electorate that might not come out in 100 degree.

[Sam Cedar]

And I just think that the support for Cuomo is not as intense.

[David Dayen]

It may be larger but it may not be, but it's not as deep.

[Sam Cedar]

And when you have an obstacle to voting, this is the sort of the classic thing. Right.

[David Dayen]

That's interesting. I mean you know seeing that Maris poll that came out that had a kind of at a 10 point race very much in line with Cuomo's internal polling. It seems to me that there is a larger electorate for, for Cuomo at the moment. I think although that gap is shrinking.

[Sam Cedar]

I think that gap is shrinking. But I also think that like look, you know, I don't know how many of these voting places when there's a line, if it's not out the door And I don't know, 100 degree weather. In 100 degree weather. You know, I met one Cuomo canvasser just this is a completely anecdotal story. I grabbed. He. He handed me the thing. I walked like a half a block and I'm like, I wonder. And I went back and I'm like, what is it you like about Cuomo?

[David Dayen]

And the guy was like, I like getting paid. I like the check that he gives me every week.

[Sam Cedar]

And then so I went back up to where I was going and then walk back, he was gone already.

[David Dayen]

And one thing that's interesting is I just got to the area just yesterday, but the, the ad war that is happening for. And it's all anti Mamdani. Oh, total Cuomo is pretty staggering. In fact, Zoran today went to the City Board of Elections, said you have to raise the cap because the super PAC money that Cuomo is getting is something like $24 million. So you have to allow me to spend more money above the cap because of all of these super PAC resources that are coming in.

[Sam Cedar]

Yeah. I wonder, I wonder in a new, in a, in a primary, you know, in 95 degree weather, how much cable television ads impact the election? I mean, I don't.

[David Dayen]

What about that globalizing Intifada controversy?

[Sam Cedar]

I just don't think that. I just don't think that's going to be as. I think that was already locked in.

[David Dayen]

You mean the people who are going to vote against Mondani for that reason already were going to.

[Sam Cedar]

We're already going to vote against them. And if anything, like, you know, so I think like, the Lander Cross endorsement gives a permission structure for people who might have been on the, on the fence. I mean, I think it's really going.

[David Dayen]

To come down to going live on Tuesday. Well, we go live every day on election night.

[Sam Cedar]

Oh, that's a good idea. I may.

[David Dayen]

I have your ideas. I'm the one coming up with these things for you.

[Sam Cedar]

I mean, it's, you know, I play softball on Tuesday nights, but maybe I.

[David Dayen]

Don'T want to block your softball.

[Sam Cedar]

But maybe, maybe I will do that live from my softball game.

[David Dayen]

The dugout.

[Sam Cedar]

Exactly.

[David Dayen]

Checking Twitter for the.

[Sam Cedar]

But I think it's really just a question of who turns out, and I think that's a much harder. As good as these, these polls are.

[David Dayen]

Yeah.

[Sam Cedar]

And I think, like in the marriage, I think it's very reputable pollster. I think it's very, very difficult to assess who's going to come out.

[David Dayen]

Right.

[Sam Cedar]

You look at like the last Primary, like five people came out to vote for that in the, in the Adam.

[David Dayen]

The Adams Garcia race.

[Sam Cedar]

Yes.

[David Dayen]

This is going to have much higher turnout than that.

[Sam Cedar]

I mean, well, that's what I'm saying.

[David Dayen]

People are more engaged.

[Sam Cedar]

I think it's going to be. I, I think it's conceivable it could be 50% higher, maybe more. And there's also a lot more sophistication about ranked choice voting that did not exist that time.

[David Dayen]

Right.

[Sam Cedar]

And so I think it's just right.

[David Dayen]

Because that was the first one. So you think, like the, The. The escalation in terms of knowledge and engagement from one to the, the first race to the second race is pretty exponential.

[Sam Cedar]

Yes. And so this is. And it's also interesting. Matt's putting this up here. Let's just go through this. Bill de Blasio, who I think never, ever, ever got enough credit for, nor did he do himself any favors until he seemed like never to talk about it.

[David Dayen]

Right.

[Sam Cedar]

But this his Universal Pre K, which he fought tooth and nail with Cuomo over.

[David Dayen]

Yeah.

[Sam Cedar]

I mean, Cuomo had basically tried to put a poison pill in there that would kill it at one point, but it was so amazingly popular. And Cuomo got significantly weaker after just happenstance after this fight with Bill de Blasio, the pre K and 3K.

[David Dayen]

3K. I mean, three year olds going.

[Sam Cedar]

Yes. It means the last two years prior to kindergarten.

[David Dayen]

Right.

[Sam Cedar]

Are universal. Are paid.

[David Dayen]

Right.

[Sam Cedar]

And, you know, by the city, essentially. And it is huge. It is so massive. And I think were it not for Covid, we would see huge gains in, in, in education achievement. So.

[David Dayen]

Right.

[Sam Cedar]

I don't know. That's. We'll see. Andrew Cuomo fought tooth and nail against that. David Dayen, I know you're gonna get to lunch. Thank you so much for.

