I was glad when they said unto me, Come, let us go into the house of first congregational. Long live Connecticut, and have revival with the Connecticut Conference of the United Church of Christ. I bring you greetings from the Peach State of Georgia, the capital city of Atlanta, eastern suburb of Stone Mountain. The good people of the victory for the word United Church of Christ is good to be in Connecticut, especially when the Falcons aren't playing the Giants or the Jets. We give God all the praise for God's amazing grace.  The hour is already going late, so let us not hold you too long. In the book of Acts chapter 1, I want to invite your attention to verses 6, 7, and 8, Acts chapter 1. From the New Revised Standard Version, it reads like this. So when they have come together, they ask Tim, Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel? He replied, it is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. And the disciples want to know, Lord, at this time will you restore the kingdom to Israel? Our topic tonight in the meantime. Got to say a word about this praise team. I'm sure if we looked up praise and worship in the dictionary, you would find the pictures of these sisters right here. And these amazing musicians. God, we honor you tonight. We ask that you will continue to move in this worship experience. Give us eyes to see, ears to hear, hearts to receive what the Spirit is saying to us tonight. We thank you because we know that you're already here, already moving, already blessing. Continue to do what you do best, and that is set your people free.  In Jesus' name. Amen. My brothers and sisters, everybody I know is waiting on something. Workers are waiting for payday. Students are waiting to graduate. Young people are waiting to get older. Older people are waiting to retire. Sick people are waiting for healing. Lonely people are waiting for relationships. Tired people are waiting for rest. Hurting people are waiting for help. Unemployed people are waiting for jobs. Distressed people are waiting for deliverance. And some of us are just waiting for church to be over. We believe that God will answer prayer. We believe that God will work all things together for our good. We believe that one day we will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. But while we are waiting for all that, the question is, what do we do in the meantime? How do we make it in the meantime between a prayer request and a prayer answered? How do we make it in the meantime between what we believe and what we expect to receive? How do we make it in the meantime between the weeping that endures for the night and the joy that is promised to come in the morning? We know that God will provide and that God will make a way out of no way. But the question tonight is, what do we do in the meantime? According to Acts 1 and 3, Jesus appeared to his disciples 40 days after the resurrection. On this occasion, the disciples asked Jesus, Lord, at this time, will you restore the kingdom of Israel? The disciples were really asking Lord, when bring back the glory, the independence, the sovereignty and the prosperity that we as a nation once enjoyed under the golden reigns of King David and King Solomon. We've been under Roman oppression. We've been under Roman occupation for a long time. We've been praying for a Messiah. One sent from God to lead us out of the oppression into the promise of our national inheritance given to us through Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God, we believe that you will make us a great nation. We believe that God will establish us as a great nation in truth and righteousness. We believe that God will deliver us from all of our enemies. We just want to know when. Haven't we been praying and hoping and struggling and waiting long enough? We know God is a strong deliverer. We just want to know it tonight. Waiting on God to bless, while to solve a problem has the same question that the disciples had. Lord, when? It seems like we could handle our tribulations a little better if we knew when they would be over. It seems like we could bear our burdens a little better if we knew that they would be over by Thanksgiving for two or three days. Longing and versities in life God would show up and make things all right. The disciples of Jesus wanted to know the same thing that we all want to know. Lord, when? When will you make good on your promise? When will you make things all right? When will you restore the kingdom or the kingdom of God? When? Will you answer prayer? When? Will our faith become sight? Lord, we know you can. We believe you will. Just tell us when. Jesus responds to all of us in Acts 1 and 7. He says it is not for you to know the times or the periods that God has set by God's own authority. In other words, the question of when is God's business. Not your business. Jesus says, I'm not going to tell you when everything is going to work out. But I will tell you how to meantime, while you're waiting on God to heal you. While you're waiting on God to open doors. While you're waiting on God to deliver you. That's what you need to know in the meantime. You shall receive power. Undespite your perfect power. I know you want to know when your problems will be over. But I hear Jesus saying, I'm giving you power to do everything. Despite your problems. I'm working with what you've got until you get what you want. Some people can't do anything. Some people can't even get started. As everything is in place. Just to make you proud. Until you get what you want. Basement until you work your way to an upper level. Come on, wait. Until you can receive your degree and demand. To start with a little and develop it into a whole lot of something. Start with a book and build it into a library. Start with an idea and build it into an institution. Start with a desire and follow it into your destiny. You're not going to always have everything you want. The way you want it. I've got to handle what you've got. If you want everything you want immediately. Glad it's nice that I really got to use my imagination. The best stuff. That's what you want. What you got. What you've got. Receive power. Come to the church. Even big church folk. Get on the reserve. Get there. Jesus said while you're waiting on your blessing fight your pains, pressures and problems. Secondly, in the meantime. While you're waiting, I'm giving you power to proclaim good news. Despite your predicaments. I know you don't have everything you want, I hear Jesus say. I know God hasn't given you everything that God has promised you yet. But in the meantime, according to Acts 1 and 8, after you receive power you shall be my witnesses. You will have power to proclaim good news in spite of your bad predicament. In other words, I'm going to give you a testimony not after your test but in the midst of your test. I'm going to give you power to proclaim God to still walk in through the valley for the shadows of death. Some of us think we only get a testimony after the test is over. Until the battle is over, I'll put your pain through. But sometimes we've got to bring God to give me the desires of my heart. But I need to hear from somebody to bless God with a broken heart. Somebody in here tonight in a rocky romance. Somebody in the midst of another love, TKO, who can come to church and still say, bless the Lord within me. I know how to thank God when my finances get right. I know how to thank God when the ship comes in. But I need to know how to keep the faith with the telephone disconnect. And you're waiting on the next paycheck and you've got a little bit to buy some food. And the baby need a pair of shoes and they've got a light bill too. I need to hear from somebody in a financial crisis tonight who can still testify to Jehovah Jireh. I've got to shout, not after the storm is over. The light can flash. The flames inspire your predicaments. I'm giving you power to prove your remittance. The disciples are concerned with the political. They thought that the mission of the Messiah only pertained to Israel. But Jesus said, you shall read my witnesses. You shall do my work. You shall spread my good news. Not only in Jerusalem. If you give to us, God bless me and stop it. You can't limit God's liberation to just your people. Your church, you can't put that church aside. While citizenship status that we're fighting for racial African Americans put a circle around free that you can hear all the folk get free. It's just a franchise group in America is fighting for justice that keeps on living.  Jesus resurrection on Easter Sunday. Have you ever thought of it twice? Have God have just what you need but then fail to take the step that it takes to get to the place where God wants to cruncher the desires of your heart. It's not that the blessing didn't work ready, sometimes we are not ready for the blessing. It's not that God can't do it. Maybe somebody wants to just think about it. Stand on your feet if you will. Be encouraged. No matter what's going on God will make it alright but you gotta stay strong. When I grew up in the little church in Darlington, South Carolina the old folks used to tell us it takes time to live holy. It takes time to walk by faith. It takes time to be patient enough to believe that what God has planned is better than what we can get. Just by grinding in desperation. Let's just bow our heads and pray tonight because I know all of us have petitions on the altar. Sometimes it seems like those petitions that God says I'm still moving even in the night and we think nothing's happening. God says I'm still attending to your need. An induced Caesar I hear the Lord say you shall reap a harvest of blessings if you labor and fend not. When on the Lord my sister God's heard your prayers and God's got everything you need. When on the Lord my brother God knows what you need and you think you know what you need. Better to trust God. I'm pressing all the upward way. New heights I'm gaining every day. Still praying as I'm onward now. Lord plant my feet on higher ground. God to thank you. So many of us have gotten discouraged. So many of us have moved from faith to desperation because somehow it seems that it's taking too long. But God not only do you know what's best you know when to deliver. You know when we are ready. You know when we are prepared to receive what you have already prepared for us as your people tonight. Prepare us for what you have prepared for us. Touch our hearts and our minds. Touch our attitudes. Strengthen our faith. Let us count to press on and persevere even if things don't work out by next Thursday. Work in us. Work the miracle in us. We may not have everything we want but God you have promise to supply all of our needs. So we thank you and we give you praise for right now. As a matter of fact before we ask you for anything else we just want to say thank you. Thank you. For the doors you've already opened if you don't open another door you've already opened doors. But we give you praise before we ask you for anything else we just thank you for our lives right now. And thank you for strength to be more than confidence right now. And thank you for the victory not when things happen but right now. We believe and we receive. Thank you for being our prayer answerer. Thank you for being our sustainer. Even in the meantime in Jesus name Hallelujah. Thank God. Ain't no need to worry but the night is going to bring it will be all over.


