can overwhelm you. you could even use your way i know you want it all so let me bring you the best. it's easy just press play. those in command of toxic systems designed to keep us confused distracted of where you are no match worn away get in my they lie you win the baby lie you in poverty they tell you. they're watching are you watching them are watching. what. can you source the story about the fact that delayed maxwell that will likely take others doubt i guarantee you there's a lot more going on. in our nation's capital this is the news with

rick sanchez and protesters who are not happy this is what we're going to drill down on right here on news direction where we really do believe it's time to do news again. this type of american is doing very well but then there's these guys over here who aren't doing so well but if you drill down to look at the real numbers especially the rent numbers right it's pretty bad there's people who are not paying their rent and say they're not going to be able to pay their rent for the foreseeable future. welcome to on contact they were going to discuss why joe biden is not f.d.r. with a historian and author paul street we look back at good thirty's in the new deal and how they happen they happen because it was under on the left there was dissent

in the streets right before the social security. and. probably the to see progressive lynch in measures far from perfect in the instant much of the minority black population from their coverage should not romanticize the new deal but they were breakthrough pieces of legislation for much of the work that i've been lation all leads and sions in the legalization of organized black market in the year before those happened there was there was a. gigantic longshoreman strike all across western homes there was a general strike trotskyist teams to. in the twin cities there was a national textile strike there were hunger marches from coast to coast and every major city in this country had a resurgent nest. in the in the twin cities that was often syndicalist i don't you don't see you in tragedies in chicago and detroit it was communist probably the

dominant and this is not in this article i did issues with communist party got us a lot of great organize. don't be fooled by joe biden he knows his infrastructure and education bills have as much chance of becoming law as the $15.00 minimum wage or the $2000.00 stimulus checks he promised as a candidate he knows his american jobs plan will never create as he says millions of good paying jobs jobs americans can raise their families on any more than nafta which he supported would as was also promised create millions of good paying jobs his mantra of buy american is worthless he knows the vast majority of our consumer electronics apparel furniture and industrial supplies are made in china by workers who are on an average of one or $2.00 an hour and lack unions and basic labor

rights he knows his call to lower deductibles and prescription drug costs in the affordable care act will never be permitted by the corporations that profit from health care he knows the corporate donors that fund the democratic party will ensure their lobbyists will continue to write the laws that guarantee they pay little or no taxes he knows the corporate subsidies and tax incentives he proposes as a solution to a lemonade the crime it prices or deal with it will do nothing to hold all in gas fracking shut down coal fired plants or haul the construction of new pipelines. or gas fired power plants his promises of reform have no more weight than those peddled by bill clinton and barack obama biden slavish lee served and who also promised social equality while betraying working men and women joining me to discuss the biden administration and its continuity with the democratic and

republican administrations that preceded it is history professor and author paul straight so paul i know you like i have been stunned at the response by liberals and progressives in doubting biden with a kind of radical agenda that's just not there explain to me what this is about and why it's happening well some of what it's about is brand. nothing new you may recall when obama was elected in 2008 there were all kinds of. frankly absurd and now it's he said after you are in the news you know inmate i came to new york to sell my book barack obama in the future of american politics and just receive all kinds of pushback rushes not just from liberals who wanted very badly to believe this was a new deal moment this is kind of

a rip current. name. christopher hitchens once described the essence of american politics as the minute the elation of populism by elisa's and i don't know where does populism here but think progressivism in the claim that there are all these things happening or that might happen that really aren't happening and aren't going to happen and they're certainly not the kinds of things you knew deal progressivism that one would have any reason to expect from biden on the basis of is very long term political career in washington d.c. they used to call this guy the senator from mastercard he rolled back bankruptcy protections he backed corporate price fixing as a senator he helped coca-cola ovoid antitrust prosecution he was a champion of the north american free trade agreement health champion financial deregulation in the 1990 s.

