thank. you i'm tom hartman at washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture a republican so-called health care plan is a glorified hand for millionaires and billionaires but not every millionaire supports it morris pearl of patriotic millionaires will explain why in just a moment and can the democratic party follow the example of germy corben in the

u.k. and turn progressive politics into success at the ballot box as michael's in a richard ask out tonight special panel discussion on the future of the democratic party. the congressional budget office has released its score of the senate republican health care plan according to c.b.s. the so-called better care reconciliation act would cause twenty two million people to lose health insurance which when you really think about it is pretty weird i mean what's the point of a health care bill that causes people to lose their health insurance well here's in on a little secret the republican health care bill isn't really a health care bill at all it's a massive tax cut for the very very rich paid for by an equally massive cut to medicaid joining me now is morris prole chairman of the patriotic millionaires and former managing director at blackrock morris pro welcome back. or

a three year show it's great to great to talk with these millionaires like you would benefit from the glorified tax cut for the rich that is the senate health care plan but your organization says it's morally bankrupt why and what is so offensive to you about this bill. well it would cause twenty two million people to lose their health care and that really means twenty two million people not being able to be a part of our commercial economic political society anymore sort of throwing them out and under the bus and that means that's bad for everybody it's bad for them certainly but it's also bad for the aspiring middle class and it's bad for the businessmen and investors who want to make money in our society that have twenty two million people who instead of getting health insurance like most of us do will be going to hospital emergency rooms and just adding up to those unpaid bills at hospitals that the rest of us are going to pay for one way or another it's just

wrong the cvo screen also pointed out if i if i read the news right it's possible i didn't but i'm pretty sure i got this right that there will actually be savings in social security with this senate bill about four billion dollars because presumably they didn't specify exactly why but it seems that the numbers they're using are assuming that over a decade long period of time based on the harvard study about two hundred thousand people will die for lack of health care so therefore social security won't have to pick up their bills your thoughts. that's kind of a sick thought but i mean it's probably true less last medical care means less people will be alive less people below behave they won't be here anymore and that's bad for everybody i prefer to live in a country where everybody can continue to live in the country six. the way i don't

want to live in a country with a few rich people getting even richer and lots and lots of people getting even poorer there are countries like that but the america is not or at least has not been one of them and i prefer not become one of them donald trump famously said that he didn't want the senate health care bill to be mean in fact when when president obama used that phrase trump talked to fox news this was this morning or yesterday morning so today i use that word first this bill doesn't meet that standard of not being mean does it. i think it's mean to everybody really it helps people who frankly don't need help for whom that help is not going to make any difference i don't operate based on whether i have a few thousand dollars more or less at the end of the year and frankly wealthy people don't have to worry about the last thousand dollars and getting

a small tax break on capital gains that's money they don't actually work for anyway is not going to make a difference in people's lives whereas for all those the rest of those people the sixty million people on medicaid they are going to have a very big difference in their lives when they don't have health insurance anymore and they have these huge expenses that are going to bankrupt them it would be both morally bankrupt and financially bankrupting and it's going to hurt all of the businesses they depend on their landlords the places where they shop it's going to be cause you know a lack of progress in our economy and that's bad for everybody you're a businessman how does this plan help the economy in any kind of a way that last time i checked more people in medical debt equals fewer people spending money and fueling aggregate demand ah i don't see how there's any upside to this bill or even you know in the grand capitalist scheme of things it doesn't

mean it only. helps if you if your criteria is lower taxes yeah i guess if you make money by the extract minerals from the earth oil or coal or something and you don't have you don't you don't sell things to consumers you're on participating in any other part of the khan academy then maybe it's good for you and maybe if you're already rich you'll get even richer but the vast vast vast majority of people it's not going to help them at all it's going to be bad for hospitals it's only bad for doctors and be bad for nursing homes too bad for old people young people think of all the people that have parents or grandparents in nursing homes a majority of the people in nursing homes eventually go on medicaid when they use up all their assets and god knows what's going to happen to those people under the trump plan you know here's donald trump advisor kellyanne conway talking about the medicaid cuts in this bill i'd like your thoughts after this obamacare to medicaid which was designed to help the poor and the needy the elderly the sick and disabled

also children and pregnant women it took it and it went way above the poverty line and open it up to many able bodied americans who should probably find other issues should at least see if there are other options for them and if they're able bodied and they want to work then they'll have employer sponsored benefits like you and i do so you know do these people does not understand what medicaid is and it's not a program for the jobless the state based medicaid is every state has you know if you make less than three thousand dollars a year generally speaking you qualify for state based medicaid but the federally funded medicaid program that expansion that was in obamacare you have to be making enough that you no longer qualify for the state based medicaid which means one hundred percent of the people on obamacare expanded medicaid are working i mean there are kids you know what am i missing here she doesn't even understand i mean

