Yeah, good afternoon, everyone. It's really exciting to be here today. Today we are going to talk about building a batch processing platform on top of multi cluster Kubernetes and our overflows at Intuit Scale. We have around 40 to 50k pipelines at the metadata level itself, which has 100k or 2,000k concurrent execution. So let's talk a little bit about it. So here is a quick introduction about ourselves. My name is Arumalekel. I'm a group manager at Intuit. And I'm responsible for building the next generation batch processing capabilities, along with scheduling and orchestration. And with me today, Rakesh Suresh, who is the lead engineer on building this platform capabilities. So here is a quick agenda. We will be talking a little bit about Intuit background. And I will be talking a little bit about the platform overview. And Rakesh will be actually doing a deep dive into the platform architecture and some of the operational excellence and observability challenges we faced. And how did we actually solve them? And they keep demo if we have time. So before we actually deep dive into the platform, a quick shout out to Intuit. So we are a global technology platform that helps you to achieve financial confidence. We are a purpose driven, value driven company. Our mission is to power prosperity around the world with our flagship product, which is TurboTax, Qtbooks Online, Mailchimp, and Credit Karma. So next is about batch processing platform overview. So here are some of the personas, use cases which you are solving. As a ML engineer, I want to actually build and iterate on models faster and more models and features faster. As a data analyst, I want to actually provide insights to the business as quickly as possible. As a data engineer or as a software engineer, I want to produce clean data and I want to manage and run reliable pipelines. And these are some of the indirect customers who, their use cases we are solving. So now let's discuss a little bit about the core platform capabilities. There are main four platform capabilities we are providing. One is the runtime scheduling and orchestration capability. The second one is the DevOps tooling. The third one is governance. And fourth one is the service level management. So I'll be walking us through all the four capabilities in detail. So in runtime scheduling and orchestration capabilities, as part of this platform, we are providing four different runtime capabilities. One is the Spark on Kubernetes. And the second one is EMR. The third one is Databricks. And the fourth one is the Docker container. What is more interesting is all these computers are fully managed. That means the developers doesn't need to worry about touching the hardware or doesn't need to worry about managing this infrastructure at all. And we provide the capability to switch between these runtimes, any of these runtimes based on their requirements. It can be due to either the performance reason or the cost reasons. They have the option to switch between the runtimes with a few clicks on their pipeline. And along with all these Spark runtimes and Docker runtimes, we provide advanced intuitive scheduling and orchestration capabilities also. That means as a developer, you don't need to learn any scheduling or orchestration tool. It's a local solution. You can actually go and actually build you on data pipeline with a few clicks. The next one is DevOps tooling. All these pipelines are CI-CD enabled, which is built on top of Argo CD. And we provide a managed infrastructure.  As a developer, they need to actually work with a lot of cloud resources. So they need to learn how if they want to do the policy configuration, they need to learn about different kinds of cloud resources. But we provide an intuitive way of configuring their policies and automated provisioning because the platform does the provisioning for them. They don't need to worry about it. And alerting monitoring is inbuilt capabilities from the platform. The developer doesn't, as a ML engineer or as a data engineer, they don't need to actually worry about either infrastructure or setting their monitoring or alerting capabilities. The next one is asset lifecycle management and the developer velocity. So we measure the developer velocity also for those data pipelines. The teams doesn't need to worry about setting up their own way of measuring their velocities. So the next one is the governance. So Intuit is one of the leading fintech companies. So we are part of a lot of compliance and security requirements. So compliance is very important for us. So as part of this capability, we have tied along with Intuit authentication and authorization schemas. Also, we have custom approved workflows for compliance, SOX compliance, or other compliance pipelines. We do provide change management capabilities and we do provide versioning capabilities for all the data pipelines. In case, if the developer finds that, okay, so he wants to run some of the pipelines which was running fine yesterday, they have the option to roll back to the previous version of the pipeline. Now, I want to talk a little bit about the service level management. This is a highly available platform. We provide four nights of availability and we run some of the tight SLA use cases. Some of the use cases which we run on this platform has two minutes SLA use cases Intuit and we do provide cost insight between different kinds of Spark runtimes that enables the user to actually choose what runtime is suitable for their use cases rather than just one solution. And we provide paved path. What does this mean is it's a low code solution which actually enabled a developer to create a data pipeline with a few clicks. Earlier, setting up a production pipeline was taking probably a few days or probably one or two weeks. Now, a newly joined engineer at Intuit can actually productionize a pipeline probably in probably less than 15 minutes, right? So he will be having a production pipeline running with monitoring alerting capabilities with all the scheduling and orchestration capabilities. Even he can actually set up a different compliance data pipeline also. The next one is the shared process. This is core capabilities. I believe Rakesh will be talking a little bit more about shared capabilities. What this shared process means, we actually onboard a lot of platform and platform on platform use cases. Whereas some of the ML platform can actually onboard to this platform to actually trigger a workflow on the ML platform, right? So a Qflow workflow can be triggered based on the shared processing capabilities on a ML infrastructure. So here is a Q-plan of all the capabilities with like 30,000 view of our capabilities. So, but this is just a very high-level view. There are a lot of other additional features which we provide. I want to touch up a little bit about one specific runtime because this is a Kubernetes conference. So we provide the Sparklin Kubernetes. This is a Google open source project. We run, this is one of the supported runtime which we provide as part of the platform capabilities. The reason we are providing this is because we are, most of our services are in Kubernetes, so we want to actually provide this Sparklin time also in Kubernetes infrastructure. It actually, it's simpler, more homogeneous because everything is localized and it's very cost-effective, right? It doesn't, there is no vendors lock-in or there is no search charge and it's a shared resources and shared OPEC. So very cost-effective. Our developers love using this and it's very declarative infrastructure. With that, I will hand it over to Rakesh to do a platform architecture debug. Right. Okay. Thank you, Ro. So next we'll talk about the platform architecture and go over on the high-level how we have built the platform. Before we get there, let's talk a little bit about the, into its data processing flow from a very high level. On the left, we can see high-level overview of a simple data processing use case. So the top layer has some Intuit Customer Products, which are emitting data. These could be clickstream data. These could be data that we would like to post-process, do data enrichment too. So before the data arrives in our data lake, there is stream transformations done through our stream pipelines. And so there is a bunch of post-processing layers where we do post-processing and analysis. So from this layer, we are able to derive real-time recommendations, data enrichment, feature generation, model training, data curation, fraud detection, and a bunch of other capabilities. So we will look a little bit more into how we are providing the capability to build the DAG in the coming slides. So in this slide, we'll talk about the architecture. So as we went over earlier, so batch processing's aim is to simplify the use cases for a lot of personas, being it like ML engineers, data analysts, data engineers. And we do that through providing a simplified development, deployment, management, and orchestration and monitoring as one holistic solution to both engineering teams and also to the platforms to integrate. So the high-level architecture broadly has two sections as can be seen in the top. There is a control plane layer and at the bottom there is a compute plane layer. So in the control plane, we have the service layer which helps with the creation of the users, code repositories, their build environments, their artifact tree, and also hookups to observability. So this is a fully automated self-serve process that we have through our other paved road ecosystem called Modern SAS, which is fully running on Kubernetes. And we have a job orchestration service for helping with the scheduling and orchestration of your pipeline. So we'll talk about the orchestration types in the next slide. And we have namespace service for multi-cluster Kubernetes namespace management and also for Orgo workflow deployments and notification service for providing alerting capabilities on the data pipeline. So let's talk about what we perceive as a data pipeline and what a data process is to set the context for the next part of the slides. So on the right, we have a data pipeline representation. So in the previous slide, we saw a stream data pipeline and a batch data pipeline, but the abstracts are very similar between the two. The data pipeline is a compute and an orchestration layer, which is a representation of one end to end data processing job and processors or code artifact that runs in the data pipeline to do data transformations. That can be data enrichment, curation, training your model, feature generation, a lot of that. I mean, there is a lot of data process that happens before the data is usable. So all that can be abstracted. And these are processors which are shareable. So for example, data usually that needs an enrichment or curation, these can be shared between multiple different data jobs. And so that's one of the reasons why we abstract that into a separate unit by itself. And we make the processor as a shareable entity that can be added to any of your compute infrastructure, which being the pipeline. So there are varying use cases running today in the batch processing platform, be it platform use cases, we have feature management platform running to generate features in a schedule timeframe using a Spark on Kubernetes layer. We have ML platform using us for their workflow orchestrations and data scientists and other data personas directly interacting with the UI for running their SQL queries to generate reports. So the next slide we'll talk about the how we are providing the capability to build that and how we provide dependency management. So the main problem that's there with a lot of data engineering teams and platforms is how do we make sure data pipelines are decoupled and also data availability can be made sure from one data pipeline to another. So in an organization, like you could have pipelines and jobs that are not under your control, but you rely on the data. So through the abstract, such as the data pipeline, we are able to make sure that the dependency that can be built on upstream data sources. Each data pipeline for BPP translates into an Orgo workflow and each pipeline could have two types of dependencies. So we support a cron-based dependency through Orgo cron workflows and a trigger-based dependency through Orgo events capability for complicated DAG mechanics. So in this example, the