So thank you very much for having me over here. I'm always delighted to come back to Ireland. There are many personal and very affectionate memories of people who I got to know here. But the story I cannot resist telling my older son, who is a violinist, in 2007, he's a classical violinist in 2007, he said, I want to learn to play the Irish fiddle. And I said, OK. And he said, I'm going to a town called Dingle in Ireland. And I found a teacher who will teach me. And so he came to Dingle. And by some coincidence, I was here. So I went and visited him in Dingle. And my son, Krish, has grown up to be a very distinguished violinist. He still plays the Irish fiddle a little bit. When he comes to Dingle, he plays in the pubs over there. And we, as the family, have accompanied him many times on holidays to Dingle. So we have a broader family connection to Ireland, which we love very much. So this book is called Euro Tragedy. It is actually out for those of you who want to read it on Kindle. I think it'll be sold in Europe, starting in about 10 days. It's already selling in the United States. And it's a large book. For anybody who has seen it, probably no one in this room has seen it, but it's a large book. It's 670 pages, 480 pages of which are text. And the other 200 are notes and references. Even my daughter-in-law was very impressed. She said, you've got all these references. I said, yeah, I do. So in making these presentations, of which I'm making several, the task has been that I'm not trying to summarize the book because I wouldn't do justice to each part of the book. And so I'm taking slices of the book for different audiences. And telling that one story in as best its completion as I can. And the story that I'm going to tell you today is Europe ended up someplace else. So I didn't realize that I don't know how much of it. So there are not many slides that have text. Most of the slides have pictures on them. But the basic thesis, some of which we discussed at lunch, for those of you who do not remember, there was something called the Werner Commission report in October 1970. The Werner Commission report is the first blueprint of the euro. And in many ways, the euro as it exists today is exactly as the Werner Commission report described it would function. And the Werner Commission report made a very important statement that the euro as a monetary instrument will create the basis for a political union. So it was not just going to be a monetary union. It would act as a leaven for political union was the phrase the Werner Commission report used. At the time, there were other similar thesis which talked about how Europe would fall forward into a political union. The falling forward thesis being that there would be crises. And as Europe stumbled in each of these crises, it would get up and in a more unified, politically unified way, ultimately reaching some goal of political union. And it's in this sense that people would often call the euro a political project. And then there were those who said, this is silly. This will never happen. The first person who said this was Nicky Calder. Again, some of you in this room may know Nicky Calder. He was one of the great economists of the 20th century, a University of Cambridge economist. And he in an almost instant response to the Werner Commission report saying, the euro will divide Europe, will amplify the divergence, economic divergence amongst the member countries. Because a single monetary policy will be too strong for the weak countries, will be too easy for the strong countries. Therefore, the weaker countries will struggle. The strong countries will do better. The economic divergence which exists will get amplified. And he said, as the economic divergence gets amplified, the political divisions will deepen. And Calder ends with this very dramatic statement, the house divided against itself cannot stand.  Calder was an Anglo-Saxon. So he could be disregarded. So there's a whole process of European thinking that Anglo-Saxons are not quite legitimate. And I'm an Anglo-Saxon too. I'm described as an Anglo-Saxon in European settings because I work in America and I teach at an American university. Therefore, I must be an Anglo-Saxon too. But there were insiders. There were insiders. Very important insider was a guy named Robert Marjolene. For those of you who will remember, Robert Marjolene was one of the key architects of the Treaty of Rome, perhaps the most magnificent achievement of Europe. Robert Marjolene in a 1974 report said this is a really bad idea. And he repeated that several times in 1918, some public lectures in New York in 1986 in his memoirs, he said this is going to divide Europe and it will divide Europe because European nations are not willing to give up the core responsibilities of a sovereign state. And as long as you're not willing to give up the core responsibilities of a sovereign state, which is essentially in this context the taxation authority, the tax and spending authority, there can be no euro that is functionally stable. Therefore, the divisions will continue and the divisions will grow. And therefore, this is not going to end happily. Marjolene also was disregarded. And so you get the euro. So this is Chancellor Kohl, again, for those of you who can recognize him. And Chancellor Kohl is throwing the Deutsche mark into this cauldron of the euro. And the German public was deeply opposed to giving up the Deutsche mark to accept the euro. And so the political bargain in Germany was a bargain that Kohl then stated very directly in the Bundestag, is that Germans will never pay the bills of other countries. So you get the euro on a German promise to the German people that Germany will not pay the bills of other countries. That is the euro that is ultimately constructed because there was no other euro that was possible. If it had not been for that euro, there would have been no euro. I think it's very important to remember that, because there's always an idealized and romanticized notion of what the euro could be and can be. The understanding has to be clear that the Germans have been told for a generation that they will not pay the bills of others. And this is true even up to today, not just in the community of people who support the Christian Democratic Union, but also in the Social Democratic Party. The wide sort of deep understanding amongst the broad swath of German public is that Germans will not pay the bills of others. There's a small group, small elite, that has sort of a very sort of romanticized view of what Germany can and should do. But the broad German public has no appetite for paying the bills of others. And that's why you get all these national stereotypes anytime the Germans have to do something. So