and got behind the. so-called welfare reform in other words the elimination of family basic family cash assistance for the report families and and i could go on and it's it's it's all rather silly but it's part of the sales job right and if it made to some extent also expressed a desire on the part of certain commentators and others for something like that we are after all in a period of just absurd. income and wealth inequality which is intimately related back to. rampid insecurity and and the problems of the eco side and excessive corporate control and oligarchies and all those things so perhaps are some wishful thinking involved in all of this is well. let's talk about his address to the nation because he acknowledges that social inequality he acknowledges the climate crisis and then you have a response nicholas kristoff in the new york times jonathan alter and others but

let's look as i know you have let's look at that speech itself because there are in fact are some very disturbing i think trends within that speech or especially in terms of foreign policy but let's let's go through the talk well you know i'm going to a couple times and one thing that really i'm not sure. was the embrace of the notion of competitiveness american competitiveness in american competition also jobs but i actually wrote down america is rising in no he said maybe to take on the move again and then of course visa v. who else china so this embrace of competition which is really the embrace of the court anarky and insecurity of capitalism competition means insecurity in the lives of most american in

a most global people but everything when you're speaking the language of competition and competitiveness which to me is also following marx's analysis the language of anarchy and chaos you are sort of saying that everything's going to be supported the profit be subordinated to profit rates and to international imperial competition in meow politics and that means that all the other things that you purport to be for rolling back inequality in increasing labor rights and social justice and all that are probably going to go by ways side because it's all about making america great again when you think about it he wouldn't use the f. a language they'd be afraid of a you know how different is america is rising a new america is ready to take off again it's just a sort of a more sophisticated neo liberal democratic way yes they are and make america great again and it's how different is it in of and in fact in some ways on the foreign

policy level it's actually more aggressive and more imperial sounding than the truck who was no isolationist there's a there's a bit of a myth a mythology about that but. for whatever reasons have a kind of. less imperial take critically on russia. and yeah some of that language was a was heard sermon because philly's. what's your response to the people who are trumpeting biden as the new f.d.r. people like crist of all turn others i'm just kind of amazed by it and i don't yet i'm not surprised by it it's a sort of stunningly inappropriate i mean f.d.r. got to the point by them by the mid thirty's when he was going for reelection that he would repeatedly say he would denounce the economic royalists now it's right to do with him and he cleaned up in 1036 with the 2nd election in part as he did because that's how americans felt and he actually said i i welcome their hatred i

welcome the hatred of the economically of course he was from the economic aristocracy which is part of why he could get away with it as much as if biden said to manhattan donors and 29 t. he said i have no interest in demonizing millionaires and billionaires i don't think you're the problem and nothing will fundamentally change when i'm elected president no one standard of living. will ever change f.d.r. to some extent they have pushed some very real public sector job creating interventions in the economy the c.c.c. the public works administration the tennessee valley authority i don't want to exaggerate how much of that there really well but there was some of that i regularly use parks that were built by the c.c.c. and you know in the upper midwest into really neat there's no there's no actual job creating direct public sector infrastructure building in bines agenda that i can

see it's all this infrastructure plan if it gets through force is going to be watered down by joe manchin the republicans. does not involve direct you know public public job. biden even in his in his speech claiming to be sort of progressive is only talking about bringing x. progressivity back to the era of george w. bush he wants i think what 40 percent tax on the upper income brackets george w. bush before reagan it was in the seventy's attached to the top tax bracket and under f.d.r. and during world war 2 was in the 90th percentile so it's nothing remotely close to that probably the most remarkable thing that came out of the new deal from mike respected in a previous lifetime i was a labor historian and this is really critical piece of legislation called the national labor relations act wagner in many ways was the magna carta of the

emerging industrial workers mass production industrial union movement and i didn't hear one reference maybe i missed it to this to a bill that would essentially really galoshes union organizing in august and passed by the house the pro act. and he's passed this senate i mean if he was really if we were talking about joe biden as being on the entire nation of the us that would have been highlighted front and center in his speech. and you know it has problems in the senate but he doesn't have to if he would go and energetic lee and aggressively after the filibuster the filibuster has to go he hides behind these archaic. 18th century senate rules in this ridiculous body the upper chamber of the u.s. congress where wyoming has as many representatives as california even though

wyoming has less than 600000 people california has almost 100000000 people to open rejection of the core democratic principle one person one vote and anyone who is serious about moving forward on a progressive a can in a new deal kind of way anything like jonathan alter and nick kristoff of the new york i'm want to thank you as he be going after the filibuster he'd be pushing for washington d.c. statehood quite frankly if i was in the white house have been raising the issue of the apportionment of the senate was absolutely ridiculous he would be doing something that f.d.r. did f.d.r. real good the threat of expanding the supreme court that is how the way agner act was alternately ruled constitutional in 1937 the magna carta of the labor movement and all and by my hands you have some rhetoric about expanding the supreme court which you know is it's certainly to the right of american public opinion to $63.00