root node are pipelines that have time-based dependencies. So that's starting up on a specific calendar schedule and that's defined through the cron workflows and all the downstream dependencies that are waiting on the root node are waiting using the Orgo event source and the Orgo sensors. So each of these workflows run in our orchestration compute plane that we went over earlier and the workflows are decoupled from our runtime compute layer. So like I wrote, we went over earlier, so we do support multiple different time computes based on the use cases, be it like Spark on Kubernetes or if you're interested in running in Databricks or EMR based on your data processing need. So we put the workflow on a, the runtime of your choice. So in the next slides, we'll talk about the operational excellence and the observability capabilities and the journey that we went through in the past year to make sure that we are able to get top of the line availability and also the SLA number. So with the help of the paved road ecosystems within Intuit, we get a lot of observability features from our paid path Kubernetes platform which is called MaudenSatch which provides advanced GitOps and Kubernetes control plane and observability. So deploying of a new cluster and managing the cluster and also the observability of the cluster is handled by different paid path teams within the team which we interact with, which we built the platform on top of. As a platform providing distributed compute infrastructure as a service to Intuit, there are several operational challenges when it comes to managing multiple Kubernetes clusters. So right now in our production, we run four Kubernetes clusters, two for our orchestrations and two for our runtime. So we tackled improving the operational excellence to optimizing on two areas. One is platform operational excellence and the other is providing developer and customer operational excellence. So when it comes to platform operational excellence, we took several steps to improve our confidence and visibility into the health and reliability of this platform and the infrastructure. Starting from tightening the opt-mic process within the team for building cross-service expertise and confidence through unified operation monitoring and continuous improvements by monitoring the MTD area and MTDR quarter over quarter and also constantly tackling stability and scalability as P0 for the platform. So through this journey, what we did is we were able to scale to thousands of concurrent workflow runs and we were able to provide four nights of availability and less than one minute job deployment guarantee. So let's talk about the one minute job deployment guarantees. So one minute is the time that we guarantee for provisioning and deploying your entire data pipeline infrastructure and get it to running stage. So once the provisioning happens, your data pipeline can run for hours but the time between you fire the request and the time that we provisioned through our platform is one minute. So we achieve this by decoupling our compute plane into orchestration compute plane and fine-tuning the Kubernetes clusters for the specific job that it's given. In our orchestration compute clusters, we have fine-tuned our IPs to be the warm pool in the clusters to have high IP limit for the port provisioning times to be very low so that we can support large amount of concurrent workflow deployments. So and also we have built a solutioning on multi-cluster workflow deployment which we will be coming out with a better solution together with the Argo team, with Argo open hosting. So next aspect is the developer operation excellence. So as a platform, so we have to monitor our SLAs and monitor our availability but also to provide operation excellence capabilities to the users that are interacting with the platform. We have pipeline headaches to track the status and health of your pipeline, notification integration for monitoring your data pipeline into SLA and also failure alerting, auto-scaling and also pipeline retries for more fault tolerance. So next we'll take a look at the platform demo. So there is a more extensive demo coming up that's to start with. So we wanted to start showing the capability internally that we have built for a fully automated processor and a pipeline deployment experience. So here we can see that for, we have an Intuit developer portal experience where users could create a data processor by providing their runtime in this example Spark, their language of their choice and a bunch of other default Spark configuration because this is Spark data processing application. So we write out of the box, spin up the GitHub repository, the build environment, the Argo CD for orchestrating your builds and also hookups to the observability. So the developers can focus on the code and not on the process of getting your thing up and running. So this has severely accelerated the amount of time anyone can get to production. And then once you also, so like we discussed earlier, the processor being the code artifact that can be shared between multiple computes. So you can now create your data pipeline which is the computer and orchestration layer where you will be able to pick your compute of your choice. For example, the Spark on Kubernetes to pick the Kubernetes cluster, it's getting deployed to the auto provision, the namespace with the required IAM roles. We also have a Kubernetes control plane that is built by Intuit so users can configure their policies on access to the data. And we also provide abilities to add your processors. You can stack a lot of processors into a single pipeline and create your orchestration. In the next, you use the processor and the pipeline, you could create your scheduling. So like we discussed, you could either do a cron scheduling if you want your processor to run on a defined schedule or you could create a dependency-based schedule where your processor depends on an upstream data pipeline. On completion of an upstream data pipeline, your processor will automatically trigger. This provides the decoupling between data layers for improved efficiency on mapping the data availability between data organizations. So next slide, we have a prerecorded demo of our execution which will play, which shows how all the things that we talked about comes together. In this platform demo, we are going to look at data pipeline running on Spark on Kubernetes and look at all the standardized capabilities that is provided out of the box by the platform for a developer in the ecosystem. What we are seeing here is Intuit's developer portal experience where data engineers can configure their data pipelines and data processors. This Spark on Kubernetes data pipeline has been configured to run on the given Kubernetes namespace and the cluster, which are configured during the initial pipeline provisioning phase. As can be seen, the data pipeline has a processor, a schedule, and some additional configurations. Let's take a look at the processor. A processor is a code artifact with a standardized GitOps process provisioned by BPP and modern SaaS during the fully self-serve process creation experience. The developer gets a code repository and CI CD built out of the box with integration to artifactory. Besides the processor, user also gets access to into its Kubernetes service manager, or IKSN. IKSN is a control plan for managing Kubernetes cluster and namespaces. Here we are looking at the developer's configure namespace, where they have the ability to manage the namespace resources and ACLs. Besides, developers also get access to mayfriend metrics and dashboards for monitoring their pipeline. This is a sample dashboard that comes out of the box that is customizable by the developer based on their needs on their monitoring. Besides, plunk dashboards are also provided out of the box for monitoring pipeline runs and execution history are available for better visibility. Developers and teams also get a quick costing view and additional costing dashboards for managing cost on the pipeline. Additionally, Spark history server is provided but the Spark runs can be looked at. Let's now execute the pipeline and see how that works. Here I'm going to execute this pipeline twice. An execution of the pipeline can be done in an ad hoc fashion like we just did or can be based on the schedule or an upstream dependency. Each execution creates an orgo workflow which we'll just take a look at which will orchestrate the steps required for running this data pipeline. So here there are two running workflows. Let's take a look at one of the workflows. So each workflow creates the Spark application. So here I'm putting up like all the running Spark application. So as can be seen, there are two running Spark apps which are being monitored by the workflow. The workflow besides firing the Spark application on the customer's name space also monitors the Spark app and then emits an event to Kafka which is then read by the orchestration service for updating the pipeline state. If we go back to the pipeline UI, we can see that the state of the pipeline is currently running and the execution has been updated. In the execution, you can take a look at the configuration using with the execution supplier and also other execution logs which are readily available for the users to look at running executions. In this platform demo, we are going. That's all with the presentation. Brilliant, thank you so much. What a great talk here and good to see demo at the end as well. Questions from the audience? Again, raise your hands and I'll come around. Don't all jump at once. There we go, yep. What if your clusters don't have enough resources to run all the jobs your users have? Do you have any stack for that? So we have cluster monitoring based on our capacity. So we are able to load balance both our Spark application and also our workflows to multiple Kubernetes clusters. So usually when we are getting close to a capacity, so we provision new clusters. So the main aspect of this is having the ability to monitor, manage multiple clusters and load balance the load both on the orchestration and also the Spark job, so which we have. So we have the ability to add more and more clusters as we scale. So right now we are running on four production Kubernetes clusters, but we'll scale up as there are more pipelines that are getting onboarded. Other questions? How extensible is the scheduling capability on the platform side, right? So for the Spark jobs, could you use external schedulers like Unicorn or is it using a standard Kubernetes scheduler? Scheduling on the Spark jobs? Yeah. So for scheduling, we fully used Argo. So Argo provides the Argo events and Argo workflows, so which we use for both the scheduling and the orchestration. And the jobs are deployed. So the scheduling is outside of Spark jobs. I see, I see. Okay. Also, would it be able to do things like gang scheduling? There's a lot of workload which is still running on EMR. So we want to actually do the dependency management between these two jobs. So it needs to be outside of the Spark. Yeah. So that is the reason we actually build a scheduling and orchestration layer outside the Spark on time layer. I see, gotcha. Thank you. I'm kind of curious, when you have a one minute job SLA, I'm assuming you run on AWS, you said I am and some other stuff. Do you just pre-provision nodes or have some pre-scheduling so that pods can actually go on to nodes or is it that pods are created and the cluster auto scaler is gonna kick in? So the pods are not pre-provisioned. So the nodes are dedicated for, so we simply have a dedicated clusters for our provisioning, I mean, and scheduling layer. So those clusters are highly available. And on top of that, we pre-provision the IPs required for bringing up a pod. That has been our throttling point which we noticed when we were doing our load testing and when we are trying to provision thousands of pods, pods were taking six minutes and 12 minutes. So the optimization strategy for us was providing each nodes in the Kubernetes cluster more pre-warmed IPs so that it can provision. So the resource never was the issue. It was always IP limitations that has been enforced in this case by the cloud provider AWS on the EKS which we run on. Great, any final questions? Okay, well, yeah, thanks again, Arup and Rakesh and let's give him a round of applause. Thank you.