well i don't. i don't read minds i don't know what she thinks but just walking into your studio walking by the drivers the people selling newspapers the guy selling fruit from fruit stands all of the people who are either independent contractors in today's sharing economy or have jobs that frankly don't come with health insurance which maybe kellyanne conway is not even aware those exist but believe me there are millions of people who are employed but do not have employer sponsored health insurance and those are the people who are going to be hurt by this a lot you know what even people like even people like me. this is a nonprofit organization i'm not an employee and i don't get employer sponsored health insurance and i'm on one of the obama care plans myself personally. remarkable how does patriotic millionaires your organization how do you plan on fighting back against the republican health care plan. just what i'm doing right now trying to explain to people that it's a complete fall

a sea that this is good for businesses and investors and job creators it's not it's not good for anybody it will hurt the american economy it will hurt american businesses because lisa will have so many more problems with people who are not able to participate and shop in our businesses because they have these medical expenses that they just can't get insurance for anymore so that's what we're trying to do is explain this to people everywhere from capitol hill in washington to the streets in wisconsin to everywhere in between and the rest of the country too and that's what the patriotic millionaires are doing there are currently five republican senators explicitly opposed to the bill i would submit four of them are just peacocks who will probably you know fold in once they've had their time in the in part of the t.v. cameras but but i think the dean heller is you know firmly against it and then there's there's a nother half

a dozen. and so who are we can infer that they may not supported particularly susan collins and lisa murkowski what are your thoughts on the politics of this and whether it will actually pass. i mean i don't know i mean i heard one democratic senator saying that in the next elections and twenty thousand watch be better off the does pass but that we're still going to there's still going to fight against tooth and nail you know what are the politics i mean i'm not running for office i don't know if i think that it's pretty clear that some people are on one side and some people are the other side and the american people want to know what the differences and who's on which side and what what that means if this if this legislation has the sixteen or seventeen percent approval that you know the polls are telling us it is broadly disliked by the american people and the american people you know like to our our our elected representatives what constituency are

they pandering to by taking away health insurance from lower income working people i don't i don't get it who who are their real constituents they might be pandering to a small group of people who really do care about having their taxes on their capital gains on an income reduced by bit at the top and they might be pandering to a few philosophical people who just believe it's not the proper role of government to provide health care for the people. i don't know they might just be pandering to each other for all i know and just oh well it's called obamacare we have to get rid of it i don't really i can't answer that question any more fully the great mystery of it almost seems you know that the reagan legacy project that there was launched a year or so after his presidency was over where they were going to put a statue to him or name a building after him in every congressional district in america and in every country around the world i've heard rumblings that this. it's actually the reverse

obama legacy legacy project there that republicans are trying to erase every accomplishment he made regardless of consequences to just wipe out any any memory of our first african-american president so we get the sense to you. i mean it's not how i would run the country but i mean it sounds as likely as anything else i don't i don't read people's minds particularly republican government officials so i just think that it's just a bad thing i mean think of how many people have preexisting conditions and like won't be able to change jobs they will get new health insurance think how many people are like college age students you know age twenty and twenty two and twenty four who won't be able to be on their parents' insurance if this bill passes in just it just will hurt so many people so much i can understand that morris pearl

it's always great talking with this or thank you so much for drunk you know. what i mean thank you coming up donald trump is an historically unpopular president so why did democrats keep losing elections will get his thoughts right after the break. i think the average viewer just after watching a couple of segments understands that we're telling stories in our critics can't tell you know why because their advertisers won't let them. in order to create change you have to be honest you have to tell the truth marty's able to do that every story is built on going after the back story to what's really happening out there to the american what's happening when a corporation makes a form

a suit. the chills people when a company in the environmental business ends up polluting a river that causes cancer and other illnesses they put all that health risk all the dangers out to the american public those are stories that we tell every week and you know what they're working. on right. now right now. let's pick up on. my problem with let's look. at. what politicians do sometimes. they put themselves on the line

they get accepted or rejected. so when you want to be president. or something want to. go to the right person that's why the full story of the people that i'm interested in the lives of. this. after another disappointing special election loss the democratic party's identity crisis has returned and for apparently a very good reason donald trump is an historically unpopular president so why are democrats still struggling to win elections is it time for a political make over joining me now is richard asco host of the zero richard welcome back always good to be here town always great having you so let's start with the crisis i mean that that race received far more attention frankly maybe