Oh my God! Explain the different levels that we sell of protection dogs, right, like level 1, 2, 3, and that there are levels. A lot of protection dog companies don't have levels, okay, that's fine. So they all, for example, one company sells protection dogs for $150,000, not a penny less. And every single dog is trained exactly the same. There is no difference between the Rottweiler, the Connie Corso, the Doberman, doesn't matter the breed. Every single dog, it's a cookie cutter system where it's just basics of training. That's it, nothing advanced, nothing, you know. And each one is going to be trained exactly the same. There are no differences between any of them. So we just depend on what breed you prefer, okay? That is not the way we work, okay? Because in that one, you know, level system, cookie cutter system, it's very generic, right? Where there's not a lot of diversity, there's a lot of things lacking, okay, in skills. So that's why we have the levels, 1, 2, 3, and then we have a 4 for people who really need outrageous stuff, okay? And we do have a lot of clients in that level 4 category. And I'll discuss that when we get to level 4. So level 1, we have the basic functional hold our leg, right? As in walking, healing, that they hold the leg tightly, nicely, perfectly in concept and position. If we ever need the dog, leash or no leash, doesn't matter. That dog will turn on and bark at the person when we say the word, the cue to watch, okay? And that activates the dog to go into aggressive hostile state.  And that's it, no more. To try to scare the person, okay? Not to let this go any further and just to back them off and just let them know not to go any further with this hostile act towards us or else. Okay? So as the dog turns on here at the leg, they're not allowed to move from this position, okay? This is control, okay? Massive control. So to hold the dog's drive back, right? Because they all want to go attack. That's the easy part, right? To just have dog attack, that's the easy part. The skilled part and the thing that costs money takes us time to do, create is control in the protection game. Just letting dogs go fly attack, again like I've said in all the previous videos, takes very little skill to none. And so it's not even really something worth, like yes, it can protect your life, yes it's great to have, we need it for sure. But it's a very, very low level skill to teach, okay? So the dog holding the leg, controlling itself, knowing it cannot just fly off and attack, okay? It just stays there and barks aggressively, threatening somebody. They watch them, they go fly out on the end of the line and go crazy, right? And is considered a fully trained elite protection dog, okay? And that's what the world is believing that that's what a protection dog is and the dog was sold for $150,000, okay? All this bouncing on a leash is unacceptable. Again, it's beginner stuff, baby stuff, not controlled protection dog, let's put it that way. So I've been saying in the videos that anybody can handle my dogs that I build, okay?  That to me is not a trained dog, okay? So I will never sell that kind of dog, not for $10,000, $15,000, $70,000, $100,000, $150,000, doesn't matter. It will never leave my facility being that way because that's an untrained dog to me. That's a day one beginner dog. So I was showing how controlled and disciplined our dogs are that anybody can handle them. Men, women, children, disabled, okay? Because they do not go crazy on a leash when you go, watch out! And they go crazy, right? That owner of that dog room has young teenage girls, okay? And they better pray that those girls, if they're ever walking with that doorman somewhere, never needs that dog.  Because that's going to be a lot of dog to try to hold back, all right? So you know that in those particular cases they're going to be thinking, oh my God, do I have to turn them on? And even if two of the girls were holding on at the same time, they're going for a ride. They're probably going to crash into each other, fall on the floor, go for a ride on the concrete. That dog's going to pull them all over the place, okay? If they have to turn them on and try to use him to protect them. That just doesn't work functionally. That's just not acceptable, okay? So again, saying that anybody, and I use children as an example because I showed women doing it, examples of if you are in a wheelchair, right? It's the same thing. Alright, so here we're going to do something we've never done before. Sue's calling Rocco out of the house. I'm walking around just cruising around. He has to ignore me. Listen to Sue. Go straight to her. Not mess with me at all. She puts me down. She's going to go in the house. She's going to stay there for a little bit and just leave me and Rocco outside alone together. He's got to hold his down stay. Not let me bother him while he's in command. So I'm just strolling around seeing if any movement will trigger him to get out of that down. Either just breaking it down or trying to go after me, either one. Here I pet him. Make sure there's no aggression whatsoever while he's holding his commands. Perfect, and then Sue calls him past me and to her. Perfect. Exactly what we want to see. Now here she turns him on. Gives him the watch command. Now the more here, moving around, I'm trying to bait him into a mistake. Rocco has no leash on and I'm trying to really get to him by all the movements and closeness. And then there I make my move and he should attack me defending his owner just like he did. All right, and here Sue turns him on into aggression. I'm making all sorts of moves. I left my little things dangling and drive him crazy and then Sue's going to tell him to out.  No more talking to me. No more lunging.  He shouldn't react to me at all. And here Sue turns him back on. Now you see there, he went right into engage and no leash on. He was going to take off. He held himself from taking off to try to attack me just like he should, self-control. Here I'm trying to bait him again. A lot of movements, a lot of jumping around to make him really, really try to come off his game. But he's holding it in here. Sue's going to shut him off again. Protection should be. Light switch on, light switch off. You turn.  So we're flip-flopping back and forth to make sure he's fluent with turning off. And on cues, he's allowed to go bite without any hesitation.  And there, right away. As soon as Sue sends him, he hits me right up in the upper. And man, I got a bruise from that hit. That hurt. You can see it there. That hurt badly. Hold at the body and not be able to pursue me until she tells him to leave that spot. And then here you see he holds no matter how much I move around. I'm trying to bait him into failure by moving back and forth across the hallway to see if I can turn him on enough to make a mistake. Perfect. He holds next to Sue barking and then I tell Sue to send him. And then when she tells him to come, BAM! Phenomenal hit and aggression right into me. Beautiful. And here he holds without the leash right next to Sue when she tells him to watch right on cue. He goes into action, allowed to leave the body unless I go touch or she sends him. So I test him and I go around him perfectly. And then I back out. Instead of touching, I now want to give him the reward of being sent and make sure he leaves right away on the cue to do what he was told to make sure the fluency is still there and he hasn't gotten rusty. There it is. Skills. The level one package, which is a lot more than you're going to get. The $150,000 dogs from the company that I've been referring to that selling the most expensive dogs in the world don't have any of these skills. So our level one is way beyond that company's $150,000 cookie cutter system where we have so much more value in just our beginner package than the end result of almost all other companies. One thing that separates us big time from everybody else and I'm known for this in the protection world. Control, control, control.  We do not want any out of control behaviors. A dog on his own gambling. Gambling causes major issues and confused dogs and gambling dogs where they will just, if they have a mood and they're not trained properly, will just tag people if they feel like it because they're having a moment. And good skilled dogs don't have moments. They understand it's black and white on how the protection game works. So control, control, control. Skill, skill, skill. This is what you're supposed to be buying when you buy a protection dog. Not out of control chaos.