The approval of aspartame has a controversial history. The FDA commissioner concluded that there was reasonable certainty that human exposure of aspartame would not pose a risk of brain damage, resulting in mental retardation, hormonal dysfunction, or both, and will not cause brain tumors. However, the FDA's own public board of inquiry withdrew their approval over cancer concerns. Furthermore, several FDA scientists advised against the approval, citing the aspartame company's own brain tumor tests. The commissioner approved aspartame anyway, before he left the FDA and enjoyed a $1,000 a day consultancy position with the aspartame company's PR firm. Then the FDA actually prevented the National Toxicology Program from doing further cancer testing, so we were left with people battling over different rodent studies, some of which showed increased cancer risk and some of which that didn't. It reminds me of the whole saccharin story, where it caused bladder cancer in rats, but not mice, leaving us with unanswerable questions like, so are we more like a rat or a mouse? We obviously had to put the aspartame question to the test in people, but the longest human safety study lasted only 18 weeks. We needed better human data. Since the largest rat study highlighted lymphomas and leukemias, the NIH AARP study tracked blood cancer diagnoses, and higher levels of aspartame intake were not associated with the risk of cancer. It's a massive study, but was criticized for only evaluating relatively short-term exposure. People were only studied for five years. Hey, better than 18 weeks, but how about 18 years? All eyes then turned to Harvard, which started following the health and diets of medical professionals since before aspartame even came on the market. In the most comprehensive long-term population study to evaluate the association between aspartame intake and cancer risk in humans, they did find an association between both diet soda and total aspartame intake and the risk of both non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and multiple myeloma in men and leukemia in both men and women. Okay, but why more cancer in men than women? One result was found for pancreatic cancer and diet soda, not soda in general. In fact, the only sugar tied to pancreatic cancer risk was the milk sugar lactose. It was the diet soda. So the male-female discrepancy could have just been a statistical fluke, but they decided to dig a little deeper. Aspartame is broken down into methanol, and the methanol is turned into formaldehyde, a documented human carcinogen by this enzyme here, alcohol dehydrogenase. The same enzyme that detoxifies regular alcohol is the same enzyme that converts methanol to formaldehyde. Is it possible men just have higher levels of this enzyme than women? Yes, that's why women get higher blood alcohol levels drinking the same amount of alcohol. If you look at liver samples from men and women, there's significantly greater enzyme activity in the men. So maybe that explains the increased cancer risk in men, the higher conversion rates from aspartame to formaldehyde. But how do we test it, though? Ethanol-regular alcohol competes with methanol for the same enzyme's attention. In fact, regular alcohol is actually used as an antidote for methanol poisoning. So men who don't drink may have higher formaldehyde conversion rates from aspartame if this whole formaldehyde theory is correct, and indeed consistent with this line of reasoning, it was the men that drank the least alcohol that appeared to have the greatest cancer risk from aspartame. A third cohort study has since been published and found no increased lymphoma risk associated with diet soda during a 10-year follow-up period. So no risk detected in the 18-week study, the 5-year study, or the 10-year study, only in the 18-year study. What should we make of all this? Well, some have called for a re-evaluation of the safety of aspartame. Of course, it's gonna out of the barn at this point with 34 million pounds of the stuff produced annually. But that doesn't mean we have to eat it, especially perhaps pregnant women and children.


If you are a consumer of independent news and the first place you should be going to is Consortium News and please do try to support them when you can. It doesn't have its articles behind a paywall, it's free for everyone, it's one of the best news sites out there and it's been in the business of independent journalism and adversarial independent journalism for over two decades. I hope that with the public's continuing support of Consortium News it will continue for a very long time to come. Thank you so much. Welcome to CN Live, season two episode 19, Green Ticket. I'm Joe Laurier, editor-in-chief of Consortium News. And I'm Elizabeth Voss. As in 2016, Americans are going to the polls or the letterbox this time to choose the next president of the United States or among two less than popular major party candidates, Democratic voters from the progressive wing of the party and independents who identify as progressive are angry that the Democratic party establishment again teamed up to destroy a center-left candidate this time Bernie Sanders again actually and this time for the center-right Joe Biden. As both major parties serve wealthy interests there seems to be no one in Congress or the White House who represents the interests of the majority that is working Americans. Without representation, calls continue to grow for new political parties that can break the stranglehold the Democrats and Republicans have on the system. The feeling of many progressive voters is that they are desperate to get rid of Trump but they can't abide Biden. The dilemma of 2016 seems to be getting even deeper this time around. With us for the next hour are the presidential and vice presidential candidates of the US Green Party, Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker, the green ticket. Welcome both to CN Live. Thank you. Thanks for having us. CN Live has also requested interviews with the Joe Biden and Donald Trump campaigns but we have not heard back from them. Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker, can you both of you give us a brief overview of your backgrounds and how you came to be representing the Green Party in this election for our audience please. Well I'm a recently retired teamster, worked on construction sites and warehouses but that was to pay the bills. I've been a social movement activist since the 1960s. Civil rights, anti-Vietnam War, early ecology movement where I came up in the San Francisco Bay Area and concluded back then that both parties were dragging their feet on civil rights at best and both of them supported the escalation of the war in Vietnam. So I was asking where's my party? Where's the party that represents peace and justice and the environment? So I supported the Peace and Freedom Party in 1968. I couldn't vote for it but I rooted for it and I pestered adults to vote for it, supported and voted for the People's Party in 1972 and 76 and the Citizens Party in 1980 and then I got invited to the first national organizing meeting for the Green Party in 1984 and I've stayed involved in that effort ever since. Greens in New York have run me three times for governor in New York. Each time we got enough votes to get a ballot line and one year we got five percent of the vote. That was the area Andrew Cuomo wanted to run up the vote to get ready to run for president, get more than his daddy Mario Cuomo ever got, get more votes when he was first elected in 2010 and he got less and he couldn't take us for granted. He had to compete for our votes and he adopted a number of demands we've been campaigning for like a ban on fracking a $15 minimum wage, extending the millionaire's tax and paid family leave. So I think I'm running for president because of those gubernatorial campaigns I ran. Greens around the country asked me to, wasn't what I was planning to do but here I am. Angela. I am, thank y'all for having us. I am a dump truck driver by profession, have been a commercial driver. In January it will be 20 years. I do it because I love it. I feel like a big kid in my truck. I'm originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I live in Florence, South Carolina where I am much, much happier. I've been a labor organizer. I have been a community organizer. I was part of the Wisconsin uprising in 2011. I was part of the Occupy the Hood, which was an offshoot of the mainstream Occupy movement because it did not address the needs of black and brown communities during that time as well. I served as the legislative director for the amalgamated transit union local 998 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin for about two and a half years. And in 2014, my late friend Rick Castell drafted me to run against former Milwaukee County sheriff David Clark. I think y'all know who that is, so I'm not going to describe him. But as an independent socialist and in that election we took 20% of the vote, which shocked everyone, myself included, and that got the attention of the Socialist Party of the USA and in 2016, how is the running mate of my, you know, very dear friend who also recently departed, made me so sick. And I ran with him in 2016. This war of politics forever, and I really, really meant it. And then I got a call this April from Howie Hopkins.  We've been on panels together. We've been in discussions together. So, you know, there's a synergy between the Greens and the Socialists. So, here I am. Well, thank you. Before we get into some of the issues, I just want to talk about the two-party system. What do you say, first, Howie, to fed up voters who say they're going to hold their noses and vote for Biden as the lesser evil, whether they're in a swing state or not? Noam Chomsky, as I'm sure you know, and Dan Ellsberg are prominent voices who don't like Biden, but who are urging voters, particularly in the swing states, to vote for Biden. What is your response to that, Howie? Well, until the Left acts and speaks for itself under its own banner, puts its own program forward, we disappear. You vote for Biden and you're for a Green New Deal and Medicare for All and ending the endless wars, you get lost in the sauce. They don't know you want those things if you vote for Biden. And Biden doesn't know it. He'll take you for granted. And I'm afraid all these prominent progressives telling people they got to vote for Biden everywhere, no matter what, they are reducing the leverage progressives might have. You know, they say defeat Trump, fight Biden, but what are they going to fight him with? Biden's going to think he's got the progressives in his hip pocket. So, you know, the first principle of socialist politics since 1850 has been we need our own party for working class people. And for a lot of socialists for a long time, voting for a capitalist party was like crossing the picket line in a strike. But we seem to have lost that principle of socialist politics. And I think it's a problem. I mean, it's really been the dominant