than than than it even deserve it i mean there was a similar election as i recall in north carolina nobody heard anything about the fact i lost track of. but in any case it seems like this defeat was born more than just a one off defeat setting aside greg palast skin siddur ations about voter suppression and interstate cross-check and all that even the. even if you would have won by five ten fifteen thousand votes if there had not been the aggressive voter suppression that karen handel had been doing and in georgia had been in a certain state it's still you know what's a republican doing back close to a democrat in this day and age what what does this tell us well you bear in mind too that os soft drew in and spend an enormous amount of money twenty million dollars this was the most expensive house race in history and yet i couldn't even match hellery clinton's numbers in terms of percent percentages she did better than

he did i think it's the last gasp of the century this sort of bland republican lite appeal that democrats have been trying to sell themselves on for so many years now i think that cycle in political history is over and i think democrats need to recognize always is that how you're characterizing john asaf i mean that characterization certainly did not make its way through the media machine no i absolutely characterize in that that way he he emphasized cutting waits for government spending and in fact i have his words here somewhere he basically said he said he wanted to bring the government up to private sector standards in other words he campaigned against government can and is a corporate cyst yes and i soon he did not mean the private sector sander standards that created the financial crisis or the private sector standards that created the b.p. oil spill so you know that that whole kind of rhetoric he was against single payer health care was against medicare for all he was against it he was the kind of

democrat the old thinking is in a district like that you have to run as a republican light but i went through the demographics of the district there are one hundred thousand african-americans there were turnout was low one hundred nearly one hundred thousand hispanics there are people over sixty five who would be excited about an expansion of social security there were eighty thousand people who earn less than. national average on a non-republican democrats have got to start thinking about bringing in these voters and mobilizing these voters rather than trying to appeal to voters who already rejected them by becoming republicans well and in fact you know if asaf was if his sales pitch was make government like the private sector bet some of the typically resonates with the white upper middle class voters people making more than sixty or seventy thousand bucks a year and lost a million and well all the way up actually right and and now we know the you know from this i'm guessing you're familiar with this the study that came out

what maybe two weeks ago that found that the majority of white trump voters were not the poor or an educated you know high school drop outs that everybody assumed or even just high school graduates the majority of the white male or the white. voters were actually earning above the median income in the united states right but that i think that they that has been misinterpreted misread what you really got to look at are the voters in the swing states who moved who went from obama to tromp or who were potential democratic voters and stayed home so everybody's treating that report as if it refutes the idea that you have to appeal to working class voters when you appeal to working class white voters the same program programs appeal to working class black voters and working class hispanic voters so so it's not it's not one size fits all and yes those upper class white voters are going to

be tough to dislodge from the republican column so go for the working people who would be drawn to medicare for all who would be drawn to better benefits would be drawn to family leave medical leave those types of things that's the way to win those voters over not by trying to get to the rich white folks who think government ought to be brought up to private sector standards and there's a hell of a lot more of them too i mean the people making over one hundred thousand one hundred fifty thousand a year that's the top four or five percent. short and and i think that the democrats already have in this segment of those people they're going to get the the professionals and so on i think they do well among the professional class and less so among the southern and suburban corporate class and that's always going to be that way the democratic party seems to have a brand problem here's bernie talking about this. i guess because the more the serving independent in american congressional has three the democratic brand is pretty bad i mean i don't i think the trump brand there's also pretty bad as is the

republican brand that's why so many people have given up on politics they look at in washington and what the average american it's like i'm in a lot of pain my kid can't afford to go to college make it ten bucks an hour what are you going to do for me and bernie says stuff like that and weirdly on some democratic message boards it just gets trashed and it's just what is that causes people within the democratic party to be so. hostile to self reflection and grit and you know criticism of themselves you know it's a fantastic question tom and i think there are two elements to it i think one is among the democratic professional consultant clients it's in their self-interest to squelch this kind of talk so i think they get outrage or feign outrage in order to suppress it but then i think look party affiliation is in essence a kind of tribal affiliation and

a lot of people i've seen and encountered get very offended he's not even one of us how dare he criticize ised it becomes like the blue sure it's versus the red shirts or the in-group or is the outgroup and that actually i think that's harmful to democracy as you know george washington warned against the punish use of facts of parties in democracy and i think sometimes we get over attached to party affiliation and not attached enough to better policies and more just outcomes you know all. disagree at all. if democrats need to win it's i mean we saw this writ large and there were clinton campaign although you know granted she got three million more votes than donald trump just not in the right places but still if democrats need to win they need to be explicitly for something the vast majority of her campaign was about you know the children are watching how evil donald trump is. how how how does the democratic party line up a bunch of things that it's for what what should be the top three bumper sticker i

