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tv   Velshi  MSNBC  October 24, 2021 6:00am-7:00am PDT

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i'm ali velshi. news came out just an hour ago that president biden will host senator joe manchin and senate majority leader chuck schumer at his home in delaware this morning. the trio will continue talks about biden's multi-trillion-dollar build back better plan. and i will talk to senator sherrod brown about where the bill is going. but first the wide-ranging investigation into the capitol insurrection. it hole voted to hold former trump chief strategist steve bannon in contempt. the contempt proceedings offered some insight into the committee's investigation. the committee referenced bannon's, quote, participation
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in the events of that day january 6th from a war room organized at the willard hotel. what happened there in the subject of a new report published yesterday by "the washington post," in the weeks before the insurrection a dream team of trump associates turned the willard hotel, which is located just a block away from the white house into what they called their command center. the group that gathered there was led by rudy giuliani, trump's personal lawyer who was instrumental in stoking the far-right's election fraud. and "the washington post" reporting notes that carrick and his legal team were reimbursed more than $50,000, a sign that the close ties that they had to this command center. john eastman was there too. he's the author of the infamous memo that sought to convince
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vice president mike pence to stop the steal, as they call it, by taking control of the electoral counting process that, process that was underway on january 6th when the attack on the capitol happened. what happened at the willard hotel and what the team was planning at the command center in the weeks leading up to january 6th is now of great interest to that january 6th select committee. the twice impeached president's supporter had their own command center. sourced from documents provided by the whistle-blower frances haugen detail how facebook played a hand in the leadup to the deadly january 6th insurrection. one internal report, quote, concluded that in the weeks after the election, facebook did not act forcefully enough against the stop the steal movement that was published by -- or that was pushed by trump's political allies, even as its presence exploded across the platform, meaning facebook. joining me now is the author of "the early 202: a washington
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post newsletter." she's also one of the journalists who reported that big piece that weekend on what happened in the willard command center. good morning, good to see you, my friend. we knew there was something happening at the willard. it speaks to the degree and the sophistication and the involvement of the people who were working out of the willard hotel, which leads one to believe that everything that happened on january 6th was not as spontaneous as it may have seemed. >> yeah, thank you for having me this morning to discuss this reporting. we found out, you know, as soon as liz cheney, the vice-chairwoman of the january 6th select committee mentioned this war room during the contempt proceedings that we saw play out. we quickly went into all of our notes and checked back with our sources to figure out what exactly was going on in these days january 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 6th leading up to the january
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6th insurrection to figure out what these people rudy giuliani, bernard carrick, boris epshteyn, steve bannon, were up to at the willard, where a suite of trump allies were camped out. we know that this team in particular were running what they called the legal command center out of the willard. they were some satisfy trump's closest allies, and there was outside legal team that was trying to embrace a legal strategy, a constitutional strategy that was not embraced by those in the white house like pat cipollone, trump's legal counsel. they worked day and night to make the case against pence to take actions against him that basically suggested that pence had in his powers to block and prevent the certification of the election. eastman said this in a variety
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of ways publicly and privately, we reported. but this was the strategy that the advisers in the willard command center coalesced around in the days leading up to january 6th. >> the review on october 22nd reported this about john eastman, a name that most people don't know. eastman now tells the "national review" in an interview that the strategies was having pence reject electoral votes was not viable. eastman was the author of the now infamous legal memo "making the case," that pence had that very power. so there were competing legal arguments between the trump white house and the trump campaign about what was actually legal. somehow, and it could've changed the outcome of january 6th, somehow mike pence decided that one of them was more viable than the other and that the argument that he does not have the legal power to overturn that election
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was the prevailing one. talk to me about that and how that came to be. >> yeah. and you're exactly right. ultimately vice president pence withstood all of the pressure and this entire pressure campaign that they were trying to execute by galvanizing the support of republican state legislatures. but john eastman, i think to explain a little bit more to our viewers, is a really interesting character. he is a federalist society member, a law professor in california, and i think was previously very well respected in republican legal very conservative legal circles. he was pulled into this process to outline some of the constitutional and legal strategies as the outside legal team was scrambling to figure out the best way to block the certification of the 2020 electoral results. he came in late in the process. we have reporting that rudy