I don't know how many people recognize this. This is an American baseball player, Yogi Berra, who is well known for his aphorisms. So if you don't know where you're going, you're going to end up someplace else. He has similar sort of phrases like, if you reach a fork in the road, take it. But I thought this was quite appropriate, that Europe did not know where it was going, and so has ended up someplace else. Where it was going was supposed to be some revision of political union. It's ended up, the Euro has divided Europe in very important ways. So I'm going to show you a number of pictures on what I mean by the phrase, Europe is a divided continent today. And how the Euro has played an sort of integral role to that division. So these are charts of per capita GDP. From 2003, you see three countries, Germany, France and Italy. They're doing sort of reasonably, the Germans are beginning to go ahead even before the crisis. But after the crisis, you see this huge divergence that occurs. And this divergence is important, not just between Italy and Germany, but also between Germany and France. So France has essentially flattened out, whereas Germany has gone up. And you see those numbers mirrored also in the unemployment rates. German unemployment rate has gone down, Italian unemployment rate has gone up, and so has the French unemployment rate. And a very important political feature over here is that the unemployment rates are especially high amongst young Italians and young French. Many of whom, even when they are employed, work in extremely precarious jobs. So the political divisions, the economic divisions that are occurring through this process are then reflected in domestic politics. And the domestic politics then get mirrors, the anxieties of people who are dealing with the crisis in their daily lives. And you then see this again in two other dimensions. If you look at public debt, again you will see Italy, Greece, Spain, France, Portugal, and then you have these so-called northern countries. And in the youth unemployment, you have again Italy is the champion again in the youth unemployment and Greece, Spain, France, Portugal. So you have the divergence that has occurred both in the sort of macro numbers like per capita income and unemployment rate. The debt burdens in the south were already large, went up. The youth unemployment was already high, went up. Whereas whether the so-called north did was already better and either did marginally worse or in fact has improved since the time of the crisis. So the divergence which already existed has been amplified. And exactly what Mickey Calder said in 1971, single currency, particularly at moments of acute stress will create, will handicap the weak and will give greater strength to those who can manage on their own. So the point of this is what I've just said to you that the divergence that we see was not accidental. It was predictable. It was exactly what the economists had said. And at this point in the book I say that although I don't believe that the euro was a political project, it is clear that it was a political decision. It was a political decision which overrode the logic, the economic logic. But economics always has its revenge. And economics had its revenge during the course of the crisis. It essentially at that point overturns the notion that there is some kind of political primacy and the politicians can override it. Just one final word on the divergence. When I say weak countries and strong countries, what do I mean by weak countries and strong countries? And what I mean by weak countries and strong countries is that the weak countries, the weak countries, again the same sequence, Greece, Italy, Greece, Spain, France, Portugal, by the world bank measures of institutional quality and governance quality, always doing worse than the Northern countries. So the weakness lies in the fundamental institutions of those countries, not in some just general amorphous sense. And the economic studies are quite clear. Countries that have these weak institutional and governance features also tend to grow slower, everything else equal. So they're sort of almost in a trap because they have weak governance, therefore they grow slowly, they're handicapped by a single monetary policy, therefore when there's a crisis, they get a particular setback, therefore their ability to politically mobilize to improve their governance, which in theory is possible, is still handicapped. And so they continue to stay in this zone. Also another manifestation of the weakness is in the research and development.  And these are the stronger countries who did and continue to do large amounts of R&D. Look at Sweden over here, outside of the Eurozone. So both from an immediate governance perspective, as well as from a more longer term perspective of growth through innovation, these countries remain bound in a low growth zone, and as long as they remain bound in a low growth zone, every time there's an economic shock, the single monetary policy is going to impose hardship on them. Therefore the divergence will grow, therefore the political divisions will continue to remain important and salient. One outcome of this has been that as this economic divergence has grown, the Germans have started looking elsewhere in terms of their trade relationships. So the Germans used Germany's principal traders, two principal trading partner was France in 1999, and the German share of exports to France has steadily declined, the German share of exports to Italy has steadily declined. It has increased to the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, the three European countries that are not in the Eurozone, and it is increasing massively to China and to some extent to the United States. So this notion that the Euro will somehow bring, will create a single market and will create economic integration is also relied, because the Germans are not looking to the single market just because there is a single market, and just because you can use the Euro within the single market, they are looking for where the growth is. You sell products where people want to buy them, and where you want to buy, where you see people wanting to buy them are in these countries that are growing rapidly. So Germany's trading links are also growing with the rest of the world rather than with Europe necessarily. And finally, despite the claims of some modest recovery in Spain and Portugal, again I don't know how many of you know the phrase target two, but target two balances are balances within the European Central Bank and essentially is a form of borrowing from the European Central Bank to pay off external lenders. So when the European Central Bank's quantitative easing program began, the