mean you say republican right now you can summarize that in three bumper stickers you know cut government balance the budget stop abortion or you know gays guns and god or something. what should the republican party or the democratic party's bumper sticker be at the end of the day in a decent job for everyone decent wages benefits that allow you to live a decent middle class life that to me would be it and then a foreign policy that makes sense and is not run away. interventionism you know that's for i cheated but yeah so what's standing in the way of that inside the democratic party those are not irrational things to ask for i would say probably more than anything else corporate financing and big donor financing of elections i think a lot of democrats if it starkly felt they needed big campaign contributions to win a party that may be cynical part of that maybe they think that's the practical

approach but that keeps them from embracing papa sees that could help them win so they should take a page from bernie's book and do more to get a lot of small dollar contributions by running on policies that excite people because i'll tell you what the other way isn't working we can see that in the numbers one thousand lost state legislature seats a loss of all three branches of the federal government i mean i could go on and on but you get the drift they better be prepared to try something new and they'd be better be prepared to fire the people who put them in the mess they are now you know it's the plan jerry corben in the u.k. the labor party just forced a hung parliament i mean that's that's pretty astonishing that would be you know what bernie sanders getting forty eight percent of the voters something it's. should democrats take a lesson from corbin's labor or are u.k. politics that different from us politics no i don't think they're different at all i think there is a lot of commonality of culture in both countries including the multiculturalism of

both countries so i don't i think we should take a lot from that i think the big lesson from that is the journey corben ran as a guy who believed in something and people understood that there was a core a set of values they were number one and number two the labor party his candidates ran on their manifesto they ran you know democrats we know that democrats both parties have traditionally and ignored their party platform these guys were proud of their platform it was something they believed in it was something they would wave it at every campaign event and every so. each the democrats ought to have a platform that working people in and most people in general can embrace and they should be proud of it and they should stand by understand that they're working on it and the and that in the next week or so chuck schumer is actually going to roll out and presumably would nancy pelosi and leaders of. roll out here's now what democrat you know with the newly invented democratic party. if they do that and they go full bernie and i personally would put at least

a fifty percent chance on the curious your thoughts on that but you know how she how well what do you think about where you want to put some real money on matt no. i am skeptical i hope they do i think that they have a credibility problem the to overcome one of the things that makes me skeptical is that nancy pelosi would quite like in general but she was quoted the other day as saying we don't have a problem with our our our policy we have a problem with our messaging the words to that effect and i think that's exactly the wrong i think the democrats have a problem with both but if you look at the democratic platform the party plan for hillary clinton ran on the nancy pelosi helps you know influence significantly it calls for single payer health care it calls for the government of the employer of last resort it calls for expanding you know social security medicare medicaid i mean it's pretty much bernie's platform so well yes and no it's close it's the most progressive platform the democratic party has had in modern history i'll definitely

agree with that answer but it has it has a lot of outs in it and it was not presented as the core statement of the democratic party didn't see hillary standing at a podium or tim kaine or anyone else and saying this is what i believe in and holding it up that's what labor did in the u.k. that's what the democrats need to do if voters see it as just another messaging tweak from the democratic party that keeps tweaking its message and they will come off believing that democrats are less sincere rather than more so it's really got to be something the. stand by so how do how do. well i guess it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out we're just we're out of time richard thanks so much for being with us always great talking and that's the way it is tonight and don't forget democracy is not a spectator sport get out there get active tag your it. was.

in case you're new to the game this is how it works now the economy is built around corporate perforations from washington to washington controls the media the media the. voters elect the businessman to run this country business equals power who must it's not business as usual it's business like it's never been done before . what politicians to do something to. put themselves on the line. to get accepted or rejected. so when you want to express. yourself wanted. to be right. it's

like the for real people. interested in the why. i should. thank. you. card off today's show talking about our lord and savior

amazon. she's been busy. amazon is buying. organic stores. today announcing it is rolling out something called amazon wardrobe and joining the box party it may feel like the online retailer is pretty much taking over your life. your shopping your reading and even your home have no fair folks it's only taking over your life in your home. amazon has brought breathtaking offish and seem to consumerism right it is also brought breathtaking inefficiency to consumerism amazon is. really convenient for all of us and it is the worst thing to happen to us since the bonding play. it's like of the bond of play it got infected with steve bannon like. it came down with. those statements that i just said all.