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giuliani and bernard carrick were there from the beginning working to try to find some sort of way to decertify the results. but when eastman came in, that's when there became a really coherent legal strategy. in the recent days though he has tried to distance himself telling the "national review" that he's not even sure he authored it himself, which it contradicts all of the reporting that we have. >> the story gets weirder and weirder every day. jackie, good to see you. >> likewise. >> it's a newsletter from "the washington post." meanwhile, today's meeting between president biden and senators joe manchin and chuck schumer is another sign of progress for democrats who are sounding more optimistic now about passing the massive and build back better package. vice president kamala harris said she was not only optimistic that confident that we will reach a deal. house speaker nancy pelosi emerged from a meeting with the
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president at the white house on friday telling reporters that a deal, quote, was very possible and that more than 90% of the package was already agreed to. 90% is close, but that means there's still work to do, and negotiations have been continuing this weekend. manchin and arizona senator kyrsten sinema remain the wildcards. sinema remains tight-lipped about what she actually wants to get a bill done. the bill is less massive and once ambitious that it once was. still, democratic leadership has dropped hints in recent days that a vote could happen as soon as this week. joining me now is democratic senator sherrod brown of ohio. he's the chair of the senate banking committee, housing and urban affairs. he along with congresswoman manneen waters of california have called attention to the housing crisis in this country. let's start with big picture.
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there's a meeting between the president and chuck schumer and joe manchin today. what do you know about where we are in getting manchin on board with what nancy pelosi says is at least 90% of the deal, which is that final 10%? >> first of all, i saw pelosi yesterday. i talked to the president yesterday. i am very confident this is going to happen. i echo the words of vice president harris. this week a number of us spent a good deal of time with senator manchin. he and i have parts of our states are very similar. southeast ohio is very similar to much of his state across the river. we're going to come to agreement. i feel that this bill is going to get to the president's desk before thanksgiving, and keep in mind, i know you started off talking about how it's smaller, it's still transformational in housing, transformational in transit. and when we are done with this,
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it's going to have an impact for the next decade or two. and that's what excites so many of us about coming to this deal. >> the child tax credit is something you were curious about or worried about, and so are we, because, put morality aside and what a lot of people think we should be doing because we should be doing it. >> this is one of those things that, economically speaking, has been very robust and has had an immediate effect in lifting children out of poverty. that and housing are things that every dollar that is in this bill will have a return on investment that is a multiple of it. yet, that's not how we're thinking about it as we're trying to cut this bill. >> yeah. well, we're still thinking about it. the child tax credit, think about what happened. name anything else, ali, that has happened like this in government. march 6th senate passed the child tax credit. every democrat including joe manchin, every republican, signed by the president i think
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five days later. we immediately went to the secretary of the treasury about getting it up and running, first monthly checks went out july 15th, august 15th. october 15th the poverty rate among children has gone down 40% as a result of that. tell me anything that has had that kind of impact. i would like to make it permanent. that bill is not big enough to do that. but there are no work requirements, it's refundable. it was expanded to 250 or $300 a month depending on the age of your child. 90% of ohio children are eligible, and we've gotten checks to 90 plus percent of them. we've got to reach that last group of people, mostly the lowest income, hardest-to-reach people. but this has had such an impact in how dare -- you're a republican candidate in 2022, ali, and somebody says you're going to take my child tax credit away? i've been getting this check month after month, it's made a difference in my life.
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i'm not so anxious about paying my rent. i can actually put a little money aside for my community college for my 12-year-old daughter. you're going to take that away? people are going to see the child tax credit the way they see social security. republicans have never liked social security, but they can't get rid of it. they don't like the child tax credit, they all voted against it. but we're going to stand strong. no work requirements, and continue this. >> you have a good relationship with joe manchin. you have shared interests because some of the things that happened in his state are very similar to some of the things that happened in your state, including with coal, including with manufacturing and industry, including with fossil fuels. what have those conversations looked like? joe manchin's becoming a bit of a paria in the democratic party. how do you want people to sort of look at the things that are going on with joe manchin right now? >> well, i don't have any stake in what joe manchin's reputation is, among fellow senators.