Bank of Italy would buy bonds, buy its government's bonds from foreign investors, and the investors at that point would say, thank you, take their money out of Italy altogether. And so Italy becomes increasingly indebted to the European Central Bank to pay off its bond holders and so are Spain and Portugal. The point of this slide is to show you that while the crisis has passed, the lack of confidence in these three governments and Greece is quarantined, otherwise we would see similar numbers for Greece, the sense of financial confidence in these governments remains tenuous at this present time. Okay, so what is the political reaction to this? And the key political reaction during the course of the crisis was that Merkel, Chancellor Merkel in effect, became European Chancellor and she played a crucial role. If Merkel had not been European Chancellor at vetoing and making the key decisions at that point in time, the Eurozone may well have cracked in an important way. So she held the Eurozone together, okay? But having held the Eurozone together, within that framework then led to political divisions. So the manner in which Chancellor Merkel holds the Eurozone together, the Southern nations feel that she is dictating policy on them. And so you have Berlusconi in the 2013 election claiming that he campaigned on this basis, do you want to live in a system where the dictates of Merkel become the governing philosophy of our nation? So the Southerners are complaining that Merkel is being too burdensome and onerous on them. Within Germany, she has the opposite concern, opposite worry that the Germans are feeling that Merkel is doing too much for Europe. And so you have this splinter group called the Alternative for Development, which then is a splinter group from her own party, the Christian Democratic Union, which breaks off and creates this opposition party which has gradually grown in strength. And so you have this political splintering that's occurring at the same time as the crisis is causing the economic divergence. And you then see those that also in the numbers of people losing trust in Europe, the Italians have this very large drop in trust, the French and the Germans. If you, I have these numbers up to 2016, if you do them up to 2017, the German drop has been partially reversed and so has the French drop, but the Italian drop still remains very large. So the rank ordering of this remains the same that the biggest drop comes in Italy, which is where you are also now seeing this so-called Euroscepticism embedded in Italian politics has become part of the process. And so I say, I use the phrase, the economic wounds are creating political scars in Europe. And I use the word scars to indicate that the wounds have lasting effects. In other words, just because the wounds will eventually heal to a certain extent does not mean that their memory and the after effects that they spawn at the time of the crisis will also disappear. Then there is this other notion, well, the economics is divisive, but there is this historical force called the Franco-German friendship. And the French and the Germans always come together at critical moments and they bring Europe together and that will be one way forward. So I did a textual analysis of the use of the phrase Franco-German friendship and what is true is that the Franco-German friendship notion was important at certain periods in history, but it's basically ebbing. And you can trace the relationship between the two countries very much in line with this textual analysis. The Germans have always had a very much more cold and agnostic view of this relationship when it's in their benefit, they use it, when it's not in their national interest, they don't. And to just give you some, again, some highlights of this from the course of the crisis, this was pretty much the relationship between Merkel and Sarkozy during the years 2010 and 11. And this was the relationship between Merkel and Oland. So Oland is proposing all these wonderful things like Euro bonds and so on. And at a December 2012 European Council meeting in Brussels, Hammond von Rompuy, who was the guy right at the back, he proposes this Eurozone budget. Eurozone budget being a large budget that will then be used in some kind of way to ease the distress of the nations that are suffering more during the course of the crisis. And Merkel says to von Rompuy, and where will the money come from? And Oland chimes in and says, don't think of it as a Eurozone budget, think of it as a solidarity fund. And Merkel looks back at him coldly and says, and where will the money come from? And that, I narrated to you the Bundestag speech that Chancellor Helmut Kohl gave in 1998, that essential national interest of Germany remains very crucial to the whole process. And then when Macron was elected, again, this narrative of Franco-German friendship came up. Macron made a lot of effort to propose a certain a new way forward for Europe. He's continuing to do that. So the story I'm now telling you is an ongoing story. So Macron is elected in May 2007. This spike of references to Franco-German friendship in the press suddenly is evident. It dies quite quickly. And then there's another spike. This is the 55th anniversary of a Franco-German treaty in 1963 between Chancellor Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle. And so there are historical moments at which this narrative sort of spikes up. And the outcome almost always is that there is a sort of gross imbalance in the financial strength of the two countries. And Merkel doesn't have to do very much. Merkel's whole strategy through the course of the crisis and continuing as she waits till she feels that there is an imminent crisis. And then the one thing that Merkel seems to have as part of her objective function is she doesn't want the Eurozone to break up under her watch. So if and when it comes to the point at which it looks like the Eurozone may actually break up, then she does the bare minimum needed to ensure that the Eurozone will not break up. But at that moment, the manner in which it is done and the sort of very sort of top-down way in which the decisions are conveyed create this sense of political disenfranchisement amongst nations and amongst the peoples of nations. Very briefly, I'm going to talk about social democracy. So one other sort of last unifying force. So economics causes divergence. The Franco-German narrative in my view is a myth. And the notion of perhaps what brings Europeans together is values, values of social justice and open society. And I think that is very reasonable. I think if there is a true foundation to Europe embodied in the Treaty of Rome, it is that an open society and a sense of equality and fairness in