representatives of israel and palestine trade occupations that the un security council over the latest escalation of violence in the gaza strip. or to the. races the european weaponry ending up in the hands of terrorists in iraq syria. as opposition parties blame the government for a wave of suicides in the fall. for the latest on these stories head to. stay with us today for the kaiser reports looking at the impact of the recent midterm elections in the u.s. .

by our max kaiser this is a concert for a yes or stella florida we're just finishing up our gonzo american pilgrimage shoot cross-country journey into the soul of america coming to artsy in december look for stacy yes we're in florida which is the home of the swamp and we have had elections just now where we drain the swamp of one party and install some more in congress so we're going to go over some of the election results just so you know because this is a swamp people love the swamp and you might hear some noises behind us that is some people building into the swamp where they like to live with the alligators here behind us in terms of the actual polls that we saw in these midterm elections twenty eighteen the number one issue for both democrats and republican voters was indeed health care that was the number one issue both parties both voters

they cared about health care they did not apparently care that much about russia but we get into that in that moment but health care was the number one issue max. that's correct health care number one issue why because the country is sick the country is sick and the ability to mend the country and to take care of the country is waning. all parties involved in putting the government are down doing their gouging the individuals are gouging the citizens there they're just dropping in and gallons in their institutions looking for every nickel and dime to pay the rapacious creditor tours the health care companies the insurance companies that are raking it in at the expense of the country itself it's amazing because the more we spend on health care the less healthy we get the really interesting thing is like i said at the top of the show like the partisans of each party think somehow every.

things miraculously going to change but it never really does on the local level is where you see some really big changes and that is especially through the south there's been a lot of activism that has changed the fabric of of how things have been operated since the jim crow days so in florida for example we had jim crow laws essentially whereby if you were a felon you could never vote again if you had a felony record you could never vote again well that left forty percent of the black male population here disenfranchised while they overturned that here in the elections of twenty eighteen so now people with a felony record if they've served their time they can vote again so forty percent of black males just got to vote here in florida when you think that it's a long time coming and that's one thing we've discovered on our trip across america we talked to a lot of members of the black community

a lot of the native american population and really got to understand their feelings about being a survivor a genocide with the native americans and then an attempted genocide in the black community and the rights they are enjoying have come extraordinary cost. and anguish but slowly but surely these human rights are being restored but decades and decades and decades after they should have been and there were other jim crow laws overturned including in louisiana where by basically they had a jim crow laws still in effect which they allowed non unanimous juries to convict somebody and send them to jail for life that was primarily aimed at african-americans also in nashville tennessee we had some activists mostly african-american activists female activists who led the drive to get a police oversight committee installed. elected by the local citizens who would be

able to oversee what the national police were doing because of the extreme amount of shootings of mostly african-american men often unarmed so those were jim crow jim crow era things i think i just saw an alligator jump out of the swamp behind some very scenic leaping alligators florida yeah it was great to see finally some rights being restored but you know this is the original stain that has kept america from enjoying the fruits of it manifest destiny as it's called because as long as you keep a huge percentage of the population imprisoned or with rights no one can enjoy the benefits of the constitution i want to also look at the exit polls what they showed and what that might mean for twenty twenty and this is exit polls majority of voters say russia investigation politically motivated a majority of voters in the house elections view the russian investigation is politically motivated according to c.n.n.

exit polls while a plurality disapprove of special counsel robert muller's handling of it specifically fifty four percent of voters said the investigation into russian interference and that twenty sixteen election and possible collusion with the presidential campaign was politically motivated compared with just forty percent who said it was mostly justified so i think looking forward to two thousand and twenty as we head into there is you could probably look toward the commander in the troll in chief donald trump to keep. kind of basically provoking the left to keep on mentioning russia because the polls consistently show that the population didn't care about it obviously a lot of the congressional candidates did know this was the truth because they themselves did not campaign on that never ran ads mentioning the investigation but i'm sure donald trump will try to provoke them to keep on saying stuff down there's a phrase down here in. that no you don't hunt in zero then whole russia gay hoax

never got any traction as men no proof but it's great troll bait and i think trump is pleased that he increased seats in the senate. barking nancy pelosi hitting the russia gay hoax button every single day which will drive ratings for rachel maddow but it will do nothing to help them in two thousand and twenty so another thing you mention the senate republicans have actually gained seats in the senate which is the upper house and our congress and we ever an interesting headline here explaining part of that and this is from the new york times red state voters stand by republicans despite trump's trade war paint voters and red states largely shrugged off concerns about the economic effect of president on school trade war throwing their support behind republican candidates who embraced the administration's protectionist genda as