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more power to him in west virginia. i disagree with him on fundamentally most of these things. but we come to terms with them. again, he was a co-sponsor a year and a half ago with 45 -- he and i and 45 others of my bill with michael bennet and later cory booker and raphael warnock on expanding the child tax credit, making it refundable. he's supported this in the past, and we've got to make sure this package comes together. you mention housing. my friend said, we've got to make sure that housing is front and center. brown's chair of the senate banking, then you changed it to banking, housing, and urban affairs. now it's about housing and housing thanks to maxine waters being in the vineyards for so many years raising the issue of housing and what we're doing together again is going to be transformational, not as much as investment as we want, but it's
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going to matter first time home buyers, first-generation home buyers that they're going to get help. we're going to get help with vouchers and public housing. we're going to get help with the housing tax credit, low-income housing tax credit. we're going to see more housing available increasing the supply, and more affordable for the millions of americans. the whole point here is we've seen profits up, we've seen the stock market up, we've seen executive compensation explode. we've seen wages flat in this country. and this whole build back better is going to change. that's the whole point of this much-too-long exercise. >> well, it's 40 years we've seen wages flat in this country for working people. they've got a right to be upset about that. senator, good to see you as always. we got a lot more coming up on velshi. at some point facebook, instagram, and twitter stopped being a virtual place to post your vacation pics and turned
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into something much more sinister. i'm going to discuss it with eurasia group. if you don't know what's going on with china's massive belt and road initiative. first we've got sad breaking news out of texas. two children are dead this morning and eight people are injured after a drag race car veered off the track and crashed into spectators and parked cars. a 6-year-old boy was pronounced dead at the scene. an 8-year-old boy died en route to the hospital. four others were treated on the scene and released. police say they are still investigating the accident and how it may have happened. ♪ there are beautiful ideas that remain in the dark. but with our new multi-cloud experience,
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so as this tug of war on infrastructure continues on capitol hill, china is heavily investing in the infrastructure of other countries. starting eight years beijing launch the belt and road initiative. that project stretched from east asia to europe and all the way to the caribbean, significantly expanding the chinese government's economic and political influence. 140 countries have signed on so far, including some thought to be geopolitical allies with the united states as opposed to china. nbc's vaughn hillyard traveled to the caribbean island of
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antigua. >> reporter: this pristine caribbean island is nowhere close to china. but today china's presence here right in the backyard of the u.s. is increasingly obvious and defining. $5 million toward construction of the island's university, a $50 million loan for its renovated airport. a $55 million grant for a cricket stadium. in the country, even constructing a confucius institute to connect antiguans to china. just how much has china invested in finance and grants? >> maybe about $200 million, which is sizeable for a small country like antigua and barbuda. >> reporter: on average china is spending two to one compared to the u.s. in overseas
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development. antigua and barbuda is one of 140 nations now partnering with china as part of its belt and road initiative, building infrastructure across the world. whatever does all of these investments get china ultimately? >> it gets china a strategic position in the caribbean. >> reporter: china strengthening its partnerships in the process. in 2020 a vote came before the u.n. human rights council to condemn china for its crackdown of pro-democracy protests in hong kong. >> antigua and barbuda voted. if it weren't for china's investments in your country, would you have voted definitely? >> we have a very good relationship with china. we obviously voted to maintain our relationship with them. >> reporter: in china's expansion near u.s. shores, a concern militarily. >> the fact that they don't have any basis today doesn't mean that it couldn't leverage the very strong military
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relationships that it has and the familiarity with those facilities such as the port facility that it's building right there. >> are you able to commit that antigua and barbuda will never allow china to operate a military or submarine installation on your land or off your shores? >> absolutely, that is yes without a doubt. >> reporter: and this right here is their port being completely rebuilt. >> reporter: for now economic positioning. a majority of the construction team, chinese workers. the web of chinese financing is complicated. chinese banks are estimated to have loaned at least 137 billion to countries in the region in the last 15 years. when directly asked how much the country has invested in ant igwas, an official with the chinese embassy wrote, i do not have that information, such cooperation is carried out on the premise that it serves the interest of antigua and barbuda. we would hope that our american friends refrain from