majority super majority right wing supreme court in a majority of progressive nations preposterous and you have expanded he recently just appointed a blue ribbon commission to you know do a study of nadya's sometime we like to. it's the end of this current me sort of neo fascist the far right supreme court to be position to invalidate roe v wade so i mean these are the kinds of things a real progressive would do not the other thing they leave out in the end if they want it they don't seem to be capable one to say is that it isn't just about who the president is it isn't just about who's sitting in the white house it's who sitting in the streets and sitting on the shop floor and engaging in direct we're going to come back about paul we're going to come we're going to come back exactly that point when we come back we'll continue our conversation about the proposed reforms of the biden ministration but history professor and author paul

street. welcome back to on contact we continue our conversation about the proposed reforms of the biden ministration with history professor and author paul street so before the break you mentioned quite correctly that it matters far more who's in the streets and this was true for the new deal and for f.d.r. as well so proclaiming that the biden is going to somehow deliver the new deal is as false as the notion historically that f.d.r.

didn't deliver the new deal without serious kind of pressure sit down strikes in flint to find farmers revolve but but lay out that historical period because it shows how progressive legislation actually comes about yeah well so. in his new york times piece jonathan alter actually has this line this is a piece in mid april and jonathan alter liberal by no obama allergists actually has this line that what we're going to find out if biden you know if we're if we're really going to get the new deal it altered things that i didn't want to do this suppose a transformative break with neo liberalism whether we're going to find a bike and do it as we can find out if he has the edge that that's what he said you know to to bandy people's arms in congress because that's how stuff gets done we can look back at the thirty's and the new deal and how they happen they happen because it was thunder on the left there was dissent in the streets right before

the social security act and the wagner act probably the 2 key progressive linchpin measure far from perfect in the excluded much of the minority in black population from their coverage incidentally we should not romanticize the new deal but they were breakthrough pieces of legislation for much of the working class population old age pensions and the legalization of union organizing and collective martin they are before those happened there was there was a. gigantic longshoreman strike all across western coast there was a general strike led by tracts he has teams through in the twin cities there was a national textile strike there were hunger marches from coast to coast and every major city in this country had a resurgent left. in the in the twin cities it was often syndicalist either of you w n trotskyist in chicago and detroit it was communist probably the big i mean in tennis

it was the communist party out of issues of the communist party but also a lot of great organized and they were on the ground and they were present and when there were issues in a city like chicago and people that are victims because they couldn't pay their rent because they lost their jobs and the cops would come into view. then a black woman on the south side would say quick go get the reds and people knew where they were and they went and got him and the reds came with loudspeakers and organized mass resistance and this was true all over america and this thunder on the left shows up in the congressional debates. that lead to the passage of a lot of progressive legislation in the thirty's if we don't do this then we're going to get revolution and course there's a soviet union at that time and there's fear of revolution elsewhere in the country and so there's a global kind of sense of threat of a left and that's not happening that's always been one sort of kind of the mis you

know another piece that's missing historically too is what the lakes political kindness giovanni ribisi called workplace bargain power there were these remarkable capital intensive industries they could be shut down they could be crippled by a static in a body plant in michigan or in or in the chicago packing houses in armor or sleeves where a bunch of left militant workers could stop the killing floor and a huge hole gigantic $10000.00 workers plant would go down the whole continuous flow of production of foundries of the river moved plants and for all that kind of ability is capacity to disrupt. capital intensive industry was a really big part and it's in its ability to potentially undo a recovery from the great depression was a big part of what happened in the 1930 stoppages direct actions in a lot of the sense that time a lot of jobs have left its country production has been off shored that kind of

capacity doesn't exist it doesn't mean direct action is irrelevant but anyone who is really serious about calling for progressive changes would be this is something even bernie sanders fairly do this i sliced the number of things on the left and including noam chomsky who have a lot of respect for extensively claiming that that bernie sanders was a strong advocate of social movements beneath and beyond electoral college since we need you know sort of what would have been uncovered wrote about in the book or people's movements as this continues this isn't just the thirty's this is true in the sixty's it was during the progressive ages during the 1000 century stuff happens when you have social movements in the thin beyond these quadrennial candidates entered major party electoral its grab a gander or so to us as the only thing that about politics in bernie at the end of the day was really ultimately about. the squadron i was traveling in says and you