trend on the left in this country since the 1930s. So we don't have a mass based party on the left. And that's what we really need. Otherwise, we end up doing the grunt work for the centrist like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. And that doesn't build the left or an alternative for the life or death issues we face. I mean, Trump is terrible, no doubt, but Biden has no solutions to life or death issues like the climate and inequality crisis that has life expectancies in this country and decline. And a new nuclear arms race, you know, the bulletin and atomic scientists are doing they clock the closest they've ever been to midnight. That issue has not been addressed by any of the candidates to be the party because both parties support this nuclear modernization where they're deploying new strategic nukes and new tactical nukes. So the left better speak up for itself or it disappears. Angela, do you have anything to add to the issue of of the party of the duopoly and what voters should do right now? I think we've lost her. Looks like yes, she froze. She's frozen. So I hope Angela will assign back in again. That's probably what she has to do. The Green parties in other countries like Germany in particular have had success in getting seats in Parliament. I think proportional representation is probably one of the reasons. In the US two-party system, including the difficulty of getting on the ballot, what is the main reason that for the Greens uphill battle? Is that the main reason you think the lack of proportional representation or are there other issues? That's the main institutional reason. When you have single member districts, plurality wins, whether it's an executive office like president or proceeds in Congress. There is a institutional pressure to settle for the lesser evil to stop the candidate you fear the most.  But I think it's also like I mentioned, since the 1930s, the left has mostly focused on trying to get reforms through the Democratic Party and it's disappeared as an alternative. There are countries with single member districts, plurality winner, where they have multi-party systems. Canada, the UK, Venezuela was a two-party system under that and now all two parties are long gone, same in Mexico. So I think that subjective factor is also very important and the left needs to start acting and speaking for itself instead of trying to be a lobby inside the Democratic Party. So you advocate voters voting their conscience even though they vote for a party that has very little chance of winning. Yeah, their conscience, their principles. You know, as I mentioned when I got 5% of the vote running against Cuomo, it made a difference. You don't have to win the office to have leverage in the political system. Now, I think we're on the verge of getting to proportional representation. We now have ranked choice voting in 23 cities and counties. We're using it in a state of presidential election. It's on the ballot in Massachusetts and Alaska and you can expand that to multi-member districts for legislative bodies. There's a bill in Congress to do that for the house carried by Jamie Raskin and I think as we get more ranked choice voting in local jurisdictions and states, then it becomes a real discussion at the federal level. So I think that's the idea whose time has come. What is the procedure for getting it on the federal level? Wouldn't Congress have to vote on their own change to proportional representation which they would unlikely do? Yeah, Congress could pass a bill and that's what the Raskin bill would do for the house. For the presidency, you'd need a constitutional amendment to replace the electoral college with the national popular vote using ranked choice voting and Napoleon shows people want that. They want a national popular vote. Ranked choice voting they're still learning about but I think we can build a movement around that demand. I mean it's just incredible because even Israel, US is very close. Ally has proportional representation. Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and of course it creates coalition governments. Sometimes they have to vote again. It appears messy. That's the argument you hear but democracy is messy, isn't it? Yeah and we have gridlock. We have negative partisanship. Most people don't vote for their own party. They vote against the other party because they fear it and in the Congress it pays to go negative. You may have mud on your hands but you're getting mud all over to your opponent. You get a multi-party system and then you got to build coalitions because they shift on the issues. Imagine we had Greens and Libertarians as well as Democrats and Republicans in Congress. You know Greens and Libertarians would be on the same side of issues like getting out of these endless wars, civil liberties, ending the surveillance state, cutting corporate welfare. But when it came to economics, the Greens are probably more aligned with the progressive Democrats on a lot of questions. So the coalition shifts so you don't want to make enemies. You want to keep relationships with people. And so multi-party systems, they don't get in this negative gridlock because the coalition's got to be built. So I think it creates a more positive, constructive political situation. Probably why they wouldn't want to. Angela's back with us. Angela, let me ask you a very broad question and then something specific. Can a third party that has a chance to win be built and would that require some coalitions being formed with the Green Party and other parties and has there been any effort to do that? I think that it is definitely possible. I think that now more than any other time in recent history, I think people are very serious about making something like that happen. And I think that the coalition building is important. One of the most exciting things about this particular campaign is the fact that we are running on and part of our campaign is left unity and left solidarity. Because we understand we're not an island as a party and we're not going to necessarily hold hands and sing Kumbaya with everybody on the left. But there are a lot of places where we can intersect and work together because we don't have a broad independent left in this country. And it needs to be built. And so I think that coalition building is necessary. And I think that a party that represents working class and cash poor people in this country is very, very possible and can be, I would argue that we're already viable. I have a good question for both of you. And that is, do you see issues with election integrity standing the way of your goals in terms of both getting leverage over the Democratic Party and potentially achieving ranked choice voting and that type of thing? Howie, you first. Well, election integrity is a huge issue. There's of course Republican voter suppression, massive issue. The electoral college came into play in 2016 and elected the losers. Donald Trump and George Bush, they lost the popular vote. But it wouldn't even have been close without massive suppression of particularly the black vote. So now we're in an election where Trump and the Republicans are calling the mail-in ballots fraudulent. So after November 3rd, we may be out in the streets demanding that they count the vote. And I'm going to hand it over to Angela because she has experience in that from 2000. Yeah, I was actually a voter in 2000 in Florida where they told us our chads were hanging. And I was the first mass mobilization I ever attended was going to Tallahassee to the governor's mansion to demand that they count our ballots. And obviously, you know how everything went. But it just gave me my first glimpse into the fact that the Democrats didn't have any fight in them. We legitimately, you had this mass mobilization of people who showed up and said, we're not being paid attention to. We want our ballots counted. This is not how our democracy is supposed to work.  So I am very concerned about election integrity, particularly with all of the chicanery that is already, you know, in the air around this election. You know, I have a lot of concerns. And we might add the pushing through of the new Supreme Court justice as part of that to put her in place so that Trump would have a 6-3 majority in case this election like the 2001 goes to the Supreme Court. But am I wrong in thinking that we we're inevitably or inexorably moving towards some kind of third party that's viable given what happened in 2016. So many voters were disgusted with both of those candidates. Maybe they're a little less disgusted with Biden. I don't know the people were with Hillary Clinton. But once again, the rest of a huge section of the population is being shut out. And is that is that growing? You think how we from 2016? Is there a more of a momentum towards some something that has to change here? Well, I think the conditions are there for that. The problem this year is Trump.  He scapegoats so many people. And it's people just want them out. And they're not thinking what the next step is, which is Biden. And there's no solutions there to these real serious problems. But you look at where the people stand. I mean, the three issues I mentioned, Green New Deal, Medicare for all, any needless horse, public opinion polling shows our platforms more popular than Biden's and Trump's because they oppose those things and work for them. And then you look at public opinion polling on party affiliation, the biggest block of voters are unaffiliated now. Polling shows the majority of people would like to see another major third party. So I think it's the onus is really on the left to get its act together because the conditions are there. And I think the way we do that is from the bottom up, you know, the Greens have elected over 1200 people over the years, there are over 100 in office now. We should be electing thousands to local offices. We win a high percentage, you know, relatively high over 30% of those races. It's a matter of knocking on doors, identifying your support and getting out to vote.   We can win a lot of those races. And as we build a foothold at the local level, then psychologically, people's can say, well, why can't we elect them to the state legislature or the house? Because we've elected them locally. So you go with that psychological barrier. So I think we can build this from the bottom up into a major party in American politics. How many states are you on now in the ballot? We're on 30 states. That's 73% of the electorate, 381 electoral votes. And where we're official write-ins where the votes will be counted, it's 17 more states. That's, I think it's 94% of the electorate and 514 electoral votes out of a possible 538. What is the source of your campaign contributions? The individuals almost totally. We do have, I think we got $50 from one Green Party local, $500 from one socialist organization. So aside from those sort of political action committee donations, which will accept from people's organizations, we won't accept from, you know, corporate or for-profit interests. It's been individuals, you know, average donation. I don't know what it is right now. It's about $25. And we've raised, last report was $360,000. It's probably about $400,000 now. We've applied for matching funds. We're the only campaign in the country that did. This is primary matching funds. You have to raise $5,000 and contribute to the 250 or less from 20 states. We did that. We're just trying to get it documented with the FEC. And I believe there's 150 or 200,000 more dollars we'll get from that. Now, that's a drop in the bucket compared to the billions the two major parties have, but enabled us to run a, you know, pretty good campaign staffed with, you know, about a dozen people got us running around the country. You know, we're able to do a lot. We can't buy big TV advertising and that kind of thing because that's where the big money goes or direct mail. So have you had, what was the interest from the media been like? Well, print and TV, excuse me.  