principle is what unifies Europeans. And so the question is, can the social democratic party that espouses such values, can a group of social democratic parties bring Europeans together as a collective in a way that leads them to think that the goal over here is not necessarily economics but it is to strengthen and deepen these values. And the answer to that is that social democracy has been in a near-terminal decline in large parts of Europe, especially during the course of the crisis, pretty much all social democratic parties have suffered huge losses. The SPD itself within Germany is now polling at 17%. And the SPD is a very important party because the SPD in my reading acts de facto as the pace setter by virtue of being German as the pace setter for European initiatives. And the SPD, you know, the sort of some examples of SPD's pace setting, these are tweets by a guy named Martin Schulz who some of you will recognize and Martin Schulz issues these extraordinary tweets in which he says, I want a new constitution for Europe and anybody who doesn't sign on to that constitution any member state that does not sign on will be ejected. And so he has this sort of very eccentric view completely a historical considering that the constitutional treaty was so soundly rejected in 2005 by Dutch and French voters that he will now bring back a constitutional treaty which will potentially eject France and the Netherlands whose voters will almost certainly again vote against such a treaty. On the other hand, the German finance minister Olaf Schulz who is also a social democrat says a German finance minister is first and foremost a German finance minister who needs to look after the interests of Germany and Europe then comes within that context of Germany being the primary objective. The party does not matter, any German finance minister is primarily a German finance minister. Just two or three quick slides and then I will stop. And the final theme is that this division of Europe is coming within a broader context of Europe as a declining continent itself, declining in the context of the world. And you can see a few very quick slides the share of German GDP increased in the early part of the 20th century. So in the later part of the 19th century the share of German GDP increased, flattened out and even German GDP has steadily been declining. France has been on a decline since 1870 in terms of its economic strength in the global economy. The financial crisis gave the Eurozone another setback. The US economic recovery primarily because of much better policies was quite rapid after the so-called Great Recession. The Eurozone economic recovery, which is well known to all of you, has been very modest. And Eurozone economic recovery has been modest even in relationship to the same countries during the Great Depression. And this final slide is, if I look ahead, what is one leading indicator that tells me what the future of the global economy is? And these are patents registered in the US patent office which is the most demanding of the patent offices. And in 1995, the Koreans had, between half and one third of the patents of Germans. And today the Korean patenting is twice that of Germans. France and Italy have remained flat. French and Italian patenting has remained essentially flat for 20 years, 25 years. And the other country that is growing up rapidly is China. And behind these patents lie much stronger R&D systems, much better educational systems. So the East Asian economies are preparing in a much more robust way to the challenges of the next 50 years in terms of the kind of knowledge base a modern economy will need relative to the European countries. Therefore, if you put it all together, the decline that we have seen in these last 50 years will, if anything, accelerate over the next 50 years. And in a context of general decline, the divisions become politically even more difficult to handle in a period when there is growth and there is a general sense of optimism, the ability to handle divisions is much better. But if the decline and the divisions come together, it becomes even harder. So that is why I call it a tragedy. I call it a tragedy because it need not have been. There was no good reason to have the Euro, but once it came, it worked its inevitable logic. The logic of division, it has hobbled many of the member states, created political divisions. And as I say, it's a tragedy in the sense that Aristotle might have used the word tragedy that eminently could, and just people, enacted the Euro tragedy, not because of vice or depravity, but because of frailty and error. So I'm gonna stop over here. I'm sure that especially to this audience and given my own background, there'll be questions on Ireland. But may I request that we first talk about Europe more generally, and then I promise that if there is an interest, I will give you a few of my views that are expressed in the book on Ireland and its role in the Eurozone. Thank you.


So we have the grow light, pull the cap off the back, this is an easy installation, it's suitable for standard E26 and E27 bases. This light can also prevent common plant problems such as leaf drop or stunted growth and it does that by providing the optimal spectrum for plant growth. This light is full spectrum and with 180 LEDs it is very bright and promotes all stages of plant growth. It's perfect for your home, garden or greenhouse and it stays cool to the touch.


Here we are zooming into the star cluster Westerland 2 in the GUM 29 H2 star-forming region 14,000 light-years away. It's only 2 million years old and contains some of the most massive, hottest young stars in the Milky Way. The Hubble Space Telescope was used to conduct a three-year study of this cluster from 2016 to 2019. This study sought to investigate the properties of stars during their early evolutionary phases and to trace the evolution of their circumstellar disc environments. They found that the most massive and brightest stars in the cluster are found in the core. Westerland 2 contains at least 37 extremely massive stars, some with up to 100 solar masses. These stars do not have planet-forming, circumstellar discs around them. In the study found that the stars near these giants also exist without circumstellar discs. Further from the center, they found that most of the stars do indeed have these dust cloud discs. One explanation for this situation is that the blistering ultraviolet radiation and strong stellar winds from the central stars erode the discs around neighboring stars, dispersing the giant dust clouds that one day may have formed planets. This cluster will be an excellent target for follow-up observations with the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope.