know it's a o.c. and him say things that sound different every once and it's really they're really in mash in this corporate captive realm of electoral politics so if you were serious about c.b. coupling it with a call for people in the streets i thought under trond that if democrats were serious about getting trump out of i could trump deserve mass movements in the street i'm glad the trump is on screen pardon me the trump is gone he's not gone the way i think he should have been he should have been forced out i'm nass action and the democrats never called me a they did it's just their job is to keep the one my job has always one of their top jobs is to keep people off the streets and when people have occupied all over this country in the fall of 2011 obama made sure to subtly work with democrats in cities coast to coast in for 3 years mantle yacub high wall street which

was an actual populist rebellion for a while i want to talk about the consequences so most of this money that biden has proposed will go either to corporations or to the states with just a tiny minuscule amount $1.00 time tax of $1400.00 of unemployment benefits which are about to expire a tax credit for children but really just you know the doesn't in any way deal with the structural a fault right on the working class. what are the consequences most of all you've got to run out by the end of the year what are the consequences of that politically . well i think there's a very you know they say there's a tendency almost always one thing 34 and roosevelt was an exception. for the up the party out of power to lose the house of representatives of the the party in presidential power usually means is the mid term elections are rare exception one

that doesn't 1934 was one because of the total discrediting of the g.o.p. by the great depression and herbert hoover and f.d.r. as. pretty sophisticated public relations and promises of the oh and george w. bush because of 911 and all the sympathy he got into the general energized that typically the other party comes in i would think i would think that that's slated to happen again in a strong possibility also given the fact of the credible job right we're gerrymandering of our house districts in entre there is a bell that came out of the house it's an election reforms you know that targets gerrymandering hoops to undo them and also targets all these races motor republican voter suppression that's going on in the states but he can't get past the senate until we get past the filibuster and. and.

sleepy joe biden and king joe mansion once just have certainly powerful mouth of the nation have a voice their opposition to getting rid of the filibuster so will get passed so it's going to the the threat is the motive of the standard democratic party in authentic opposition party the mobilization of their own base opening the door for electoral triumph of the. of a of a republican party that isn't just my grandfather's republican party sort of white nationalist a neo fascist that has been for a while. this happened in 2010 i mean this is the story of george meant in many ways along with the absurdity of the electoral college of the a stories of george bush is all and 2 elections to some extent a story of how that's

a big part of the stir that the democrats demobilization want to raise a big part of trump's initial election from 16 it's a part of the tea party midterms in 22 and i think i'm not a prognosticator or or an electoral 538 i but my sense is that the experts are giving a very strong chance of the g.o.p. uniting the house and i magine i could involve some revenge impeachments. you know the the as show deepens you know. and if it could potentially bring a republican back. god forbid maybe even trump himself in 24 unless biden and the dems were to get really serious and to get serious would mean among other things embrace in structural and institutional change and in the policy system itself they're scared to get rid of

the filibuster event of the public again. in him and then there are all of us will guess what we don't have we can't move forward without things like remove the young and eye for real federal minimum wage and the real legal ization of union organizing don't be scared you know that i'm going to do this and i might try to goto mindset of it's if i was a progressive democrat i'll do that for a 2nd don't be scared dan jam the stuff through that has majority support in such a way to guarantee that the republicans can't come back this isn't the part of their power that should our party that needs to be swept into the dustbin of history anyway do it but they want it not actually want to they're caught up in a codependent. mutually reinforcing relationship with an increasingly white nationalist neo fascist g.o.p. as a very sick game and is being played on all of us in the rich get richer the poor get poorer the top one percent had 90 percent of the wealth before trouble is even

elected god knows what the maldistribution is now after coding i did hear biden say something to the effect that $643.00 rich people became a trillion dollars more wealthy. during how that you were going to have either joe . probably not well the democratic party works for goldman sachs and citibank and that's who they work for and that's who biden has always worked for and that is the fundamental structural problem with american politics thanks that was history professor and author paul straight on how joe biden is not f.d.r. .

oh yeah oh. go by. all the feeling of going to. every the world of experience. and you get it on the old low. the old according to gesture.

come along for the wrong. i think. i'm going to be. i think. france byron schools from using a modified version of the french language that supporters say avoids sexism people are divided though about whether reforms are really needed. we must include every point for me it's a bit bland to the issue of sexism and writing is something you have to take into account cities use less complicated speech. over 200 people while the number of officers injured in clashes in jerusalem with police taking a tougher line on journalists filming be an arrest. and food of the future also they call it dried you know worms could soon become a large part of your menu.