a spy it sounds by democrats to turn it into a wedge issue in particular they mention the three democratic incumbent senators who lost their seats senator claire mccaskill of missouri senator heidi heitkamp of north dakota and senator john donnelly of indiana lost their seats to republican challengers even though they had run saying. you know on donald trump's trade war harming farmers in the midwest right as marshall op a frequent guest on this show points out it great economist and he looked at the trade warney looked at what's happening in china and america and concluded even though he's a progressive that trumps trade war is effectively genius and this is led to a remarkable spurt in employment in the u.s. and put china on the defensive. as we enter what i call this era of neo mercantilist i'm going to be everyone against everyone without the coordinated. of

central banks keeping the dollar artificially low you know i expect that we're going to see a lot more currency chaos going forward yes so they said the races were a test of whether or not trump kept telling voters in the midwest that it would be short term pain for long term gain and they seem to have bought that in fact the new york times says themselves mr trump's overall popularity in rural america seems to be growing and it seems to have been stoked by the tactic employed by china and other trading partners of targeting retaliatory tariffs trump friendly districts so remember we covered that that the chinese had taken out ads in the and like local iowa newspapers saying that it's trump's policies that are causing you any pain and apparently this backfired. if thing about. marketing is you need a good protagonist and a good antagonist and by positioning china as the bad guy americans can relate to

that because they've been trained to think politically in terms of very simple good guy bad guy narrative so we have learned this on our trip as well going across the country people are not into nuance they're not into subtlety they like clear cut bad guys so trump was able to make china the bad guy and so he gained in the senate as a result of it people voted accordingly and he turned the congress the house of representatives into useful it is nancy pelosi will be the useful idiot going into two thousand and twenty actually should also i'm not going to cover any of us three specifically on this but matt stoller who also is progressive but covers antitrust in particular in the not huge monopolies and all of that control much of the stuff he does blame a lot of. support for democrats in the agricultural districts collapsed under obama partly because of vilsack who is now a lobbyist for big ag but he was basically

a lobbyist. big ag when he was in the obama administration and what he did is one thing for dairy farmers in particular they encouraged dairy farmers to buy this insurance that the government was backing which would basically protect them in the in the case that milk prices collapsed and then milk prices did collapse and they asked for some money based on the insurance premiums they had been paying and they never got paid and thousands of dairy farms got wiped out so this is the sort of policy that they remember it was never of course covered on m s n b c or c.n.n. or any or fox news for that matter so that a lot of people don't know why their anger is there they so because they don't understand the genesis of thing or they just assign you know things like racism or xenophobia or things like you know but the real reason could be some of the policies that obama had regarding farmers well the success of the democrats and the rich i'm just with bill clinton remember it's so big it's the economy stupid and he

dared to talk about numbers economics and finance and they did very well with that but then with hillary and bernie sanders and other democrats they've gone back to trying to convince people that economics doesn't matter finance doesn't matter mathematics doesn't matter physics doesn't matter it's just about how you feel and if you feel good then everything will be creating and they're going to lose track of the early going forward bernie sanders did try to run on the anti trade policy and and t.t. ip so. stole his speeches when speaking to michigan and wisconsin and pennsylvania and that helped him but i want to quickly wrap up with one headline that something that we've been covering for the past decade and this is former j.p. morgan trader pleads guilty to manipulating u.s. metals markets for years so an extra few morgan chase traders admitted to manipulating the u.s. markets of an earl ray of precious metals for about seven years and he is implicated his. supervisors at the banks so he pled guilty he said that from two

thousand and nine to two thousand and fifteen he manipulated prices of gold silver platinum and palladium and with the help of his supervisors he faces thirty years in prison he's pled guilty to this what do you think of this i think the non manipulated price of gold is two thousand four hundred dollars an ounce number that's the map it to the growth of debt if you look at the growth of that chart in the price of gold chart they map each other pretty well going back a few decades then they split recently when the manipulation got out of them as a manipulation is gotten rid of then the price will snap back to its long term trend which would be twenty four hundred per ounce up almost a thousand dollars from the current price russia then would have a huge. party because they've been buying gold by the hundreds of tons china's well hey we've got to take a break much more coming our way right after this. show

seemed wrong. but i. just don't hold. anything. yet to. this day and to. engage with. the trail. when something is find themselves worlds apart we choose to look for common ground . i've been saying the numbers mean something they matter us is over one trillion dollars in debt more than ten white collar crimes happen each day. eighty five percent of global wealth to the ultra rich eight point six percent market thirty percent last year some with four hundred to five hundred three per second per

second and one rose to twenty thousand dollars. china's building two point one billion dollars ai industrial park but don't let the numbers overwhelm. the only number you need to remember is one one you know bored to miss the one and only. welcome back to the kaiser report i'm max kaiser time now to turn to randy voller former mayor of pittsburgh north carolina and former head of the democratic party in north carolina for any voter welcome back great to be here max or