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I'll be headlining over Frank Conniff at QED in Astoria Queens Friday night. What time is the show, Alex? The show is going to be at 7.30 and it's Friday, September 16th. You will not want to miss it. You will not want to miss it. I'm getting my special ready for Doug Stanhope. Correct. Doug Stanhope is going to produce and direct my next stand-up special and I'm getting it ready. If you want to see me get my special ready, come out to QED this Friday at 7.30. I'll even talk to you after the show. There you go. Don't pass that up. I get to talk to him every day and I can tell you... It's worth it. It's almost worth it. I'll even shake your hand. Yes. Do we have Purell? Oh, we're going to need it. Not for me, for people who shake my hand, because I'm a disgusting, vile human being. You're listening to David Feldman's show. We'll be back to our show in just a second. Remember to do all your Amazon shopping via the David Feldman show website.  It does not cost you more to shop on Amazon via the David Feldman show website. Now, back to our show. Welcome to the broadcast. I'm David Feldman, DavidFeldmanshow.com. Please friend me on Facebook. Follow me on Twitter and read Down with Tyranny, written by our guest, Howie Klein, who is the founder and treasurer of the Blue America Pack. And thank you for joining us, Howie Klein. You're welcome, David. And David, when we were talking earlier, you had asked me a question and I gave you the wrong answer. You asked me how much Wells Fargo had been sued for how much the fine was that they were going to be paying. And I told you it was $135 million. I was lost by $50 million, which is considerable. They have to pay $185 million in a fine. Okay. After the great recession, after the Republicans crashed our economy, President Obama became president. And by the way, that was his name before he was president, President Obama. And there was a bill passed called Dodd-Frank, written by Chris Dodd in the Senate and the great Barney Frank in the house. And it was a bill that, a bill that was passed, but it was a bill in search of actual statutes. They never really figured out what the bill was, but they passed it, and then they began to debate it afterwards. But one of the things that was in Dodd-Frank was the establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which would be housed inside the Federal Reserve. It would answer to the Fed, not Congress, not the president. It would answer to the Fed. And President Obama wanted Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which would protect Americans from predatory lending, from shady stockbrokers, and from horrible banks creating phantom accounts to cook their books. We have instead a guy named Caudry, who's the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The Republicans loathe the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This week, you write about Wells Fargo being fined $185 million by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Is that a lot of money for Wells Fargo, how he climbed? Well, it is. It's a lot, well, I don't know if it's a lot of money for them, but it's $185 million is a lot of money, anybody, anyway. And that's just the beginning of this thing. So that's just what they agreed to pay. Now, there's a lot there that isn't about that $185,000. They opened up $600,000 credit cards for people who didn't ask for credit cards. They opened up hundreds of thousands of accounts and charged people fees who didn't even know they had these accounts. They just did it. And how were they paying those fees to all those people? Were they paying those fees? And where was that money coming out of their checking account, their savings account? Yeah, so in other words, the problem is this. This is what it's down to. The higher ups at the bank, what we call the bankers or the banksters, in FDR's words, had more at Wells Fargo than any other bank by far, had this thing where if you were a low-level employee, just someone who could literally be threatened, if you don't do your job, you'll be working in McDonald's next week. So that level of a person. They're pressuring them that if any is a teller, say, or a telemarketer, anyone who's dealing with Wells Fargo customers, they're telling them you've got to sell more products. So it's people who already have an account, say they have a checking account. They're supposed to sell them other things, like whether it's a credit card or a savings account or a mortgage or something that Wells Fargo was selling. They had a quota that they had to sell, a very, very, very high quota. So it made it like a pressure chamber in that bank. Everybody was freaking out. And what they started doing, 5,300 of these, let's call them tellers, although they weren't all tellers, but a lower-level employee. 5,300 of them opened up accounts for customers without those customers knowing. All 5,300 of those people either have been or are in the process of being fired. The people who made them do it, the executives who forced them to do this, who threatened them and terrorized them, none of them are being fired. If you talk about $185 million, that money comes from the shareholders of Wells Fargo. That doesn't come from these executives who did this stuff. These executives still have to, hopefully, face punishment by the Justice Department. It's what I'm hoping is that they will be charged with something. Now, Obama doesn't charge any bankers with anything ever, so that's not going to happen. So the only hope we have is either President Hillary or President Trump pansy will do something when one of them take over. But Obama will do nothing. It's a very, very, very serious matter. And the Republicans, you brought up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is part of Doug Frank, something that Elizabeth Warren wrote. She wrote the Statute for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The Republicans have, the number one priority in terms of the financial industry has been to cripple that agency. That is more than anything else that they hate that agency. And it's not just the Republicans. It is basically all Republicans plus conservative Democrats. So what I did in my post that down with tyranny was to explain the whole Wells Fargo scandal and then go into how Wells Fargo, why would they have the nerve to do this? I mean, this is pretty blatant.  