Straight up, you gon' be big. At the time I had Mac Main on there, I had young money on there.  Yeah.   So I tried it, right? We're with me. Straight up, you gon' be big. And the video probably went crazy. Yeah, we on Boss Talk 101. I think of Gutter TV, man. I think about all the extraordinary things you do. But how did you get that drop with that, that's Webby, ain't it? You gon' be big. How did you end up getting that drop? And how did you know that was the one? Straight up, you gon' be big, Gutter TV.  But I was chillin' at Webby House. We were just smokin' chillin'.  We was just smokin' chillin', talkin'.   You know what I'm sayin'? So it'd be cameras on the computer, that's right. And I have my laptop everywhere I go. Yeah, me too. So boom, I whip out the laptop. I just sat it on his studio board and think, hit that little, not even, you know, the little camera and photo booth or whatever it is. I hear it record.   It's like three hours worth of footage.  Yeah, I still got all that.   Straight up, you gon' be big. Got a TV. At the time I had MacMaine on there. Yeah, I had Young Money on there.  Yeah.   So I tried it, right? We whipin'. Straight up, you gon' be big. And the video probably went crazy. And I was like, damn, and then I was like, you know what, I'ma do it again.  Straight up, you gon' be big. We gon' keep running with his head. Yeah, I just kept going with his head. I love it, man, because every time I hear it, man, it's just somethin' about it. I'm like, that's it, that's got a TV. But you know, I be sayin' that's God, too, because my whole life, I've been wanting to be on some motivational shit, too. You feel me? Straight up, you gon' be big. Like, look what he did for me. He gave me a drop. There's more inspiration, you know, inspiring than anything. Like, people see me and say that and go crazy. How did you meet Webby, though? How did you end up meeting him? When I, in Little Rock, I used to book shows. Okay. So I used to bring him to Little Rock. And so, and then y'all got so tight that you end up in Band-Aid. When I was staying, now, when I was staying in Atlanta. Okay. It's a deep story. I'm listenin'.  I'm staying in Atlanta. I'm havin' some trouble where I'm stayin' it, payin' rent and shit. Yeah. Cause I'm out there trying to figure it out at the moment, right? Life. So, my partner come in my room one day. But at the time, I'm lit in Atlanta. I just got here. I'm probably four, six months in Atlanta. But I'm lit. Yeah, they lovin' you. Man, if Gutter ain't at your spot, it ain't poppin'.  So, I'm havin' a little trouble tryin' to figure out how to make the money from everything I'm doin'. Exactly. So, my partner, who I'm staying with one day, he blessed me with the crib. He busted in the room one day, like, bro, it's the eighth, bro. We gotta pay the rent. He like, goddamn, bro. He like, he like, bro, all these people, come on, bro, figure somethin' out. And he said, come on, help me out, bro. He said, all these people you know. He say, all these people you know.  I ain't needin' them about three, four hundred dollars. I ain't no nigga that to talk to like that. Okay. You feel me? And I'm a hustler. So, like, I always hustle my whole life. But when I took a chance goin' to the A. Yeah. Feel me? I gave up the trap. You gotta jump.  Like, we got into a real fist fight. I'm callin' nigga right now.  I was like, cause I was up. But I was like, man, I'm finna go to the A. And I just moved. You feel me, buddy?  My partner was like, A, bro, figure somethin' out. So, I get to goin' through my phone when he closed the door. And I'm really like, man, I wanna go in there and fight the nigga. Yeah. That's my nigga, Dane Dash. And I'm like, man, I wanna go in there and fight the nigga. You know what I'm sayin'? Cause I'm hot.  You know what I'm sayin'? I'm like, nigga. And I ain't no nigga be trippin' over no $300, $400. So, I ain't used to that. It's just I ain't got it at the time.  So, at the moment though, I'm like, he right though. When I sat down and laid in the bed, I was like, damn, the nigga right.  I'm only like 22 or something. But I'm like, damn, I'm laying in the bed and I ain't got, you know what I'm sayin'? I can't do this. So, boom, I get to, he say, go through your phone or something nigga. That's what he said before he closed the door. So, boom, I'm really thinkin' I go through my phone. I get to go in, I started A. It was crazy to this day I do this. You know what I'm sayin'?   Give up the game. But I started at A. And everybody that I hit just went seein' what I wanted to say.  It's over. It's over, like, yeah, damn, man. It's over, man. I'm puttin' my stomach for to be touchin' my back. I didn't even go home or somethin' like that. And I'm like, Webby, Webby, I didn't met Webby a few times. I'm like, man, Webby ain't the one finna respond how I want him to respond. Feel me, bro, real. He risked Gutter. He just Gutter. But when I called him, he said, I said, hey, bro, I need to get on the road with you or somethin'. I need to do somethin'. I need to make some money. And he said, it's true story too. This is just how I called him. Soon as he answered, cause I didn't expect him to answer. I was like, hey, I need to get on the road with you or somethin', bro. I need to do somethin'. He said, what you want to do? I said, man, I don't know. I said, I just need to get on the road with you or somethin'. You feel me? I need to make some money. And he said, man, holla at big boy.  You know what I'm sayin'? And then he was like, I'ma send you a number. He gave me a number. And I'm like, this nigga gave me a security guard number?  You know what I'm sayin'?  End up choppin' up with him. The niggas say, meet him at the mall. I meet him at the mall, Lennox Mall in Atlanta. And it was big mail. He owned Trill Entertainment. And she, we just locked in. And he started, you know, pretty much come up with a budget and say, we gonna rock out? He put me on the road with Lil' Fat, his son. And he put me on the road with Webby. She, I was, I was doin' everything. Yeah, we on Boss Talk 101.


How do you know if he's on Facebook or not? Yeah. I mean, it's my part of the program. I'm friends with her. And I'm really well-known on Facebook. So, yeah. So, we're so happy to be here. And I promise to help if you're working here. I do. Why don't we, everybody, wait a minute. Yeah. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. Yeah. Well, I'd like to introduce, without any further ado, Mackinzales. It's always difficult to hear about all my political defeats. I've run four times in one-one race in baseball. That wouldn't be a very good average. You know, I grew up in a town in South Texas, McAllen, Texas. And you're not missing anything. Don't worry. I grew up in South Texas and McAllen, Texas. And I became an attorney. And I started work in the public defender office in San Francisco. And I spent about a decade doing that work before, as David mentioned, I ran for district attorney. I ran because I'd represented a young person in a marijuana case. And the district attorney, who was considered the most progressive district attorney in the United States, wanted jail time for a kid that was basically smoking pot on some steps on Haight Street, which was against the law back then. Not anymore. And so in negotiations with the district attorney, the head of the narcotics unit, it was actually an attorney that had smoked pot in my house at a party. And it was very interesting because the defense attorneys, the public defenders, weren't smoking pot, and all the DAs that came through were. And so he's telling me how they're going to have to make an example of this young person. He was like 23 years old and was going to college. He had no priors. And the judge, who's now on the Ninth Circuit, very conservative judge, did, in fact, sentence the defendant to jail. And at the time I said, if you do this, I'm going to spend all of my resources telling people what you're doing. I mean, I'll take out ads in the paper, I'll go on the radio, I'll run for district attorney. I mean, I'll do whatever it takes. So the next day I was in a courtroom and that attorney walked through, the head of the narcotics unit, and said, you better get your filing money together. And it was really just an insult. So I did, and I ran, and his boss had to listen to me at all these various debates, explain to him what they were doing wrong. I was elected the next year to the city council, the board of supervisors. I was a member of the Green Party, and a couple years later became the president of the board of supervisors. I was not expected to win the mayor's race, that I got into. And in many respects, I was not a very good politician. I had closed my bank account after being elected to the board of supervisors, and when we were making planning decisions, I would often get checks from some of the parties that were appearing before me, and it was so weird. It was like, why are they sending me money? But they just understood that that's what you did. You're supposed to pay your respects to the politicians by giving them $500 for their next race or something like that. We would just send it back, of course, my office. But I thought getting elected mayor might be easier than having to put together eight out of 11 votes to override a mayoral veto, and that's what motivated me to run. I got into a runoff with very low vote totals. I had about 19-20% of the totals. It was a wide field, and Newsom had over 40%, I think 42%. So he was expected to win, and it became a very close race. Unfortunately, there were a lot of progressive allies, labor unions, et cetera, who as they tried to assess who they should support, they basically went with him because he was going to win. And in the week before the election, he started saying, oh man, if we knew it was going to be this close, we might have done this different. And probably my greatest injury in politics was when the union representing janitors that I had marched with endorsed my opponent, even though all the guys in the room knew me because the heads of the union in Sacramento told him to do that. I returned to private practice. I didn't seek reelection of the Board of Supervisors. I started a progressive law firm. It was a bunch of lefties, a Green Party attorneys, about six, seven, eight of us at the peak. We filed lawsuits against district attorneys, against police, against grand juries, against businesses like Comcast and national hotels not paying the minimum wage. We got into big fights that we didn't have the resources to fully do, but we had some attorneys that were so talented that they could single-handedly fight entire law firms. I want to tell the story of some of these cases in Davis because