a you know i know there's a big vote we like to check in with you know democrats have taken control of the house they have and they are promising impeachment and other agendas that poll well with their base but not with independent voters or wavering republicans i guess what are your thoughts. well i'm sure that they're going to come into the house and on their committees try to hold the president and the executive branch accountable and i hope they do with transparency but i'm not sure whether preachments going to be the first thing out of the box now on the state level randi the shift in twenty eighteen was decidedly progressive from overturning jim crow era laws in the south lake disenfranchisement of those with felony record here in north carolina tell us about some of the north carolina specifics well i mean they they worked really hard for the last couple years break the majority which is essentially a north carolina the general assembly has been run by the republicans ever sence

the great victory of two thousand and ten they had a veto proof majority so our governor could veto legislation that a vast plurality didn't like and they could override it now we've overcome that and i think we're going to add somewhere around ten seats in the house which will give democrats fifty five and six seats in the senate which means both chambers will be . there won't be a supermajority so they could sustain a gar veto by governor cooper but the key takeaway is all of these gains for the most part happen in urban areas where the districts were region ron from a gerrymandered scenario to something that's more equal for the voters so the voters can actually pick their legislator and a lot of these races were very close i mean right now i think in wake county you only have one republican legislator left and the border commissioners for instance is all republicans and in mecklenburg county another major urban county the entire

county board of commissioners is now democrat all through republicans lost and i think they only have one republican left so that's a huge change before the election the goal was to say let's take the house and democrats. take the house then the morning after there's been some monday morning quarterbacking and saying well you know senate went more republican in on balance it seems some are arguing that actually trump did pretty well republicans did pretty well but then you had a tremendous grassroots progressives in local elections all over the country and all kinds of interesting races where one can you give us a feel for how that split would work going forward now is it is there more balance or is trump still kind of maintaining an edge there. well legislation starts from the house and certainly they have the ability to start articles of impeachment or

the subpoena power for investigation so control of the house is incredibly important but i think i would push back on the notion that trump did well i mean he lost you know he lost hundreds of legislative seats you know in legislatures across the country if you look at places like nevada that used to have quite a few moderate to center right leaning republicans you lost there senator heller and a whole bunch of other races out there as we speak right now we're still having the counting going on in arizona that looks like jeff like see it's going to probably flip over to a democrat we don't know what's happening in florida which always seems to be a fifty fifty race between nelson and governor scott we're down to somewhere around fourteen or fifteen thousand votes with county council votes in broward so i'm not really sure how he says he did well i mean the senate is set up to perform for republicans because you have two senate seats for every state so you can have states that have populations of six hundred thousand to

a million with two senators or california with forty million with two senators i mean so it's obviously set up to perform against heavily urbanizing areas i mean this is how it was set up by the founders and you know i think trump is quite worried about what's going to happen out of the house what i hope happens is that the house comes out with a strong agenda as you refer to universal health care and then stead of leading on articles of impeachment which can certainly be slow play let's see what happens with the mower investigation let's see what the report is let's lead with very strong ideas and send them over the senate and let mcconnell have to deal with it yeah ok i mean that sounds great and it sounds like a bit of a change from what we've seen the last couple of years were spent more about which let's trickly get rid of this guy now and it hasn't really worked in a lot of political capital since i have a. wasted so you're saying hey let's just focus on some policies that we can really

stand behind health care is certainly one of them and one of the sum of two or three other majors well infrastructure i mean when trump first was elected there was an awful lot of bipartisan support for infrastructure it kind of went to the wayside as he's gotten very involved with building the wall and all this nonsense about you know these immigrants coming in here i mean yes we have caravans coming up but that was certainly overplayed we do need immigration reform we do need you know coherent policy with the dreamers and i think you could probably get that now with some of the moderate republicans on the senate side and what happens with the new house but there's a lot of things that need to happen in this country we have bridges that are you know decaying we have roads that are falling apart we have water and sewer systems that need to be addressed we have the physical infrastructure of schools that need to be handled there's you know we have transit there's so many things that can be done you know we have obvious affects of these major hurricanes and storms which are pointing to a changing climate there could be real leadership coming out of the house perhaps

we could get bipartisan support for that matter nancy pelosi is going to be leaving the house i think seems to be a scuffle there and maybe sell in austin if someone else who might it be cardwell there's various pretenders of the throne but i really don't know who's going to be the one that emerges i mean there's been an awful lot of complaint with nancy based on her being the one that they've singled out and picked on over the years but my assumption is the post will probably get the speakership there might be a reshuffling of the deck with leaders as we know you have this new congresswoman out of new york that knocked out one of the top three leaders so you know there's going to be a recycling there let's see what happens with cliburn out of south carolina but the bottom line is the country elected a lot of progressives they elected a lot of women they elected a lot of minorities we've elected the first muslim women to congress there's a change is rather happening. before our eyes and even though beta will roar didn't beat ted cruz the fact that he came within you know a point or point