We don't even know how much money they cheated their customers out of yet. It's still being worked out. However, what I tried to get at is where does Wells Fargo have the nerve? The managers of Wells Fargo have the nerve. Now they have their own pack that puts a lot of money into politics, millions and millions and millions of dollars into politics. And I traced the money just for this year. It took me a whole day to do just the kind of money they were spending this year only, not last year, not for the last decade or two decades, but this year to see where that money was going. And they spend it mostly on Republicans. I mean, two thirds of it went to Republicans. And then most of the rest of it went to very conservative and corrupt Democrats. But it was mostly the Republicans. And it was targeted specifically at Republicans and conservative Democrats who have power over their issues specifically. So it went right to the committee in Congress called the House Financial Services Committee. That's the committee that Doug Frank came out of. Barney Frank used to be the chairman of that. And now it's a crooked Republican from Texas named Jeb Hans-Sawling. So I want to see what the patterns were of what would normally be called a bribe. I mean, these people in Congress have defined campaign donations as not a bribe. So legalistically, this money is not a bribe, but it's exactly a bribe. They're giving it to, and that's giving it to random people. They're not giving it to random congressmen. They're giving it to congressmen. For example, I'll give you one perfect example. The real big money would be like a $10,000 pop. That would go to someone like Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House. He would get $10,000. Now that's a lot of money from one company to get in one year. But there's only one person that got a bigger amount of money this year than Paul Ryan, who is the speaker and you know, it's a big shot in that world. And the only person who got more is a guy who you may never have even heard of named Sean Duffy. Sean Duffy is a relatively junior congressman, also like Ryan from Wisconsin. And Sean Duffy, why would he get $15,000? Very, very simple. He is a member of that committee. And more than that, he is the chairman of the subcommittee. So in other words, the exact subcommittee who's supposed to watch these banks and have oversight over them, the person who's supposed to do that is Sean Duffy. They gave him $15,000. Now how could that not be a bribe? In what universe is that not a bribe? I don't get it. I mean, when you look at the list of who they gave money to, it's just one powerful person on the House Financial Services Committee after another. Every single one who got the big amount, I'm not talking about the people who got $500 or $1,000. I'm talking about the people who got $10,000 and $8,000 and $7,000. Big amount of money from one company. And remember, we're just talking about one company now, Just Wells Fargo. All these banks are doing this and all of their trade associations and all of their lobbyists. They're all giving money and it comes to millions and millions of dollars every single year. And that's how they get away with this kind of behavior. And that's why they hate Elizabeth Warren so much. And that's why they hate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau so much. They are flipping out over this. They're trying to cut off their budget. They're trying to not pay the employees of this organization. They're trying to do anything they can to destroy the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose only job is to protect consumers. That's it. That's their job. Protect consumers. Who are these consumers? These are the people who vote for these congressmen. Is it fair to say that Elizabeth Warren wanted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau housed within the Federal Reserve to make sure it was immune from bribes like that? Well, yes. The direction you're going in is exactly right. She wanted it to be immune from the pressures of Congress. That was her goal, so it would not be politicized. In other words, the last thing you need is... The first thing that would happen if Congress got a tan on this, the very, very first thing would be there's no question what would happen. A banking lobbyist would replace Cordury. That's what would happen. That would be the first thing. And then they would do nothing. They would do the opposite of suing banks. They would be underwriting banks and giving banks permission to rip people off. That's what the job would be. So, of course, she was very, very smart to do that, to take it away from Congress. Congress, of course, is flipping out over that. And they haven't stopped. And the day that passed, they have not stopped trying to get their hands on this organization and control it. That's what they want to do. And they carry on about it no end. Then they pass. They pass all their nonsense over and over again. You know, we're lucky now because they can't get it through the Senate, that legislation through the Senate because the Democrats have been blocking it. And we have Obama in there who, at least, would veto it if it never did get passed. But who knows what's going to happen next year if the Republicans win... If they keep the majority in the Senate and they win enough seats to keep the majority in the House and then Trump wins, you know, anything goes. I mean, not anything goes. What goes is simple.  Even before it builds the wall, they will destroy the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Citizens United has to be overturned. And we have to get the money out of politics because it has corrupted the political system to the point where we no longer control our economic destiny. The Federal Reserve was set up 100 years ago by Woodrow Wilson to protect the economy from the lobbyists. There are two types of ways to stimulate the economy. There's fiscal stimulus and then monetary stimulus. Fiscal stimulus is done through Congress. They control the purse strings. And if there's a recession, in the past, Congress would have a fiscal policy. They would pump money into the economy. I do something like, for example, infrastructure building.  It puts money into the economy. Few people having jobs and then they spend the money in the grocery store and then the grocer has some money and he buys a new car, etc. That's the Keynesian stimulus. And that's morally correct because you can follow that money. You can find the corruption. You can say, hey, this money wasn't spent properly. And as far as I know, Joe Biden was in charge of President Obama's 2009 fiscal stimulus, which wasn't enough. I think it was close to a trillion dollar stimulus package. Very little money was wasted, right? Weren't they pretty good about that money being spent properly? Yes, although the amount of money was cut back drastically. So I don't know what they really wanted to spend, but they didn't even get a quarter of what they wanted to spend. It wasn't enough, but the stimulus package really worked. And history will record it as being enough to change our environmental policy. We're bearing the fruits of solar power and cheaper batteries because of the stimulus package. So that's fiscal policy that's controlled by Congress and that's how you stimulate the economy one way. The other way is monetary policy. That's the Federal Reserve deciding what interest