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mischaracterizing our intention. but can the u.s., its banks, and investors match the allure of china? is the u.s. doing enough for developing countries like antigua and barbuda? shxl i would say they have not done enough for the caribbean and there are gaps within the region, the and the united states has resources to assist. >> our thanks to nbc's vaughn hillyard for that report. move over reddit and parlor. there's a new place on the web for extremist trump supporters, and it's coming from the man himself. we'll have details on that, ahead. ahead. regina approaches the all-electric cadillac lyriq. it's a sunny day. nah, a stormy day. classical music plays. um uh, brass band, new orleans. ♪
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well, in case you haven't noticed the failed former president really misses the social media megaphone that he once used to amplifies his lies about the 2020 election. he's still banned from twitter and facebook so he's launching
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his own social media platform called the truth social, which is basically just a knockoff version of twitter. it'd be easy to dismiss this as just another one of his grifts to scam his supporters out of their money. it could actually pose a huge threat to democracy itself, and part of that is because social media networks are probably the most powerful nonstate actors in existence today. when you think about the wake of january 6th insurrection, it was really only a few privately owned companies that were able to effectively silence the ex-president and quell the flames of his incendiary rhetoric. we saw facebook and twitter kick the ex-president off their platforms for praising the violent mob. apple, amazon, and google banished the parlor app. even companies like paypal and stripe stopped supporting the
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finance payment for that. those companies took swifter action than the u.s. government ever could, and therein lies the problem. these tech companies control the majority of the digital space that we live and work in without much regulation, which begs the question of whether the power that these types of companies wield is compatible with democracy. joining me now is the president of the eurasia group, he's also the president and founder of g0 media world on pbs. ian, good morning, good to see you. you have written about this in an interesting framing that we don't normally consider, which is over time we have always had nonstate actors that are powerful and that challenge the stability of governments and democracy. but the biggest nonstate actor is not random terrorist groups in the middle east, it's social media. they are funded and influential in a way that some governments are not. >> it's technology companies, broadly, ali. and it's because the worlds that
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they create, the online digital worlds, it's their architecture, it's their algorithm, they exercise real sovereignty and governance over that space in a parallel way to how our own governments exercise authority in the physical world. if the digital world were just a hobby, it were just a side gig, it wouldn't matter so much. but as you and i know, increasingly the digital world is where a lot of the global economy actually transacts, it's where a lot of us get our information, it's how elections are fought and won or lost. it's even how national security. last year the most important successful attack on american national security and that of our allies were the solarwinds cyber hacks, which, by the way, the u.s. government didn't even find out about. it was tech companies that learned about those attacks and then that were responsible for responding to them. >> so we love the efds that comes from the entire digital world, more broadly, the entire
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technological world, the ability to search for anything online. we love the freedom of expression that the facebooks and the twitters give the world, particularly in those places that are still seeking democracy. how do we square that with the idea that some of these technology companies and social media companies are undermining and damaging to both democracy, in the case of the coronavirus, public health? >> well, there's no question that they are a new set of actors who are not focused on whether or not there are democratic principles for the citizens or to what extent there's a social construct. they're responsible ultimately for the shareholders. i thought that your opening
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framing was extremely interesting. a lot of people watching your show are very happy with the fact that trump indeed was deplatformed. but of course he was the sitting president of the united states. and the idea that that decision, by far the most impactful in responding to the events of january 6th, the deepest political instability inside our country or your or my lifetimes was not taken by governing officials but rather in an arbitrary way by the ceos of a number of corporations. maybe you like the decision or maybe not, but they could have made very different decisions. it's rather capricious in the way they do it. and i don't think we should assume that we're anywhere close to effective regulatory policy that would stop that from happening, in part, because we don't agree on what to do, in part, because we wouldn't know how to do it, we don't know what these algorithms do. we don't have transparency. so we don't have the expertise around it in our government.