it's really just shocking. And I'll remind you, David, in 2006 there was a group called Carol who was trying to advocate for a citizen oversight of the police department. I wrote an opinion editorial with my law partner at the time that was published in the Davis Enterprise defending the right to speak anonymously because the police were trying to go on chat rooms and try to figure out who was behind the citizen's effort at oversight and try to figure out where the money was coming from. So there are a lot of us that have participated, as you are doing, to make this community more progressive and, you know, I think we're all in it together. The case you mentioned, I want to just talk about Khalid's case, the goat case, because it's a fascinating example of obvious bias. He was represented by another attorney that was urging him to take a plea deal. He came to us and asked us if we would handle it. I was worried that if we took the case over, the judge would want us to go to trial like that day because we were substituting in his counsel on trial date. But we got ready, I showed up, I think it was Judge Fall, and they were extremely hostile to somebody representing, you know, his case. And I remember when I appeared in front of him, he said, okay, I understand you're going to be the new attorney on the case. Is that correct? And I said, yes. My name's Mackenzole as I'm going to file a general appearance on the case. And the first thing he said to me was, I'm sorry counsel, did you mean to say yes, your honor? And I said, no, actually I meant to say yes, which is what I said. And that's literally how it started. But this is what happened to Khalid. He was actually, he had gone to, he was Muslim, he had gone to one of the California agricultural schools and was very interested in state-of-the-art technology. He was married to, you know, California, Caucasian, blonde-haired woman. They were a great couple. They had kids. They were super happy, just law-abiding people. And they had the best fencing for goats in this entire region. But goats are pretty crafty. And these guys would charge the fencing and get through it. Not a big deal. You have dogs to round them up. It's a rural area anyway. And rounding them up, it's just something you have to do as a goat rancher. Well, Khalid had a problem which was there was a crop-dusting operation nearby. And if the planes came in too low, the goats would be frightened and charge the fencing.  Typically, it's like getting a parking ticket. It's an administrative code violation. They just write a ticket and you probably pay, I don't know, $5 per goat. I mean, if anybody even cares. In this case, they did criminally prosecute him for over 100 violations. We brought a motion. It's called a Murgia motion that shows discriminatory prosecution. And every other goat rancher, Caucasian goat rancher, came forward to sign declarations that in the same time period, they had had their goats get out more often than him and had never been prosecuted. Never even had a ticket written. And we were able to subpoena those records. And ultimately, it was dismissed when we made these allegations. Judge Fault denied that motion and we threatened to make it as a trial defense when the DA gave up. Another case we handled was the young woman Halima's case. Juvenile charged in a hit-and-run. What had happened was her mother with her brother's mother and the mother's sons had gone to the supermarket. I think it was raining or something. And in parking the vehicle, she bumped another car. They didn't pay any attention to it. It wasn't like a big deal. This was a super minor situation. She went home and I guess someone had written down her license plate and the police came and told her what had happened. She said, oh my God, I'm so sorry. I mean, this is a wealthy family. They've got, you know, good, solid jobs. I mean, they've never been in trouble at all.  I'm so sorry. I absolutely mind it. I was on the way home to get dinner, et cetera, et cetera. She immediately contacted the other party, paid for it, the whole thing. The cops got it in their head that her daughter was driving because whoever saw it thought it was a younger person. And the son said that that wasn't true. The mother, et cetera, et cetera. And literally that got criminally prosecuted. When I appeared in court with my law partner Whitney Lay, African American from Chicago. We had met in law school. Great. Just a brilliant lawyer, the best legal writer I've ever been with. We appeared in front of this judge and he was very unhappy that we were there. And so he started with this sort of like, okay, well, when are you coming back for the pre-trial conference? And we said, well, what about the 16th? No, that's too far away. Okay, how about the 12th? I'm not available on the 12th. Okay, how about the 11th? How about the 10th? I mean, I put out five or six dates. Then I said, well, Your Honor, why don't you select a date and we'll be here? You know, I just said it like that. And he said, you know, counsel, I don't appreciate you talking to me like that. He says, why don't we do this? I'm going to put the matter over till tomorrow and we can pick a date tomorrow. Now he was doing that because he knows we're driving to San Francisco and have to come back. And I appeared on a lot of cases in Davis where that was the deal. They would call my case last. If I walked out of the courtroom, they try to call it. When I wasn't there using the bathroom or something like that, it was really quite ugly. And I represented the head of the housing authority, David Serena, who had a high performing agency. When he traveled, they shared rooms and slept on the floor. I mean, he worked with Cesar Chavez back in the old days. And the Republican grand jury kept issuing reports saying it was a low performing agency and alleging that he was misusing monies and staying in lavish hotels. And we contacted them and said, look, before you issue your report because you did it last year and you did it the year before that, why don't you just tell the truth? I mean, here are the documents, none of this is true. You keep putting out this false information. What was going on was it was all Republicans selected by Republican judges and conservative Democrats. And they were in effect trying to undermine him because he was building housing for poor people. So we filed a lawsuit against the Superior Court and the grand jury in this county in Yolo County and just said, you can't do it. The way you're picking grand jurors is like your friend. There are no Latinos on the grand jury. It's just completely discriminatory. The next week they filed, I don't know, 40-something charges against David for misappropriation of public monies. All felonies. What had he done? Well, he had a girlfriend who he later married and she had two children, minor children, and they were getting medical and dental benefits via his employment with the county. And so they had decided, I think they'd been to the dentist one time. They'd gone to the doctor a couple of times and they decided this was criminal activity. So fortunately for us we had filed a lawsuit against the Superior Court so they recused themselves because they were being sued. And they had to bring in a judge lucky for us from Berkeley, California. You know how this turns out. And they put a death penalty prosecutor on the case who was extremely rude. And I just said, look, a crime has not occurred. We're not going to plead guilty to something. And at the preliminary hearing we're able to show, I forget if it was the medical or the dental benefits, but one of the benefits, in fact, the law did allow these children to get the benefit from him because they were living in his house. And as to the other benefit, they were not entitled to get it. However, my point was he never lied in the application. The county gave him the benefit. He told the truth. He says, no, I'm not married to their mother. They're living in my house, whatever, whatever. Your mistake doesn't make it a crime. He just applied for the benefit and you gave it to him. That's your problem. And if you want him to pay you back, you know, a couple hundred dollars, ask him. And that was that. Let me tell you a couple of things. You know, I know everyone's been sitting a long time and if you're bored by all means leave. But I mean, all these memories are coming back because we really litigated these cases and we cared very deeply about trying to do the right thing. We handled other cases here. I don't recall any of them resulting in a conviction. So it turned out pretty well. The Garcia Zarate case that I handled, you know, just kind of swept up in the, with media attention because of our current president. I may not recall, but he had, well, you recall this, but not the time period with the case I handled. He had announced he was running for president after coming down the escalator at Trump Towers and he disparaged Mexicans and Mexican immigrants and saying, you know, they're not sending their best people, et cetera.  This was a joke candidacy. Two or three weeks later, Kate Steinle dies on Pier 14, a populist tourist location in San Francisco. Young, beautiful, her whole life ahead of her and she's with her father when she gets shot in the back. It seems completely senseless. And my client, Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, in his forties, is arrested. He had been deported, oh, I don't know, about five times. He had seven felony convictions. And so Trump started talking about his case and talking about what a terrible fellow this was. And I was in Colorado when the elected public defender, Jeff Adachi, called me up and said, hey, we've got this case. Will you take this case? And he was wondering if I had bandwidth because I was handling another serious murder case at the time. And I said, sure, I'll do it. All we knew at the time was, you know, he had shot this woman at point-blank range is what we understood. And he had confessed to it, to a TV camera that weekend. And so I went to see him. I flew back the next day. I went to see him. And immediately I could see there were some mental health issues going on, very simple. But he had no violence in his background, no history of any kind of violence. And he just, he didn't know Catherine Steinle. He had no reason to hurt her. This was not like a robbery gone bad. He never committed a robbery. He never committed a theft. This guy was just not the way he was being portrayed. And so we were able to show pretty clearly, but it was hard to get the media to hear this, that he was seated on the pier when the gun was fired. The bullet struck about 12 feet from where he was and traveled another, I believe it was 70 or 80 feet before it struck Steinle in the back. It's a totally freak occurrence.  