rate should be. And that's pretty cloudy. That is undemocratic. That is these high priests of finance controlled by bankers determining interest rates and you stimulate the economy by lowering interest rates and you slow the economy down to fight inflation by raising interest rates. That's monetary policy and that is voodoo. And nobody understands what's really going on at the Fed. They are doing quantitative easing, buying back bonds, but nobody really knows. They're printing money, but nobody really knows. Nobody really understands it. It's very mysterious. It's smoke and mirrors and it's undemocratic. And the bankers want it that way because Bernanke and Yellen, they're part of the revolving door on Wall Street and they're bankers. The Federal Reserve is a bank and they are controlling interest rates and they're controlling whether or not the economy is growing or shrinking. It's unconstitutional. The Constitution gives the power of the purse strings to Congress. It is Congress's job to determine fiscal policy and because of the corruption in Washington D.C., we no longer trust politicians to determine the fate of our economy. It's being left to bankers, private bankers at the Federal Reserve and they put the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau inside the Fed to enforce these Dodd-Frank because nobody trusts Congress because of the bribes. So they put the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the Fed where the bribes come from. So either way we're screwed. Right. Well fortunately they don't exercise control. I mean it's not like Janet Yellen or any of the regional presidents of the Fed control the Cordray. Cordray is the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Yeah.  The Consumer Financial... They're doing pretty well, yes they are. I mean you know could they do better? I'm sure they could. But they're doing better than I expected them to, that's for sure. Yeah. They have been, you know, I mean their purview is very specific. I mean like I said earlier in order for these bankers to be held accountable it has to come from the Justice Department. You know right now, I mean I guess the theory is this. The theory is if you find which they can do and they do and when you find a bank then the shareholders lose some value and then the shareholders can then say well let's fire these executives. But that doesn't ever happen. It just doesn't work that way unfortunately. It's like never, never works that way. So when they find the bank it's just these portion of shareholders who lose. And that's the end of that. In another life you ran a record company. I did. And you dealt with lawyers and accountants and professionals. It was really possible but I did. Right. And you came out of that experience with a contempt for the professional class. Is that a fair statement? Uh, hmm... Yeah, partially. That there are white collar workers who call themselves accountants and lawyers who will license to be accountants and lawyers. And will what? Will lie? Will cheat? Right? To make numbers sing. Right? Uh... And don't they tend to say well it's the world we live in. Yes. That's, you know, it's not my fault. It's the system. I'm talking about the record industry. Right? I'm just trying to... Right, I'm just, you know, I'm not sleazy. I'm just, you know, this is the system and we just have to accept it. Right? Yep. And we don't have to accept it. Right? I have a story that I worked on that's coming up in a couple of hours on my blog that is a letter of resignation from someone not from the record industry, although I talked a little bit about the record industry as a matter of fact, but it's someone who worked at Wells Fargo. And he writes a letter to the CEO of Wells Fargo telling him why he is residing from the company. He refused to be part of this system that they were using to rip off their own customers. And when I wrote about it, I certainly was thinking the entire time I was writing how similar it was to the record industry, which is funny. I mean, you and I obviously didn't speak about this before in any way, shape or form, and here we were both taking in the same direction. Yeah. My advice, one of the things I've learned as I get older in dealing with the professional class in America is don't talk to them on the phone. Use email. There are some tricks that they use. They all want to talk on the phone. They all want to have conference calls. They're not willing to put any of their advice into writing. If you're dealing with a lawyer, an accountant, a broker, a real estate appraiser, anybody who has a professional title, get it in writing. They all want to talk on the phone. They all want to inject the human element into this because there's no accountability when you inject the human element. Get it in writing. If they say something, have them put it in an email. Back it up with words. This is a professional class in the United States. It's all cronyism. It's not just politics. It's not just Washington, D.C. It's the whole system is cronyism. You all circle the wagons for each other, protect each other, and then you're good.  Nobody wants to work with that person because they won't circle the wagons and protect their own. And it doesn't happen in other countries the way it does in the United States. It really doesn't. It's really endemic to America. People just say, well, it's very complicated. It's a very complicated system.  Hey, gerrymandering Howie Klein. You still there? I am. Gerrymandering. I read an interesting article. It's axiomatic that the Democrats will not win the House in November because of gerrymandering. But I read an article that says that the Democrats can win the House because the Republicans are spreading the districts thin. In other words, there aren't enough Republicans to spread out into other districts to turn a purple district red. Have you heard this? Yes. Well, it's a theory. And unfortunately, the theory is irrelevant. It could be true. You have to think of it in terms of the actual districts themselves. So you look at the three suburban districts around Philadelphia as a good example. These are three gerrymandered districts to protect Republicans. And what they do is they'll take lots and lots of Democrats and dump them into one district. All the Democrats are concentrated in one district and that gives the Republicans a little bit of breathing space and they don't have to worry about all these Democrats. So in other words, the one Democratic district with all the Democrats in it will be, say, a D plus 10. That's a lot of extra Democrats plus 10. Whereas the Republican districts that they create around it will be R plus 1, R plus 2. So if they have a bad year, they can lose those districts. It's possible to lose them there.  No Republican is going to win a D plus 10.  