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and also because, of course, the u.s. companies are competing with the chinese companies, and there are a lot of people that would say, well, if you're going to constrain the u.s. corporations that, just means that the chinese are going to increasingly be dominant. i think it's more about how we adopt to a reality where in the virtual world, in the digital world there's simply a different set of geopolitical players and we need to understand their motivations, their mission statements, what they want to do, and we need to adapt to it. it's kind of like climate change. when we started climate change, adaptation was a dirty word. 30 years later we're living in a world with climate change and we have to start living with the responses, we have to respond to it. i think that's what's happening in this what i call techo polar moment but a lot faster. >> thank you for your article and your analysis this morning. ian bremmer is the president of the you are asia group. grant woods, the former attorney general of arizona
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passed away yesterday from a heart attack. he was 67 years old. woods spent his life dedicated to his family, to public service, to the arts, and to his beloved state of arizona. his highly sought after political endorsements frequently straddled party lines and he always did what he thought best no matter the political implication. woods was longtime friend with the late senator john mccain and his family. mccain's widow wrote, grant woods was one of my best friends. my only comfort is knowing that he's laughing and joking with john now and watching over all of us. she also said she takes solace in the fact that both men can once again worry about the fate of arizona diamondbacks together. we knew grant was a man who was always willing to wake up before the sun rose in arizona to speak out in defense of democracy. he was quick with a smile and always kind. grant was a great friend to our show. and he'll be missed sorely.
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president biden is set to meet with senator joe manchin and majority leader chuck schumer at his home in delaware this morning to discuss the build back better package over breakfast. it's a very hopeful sign the democrats could be making progress on terms for a spending bill that can actually get out of the senate. another senator and huge proponent of that multi-trillion dollar plan is joining my friend jonathan capehart today on "the sunday show." you are speaking with senator elizabeth warren this morning. >> yes, i am. and i'm very excited to talk to senator warren about this. we're going to be talking about that breakfast meeting happening this morning. and i'll be curious to see what senator warren has to say about it as well as what she's fired up about in terms of keeping -- in terms of what to keep in the build back better plan. i'll also ask her about her plan
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to get the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes, which is a major priority for her. i flew down this week to atlanta to meet with civil rights icon andrew young. he's 89 years old. so, there are a lot of lessons from 56 years ago that can be applied today. and so all that and much more coming up. >> andrew young is one of the few people around who were there to remember it. we are losing some of that institutional memory so i'm that you're there. you and i virtually never see each other in person, but i got to see you on thursday night at the kennedy center in washington, and it was a great treat. that was a great event. and it was nice to see you in person. >> it was great to see you in person as well. i'm so sorry that we didn't have
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more time to chitchat because i would have told you add the navy blue tie, then we would have been twins this morning. >> you can catch jonathan right after "velshi." "the sunday show" starts at 10:00 a.m. eastern. coming up, looks like donald trump has turned off fox news for a second and tuned into fox business, at least long enough to learn about meme stocks, or someone just told him about it. i'll explain, ahead. ♪ there are beautiful ideas that remain in the dark. but with our new multi-cloud experience, you have the flexibility you need to unveil them to the world. ♪ ♪darling, i, i can't get enough of your love babe♪
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despite a common refrain, donald trump is a terrible and dishonest businessperson. he's filed for bankruptcy multiple times, defaulted on loans and has dozens of failed business ventures. as for having a regular salaried job, he's not very good at those either, having been impeached twice when he worked for the american government for a few years. but having that resume isn't holding him back from his next business venture.
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he is launching a new social media platform which he's positioning as a new right-wing alternative to the likes of facebook, youtube, and twitter, from which he is band. luckily for the former grifter in chief, a newly popularized fad on wall street has enabled him to gain quick access to hundreds of millions of dollars. it's called a spac, a special purpose acquisition company. it's basically a firm that goes public as soon as it can and raises tons of cash from investors in hopes of merging or acquiring a yet-to-be-determined private company. a shell company that starts with no actual underlying asset which then goes in search of one. investors in the spac, generally speaking, have no idea exactly what the underlying asset will be when they put in their money. this week a bunch of spac investors found out that their money is supporting the former insurrectionist president's latest endeavor. joining me now is a staff writer for "the new yorker."