He got up and split. And that was kind of, that was the case. I started realizing that his prior convictions were actually very minor when you broke them down. And I want to talk to you a little bit about them because one of the takeaways is how bad immigration law is and how things like sanctuary city and Kate's law get wrapped up into a narrative that, you know, it's like, it doesn't fit. This isn't the right case to be dealing with national legislative solutions. Here's why. He had in the early 1990s while he was up in the state of Washington, he had some, what were drug cases. Today, they would all be misdemeanors. They were basically drug possession. However, in like 1993, he pled guilty to one for possession for sale. Now the report, I read it, he had no money on him and there was residue in a plastic baggie. The police thought he was in a drug transaction. They offered him, I don't know, credit for time served deal if he pled guilty for possession for sale. He pled to, it's not a big deal. He already had some felonies. And these were, this is drug activity in between his laborer jobs and out of season while he's just trying to survive. Well, the federal law, it's 8 USC 1326. Chuck mentioned this statute because it relates to illegal entry into the United States. And I want to break it down for you like this. If you come from Mexico, the United States without documentation, you're going to get deported. Maybe you'll be in custody for a little bit before they deport you. Maybe you'll get six months or a year. Maybe if you're a repeat offender, they'll hold you for a couple of years. But that's pretty much, that's it. The universe is relatively, you know, you know what it is. However, if you have been deported on what's called an aggravated felony, murder, rape, all the sex crimes, explosives, right?  And if you come back to the United States, you're facing 20 years and it's not a joke, like you'll get a lot of jail time. Okay, that kind of makes some sense. If you did a serious crime here, we really don't want you back. Problem is aggravated felony includes murder, rape, all those offenses and any amount of drug trafficking. So any marijuana felony, the sale or possession for sale, any small amount of any other contraband means that Garcia Zarate, when he played guilty for possession for sale for virtually no jail time to some residue in a bag, he's now facing 20 years every time he comes here. First time he came, they negotiated it, five-year sentence. He appeared in court, I think, two times.  They catch him, he's committed no crime other than entering. They negotiate six years. He does six years, gets deported, comes back, they offer him seven years this time. So he does five, six, seven, okay? Part of why he keeps coming back is he doesn't understand why he's getting the jail time because he's got, like, some cognitive issues. And so he doesn't understand, like, what he did to merit this, and so he's not changing his behavior. So the feds are about to deport him, but San Francisco has an old warrant for him. It's a 20-year-old marijuana case, and they've ignored it every other time they've deported him. But this time they bring him to San Francisco. San Francisco, he appears in a courtroom, they dismiss it immediately, and the feds don't pick him up because the San Francisco sheriff wants there to be a legitimate warrant or probable cause document from the courts to release him to the feds. The feds don't get the document. San Francisco actually holds him in custody for about two or three weeks without any legal reason, and finally they just let him out in the street. He goes out on the street, he's just living on the Embarcadero, he's wearing clothes he found. They won't hire him in the Mexican restaurants, but they feed him a little bit. He doesn't beg for money, he doesn't steal. He literally looks so poor when people are walking by in an affluent tourist area that people just give him their leftover dinners that they're taking home. They're like, oh my God, would you like this? That's literally how he's surviving. And he does that for about three months before this incident happens. And he swears up and down, he found a gun at the seat that he sat down on the pier, wrapped up in something. He investigated it and it fired the bullet. And that's what he said. Now, it was hard for people to believe that you could actually find a gun on the pier, wrapped up. But then stop and think about it. We have over 100 million guns in our society. I mean, it's a crazy number. There are accidental shootings that happen every day. I think it's something like 40 every day. If somebody dies, I think the numbers, three people die every two days from an accidental shooting.  It was grainy, but it revealed something very significant, which was before Garcia Zarate sat down at that chair. There was a congregation of about six, seven people. They had a nap sack or a bag with them. They were talking. They were there. They were together for about 20 minutes. They weren't tourists. This is a pier that everybody walks on to, walks down to the end, looks at the site and walks off, which is what Catherine Steinle was doing with her father. Garcia Zarate didn't do that because he's just a homeless guy sitting on a chair swiveling around. But these people could very well have been discarding a gun. Now, why would they discard the gun? It turned out to belong to a Bureau of Land Management Ranger who had left it unsecured in his vehicle, and it had been stolen a few days earlier. And we argued very clearly that Garcia Zarate had no history for stealing. He had not tried to offer any object for sale in the preceding days that he was arrested.  And there were other things of value stolen from the vehicle, laptop computers, credit cards, all kinds of stuff. There were many things that happened during the trial that frustrated us because I felt the judge wanted a different outcome. He is a Schwarzenegger appointment, and he did a lot of things that we think resulted in Garcia Zarate not getting a fair trial. Now, he was found not guilty of the murder and manslaughter charges, and that's why it was celebrated as a big victory. But he was convicted of gun possession, and I'll give you an idea of why that shouldn't have happened. Basically, the judge would not instruct the jury on this idea of a momentary possession. And think of it this way.  And I say, oh, have a look, and you open it, look in it, and there's contraband in there, and you put it on the ground. You say, I don't want this. You hand it back to me. Have you committed the crime of possessing that contraband? Well, I think the answer is no. You didn't know. You had no knowledge. And once you had knowledge, and it was in your hand, the only possession you had was to get rid of it. Well, that was what we were trying to explain to the judge, that, look, Garcia Zarate did not know it was a gun. He's handling it. It fires. At that moment, the jury says, well, it is in his hands. Is he guilty of possession? And they asked for instructions from the judge, and he would not properly instruct them on the law. There were a lot of other things that happened. The Bureau of Land Management Officer was allowed to testify to all the safety precautions he took, but the judge wouldn't let us tell the jury that he actually had a second loaded firearm in the car, also not secured properly, that had not been stolen. Things like that. And one of the things that, in the course of this trial, that was most frustrating was that the firearm that he had was an elite firearm that can be fired with a very low trigger pull. The factory trigger pull of this gun, when it's in single action mode, is like 4.4 pounds. And this is a gun without a safety. It's meant for law enforcement to be able to reach for this gun and start firing, not to be messing around with the safety. This is a gun you have as a secondary weapon that you reach for if you're in trouble. That's the concept. It's a very well-made firearm, but it's got a very light trigger pull. So we were trying to demonstrate how low the trigger pull was to the jury, and we were making a simulator that couldn't actually fire a bullet, but would allow a jury to test the simulator. We had a firearms expert in Canada making the simulator, and we told the court about it. We weren't in possession of it yet, but it was in the mail to us, and we told them when we got it we would turn it over to the DA. They could test it and the whole thing. Well, the DA was very upset. So there was no simulator. We're going to object if the jury should see the real gun. So we said, fine, let them test the trigger pull on the real gun. The judge said, great, we're all in agreement. Well, a few days later, the DA changes her mind. Before I can even be heard on the subject, the judge agrees with her. And so the DA argued to the jury that 4.4 pounds is like lifting a 5-pound bag of sugar. That's what it takes to fire this gun. When the truth was squirt guns, our expert tested some children's squirt guns at trigger pulls of like 4 pounds. I mean, this is a very light trigger pull, and this was the kind of gamesmanship that was happening in court. Anyway, I could go on and on. Let me just say a couple of other things about the law. I mentioned this idea of this illegal re-entry based on the aggravated felony. I want to just say about sanctuary city. I think it hurts us when everybody is presenting sanctuary city as a municipality fighting the federal authority and that we want to have our own laws and we don't have to follow what the feds are doing. I don't think that that works because we're a nation of laws and that seems to make sense to people. They don't understand what are we going to do, be ruled by local authorities when there's federal law. And here's why that argument is wrong. What has happened in a 10-year period, it was proven that ICE and Homeland Security arrested 1,500 U.S. citizens by mistake. They put detainers on them. They would call the sheriff of a county and say, put a detainer on that person, we're going to deport them. It turned out they got it wrong 1,500 times in that time period. So the courts in Nevada, North Dakota, Rhode Island, I think Utah, a number of different places said, no, no, no, you can't do it that way. You have to present probable cause, a warrant, a probable cause instrument that says this person is not a citizen and subject to deportation. We have to see that before the municipality does what you want. That's what's actually going on. It's the federal authorities, ICE and Homeland Security that don't want to follow federal law. It's the municipality that's following federal law because federal law gets interpreted by the courts. And that's really the fight.  