But the national networks, the cable news networks, the, you know, agenda-setting newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post has been nothing. We got three minutes on Morning Joe the week before last, which was really a setup, you know, to say I'm a spoiler. So I was on camera for three minutes and then they spent two minutes after that saying why, I mean, Willie Geist had to admit my program was popular and a lot of people might want to vote for it, but not this time. And then the only time New York Times or Washington Post covers us is when we get knocked off a ballot in some state like Wisconsin or Pennsylvania. So we've been basically blanked out. We get more coverage, a lot more coverage in Europe and Latin America, Morocco, places like that, but not the United States. I'd like to move to foreign policy now. Let me ask you this. What is the biggest foreign policy problem facing the U.S.? Well, it's trying to be a global military empire. It is a global military empire. And that's not about the peace and security of the American people. It's about the security of the profits of U.S.-based global banks and corporations. So it's an enormous strain of resources and it makes enemies instead of friends around the world. So we want to totally change the direction. We have peace initiatives. We want to cut the military budget by 75 percent, withdraw from these endless wars, start withdrawing our troops from these over 804 military bases, pledge no first use of nuclear weapons, and with tensions reduced, go to the other nuclear powers and deal with this global nuclear weapons crisis and negotiate complete and mutual nuclear disarmament under this new treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, which 122 nations agreed to the text of three years ago. And now 50 states have ratified and it's going into effect for them. That just happened this week. And go there with world public opinion. Those nations, the international campaign for the abolition of nuclear weapons got the Nobel Peace Prize for getting that treaty, the text agreed to by those 122 nations. And hardly anybody in America knows about that because the two major parties are for nuclear modernization, deploying these new nuclear weapons. And corporate media won't talk about anything that they won't talk about. So it should be a top campaign issue, but it hasn't been. And then we got bipartisan support for things like changing who the president of Venezuela is, as if we have the right to do that. Juan Guaido is in the gallery at Trump's last state of the union address. And when Trump acknowledges him, he got a standing ovation from all the Democrats as well as all the Republicans. Very little dissent on that side from deciding who the president of Venezuela is, as if we have the right to do that. You know, Howie, if I'd asked the other two guys running, what's the biggest foreign policy problem facing the US, they would have said some combination of Iran, China, Russia, Venezuela, et cetera. But you've pointed out it's the United States itself that's the biggest foreign policy problem, isn't it? With all of its bases around the world, with its aggressions. Andrew, let me ask you, does the US really face any threats in the world? As we keep hearing? I don't think it's what, I don't think that it's what we're hearing. I think we are the threat. You know, I agree with Howie on that. I think that, you know, our idea of American exceptionalism that, you know, we have the right to, you have something under your sand or something under your soil or in the mountains in your country. And we want it, we come take it because we're us.  No one, I mean, we are the threat.  So I think that, you know, going to what Howie was saying earlier, we really have to change the way that we move in the world if we want to change our standing and the way that we are working with other countries. And speaking of, you know, US aggression around the world, we know that journalists, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have done a huge amount to expose evidence of US war crimes and other corruption around the world, committed by not only obviously the US, but also powerful corporations and the list goes on. So now that Assange is facing a tradition to the United States charged with under the Espionage Act, I'd just like to ask for both of your comment on the situation with him and the threat that his prosecution would pose to press freedoms in general and around the world. It's a huge threat. I mean, if he's convicted for that, there's no press in the whole world free. He's not even an American citizen. He's an Australian and US things that can go around and get people for publishing leaked information. I mean, everything or not everything, but a lot of what the New York Times and the Washington Post reports is leaks. That's how that we find out what the hell our government is up to. Julian Assange is being persecuted because he exposed war crimes that Chelsea Manning, you know, released to him. He published.  It's a huge threat to the press freedom of all news organizations. So we believe Julian Assange is the charges should be dropped and he should be freed. Angela, did you want to add anything to that? No, I agree with what I always said.  So, and it sets people up to not, to not say anything, which is, you know, the intent. So Julian Assange should be free. Howie, Howie, did you have a change of heart about Assange? I think you were quoted earlier a couple of years ago in questioning whether he was involved with Russia in in the leaks of the emails, or have you always had a consistent position on Assange? Yeah, I've always said Assange should be free. I think, I think in an interview, I did say I was critical of him for direct messaging Donald Trump Jr. during the 2016 campaign, which I was actually recently talking to Daniel Ellsberg, who is trying to get me to tell people to vote for Biden in the in the battleground states. We agreed to disagree. But, you know, he mentioned he's fighting hard for Assange, but he was critical of that as well. I think in, you know, how politics is people like to pick on one thing and blow it out of proportion. I think that's what happened with that comment I made. I think it's a good time to talk about the Russia gate thing. We went through a couple of years. Elizabeth, did you have a question about that? Yeah, first of all, just to reference the way in which Jill Stein, you know, your predecessor, the Green Party presidential candidate in 2016 was unfairly smeared in the aftermath of Donald Trump's win for being a spoiler candidate, but also there were accusations that she had some association with Russia, being a Russian tool, et cetera, et cetera. And just do you, if Trump should win a second term, do you expect to similarly be smeared as agents of Russia in some way? And do you, how much do you think the media is responsible for touting these outright false narratives? Or do you think that they, I mean, do you think that Russia gate has some weight to it basically as well? Well, I've already been called a Russian asset.  And I think, you know, circumstantial evidence to indicate they might have been 2016, but it doesn't explain why Hillary Clinton lost. That's black voter suppression in the electoral college. And as far as Jill Stein being a Russian asset, I mean, Hillary Clinton said that about 15 months ago on David Plus podcast without any evidence and the recent Senate Intelligence Committee report on their investigation into the Russians in 2016 gave Jill a clean bill of health. And they prefaced, they commented on what she did, which was go to a RT gala and she was trying to present her points of view and she paid her own way. So they reported all that and they prefaced it by saying, you know, they thanked her for being forthright in what she did. And they're not saying she did anything wrong. But that won't stop the Democrats from this narrative that Jill Stein spoiled the election and who's with the Russians, which is, you know, that's not dealing with the real reason why they lost, you know, the Republicans suppressed a lot of vote. And then the electoral college installed the winner.  Think about how authoritarian that is running for offices, probably the fullest expression of the First Amendment, free speech, petitioning government for redress the grievances, getting your word out through the free press. And they're trying to suppress us, you know, by knocking us off the ballot where they can or here in New York, they tripled the number of votes we need in a bill attached to the state budget last April in the middle of the pandemic, when nobody's paying attention, tripled the number of votes we need to keep our ballot line. So that's the real threat to democracy, the voter suppression, the suppression of parties, which is a form of voter suppression. And I think the other problem with this Russiagate narrative is that it's used as an excuse to save or rattle at Russia, which is, you know, if you care about human rights in democracy in Russia, to be belligerent toward them just reinforces their, you know, the nationalist rhetoric, you know, that they have to justify repression. So I think we need to engage them constructively, particularly on issues that concern us all, which particularly are the nuclear arms race and the climate crisis. And that's the way to approach those problems.  