So that's what you were getting at. But my problem with this is when you're talking about winning back the House this coming November, let's go back to those Philadelphia districts again. Here are three R plus 1 and R plus 2 districts that are very, very targetable. In fact, so targetable that the DCCC said we will not win back the House if we don't take these districts. These are the districts we need to take. So basically suburban districts around New York, for example, around Philadelphia, around all the big cities. There are districts like this. Guess what? The Democrats failed at recruiting candidates that they're not supporting candidates in these districts. So let's take one, as an example, Pennsylvania 7. This is an important district. It was formally held by Joe Sestak, a Democratic congressman. When he retired to run for the U.S. Senate, a Republican won the district barely. But he's a Republican. A weak, unimportant Republican named Pat Meehan is now a congressman. It's basically almost all of Delaware County except the black people who they pushed out into a Democratic district so they don't have to worry about the black people who they're afraid were all those Democrats. They're not in the district. But it's still a close district. Obama won it against McCain closely and he lost it against Romney closely. But it's very, very close both times. So there's a prime district that the Democrats have to win. Hillary is ahead in that district by gigantic proportion. I mean, 40 points. That's how much she's ahead of Trump. There have been educated white people who normally are very happy voting Republicans. Some of them vote Democrats. Some of them vote Republicans. But the Republicans are not going for Trump. They detest him. I was reading this long family at Washington Post this week about that area. It wasn't about that district per se, but about the whole area. It was based on focus groups that show that these educated women, they don't even hear Trump's message anymore. They won't listen to what he says. To them, he's a lout. He's a racist. He is what they want to protect their children from. They don't want him in the White House. They will vote for Hillary or they'll sit on their hands. They do not want him. So you take these districts, changing them massively. What have the Democrats done to take back the house that you're talking about? Nothing. They recruited a Wall Street creep to run in the district with just a nothing candidate. The local Democrats told them, you're crazy. We've got our own candidate. Don't bring in some outsider.  And they brought in their own candidate. The locals ran a political science professor, a really good candidate named Mary Ellen Balchunis. Mary Ellen Balchunis beat the Atollo Vistausian candidate and all the money and outspent her 20 to one or something. She beat him 74 to 26%. She got 74%. He got 26%. What does the DCCC then do? These people who say they want to win back the house and identify this district as a district you have to take. They pack up their tents and they walk away. They're not supporting her. They're telling donors not to give her money. They don't want anything to do with her. And they're just giving up the district and letting Padme hand Republican win it again. And they're doing this. I'm telling you about one district. They're doing this everywhere in the country. You can name any state and I'll tell you where they're doing the same thing. That is the DCCC. That is why these theories about what could happen and what might happen don't matter. When you read the COOP report telling you about this nonsense, if they're not going district by district and telling you what the real story is on the ground, it doesn't matter what these theories are. It makes no difference. Because, you know, let's take another one so I can make the same point. Under Tom DeLay, a very corrupt, very powerful Texas congressman who is the also, when Denny Hastor was the speaker of the House, it was really Tom DeLay who was the majority leader who ran the show. Hastor didn't run any show. It was all about DeLay until he was forced to resign or go to jail. But before he was forced to resign, he oversaw a redistricting of the whole state of Texas in the way that you and I just talked about. They gerrymandered the state up. They went from a majority Democratic congressional delegation to a big majority Republican delegation. So they would do things like take the city of Austin, which is, you know, Travis County and Austin is the county seat. So take that county, divide it up in four, and spread it out to Democrats so that they're inconsequential to these districts that went all over the state. So instead of like Austin, Texas would be two Democratic seats. If it was just Austin, Texas or just Travis County, that's two Democratic seats. Instead, it's three Republican seats and one Democratic seat. That's how they were able to divide up Austin. And this is what they've done all over Texas. Let me add a quick question about this. I'm sorry to interrupt. You always think of Texas as a diehard red state. So isn't it fair that Texas should send more Republicans to Washington than Democrats? Well, you shouldn't think of it as a diehard Republican state. I mean, it's not. I mean, it's the way it's gerrymandered it is. Well, they have, you know, Anne Richards hasn't been governor for 20 years. I mean, they do tend, they send Republicans to the Senate. They have Republican governors. Doesn't it follow? They always vote for the Republican. It's definitely a red state.  So in other words, less than 50% of the state is now white. So it's, you know, Texas is changing also. There are big swaths of Texas. I just gave you an example of Austin, which would absolutely be two Democratic congressmen and is now three Republicans and one Democrat. We've got to wrap Howie. We're running out of time. Very quickly, I wanted to ask you about President Obama and Nancy Pelosi. Is Nancy Pelosi to the Democrats want the House back? Or is that, or are they afraid that, is there more money for the Democrats not to have the House? No, they want the House back. They do. But they're incapable of getting it back. Nancy Pelosi has passed her prime many years ago and is not capable of putting together a cohesive DCCC. She's in charge of it. She's completely failed.  She can't put together a DCCC that has the capacity to win. Do they want to win? Yeah, they want to win. But there are other priorities. For example, the people who run the DCCC would rather remake the Democratic Party into a conservative force and they put their priorities there. So like I told you about when we talked about Pennsylvania 7, they were trying to get a conservative in there when the conservative was defeated by a progressive, they walked away from the district. Fantastic. Howie Klein writes the down with tyranny blog. It's a must read. And he is the founder and treasure of the Blue America pack. Let's talk next week, I hope. Okay, I look forward to it. Thank you, buddy. Thank you.