Why is it that there's so many people here in this country that appear to be here without documentation? Like was it always this way when I was growing up? Was it this way? It just seems so peculiar that this is so much a thing. And it turns out that in 1952 there was a national immigration law that was passed that changed something in the law that is causing the problem that we have now. And it relates to something in law that we call statute of limitations.  So like let's say, unless it's murder, right, there's no statute of limitations on the crime of murder. But let's say you commit a misdemeanor. Some states you have to be prosecuted within a year or within three years. Some states with felonies have three years statute of limitations. Some maybe go to five years. And what this means is I could admit to doing a crime 10 years ago, hey, I stole that stuff from you when we were roommates. I'm sorry I shouldn't have done it.  Well, this law in 1952 changed the statute of limitations for illegally entering the country. Because that's the crime, right? You illegally entered the country without documentation. So the clock starts the day you entered. And let's say five years later, they can't prosecute you for it. Now you're not a citizen, so you have to apply to become a citizen. But the law had a built-in amnesty. What did the law do? The law changed the statute of limitations not to start running from when you entered, but to start running from when you were discovered here without documentation. Which meant you never obtained amnesty. And that's why you've had this proliferation of these cases. Anyway, I've talked enough. It's a real delight to be back and to David and Cecilia. I really appreciate everything you guys have done because from the very outset, I mean you guys just took on so much. You were always supportive. Anytime we needed anything, they were there 100%. And congratulations on this event and everything you've done. Thank you. So we do have a little bit of time for audience questions. And there are mics on the side of the room. Try to actually ask a question if you're interested rather than making a statement. Because we don't have a lot of time. But if you have a question, you can get up behind the mic and ask it. Or if you just want to go, then that's fine too. So I don't know. Does anyone have a question? I've got a question. Okay, perfect. For Mr. Gonzalez, if you don't mind. There's a scenario going on right now in Guatemala where we have like seven or eight thousand Guatemalans or whatever is going on in those central countries that may be reaching the border within the next two to three weeks. And the dummy in the White House has sent like 800 troops to the border. They may not all get there, the seven or eight thousand, but some of these people are going to wind up at the border from my understanding, you know, they're escaping a life of crime being committed against them. What happens there once they get to the border? Well, I think for me, I'm most interested in the kind of rhetoric of how these folks are perceived because, you know, it's very different. Like the way you think of like illegal immigration, you know, undocumented people coming here, when you understand that they're fleeing American foreign policy decisions, then you get it. Like there's like literally the tens of thousands of guns that we have sold into Mexico contributing to the rampant crime there and the drug cartels, or you take something like NAFTA where you've got, you know, our subsidizing of American corn so it can be sold for less than it can be grown in Mexico means that you're putting Mexican farmers out of work. And it starts to feel different about why are they are coming. And I think, you know, I'm not an expert in foreign policy, but I think the same argument goes for folks coming from Central America. So many of those nations are ravaged by, you know, certainly the 20th century, United States, you know, really undermining of democratic regimes, etc. There. What's going to happen when they get here? I mean, folks can come and make application for asylum. I think that that's going to be the process. The question of whether or not Trump's tactics of trying to harm people physically and mentally to injure them so much that they give up. I mean, I don't know how that plays out. I am bothered that a rule like illegal reentry for an aggravated felony that applies to any amount of marijuana sale has been on the books for God, two, three decades. I mean, ever since I've been a lawyer and even the Democrats have got to change that law. Sure. I wonder if you could advise us in the vanguard or any tonight about concrete things we can do, like it's disturbing to read the story about Maria. What do we do? I think last year we knew what to do. We worked for a new public defender and we came, I mean district attorney and we've came close, but what do we do this year? Well, one thing I like to do is I like to write the truth and I like to put people's names in those articles and make them read about the injustices that they're engaged in because it bothers them. And when they're friends or they Google themselves, these articles are out there in the world. And I'll tell you, we had some public defenders run for judge and in San Francisco it was very hard to beat incumbents but they ran against conservative judges. And the judges were sitting court of appeal judges and a state supreme court judge basically got out there and were writing, you know, letters and editorials to the legal paper saying what an outrage it was and every lawyer should oppose this kind of attack on the judiciary. It was all rubbish, right? But one of the judges that signed on to a letter was a supreme court judge, Democratic appointed, who basically taught at Stanford, I mean my alma mater. He never even did a deposition. He'd never tried a case.  And I didn't say it that way but the point was made which was, you know, this is democracy. People are running for office. If you don't want judicial elections then change the Constitution.  So I think it's very effective. That's just something you have to do. You'll get better at writing things. My writing has gotten better. You may be a great writer to start with but I just mean, you know, and whether you publish it in the newspaper or you create your own places to publish it. People read it and find it. And it gets circulated. Everybody knows the details of what's happening to somebody and they can join forces and the powers that be feel the pressure. Hi, my name is Desiree Rojas and I'm a resident of Davis. For many years we have been fighting this DA, Jeff Rising. He attacked Maria Grihava. We were part of the community that supported Maria. Thank God they dropped the, I guess it was a complaint. So in the press conference that we had before she entered the courthouse, we stated in our press statement that we are demanding that Javier Veseda, the Attorney General, to conduct expeditiously an investigation into prosecutorial misconduct. And so my question is, what can we do to really put the pressure on him to do his job to get this DA to start the investigation? Well, I think the State Attorney General has a good reputation and I don't know him personally. I've heard him speak. But personally, I like when, you know, a lot of times people in authority hide behind the strict reading of the law to say, well I'm just, you know, charging you with a crime that you may have committed and it looks like you committed. A very powerful tool is the case I mentioned earlier, the Murgia case, which basically allows you to get your case dismissed if you can show discriminatory prosecution. And in this case, you have a Latina woman who is being singled out. The question is, is there anybody of any other category, you know, in terms of gender or race, that they have not criminally prosecuted, that they could have for the very same thing? It's a very powerful tool and it's been used, I've used it successfully to allege that, hey, why are you only arresting the Latino guys selling drugs in the city square and not the African-Americans or Caucasian guys who have a marijuana club around the corner or whatever, or, you know, out at San Quentin. There would be fights in the jail and only the African-American guys who get prosecuted in the county courthouse. The Caucasian guys that gotten fights out, it's an administrative matter, we'll deal with it in-house. That's a Murgia motion. And what Murgia does is it gives you, if you can make a showing that there appears that there might be discrimination here, you can ask to subpoena and to make the prosecution turn over the records that you need to prove your situation. So, for instance, in the marijuana case, a Latino arrested in a drug case, I put together a declaration with the names of 40 or 50 other guys being charged for the same offense, all of whom were Latino. So, I was saying, okay, here, I'm showing you all the guys being prosecuted. I want to see the records, like, show me who's being arrested so I can figure out why you're not prosecuting them. And so that's worth asking a lot of questions in trying to sort that out. And if you've got a district attorney that has run for office, I would scrutinize his own campaign finances, you know? That's a great idea. Thank you. Hi. You said a few minutes ago that local municipalities want to obey the laws, but it's the feds that don't, and it's pretty obvious we know that. So, I'm trying to understand the mentality, and this is a pattern throughout the Trump administration, not just locally or with immigration issues, but I'm trying to understand this whole thing that they do, not wanting to follow the laws. Is it because they think, well, first of all, it's arrogance, we know that, and it's a lot of other things, but do they think we're going to push it until someone sues us, or do we think, or do they think the laws don't apply to them, or do they think, what's this mentality that's pervasive? Well, they're bullies, fundamentally, and what they're doing is they're going to put pressure to make Congress change the law. So, or to get judges on the bench that aren't going to agree with those other judges, and what they're doing is they're basically saying, rather than follow the law, we're going to ignore it, and every time someone like Catherine Steinle gets hurt, we're just going to blame the municipality.  They have the long view, and they're willing to let a lot of people get hurt in the process, unfortunately. Thank you all very much. Thank you, Matt. Thank you, everybody, for coming tonight, and thank you to all our speakers and everybody who spent their time here. Thanks.