And all these war gains and maneuvers and all the, you know, geopolitical movers and the proxy wars, that is just making the situation worse. How we as the democratic establishment came under unexpected and very strong pressure in the 2016 election, it seemed that they have developed now this default position to democratic center that if there's any criticism from anyone in the US of their policies, that they, that's indigenous, that they blame it on Russia, that no one in this country in the United States could develop their own critique of the establishment unless they're being somehow directed by Russia. Also, if there's any information that comes and not disinformation, for example, the DNC emails that we could be published, that was, they were all true. That was information. Even if Russia had hacked it, it really doesn't matter because they were spreading information. It was an information campaign, not a disinformation campaign. So it really doesn't matter who the source was because of documents where now we see the same thing happening with these Joe Biden and Hunter Biden emails. The Post has published them. They seem legitimate because they've not really been denied by anyone on the Biden side. And then immediately we see these 50 former intelligence officers saying that this is a Russian information operation, apparently the letter says. So again, it's blaming Russia. It's not very convenient for the Democrats. How do you combat that by standing up to a power that every time they're criticized or every time there's some wrongdoing on their part is revealed, they blame Russia and it seemed to get away with it. Well, there's a phrase you want to speak truth to power, but I'm more interested in having the power to speak the truth and get it heard, which to me means we got to build a mass party on the left that people know us because we're in the communities and they trust us because they have personal relationships that we built through organizing. And then we can talk about these issues outside that narrative. I mean, when I was on morning Joe, after they took me off camera, Joe Scarborough said he wants to cut the military budget by 75%. Oh, Putin will love that. I would have loved to have responded to him. I think it would be a problem for Putin in their military industrial complex. How are they going to justify their big spending? I mean, it would change the dynamic, but that's not in the mainstream narrative. It's, you know, anytime you criticize the Democrats to quote unquote, the left in the mainstream narrative, you know, you must be working for Russia. I mean, I could go into a lot of my criticisms of Russia as an authoritarian capitalist country, but you know, it's really up for the Russians to deal with. I got to deal with my own authoritarian capitalist country where I live. Even if the US cut their military by 75%, they'd still spend problem more than Russia does. It may be even Russia or any other country in the world. Still. Now, how is this the issue of the myth of America that is so successfully sold to the people? And to me, I look back to Hiroshima and Nagasaki as creating some kind of megalomaniacal leadership in the US. We had Curtis LeMay during the Cold War wanting to drop 300 nuclear weapons on the Soviet Union, et cetera. And this has been an inherent part now that both Trump and Biden seem to embrace this nationalistic, chauvinistic America having to teach the world a democracy when we really, if you look at it with clear eyes, you see they're pursuing strategic and geostrategic and economic interests. And they're not spreading democracy, Libya, Syria, the countries where they touch are and collapse. They overthrow Democrats like Mosaic in Iran or our Benz in Guatemala or or Salvador Allende in Chile to put in place kings, military dictators. They've done it, Syria, they've done it so many places since the end of the Second World War when the CIA began, with the bombings behind them and with short unbelievable power that no nation has ever had before. How can you address this to the American people without them feeling insulted? It's hard to tell the American people, you aren't as great as you're told that you are. How do you make that argument today? Well, my argument is all this foreign military interventions, all these endless wars is not about our peace and security. It undermines our peace and security. I mean, this is a very wealthy country. I like a phrase Ralph Nader used to use, instead of being the world's global military empire, we should be the world's humanitarian superpower and provide aid instead of arms and make friends instead of enemies. We talk about our Green New Deal, a global Green New Deal, to help the global South in particular leap out of the 19th century fossil fuel agent of the 21st century solar age. That would do more to promote our peace and security and world peace and security than this global military empire, which just makes things worse. And you mentioned when you were starting to list some of those countries, I'm thinking more recently like Honduras, President Zelaya being grabbed in his pajamas one morning, and Clinton right away says it's constitutional and the U.S. supported that. And it's similar thing in Bolivia recently. And they just had an election and the people resound and they rejected that coup. But this is something that's ongoing. And I think you just got to explain to people, like Muhammad Ali used to say during Vietnam, I don't have no beef with no Vietnamese. I'm not going to go fight them. I think we got to ask. I'm a former Marine. I was talking with a guy that, a Marine who had been to Helmand province twice, very conservative guy, culturally conservative. And we were talking about his experience. And he said, I was over there twice. And these farmers, we couldn't engage them because of the rules engagement during the day while they're farming. And then they go home, get their rifles and we shoot at each other at night. And then he said, they're back there farming and I'm here.  I think you can explain that to Americans, but we can't do it through the corporate media. That's why we need a mass party that can actually get into the communities and have forums where people look to what we're saying and have a way to participate in politics at the grassroots level. Democrats and Republicans don't offer that. We really have memberless parties. The party enrollment, if they have it in the state, is just to determine which primary you vote in. You don't go to your local chapter of the Democrats or Republicans to solve a problem in your community. They don't exist. The committees they do have are basically social networking and voter mobilization. They don't have discussions of policy or have people organizing to find solutions to their problems. I'd like to move to domestic issues. Angela, about the uprisings. We saw an extraordinary development over the last few months after years of taking police abuse and outright murder, mostly of Black Americans. People had enough, even in the middle of this pandemic. They had enough. We saw an unbelievable uprising. For me, the toppling of statues, those statues are the leaders who created the system that we live under. The people who are now enjoying the benefits of ruling this system that we live under did not want to see their forebears really being toppled. That gets a significant act, more than just symbolic, to show that the old order could be crumbling. It also caused people to take a stand. You couldn't be in the middle anymore. We've seen the viciousness of Trump and Bill Barr, in particular, coming out against legitimate protests, peaceful protests, smearing them, and even trying to smear Joe Biden as a socialist, which is the funniest thing in the entire campaign. I want to ask you, Angela, about the uprisings. Where direction should they go? How do you avoid them being co-opted by the Democratic Party? How does it remain a legitimate movement that can really bring change by keeping the pressure on, I think, a frightened establishment? I think that, and I'm thinking of, because the movement for Black Lives virtually held its Black National Convention at the beginning of the summer, and I attended. One of the things that was up for discussion is the fact that co-optation is a threat by the Democrats. In order for Black people in this country to fully be able to advocate for their own, for our own liberation, we absolutely have to have independent, an independent party, or an independent, and they're still working this out. It's something that's in the works, as far as I understand. But the emphasis is on remaining independent, and that crafting our own agenda, and that these are things that are not coming from the power structure, which is what usually happens. They tell us what we need. It's our pacification techniques. What we're seeing with the way that these uprisings are manifesting now is that these young people are seeing through the pacification tactics. They see these things. The kneeling and kente cloth, which was ridiculous and gross. The painting of Black Lives matter murals in the street. Yeah, that's cute, but that's not what we're asking you for. We want systemic change. At this point, we realized that a lot of folks are still, which is, I saw to my, I wasn't encouraged to see it, but watching the convention, a lot of us are still very plugged into the Democratic Party. A lot of us really still feel that we can push the Democratic Party towards our agenda, but you got a whole lot of folks in this country right now, Black folks that are saying, I want nothing to do with it. We need to be independent.  A whole lot of those voices are socialist because we understand that when you end capitalism, you end some of the most horrific abuses of racism. They're tied to capitalism. A lot of people that are coming forth and saying these things are socialist. It's not something that is solidified, but one thing that is prominent is that people understand that the things that the Democratic Party have been throwing us are topical solutions because they want to keep kicking the can down the road. They don't want to tick any of their donors off. Defund the police. Why will we do that? We don't want to look bad, even though we don't want to tick off police unions. We don't want them angry with us. Well, there's a lot of growing orders among Black folks in this country. We're not playing this game with y'all anymore and are looking to create independent bodies outside the duopoly to get what we need done. Unless Elizabeth has a question on that, I wanted to move on to climate change, Howie. You're the Green Party. Trump's outright climate change denier and fossil fuel champions almost forget about him. Biden has a plan. What do you know about it? How can you critique Biden's plan? Well, I say Trump calls climate change a hoax because Biden acts as if it's a hoax because his plan is pro-fossil fuels, pro-nuclear power, and when you get down to the details that remain after he made it clear he's not for a Green New Deal. If anybody wasn't paying attention, they got that in their first debate. He gives the detail, for example, we're going to retrofit five million buildings in the first four years for clean energy and efficiency. What are 120 million buildings in the country? At that pace, it'll take them 150 years to clean up the building sector. When they talk about transportation, they talk about 50,000 electric vehicle charging stations, but not about revamping the whole transportation system around rails, light rails in the city, high-speed trains between the cities, and putting most of the freight on electrified rails, which is a lot cleaner than trucking