[David Dayen]

Thanks a lot. Good to be here.

[Sam Cedar]

Always a pleasure to have you on the program.

[David Dayen]

All right, thank you, folks.

[Sam Cedar]

We will put a link to the American Prospect, also to the weekly roundup and to Big. It's not Big Money.

[David Dayen]

Organized money.

[Sam Cedar]

Organized Money, the podcast that is focused on issues of power and money concentration in our society.

[David Dayen]

Got a great one this week you'll like on Hollywood. Yeah.

[Sam Cedar]

Is this about the streaming platforms?

[David Dayen]

Yes, about streaming. It's with Richard Rushfield from the Ankler. It's terrific.

[Sam Cedar]

Oh, fantastic. I mean, Zaslav and Malone have just raked in the money. They have destroyed the entertainment business, although I hear rumors it's coming back a little bit over the past month. But.

[David Dayen]

Well, now they created this separate company for the cable networks.

[Sam Cedar]

Yes. Which is kind of like all this.

[David Dayen]

When they, when you create a bad bank, it is like a leveraged buyout, toxic assets in the bank.

[Sam Cedar]

Toys R Us.

[David Dayen]

So that it will go away.

[Sam Cedar]

Yes, Us. It's Toys R Us and Joanne's fabric.

[David Dayen]

Right.

[Sam Cedar]

Honestly. And, and of course, the reason why the business is in the, in the crapper is because they spent billions of dollars on this streaming stuff. And without a business model, without a single clue as to what they were doing, it is literally my experience on Peacock was indicative of this. A completely sequestered product that is like cable, all the deficits of cable, but none of the benefits of streaming or the Internet or whatever. It's fascinating. I once had somebody on Air America say to me, the last CEO who drove the thing, you know, it was like three feet under. He drove it to like nine feet under. And I was telling him, like, you've really managed to completely screw up this company in an incredibly impressive way. And he, he told me, maybe this was earlier in the, in his tenure. He said, you know, when I was a program director at some Washington, I can't remember a station, it was a sports. We had Jim Stevenson, I'm making up the name, I can't remember who was a columnist with Washington Post. Come on. And I would tell him.

[David Dayen]

The rule.

[Sam Cedar]

Is you're not allowed to talk about anything you've written about and you're not allowed to write about anything you're talking about. And he goes, and we're going to do, what we're going to do is we're going to have a centrist radio station. But the most progressive.

[David Dayen]

We have to start with the obvious.

[Sam Cedar]

The most progressive website, we're going to take on Huffington Post. And I was like, you know, this is impressive because you are probably the first guy in 30 years who is going to try and develop a completely horizontal business model. What you really should do is open up a shoe store and refuse to advertise on either the website or the radio station. And he just looked at me like it was the dumbest thing I had ever, ever, ever heard by a guy who had that kind of watch and shoes. It's cool that that's the type of person that runs the world. Honestly, it, you know, I've said this many, many times before. I mean, the guy actually had donated to Mitt Romney when we looked up his only. His only. But that wasn't the issue. He, but for people to assume like, oh my God, there must be some type of right wing plant that is purposefully sabotaging Air America. No, it's just that you can't conceive of the level of incompetence that exists with a guy like that. I mean, very good at selling people who have no clue but a lot of money on what to do. So much of the world operates in that way where somebody's got a ton of money and they don't know. They have no touchstone as to what they want to do. But the first guy who walks in wearing, you know, good shoes and a watch and drives up in a nice car, they're like, this guy must know what he's talking about. And that's how we get such a f'd up world. It's all right there. Last name Zir. Anyways, couldn't help myself. Sorry, could not help myself. Folks, it's your support that makes this show possible. You can become a member of the Majority Report by going to join the majorityreport.com. when you do, you not only get the free half free of commercials, but you also get the fun half. You can IM us and occasionally we have bonuses. We were just talking the other day, Matt and I like, we gotta, we gotta dig up all these old Majority Report shows. Brian, we were saying that we've got a project for our summer intern and make these. Now, I know I've been saying this for like eight years, but this time I mean it. When Dane came in, I said, you know, our project this summer is to clean up the office. And Dane was like, that was your project last summer. And the summer before that also just coffee, co op, fair trade coffee, hot chocolate, use the coupon code. Majority get 10% off next week. Big week. Big week. Next week. Obviously the New York City mayoral race. I guess we'll find out if we're going to be involved in a massive Middle Eastern war that may happen. I'm waiting for July 4th so we can do an Independence Day and we have do an Independence Day speech when we bomb Iran. Gotta hope Seymour Hersh is wrong about his sources saying it's gonna happen this weekend. This weekend? He says soon. This weekend, probably tonight or tomorrow so the markets can open on Monday is what Hirsch is saying. But you know, he has pretty deep sources in military industrial complex and he can be wrong sometimes. So I mean, hopefully his track record as of late have not been. Has not been stellar. Yeah, but I think, look, the argument that they are taking this time to do what they can to position US military, naval, air force in a way to respond to Iran's response makes sense to me. And the idea that, you know, you would say two weeks when really all you need is four days to do this also makes sense to me. But I want to remind people, like, apparently they're not even like Pete Hegseth is not even involved in the conversations. They have bypassed exit, who just in case you forgot, was the secretary of defense. We'll talk more about this in the so called fun half. But you have a military that has stripped out. Well, we'll talk about it, you know, because I want, I want to have time to go into this. But, but it seems to me that it's hard to imagine a less opportune time, not that there should ever be an opportune time to engage in the potential of an ever increasing and spiraling regional conflict based upon how little experience it appears the top military brass has right now and how you have a defense secretary who's sort of out of the loop. Pete, I have you here just to say yes, do. Pete, you're here so we can shoot protesters kneecaps. Okay? We don't need anything more from you. Pete. The best thing about you is that you don't know how to pronounce posse comitatus. And so go have a drink. You sit at the bar and if we need you, we'll call you. We know where you'll be. Who called the bartender? Exactly. All right, Matt, what's happening on Left Reckoning? Yeah, Left Reckoning. We'll have a show probably talking about Iran. Also a preview of Monday's show, but we talked to Adam Gaffney about Medicaid cuts and the impact of that and also did a little bit of.