Welcome to the second part. Make sure you watch the first part because the second part, strangely, is a continuation of the first part. So I was saying at the end of the first part that the Great Recession damaged young workers to such an extent that they have never succeeded to recover. Generation X, for example, did recover. It regains, recaptured, big part of the lost employment. Almost all the boomers covered all the ground that they had lost, but young workers have never recovered. And the reason they have never recovered is a structural transformation in the economy. It's an economy of self-employment, economy of temporary workers. There's a consolidation of employers. Employers are not dictating the terms. It's a buyer's market. There's less vocational education. So millennials were affected by these structural changes in the economy. The Great Recession put a lid, put a hole on all this and created a kind of two-track labor market. They are very, very high-paying jobs which go to college graduates and post-graduates, especially in STEM, certain professions. STEM is science, technology and so on, mathematics. In these areas, there's high-paying jobs. People with college education generally make more money than people with a high school diploma. And all the others make a pittance. And the problem is that even people who have attained this level of education and therefore gained entry into the higher-paying segment of the employment of the workforce, even they are hobbled and buried under enormous debt, student debt, student loans. Take for example the fact that in 2004, the first millennials graduated college and they entered the market. At that time, the total student debt was $260 billion with a B. Only 14 years later, just 2018, when the youngest millennials were graduating, the figure was $1.5 trillion, six times higher in 14 years. And so in various surveys and in various studies, for example by Fed economists, Salvaro Mesa and Daniel Ringo, Camila Sommer, etc., etc., there was a direct correlation, there was a direct connection between the decline in home ownership and the increase in student loan debts since 2005. There's about 400,000 individuals who wanted to buy a home in 2014 and couldn't because of their student loans. And so, as unaccounted a policy analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis wrote recently, if people enter the labor force during a recession and they get into lower-paying jobs that carries forward for much of their lifelong working careers, that's going to have impacts on not only their income but their wealth and also their ability to save for a down payment and their ability to meet other lifetime goals. The Sensors Bureau, there's a guy, an economist there called Kevin Rins, the Sensors Bureau published only last year, that millennial employment recovered to some extent in the decade after the Great Recession but millennial earnings, millennial wages never did. Don't forget that boomers and even generation X, they derive a lot of income from investments, investments in stocks, investment in bonds. Millennials don't have discussion, they don't have home equity, in other words, they don't have homes which they own having paid the mortgage and they don't have investments in stocks and bonds. And so, in various studies, for example, Danny Yegan in the University of California, Berkeley and others, it's been demonstrated that the average millennial had lost 13% of his wages, his earnings between 2005 and 2017. And this is way more than generation X, generation X had lost 9% and it's double what the boomers had lost, they had lost 7%. And so, baby boomer earnings have largely recovered but millennials remain stuck, remain stuck way below where they should have been. And then figures are staggering, people younger than 45 years old, they had lost all their breath, remain seated, people under age 45 had lost 50% of their wealth from 1989. One half shaved, gun, it's called in finance industry, a haircut, that's not a haircut, that's a head cut. All the people, you know, generation X and especially boomers, they didn't lose anything of their wealth, they doubled it. Millennials have lost 50%, boomers have doubled their wealth. Millennials, as I said, have zero housing equity. You know, there was a study, they asked people, if you faced a $400 medical emergency, could you manage it?  About one-eighth of the population couldn't manage $400, even if they tapped friends and credit cards and so on and so forth. And among these, millennials are way overrepresented, way overrepresented. And so, millennials get married and have children much, much later. And you know, children is a form of social equity, it's a kind of social investment. If children take care of you, when you retire, children also are a form of medical insurance because they take care of their medical needs in nursing homes, care homes. I mean, watch reporting from the pandemic and you will see young people, younger people taking care of fathers, mothers, grandmothers, grandfathers in nursing homes and care homes. Children have always been a kind of long-term deferred investment in social equity. And so, the millennials get married late and have children late. They marry a whopping 10 years later than boomers. And they have children seven years later than boomers had. And they own homes six years later, if at all, the majority of them don't. And so, the irony is that all the previous generations misbehaved, the boomers misbehaved. They were narcissistic. They were sex-starved. They were solipsistic. They were selfish. They were egomaniacal. They were aggressive. I mean, boomers were really the piece. It's the worst generation in many ways. Generation X was into the high-tech bubble and this and that and they were like all over the place. They were kind of playboys, more or less. Fortunes were lost. Finance industry, high-tech industry, all over the world. The world was opening. International trade is triple. I mean, it was a party time. The millennials were the first one who did everything right. For example, millennials are the most educated generation ever. Never mind now that the level of education has declined. Because universities are more interested in money than in teaching. They had become actually mega corporations. And so anyone who can spell his name with fewer than two mistakes in the spelling can enter. I agree. Education is much. But ignoring these facts for a minute, ignoring functional illiteracy, which is at an all-time high, ignoring a rising tide of narcissism and grandiosity among millennials, documented by the likes of Twainj and Campbell and others, putting all this aside. Technically and formally, millennials are the most educated. And one thing is for sure, millennials live within their means. They are not overspenders. They don't charge their credit cards without cover. They don't go into overdrafts. They don't take loans and debts. So they are very, very responsible people. They're very serious people. And when millennials are educated, when they have relevant degrees in STEM and so on and so forth, they compare well with boomers and Generation X, although they still get paid less. But the less educated millennials, they are in a horrible situation. Not only do they lag behind the educated peers, but they also lag behind less educated members of earlier generations. So there's an education divide between the generations. Not only an income divide, not only urban versus rural, not only white versus minorities, but there's also an education divide. All these were fault lines, fractures, widely exposed by the pandemic. And institutions that we had built to cope with these things, great societies, social welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, these, they ended up hijacked by older generations. Income inequality reflects a generational accumulation of wealth in the hands of few boomers and older people, even. So 12% of all workers can't cover a $400 emergency expense, even with the help of family credit cards, according to what I've mentioned before. It's a study by Kent from the Federal Reserve. And these 12% are white folks. If you look at non-Hispanic black millennials, figure is 32%. Hispanic millennials, 20%. Millennial women, 17%. All millennials with less than a bachelor's degree, no higher education, 25%. So situation disproportionately affects millennials. It's a millennial problem. The lack of savings, the lack of financial well-withal, living with the parents until very late, getting married late, and everything is late. Everything is much later. And yet millennials keep doing the right thing. They keep adhering to the tenets of the American dream. They keep behaving responsibly, properly. They invested their education, they spend within their means. They work hard. And it's not working. This is the lens of the pandemic. This is the prism. This is the mirror that the pandemic is putting to us. The American dream is not a dream. It's a nightmare. And it's not working. It never did, by the way. Social mobility in America was the lowest among industrialized nations. The thing is that Anglo-Saxon capitalism became the dominant means of arranging production all over the world. Even China is capitalist. Even North Korea is becoming capitalistic. Capitalism. Capitalism is bankrupt with this pandemic. If you tack on capitalism, if you take capitalism, the failure of capitalism, the market failure, the structural failure, the endless boom and bust cycles, which have become much more rapid, owing to rapid transmission of information via technology and so on. If you take all this, put together and add to it the pandemic and add to it income inequality. That's it. It's a bankruptcy of capitalism. And it's going to be replaced by something which I call neo-feudalism. I suggested this 30 years ago in an article. We are heading to an age of neo-feudalism. We're a tiny, tiny elite of boomers with loads of money and wealth. When I say loads of money and wealth, I don't think you realize what I'm talking about. 10,000 people in the United States own more than half of the national wealth. So these people are going to employ slaves in all but name, slaves in all but name. And there are already new corporate structures and organizational principles like Uber, where people are not employees, but so-called contractors, glorified slaves. And so, millennials, although they do try to save, they spend less than they earn. And although 52% of millennials were already saving for retirement at age 34, compared to 42% of boomers, which had retirement savings. In other words, although millennials behave much more responsibly, physically and monetarily, the pecuniary character of millennials is much healthier, profile. They are still screwed. The most educated, most diverse, perhaps the zoomers will surpass them, we have to see. But at this stage, they're the most educated, most diverse, most responsible, most everything.  And so, what happens is that millennials are taking their wages and the wealth that they're creating, and they are transferring it in the form of student loans and own mortgages to boomers. Boomers who own the financial institutions, boomers who own politics, boomers who conflate politics with money and create a plutocracy. There is a shocking sentence in one of the reports. The parents of millennials and public authorities funded less of their college education than previous generations. And if you break down this picture and start to look at African Americans, I mean, the picture is much more horrific. Much more horrific because these groups have suffered from systemic discrimination. There is now a series of wealth gaps. The wealth gaps between black and white is a well-known, well-documented thing. The wealth gaps between educational levels, wealth gaps between men and women, income gaps, but there is a new wealth gap which dwarfs all of them. And that's a wealth gap between old and young. That's according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. And so, what's the picture that the pandemic has exposed? You're young, you're screwed.   