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and the author of "black edge." also with me is tim o'brien, a senior columnist for "bloomberg opinion" who quite literally wrote the book on trump. scheelea, let me just start with you. a lot of people really hadn't thought about it. this is the quicker and easier way for donald trump to raise the kind of money he needs and get himself on the stock market than doing it the old traditional way of listing a company would've been. >> yeah. it's important to remember that spacs are a workaround. they are a way to raise money and develop a publicly traded company without going through the usual regulatory hoops and processes. the company does not have to file a big, fat prospectus where it outlines risks and basically opens up its books for all the world to see and scrutinize.
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so, if a company pursues this vehicle, a spac, it's usually because they don't want to go through all that process and all that scrutiny. so, of course, the question always is why, why would a company want to avoid letting its investors carefully look at its books and make a reasoned decision about whether or not they want to buy in? >> so, you, tim, have studied everything to do with donald trump and his business ventures in the past. how is this one going to go? >> well, if we're going to take history as a guide, it will go south and it will go south pretty quickly, and anybody putting their money into it should recognize that who donald trump is now is a very different person than who trump was in the '90s in terms of his public presence and an ability to raise money sheerly off of his presence. in terms of donald trump in terms of who other people should trust with sizeable amounts that
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either it will be well tended to or get an ample return, all they need to do is look in the history books. donald trump ran a public company from the mid-'90s to the mid-2000s that never was profitable the whole time it was public. it went into bankruptcy multiple times. he cost banks about $3.4 billion in loans he didn't repay to them in the early 1990s. he's a serial bankruptcy artist and a self-promotion machine. and he's not anything other than those two thing when's it comes to his business dealings. >> except the interesting thing about some stocks these days is promotion, weird sort of retail promotion does help them. the stock is up 800% since its launch, but it was also very, very popular on reddit this week and reddit's wall street bets. it's becoming a meme stock. there are people investing in this. i don't know whether they're investing because of the
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momentum of it or because they like donald trump, but it's becoming sort of a wild thing to invest in. >> well, the thing with meme stocks is sort of by definition they don't, for the most part, trade based on anything to do with the underlying health and performance of the company. they're the result of a number of factors, namely that a lot of people on the internet have decided en masse to kind of buy or sell the stock to try to make money. and these technology tools are newly available to any small, individual trader pretty much in the world. and this is something they've done in the past. we start with gamestop, which was essentially a nearly bankrupt retail company that sold video games and little cartridges completely obsolete, almost left for dead. clearly a group of people online decided they could make money by
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pushing this stock up, and maybe they will. >> maybe they will, maybe they won't. all right, you two, stick around with me while we pay some bills. more of the conversation after a quick commercial break. reak won, where does it go? does it get tangled up in knots? or fall victim to gravity? or maybe it winds up somewhere over the bermuda triangle. perhaps you'll come up with your own theory of where the stress goes. behind the wheel of a lincoln is a mighty fine place to start. paul loves food. but his diabetes made food a mystery. everything felt like a "no". but then paul went from no to know. with freestyle libre 2, now he knows how food affects his glucose. and he knows when to make different choices. take the mystery out of your glucose levels,
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moving is a handful. no kidding! fortunately, xfinity makes moving easy. easy? -easy? switch your xfinity services to your new address online in about a minute. that was easy. i know, right? and even save with special offers just for movers. really? yep! so while you handle that, you can keep your internet and all those shows you love, and save money while you're at it with special offers just for movers at xfinity.com/moving. back with me. shelia with the new yorker, tim o'brien, senior analyst at bloomberg opinion. i've been wanting to talk to you
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both for a while about this big bill, these two bills passing through congress. and shelia, there has been, in my view, sort of a mismatch between the discussion of the cost of the bill, and the value contained in the bill or the return on investment in the bill. and i'm not arguing for one size of bill or other, but there is this erstwhile republican obsession with debt that shows up, sometimes, usually with respect to social spending, is entirely forgotten when it comes to military spending or wars or tax cuts. and so now we're in this battle between a $3.5 billion, trillion-bill and a $1.5 trillion bill or whatever it is, but we have lost sort of what i think is the correct way of thinking about any government spending, and that is, what does it get us? >> well, that's a big -- that's a reflection of a problem that i feel has afflicted both the business world, but also lawmakers in washington, which is this trap of short-term thinking. so, of course, a lot of the very