[David Dayen]

I.

[Sam Cedar]

Mean, talk about Blinken looking the other way about another bout of genocidal violence in Tigray between Ethiopia and Eritrea.

[David Dayen]

So check that out.

[Sam Cedar]

Patreon.com leftreckon Next week we're going to have guests on the Scretti decision. I think that'll be Wednesday. We have Chase Strangio who argue the case. I think we will have a Leah Lipman on, on some of the other Supreme Court cases that we've discussed. We're going to have Gaffney on to talk about more about the implications on medicine essentially in this country as in the wake of the bill. We've got a bunch of other stuff next week. It's going to be a packed week and then, you know, who knows, who knows what could happen, frankly. And of course, the mayor's race on Tuesday, Tuesday night I probably will do some like Live updates from my softball game. It's quite a crew there. I don't. I wonder who there. It's. There's. There's going to be a wide array of people voting the voting habits at my softball game. All right, see you in the fun half. Three months from now, six months from now, nine months from now. And I don't think it's going to be the same as it looks like in six months from now. And I don't know if it's necessarily going to be better six months from now than it is three months from now, but I think around 18 months out, we're gonna look back and go like, wow. What. What is that going on? It's nuts. Wait a second. Hold on for. Hold on for a second. Emma. Welcome to the program. What is up, everyone? Fun packaging hat.

[David Dayen]

No m. You did it.

[Sam Cedar]

Fun hat.

[David Dayen]

Let's go, Brandon. Let's go, Brandon. Fun hat.

[Sam Cedar]

Bradley, you want to say hello? Sorry to disappoint everyone. I'm just a random guy. It's all the boys today.

[David Dayen]

Fundamentally false. No.

[Sam Cedar]

I'm sorry. Women. Stop talking for a second and let me finish.

[David Dayen]

Where is this coming from, Dude?

[Sam Cedar]

But. Dude, you Want to smoke this? 7A.

[David Dayen]

Yes. Hi, is this me?

[Sam Cedar]

Yes. Is this me?

[David Dayen]

Is it me?

[Sam Cedar]

It is you?

[David Dayen]

Is this me? Oh, it's me.

[Sam Cedar]

I think it is you. Who is you. No sound. Every single freaking day. What's on your mind?

[David Dayen]

We can discuss free markets and we can discuss capitalism.

[Sam Cedar]

I'm gonna go snow white. Libertarians. They're so stupid. Though common sense says of course.

[David Dayen]

Gobbledygook. We nailed him.

[Sam Cedar]

So what's 79 plus 21? Challenge.

[David Dayen]

Man, I'm positively quivering.

[Sam Cedar]

I believe 96. I want to say. 8 5, 7, 2, 1 0, 35 5, 011 half.

[David Dayen]

3, 8, 9, 11. 3.

[Sam Cedar]

$400. 1900. 5, 4. $3 trillion.

[David Dayen]

Sold.

[Sam Cedar]

It's a zero sum game, actually. You're making me think less. But let me say this. You call it satire.

[David Dayen]

Sam goes satire on top of it all. My favorite part about you is just.

[Sam Cedar]

Like every day, all day, like, everything you do. Without a doubt. Hey, buddy. We see you. All right, folks, folks, folks.

[David Dayen]

It's just the week being weeded out.

[Sam Cedar]

Obviously. Yeah. Sun's out, guns out. I. I don't know. But you should know, people just don't like to entertain ideas anymore. I have a question. Who cares? Our chat is enabled, folks. I love it. I think I do love that. Gotta jump. Gotta be quick. I gotta jump. I'm losing it, bro. Two o' clock. We're already late and the guy's being a dick. So screw him. Sent to a gulag.

[David Dayen]

Outrageous.

[Sam Cedar]

Like, what is wrong with you?

[David Dayen]

Love you.

[Sam Cedar]

Bye. Love you.

[David Dayen]

Bye.

[Sam Cedar]

Bye.