You're an marginalized group, forget it. Everyone is falling behind. You're educated. You know what you can do with that. You know, of 10 multi-billionaires in the United States today, of the Forbes 500, of the Forbes list of billionaires, very few are college educated actually. This myth that education leads you to riches, it's part of the narrative, the fake narrative of the confabulation of the American dream. Education leads you to higher lifetime earnings, but within a very narrow strip, within a very narrow range, and only compared to your peers. Bill Gates didn't finish university. Stephen Shops didn't finish university. So when you look at millennials, when you look at these groups, it's true.  But the wages of that college, of that graduate or postgraduate, the wages have been stagnant for decades. And the wealth has been a wealth transfer, even from educated people, especially from educated people, to boomers and older generations who are not so educated, or not educated at all, narcissistic, grandiose, selfish, disempathic. In short, dare I say, psychopathic. Labor department data shows that women, Hispanic workers, and the less educated are overrepresented among unemployed millennials. And these trends are growing during the pandemic. Everything we have seen either to is just going to grow during this pandemic, until it reaches a bursting explosive point. And then we will have to see, that's how social revolutions start. Similar trends in income inequality have happened in the 1920s and led, of course, to Nazism and fascism and communism. Similar trends happened at the end of the 18th century and they have inexorably led to the French Revolution and later on to 1848 revolutions throughout Europe. This kind of fissures, this kind of friction, this kind of conflict leads to systemic social revolutions. And in these social revolutions, the heaps become have not and the heaps not don't acquire anything. Social revolutions are all in all destructive of wealth. They're not cumulative, they are dissipative, they dissipate. And so we are headed into a period of history where everything we've worked for, everything we've built, everything we've accumulated, starting with knowledge and ending with money, starting with factories and ending with international trade, starting with tourism and ending with interpersonal relationships. Everything is going to be placed under such a normal strain that are not optimistic that it will survive. I want to finish by responding to one recurrent question about shared fantasy. People keep saying it's wrong to say that if the partner exit the shared fantasy, the narcissist is not interested in the partner anymore. I've received numerous emails, comments, messages, it's all true. I exited the shared fantasy with the narcissist and he hoovered me back and he was all over me and he was on the contrary, he was contrite, he was repentant, he begged me to come back and it's all true. But that's all I said. I said that if the partner exits the shared fantasy, exits the shared fantasy by cheating, only by cheating and then causes modification. So there are three cumulative conditions, renouncing the shared fantasy, cheating, I mean sexual cheating or romantic or emotional cheating and modification of the narcissistic partner. Then the narcissist goes away. Following modification, the narcissist avoids the source of intolerable, unbearable, pain and vexation. That's all I said. Thank you for listening.


Let's bump it, Bemidji coming off her first round by as the four seed opening up against Alexandria opening set, Addie Colligan, the assist, the Taylor Wade here, she'll put it away for the kill, they have the early lead and later in the set this time Colligan to fellow senior McKenna Quinn and get out of the way, Jax are rolling then Colligan showing off the hops at the net, gets up for the stuff, they take the first 25-21 then more in the second, Jenna Lewis, the nicely placed ace, Bemidji wins the first two sets but Alexandria comes back to win the next three in dramatic fashion, a shocking upset, but what a great season for the Jax. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


The White House annually evaluates the nation's young scientists and engineers, looking to honor those with the greatest promise. The leaders receive the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, or PCAS. Each year they look at individuals across the country who are supported by different agencies of the federal government, in particular scientists and engineers, and find those that exemplify creativity, accomplishment, outreach, leadership, and other positive attributes, and they select a very small subset. This year there were 12 that were selected who were supported by the National Institutes of Health, 10 are supported through grants from the National Institutes of Health, and two work here on the Bethesda campus within the intramural program. We're very fortunate that the two intramural scientists that win 2007 PCAS awards are both here in the National Human Genome Research Institute. The Genome Institute winners are Dr. Elliot Margolies, head of the Genome Informatics Section in the Genome Technology Branch, and Dr. Daphne Bell, head of the Reproductive Cancer Genetics Section in the Cancer Genetics Branch. The 2007 PCAS awards were just announced in December 2008, and in this information-intense world, the young winners learned about it in a fairly casual way. He actually informed me by email. No, and I usually get other types of emails from Michael, Goddusman, related to parking or, you know, the holiday schedule and so forth, but seeing this email was like late on a Friday, and it was actually addressed to me, I was high Elliot, and so that was like, oh, wait a second, this is something a little bit different. To be a recipient of the PCAS award is extremely prestigious, and I'm very honored to have been selected. You get it for having potential as a young scientist in the field of science or engineering. And it's basically to recognize those scientists and engineers that are really quickly rising stars, if you will. And certainly the two individuals here at NHGRI that are this year awardees fit that category well. We know frighteningly little about our genome sequence. A lot of people have heard about things called genes, which code for proteins, but it turns out this only makes up about one or two percent of the three billion bases in our genome. And trying to figure out what the rest of the 98 percent does in a nutshell is what my research program is all about. Certainly that two percent is very important. It's about 20 or so thousand genes, but we've got to turn them on and off at the right place at the right time. So these things we call them enhancers to turn on genes or silencers to turn off genes. And understanding that language, what encodes an enhancer, what's the specific order of A's, C's, G's and T's that would encode that is something we don't quite understand yet. One of the ways that my lab tries to tackle this question is through comparing our genome to that of other species' genomes, effectively using the experiments of evolution over the last millions and millions of years to try and tease out those places in the genome that we think are important or do something, we call those functional regions. And that's been a very helpful tool to find other places in the genome besides those places that code for genes that might be important because we don't really have to know how something is encoded to be functional, but we can tease out that evolutionary signature that says, you know what, this is a region that hasn't changed across millions and millions of years, so it must be important. In addition to understanding how the genome works, the team Dr. Margolies leads also develops new research tools. The other half of my lab is involved in using new sequencing technologies to address current challenges in genomics research. And over the last few years, we've seen a phenomenal explosion in the amount of sequence somebody in the lab can generate on a daily basis, both with cost and time so we can generate a lot more sequence, a lot faster, and a lot cheaper. Cheaper and faster sequencers can speed up the search for the genetic roots of a disease. When you're attacking a complex disease, there are kind of two approaches that you can take. You can analyze somebody's entire genome and do that for a few people and try and narrow down regions of the genome that are important. But the other way, once you've narrowed down certain regions that you think are important, whether they're genes or an entire genomic loci, parts of chromosomes, then what really becomes powerful is sequencing that part of the genome in many, many, many people. And that, there's always going to be a need for that because as we're finding, you know, people's DNA is more different than we might expect. Cancer is a genetic disease, making it an ideal candidate for these kinds of studies. My lab is trying to understand the genetic changes that actually lead to the development of a particular type of cancer known as endometrial cancer. Endometrial cancer is a tumor that arises within the lining of the uterus, or the womb, and affects about 32,000 women annually in the U.S. Most women present at an early stage in their disease, and their disease is actually still confined to the uterus, and by having a hysterectomy, they essentially have a cure. But about 15% of women have aggressive tumors, and what we mean by that is the tumor has already spread beyond the uterus by the time they're presented to a physician to give a sense of the importance of endometrial cancer. About 7,500 women die from endometrial cancer each year just in the U.S. alone. The major technique that we're using to unravel the genetic alterations in endometrial cancer is DNA sequencing, where we can read the sequence of genes that we think might be likely to cause the cancer in DNA from the patient's tumor, and compare that sequence with the DNA from a normal piece of tissue from the same patient, and we look for the differences to tell us which part of the sequences has been altered in the tumor. At the moment, we're looking at close to 200 different genes in the tumor set that we have. Dr. Bell's group is not just focusing on individual mutations, but on the biochemical pathways that control growth of individual cells. Understanding these pathways could have an impact on many different types of tumors. From our understanding of cancer genetics as a whole, we understand that it's really the pathway that's important to be destroyed or disrupted, and tumors can actually disrupt the pathway by either knocking out genes at certain parts along its length, and so based on that information, you can select pretty good candidate genes. Obviously, there will be genes and pathways that you'll miss, but it's a pretty good starting point. Understanding the genetic changes in these cancer-promoting pathways should lead to new ways of diagnosing the disease, and hopefully even to the development of new treatments. These are two individuals that came into NHGRI after international searches. We brought them here recognizing that they were stars, but it's gratifying to see that other people recognize them as exemplary scientists as well.