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expensive provisions in the bill, like child care, like making elder care possible for people, helping to subsidize student loans, those are not costs, those are investments, and the returns on those investments will take time. those are things that will be rewarded over time, as people are able to seek better employment. they're able to graduate from college with less debt. so the problem is, you know, people in washington are having trouble seeing beyond the next three months and the next election cycle. and it's really unfortunate, because it has led us into this situation where if you cannot see a reward looming that you can take credit for in a short period of time, you're going to potentially undermine something that really represents an important long-term investment. so we really need to fight against this plague of short-term thinking. >> and tim, again, i want to be clear, i think people know what my politics are and what i would like to see in the bill, and i would like to see more than
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less, but this conversation isn't about what i should like. it's about how we should think about government spending on every level, or about the spending of your taxpayer dollars. when we look back to 2008, 2009, that money that everybody was mad about saving on the auto industry, that money that everybody was mad about that we put out there in the stimulus bill, that money that went to the banks, it was all paid back with a remarkable return for taxpayers. >> well, and if you put that against the long arc of what's happened in this country since the 1980s, you've got a middle class that is shrinking, a working class that has been routinely ravaged, you have the narrow population of the people at the top of the food chain, that has been reaping most of the economic rewards, against economic reality, which is that the great engine of growth in this country historically has been consumer spending. 70% of gdp is generated by consumer spending. and unless you have people who have good jobs, earning good wages, who are able to go out
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and shop at the most basic oaf of levels, your economy over time has begun to wither. that has been the thing that has separated the united states forever from every other country in the world. and we have this narrow view of infrastructure as being roads and bridges and wi-fi and other tangible assets, when the other side and the equally if not more important side of that is human infrastructure. spending on things like education and child care and other forms of support, so people can become better educated, more able to hold jobs, and better consumers. at a very basic economic level. in addition to all of the moral and social justice reasons for why these things should happen. and congress, as you've noted, is always willing to spend on big ticket items, such as the military that has no direct return on investment calculation associated with it, because we know national security matters. but we don't put that same lens
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on spending for our fellow citizens. >> so, actually, you know, when we did criminal justice reform a couple of years ago, that was something that republicans and democrats could come together on for different reasons, for different motivations. but the conservative motivation in many of these something, boy, we incarcerate a lot of people and it's really expensive and we have no particularly good return on investment on that kind of stuff. in terms of these social investments, this new infrastructure that biden is trying to convince americans should be thought of as infrastructure, that tim was just talking about. it shouldn't be all that bipartisan to understand what he just explained, shelia, that nooechlt these investments have a return that will have long-term dividends for the american taxpayer, and yet, for some reason when it falls into the social bucket, right now, today's republicans are not interested. >> a lot of this is about communication and communication problems that the democrats continue to have. they need to make this about
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work. people want to go to work. they need to be able to go to work. they need someone to take care of their kids. they need their house not to be flooding due to climate change. this whole thing needs to be rebranded about the good old american capitalist impulse to go to work and earn an honest living. and i think that would resonate with people across the aisle. >> it is great to have you both here. i really appreciate it. shelia is a staff writer for "the new yorker." tim o'brien is a senior columnist for bloomberg opinion. thanks to both you've for being with us this morning. that does it for me. thank you for watching velshi. catch me here next saturday and sunday from 8:00 to 10:00 a.m. eastern. go nowhere, because a loaded sunday show with jonathan capehart starts right now. it's october 24th. i'm jonathan capehart. this is "the sunday show."
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this sunday, we're watching a white house in action, with breaking news this morning that president biden is set to meet with senator joe manchin and senate majority leader chuck schumer this morning in delaware. and after a jam-packed week of legislative meetings featuring lawmakers of all congressional -- of all stripes, congressional democrats and president biden are signaling that a final agreement on the build back better act could, could come as soon as this week. >> we had a very positive meeting this morning. i'm very optimistic. >> but you feel like a deal is close? >> i think it's very possible. >> very possible. that is, of course, if holdout democratic senators manchin and kyrsten sinema get onboard. senator sinema has made it crystal clear she won't raise either corporate or individual income tax rates to pay for biden's plan, prompting more progressive democrats to consider closing the funding gap through other

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