a half is amazing that's what people should be focusing on i mean there were there was a a real outreach on election day that showed that this country is changing you know people are looking beyond even party labels and looking toward values and ideas and i can kind of see that playing into two thousand and twenty let's talk about anita earls ok she want to see on the north carolina supreme court she's a lady progressive on defending voting rights yet your thoughts on the new north carolina supreme court now being five two in favor of democrats well when i started as chairman of the party it was the other way and we managed to win three seats in two thousand and fourteen which made it for three because we focused on those elections and there was a lot of money that came in to beat us. you know and then of course and twenty two thousand and sixteen mike morgan became the flip seat an african-american supreme court justice and now anita earls who's biracial whose work for social equity worked against gerrymander worked on on

a lot of issues that really matter to the people she gets elected so yes we have a five too but i think across the board it's a very interesting and inclusive court because they're not all the same in terms of where they line up politically on the spectrum she might be more liberal than sam or in the forest for instance but i do think it's a good change for the people in the state considering that the general assembly is wrong roughshod over local governments and the governorship and tried to you know take power with these amendments from the governor's office and from that from the court system they're in a. progressive economics k. namely antitrust is it because the biggest oil accomplis are in san francisco based tech sector that democrats won't tackle this issue they may be socially liberal but only god please or all is not progressive economic. les i think you get the gist of my question here yes does big tech companies in california are agree

just lay and horrendously over concentrated. that democrats don't seem to really go after those guys what he thinking. well i think that the viewpoint over many years is other than that the strong libertarian strain that you see within tech leadership and kind of the broke old sort of tech leadership right. they've generally been socially liberal but fiscally conservative and the assumption is that you know tech is not a smokestack industry so you know we're not trying to regulate it like we would a koch brothers industry right i mean the koch brothers of course and others also have somewhat of a in their sector. i do think you're right that there's been they've been given a pass and obviously the big four are going to need to. you know face to face the music they are in europe right now there's a facebook and google and. the living like

a city where people are open deaf acadian on the street i mean you know that they have any responsibility and the judge is an open deaf occasion in their backyard they complain about the open deficit on their front lawn but there don't seem to really want to contribute to any solution while i mean i've heard some kind of odd ideas again coming from the libertarian strain of the tech sector like let's buy or own island you know let's you know let's create our own country i mean the bottom line is that these are human issues you have an awful lot of money that's come in there an equity through the stock market that's you know created a lot of wealth and whether this wealth is real is another question but it's real enough to actually raise property values and create a real issue with wage and income inequality and wealth inequality on the west coast specifically san francisco that's going to have to be dealt with and i mean it's really in america like m s n b c and his others liberal left leaning media

outlets never go after those guys. i don't know if they never go after him but i think they're going to have to actually raise up on the issue of antitrust whether you're from the left or the right i mean getting to a situation of monopoly or old awfully is bad for the economy and it's bad for human beings right there you could say that we've had in the state a political of obviously yeah ok it's not good to have a system or you know you don't have a check or the governor can actually veto them but it's also about in the political economy i mean that's really what you're getting to so my takeaway here randi velour is that you know you've got a little lift in your step you're feeling a little light at the end of the tunnel you've got a little progressive movement here things are happening and it's not a correct assessment i think you're yeah there's a little bit but i mean you know that i focus local and we had a great local result here i work for our local politicians and we won up and down the ballot in chatham county and i've always believed in working local chatham

county once again at the highest turnout in the state and by the way during an off year election we had sixty six point three five percent of the voters vote we'd like to get it you know it's a close to one hundred percent but that's a heck of a lot better than some of the numbers you see around the country almost sort of work again i thank you anyway. because i believe local if everyone did that in their own county we'd have a different country thank you know much for being on the kaiser report thanks for having me. that's going to do it for this edition of the kaiser report but me and stacy everett like to thank our guest randy bowler if you want to reach us on twitter as kaiser report until next time oh oh.

suitable to space well. i don't for sun they say their. role is going to say they support the business with the most into it look. this is with the. thought of fellows on the shuttle bus i wish i could. see. a scene like i'm doing that nobody else to look at them out on the funniest or flowing tones will show such as the fluid somos when. you were

doing your. thing. this is boom bust broadcasting around the world and covering the world of business and finance and the impact upon all of us on part children washington we're sure glad you're with us coming up today there's a full basket or a bucket something this show is full of brecht's news as a city of london contingency and axis of businesses the c.e.o. of straw market were ford which is here to bring us the latest and you're going to get them in one of the strangest things i have ever heard about in years implanting chips in employees.