now. Most of what he does for solar wind energy is incentives, basically corporate welfare wind. The prices of those have come down, what we really need, and this is what we do in our EcoSocial Green New Deal, which is a detailed plan. There's not another one out there like it. We show our homework, we show them how much it'll cost, transform all productive sectors, not just energy production, but manufacturing, agriculture, buildings, and transportation. We show how many jobs it will create. It creates 38 million jobs. It's a 10-year program, $27.5 trillion to get to zero to negative greenhouse gas emissions in 100% clean energy by 2030. That's because the climate science says we got to do that. Greta Thunberg was schooling the adults at the United Nations recently saying, your last report from the International Panel on Climate Change about the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold says we have a global carbon budget of 420 gigatons carbon. That was two years ago, and we've emitted 42 tons each year, which means we've blown through 20% of that budget, we'll blow through the whole budget in eight years, and there's nothing being done. So we want a full strength Green New Deal. What Biden is offering is fracking the hell out of the country. They made it clear there for fracking. They're not against drilling for oil, and they kind of cover that up when they talk about carbon capture and sequestration, which isn't economically viable. It's not going to happen, and if they did try to do it, it requires a massive infrastructure to pipe the carbon to where you can inject it in the ground, which has its own environmental hazards. It's not viable. Nuclear power costs two to three times more than most foreign to solar and wind energy. Why would you even go down that path? Obama and Biden already did. They gave long guarantees for six new nukes in South Carolina and Georgia. Four of them they've given up on due to cost overruns and construction delays, and they're still pouring money down the two nukes at Vogel, Georgia, but that's only because Brian Kemp, who has Secretary of State suppressed the Black Boat and stole the election from Stacey Abrams, became governor. He's a creature of Georgia power in the Southern Company. That's just a dead end. For the money you would spend on nuclear power, you can build a lot more energy capacity in solar and wind. There's not really a plan there. I don't think Biden really has a climate plan. When he presents it, he talks about some public investment, which really means corporate welfare, not the government itself employing people and making things that we need, which is what our eco-social Green New Deal does. We do like we did a bit in the New Deal and we did during World War II when the federal government took over 25% of the manufacturing capacity of the country in order to turn industry on a dime and that also a democracy to defeat the fascist powers. That's the kind of thing when you need to make this transition. Our eco-social Green New Deal emphasizes public enterprise and planning, particularly in the energy, transportation, and manufacturing sectors. That's the kind of program we need. It seems even the progressive Democrats can't conceive of the government actually directly employing people and producing goods and services. It's always got to be corporate welfare and then it's supposed to trickle down, but it never does. We've got only a few minutes left. Talking about having a war for it to fight climate change, you might argue the same thing for this pandemic, Angela. The way Trump is handle this is almost criminal. I mean it seems like he had a decision to make either we open the economy or else I'm not getting reelected even though that's going to kill a lot of people or we keep it shut down and save people, but I'm probably going to lose because the economy is going in the tank. What is the Green Party's platform strategy, I should say, for fighting this pandemic? One of the biggest things that, you know, sets us apart from anything else. Medicare for all is ours and for us, Medicare for all is a community controlled national health service and it would put the infrastructure in place to make sure that people can get, you know, get test traced and isolated to manage COVID in a way that we're not able to do now because that infrastructure doesn't exist is very hit or miss and I would gently push back that, you know, the way that this current administration has handled the pandemic is not almost criminal. It is absolutely criminal to know, you know, to not invoke all of the things that it could have done and literally let people die. There's a lot of things that could have, you know, if we're going to have people shelter in place, our administration would understand that folks, you know, need to be financially supported and so making sure that, you know, not this hit or miss, you know, $1,200 maybe, you know, that a whole lot of folks didn't get. Our proposal is $2,000 every month for every adult, $500 a month for every child for the duration of the pandemic so that people are not being forced out into the workplace during, you know, a plague and also, you know, alluding to what Howie said about turning the government on a dime. There should be no shortage of PPE for anyone who needs it, you know, just thinking of nurses taking pictures and garbage bags and, you know, both sewing PPE at home because there was nothing available when we as a country could have been producing that and that's something that the president could have made happen and chose not to and I, you know, I have my reasons, you know, behind wondering what his motivations were but the fact remains is he could have done this. There's a lot of things that we could have done to make sure that people were able to shelter in place and be safe and not be forced out to work, you know, or to school or wherever and being that I was, you know, thinking about the fact that I've been classified as an essential worker. I've worked in the duration of this pandemic so just thinking about people who are endangered, they've been treated like they're expendable and we didn't have to go that way. That 2000 a month is really key to this. There are other countries, Britain, Australia, I think France and Germany, they paid their workers so they wouldn't you're going to tell people to have to stay home, you've got to pay them and instead, Howie, we saw these bailouts of again Wall Street, big corporations feeding at the public trial again in the middle of a crisis. I mean, there can't be a worse advertisement for a plutocracy than what we saw here and yet the message doesn't seem to get through this is what's happened. I think the people underground do see that. They only got their $1,200 and they read that Wall Street got a bailout again when they didn't need one. How do you translate that anger again into some kind of mobilization to change this? Well, I think where it's gone is through the vote for Biden because Trump has been so bad on it. You know, I don't expect much from Biden, but I expect them to listen to the public health officials and do what's necessary to suppress community spread, which is test contact rates, isolate those exposed and infected and you suppress community spread, then you can go back to work in school relatively safely. One thing that doesn't get talked about enough is OSHA should have had a special regulation to make sure everybody had the protections they needed in terms of PPE and that workplaces and schools were restructured so you could maximize the social distancing and OSHA has been AWOL and we expect that from Trump, but I haven't heard the Democrats really push on that issue. Some in the labor movement have, particularly those industries affected, but to me the total disaster of the COVID pandemic shows how the two governing parties are presiding over a failed state. You know, all the Pacific Rim countries, European countries, many countries in the global south figured out how to test, trace, isolate, they suppressed community spread and then they went back to work in school relatively safely and we're now in the middle of this pandemic having record numbers of people the last week you know become infected. We got 4% of the world's population and 25% of the infected in the deaths. It's a total failure and while Trump has been a dummy about it, I mean he could be campaigning on how he saved us from the COVID pandemic if he just followed the public health officials.  He didn't care about us, he cared about the stock market. Instead, I think it's you know killed any chance he has to win if the vote is counted. So this is something that we could have done a lot better on but this country you know they got gridlock in Congress so they can't get you know any kind of relief to the people and the president is he's like a child you know he's like place make believe it's going to disappear. We've turned the corner as it gets worse and worse. It's unbelievable. By the way, I said almost criminal because I'm not quite sure what statute you can get him on. It must be something for the way he's handled this crisis maybe anyway. I want to end now by allowing you to make final statements. Elizabeth, this is your chance to ask a few more questions. Well, I was just going to ask both of you to comment on how much of an insult you feel it is that the Democratic Party nominated somebody like Joe Biden with his history especially in regards to the 94 crime bill and Kamala Harris as his vice presidential candidate with her record as a very corrupt prosecutor. I mean how much more tone deaf could the Democratic Party possibly be? Angela, if you want to go take that first. And tone deaf is exactly what we said you know we understood going in that it would probably be Senator Harris who would get the nomination and when they did it was just like y'all are serious you're really going to do this when you know there's a rebellion happening across this country and you nominate someone who is the embodiment of everything this rebellion is rebelling against. It was just I couldn't make it up and you know just the celebrating you know going to what you said about insult just the celebration of the fact you know on the Democrat side that hey we're running a black woman for VP this is the first black woman our side say oh excuse me wait a minute the left has been running black black female VP candidates for decades you know there was already a black woman in the race for VP you know so you know we made sure we put that point but it is absolutely just I don't even know what to call it you know the disregard of what people are asking for and or not asking for we don't want someone who is you know we don't want the architects of mass incarceration in this country to be governing this country so it is very interesting to watch this unfold. Yeah I think it should be regarded as an insult but unfortunately Trump is just I think got people scared stupid they don't even know they've been insulted you know what they did to Bernie Sanders you know after Biden won the South Carolina primary the whole rest of the field closed ranks with the corporate establishment of the Democratic Party to front Sanders off and they know you know Medicare for all is signature issue is enormously popular but they're more interested in their donors than their voters and they think they can take their voters for granted and they will until we build an independent left party. Howie Hawkins am I muted? Nope. Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker were our guests today. Howie one last question do you have any position on nationalizing certain key industries you know the idea of a mixed economy and like back in the 70s and 80s was not in the West and Britain had one in France I mean it was quite quite common never happened in the US is there any role for nationalization some interest to pay for the programs that would be needed that we've discussed Yeah we like to speak of socialization because some industries you want to have decentralized to the proper level and socially owned so it could be the municipal level or you can have like public power systems we have over two thousand of them in the country and we're going to have a national public energy system that's a federation of local public power districts so socialization means social ownership and democratic administration and we say certainly for the big banks and industries that are systemically important or so big that they have you know systemic economic impact and then in the private sector we advocate cooperatives so worker cooperatives workers get the full fruit of their labor that's a form of social ownership and the consumer cooperatives you get the service at cost rather than cost plus the profit for some owners so yeah we're we call ourselves you know democratic and ecological socialist and we want system change not just tinkering with capitalism which is structurally incapable of ecological balance because it's a system of endless growth of democracy because it concentrates wealth in a billionaire class that translates that economic power into political power is incapable of long-term peace and security because you get wars between capitalist states trying to protect their own corporations and it's not about it increases inequality without you know some countervailing measures because you get a fixed wage and all the other value you create goes to the people that own it and that just makes the rich richer and the rest of us struggling to get by so we want system change not just you know reforms of a system that particularly with the concentrated wealth of the very rich they can roll back those reforms because of their concentrated political power well that was howly halkins the green party presidential candidate we were also speaking with angelo walker the vice presidential candidate about the vast majority or a big majority of american people who don't feel represented anymore by the political class and how they are organizing and around the most important issues that they face so again we thank howie and angelo for joining us this week on cn live thank you elizabeth boss my co-host kathy wogan executive producer and our viewers and tune in uh saturday 8 p.m we will be having greg palestine to talk about voter suppression techniques so again for cn live this is joe loria goodbye get out your notebook


Hello everybody, HoodedCobraCommander78 here and I'm back with another VintageGiJoeToy review and we are back on track now. I wanted to do Tomax and Xamont last week but I didn't have everything I needed, now I'm ready to go. So this time we're going to review the CrimsonGuard Commander's Tomax and Xamont. But with this video I had a little special help behind the camera so let's meet the film crew. This is Audrey, say hi Audrey. This is Tomax and Xamont, the CrimsonGuard commanders also known as the Crimson Twins. They were first sold in 1985, they were also available in 1986, they were discontinued after that, but they were available in 1990 as a mail away offer. They were worth one flag point despite the fact that you bought these two guys together, obviously they're supposed to be twins, they were dual packed, they came in the same package, but you still only got one flag point. Really I think you should have gotten two flag points, two figures, two flag points. They were the first G.I. Joe action figures to be double packed like that. The next multi-pack G.I. Joe action figures was Special Missions Brazil Five Pack in 1986. Tomax and Xamont are supposed to be the CrimsonGuard commanders and these were the CrimsonGuard, these elite Cobra Troopers in these bright red uniforms, really cool looking Cobra Troopers, but Tomax and Xamont's connection to the CrimsonGuard was kind of tenuous. They didn't really play that role very much in the various G.I. Joe media, but on their file card it does specify that they are the commanders of the CrimsonGuard. There is a slight connection between the Twins and the CrimsonGuard in the file card but I'll get to that later. You can tell these guys are supposed to be twins, but they're not copies of each other, they're more like mirror images. This is Tomax and this is Xamont. You can tell the difference because Xamont has a scar on his left cheek. I'll look more at the differences between these action figures when I look at their sculpt. Let's start out as we usually do by looking at the accessories and they both came with this very large laser pistol that doesn't want to come out of the hand. This exceptionally large laser pistol which kind of looks more like a Star Wars gun to me than a G.I. Joe weapon. It's not based on any real-life weapon that I know of. It really is a completely fantasy weapon and it's really oddly oversized for these guys. It doesn't have any kind of foregrip for it to be used kind of like a submachine gun. I guess you can imagine it as a machine pistol or something like that but it's not really designed that way. This is supposed to be a laser pistol. As you know I'm not a big fan of lasers in G.I. Joe but you know what are you going to do? It's a laser pistol. They came with one other accessory that also doesn't like to fit in their hands very well. This skyhook which came with a long black string which I have kind of wound up here. Now this skyhook has a pair of handles. I guess they could both hold onto this if you wanted to do it that way. But basically you use this string to kind of repel them down the string using this pulley system. It's not a real wheel in there. It's just a solid piece of plastic and the string just kind of glides through there. I'll go ahead and demonstrate how this is used. Just demonstrate how the skyhook works. You just string the string through this loop here. You put the handle in the action figure's hand and you just zip them along like so. The skyhook is so frustrating because it really does not want to go on the hands very well. I find myself having to force it and I do not like to force this old plastic. I feel like I'm going to either break the thumb on the action figure or break the handle on the accessory. Let's look at the articulation on these guys and let's just look at Zemont here because the articulation is the same. They have the typical articulation that was introduced in 1985 meaning that they can turn their head from left to right but they can also look up and down. Their heads were on a ball joint. They can lift their arms up about so far and they can swivel them all the way around. They can bend at the elbow about 90 degrees and they can swivel their arms all the way around. The figure was held together with a rubber O-ring that looped around the inside and that allowed him to move at the torso a little bit. He can move his legs apart about so far. He could bend at the hip about 90 degrees and he could bend at the knee about 90 degrees. Let's look at the sculpt and the color of Tomax and Zemont and although of course they are supposed to be twins, they are not copies of each other and actually there are no parts common between them. They both have completely unique parts. They didn't just stamp out the same action figure and put a scar on one of them. As I said, Zemont has a scar on his left cheek. This is kind of a pink colored scar. There is a variant of Zemont that has a longer darker red scar but of course I don't have that one. I have what I think is the more common one. They have this very unusual looking armor on their shoulders and on their arms which reminds me a little bit of jousting armor oddly enough. I'm not really sure what that would have to do with these guys but that's just what it looks like to me. Of course the armor is on opposite sides of the action figures and they have this red sash which I think is very good looking. It's very striking against the dark blue of their shirts and of course they have this very nice looking silver cobra symbol. Now as you're probably aware, any of this silver paint on these action figures is not very robust and it tends to rub off fairly easily and you can see that's kind of happened on Tomax here. His cobra symbol is slightly worn away. This silver sash reminds me a little bit of a Girl Scouts sash so I'm assuming that they sew their cobra merit badges on there as they earn them. These guys apparently haven't earned any merit badges yet so why do they get to be the Crimson Guard Commanders? Look, even the Crimson Guard has merit badges. They both have black gloves and they have these unusual electronics on their gloves of course on opposite gloves and they have on the front in their waist piece this kind of cod piece looking thing even though it looks like these waist pieces might be identical they're not because this red ridged holster here is on opposite sides of them so even these waist pieces are unique parts they don't share those parts between them. They both have these sculpted on pistols with these red ridged pistol holsters and of course they're on opposite legs. The reverse legs are pretty plain but as you can see they have these amazing tall cobra themed boots with these nice sculpted cobra heads on top and of course knee pads and as you might know I am a fan of knee pads I love that but these boots again are not, they don't share these boots because they have knives on one side of course the opposite side so no parts at all shared between these guys they are completely unique but they are as you can see mirror images of each other. Let's take a look at the file card and thanks to an interview that Mark Balomo did on the podcast Watson Joe Mind I have taken a closer look at this file card and there really is a lot of unique and interesting information here. It says Crimson Guard commanders codenames Tomax and Zamot and of course Tomax is Zamot spelled backwards so their names are also reversed. Their portrait here has both of them. They're both on the same file card and of course the top one looks like Tomax, the bottom one with the scar looks like Zamot. File names are classified and it says their specialty is infiltration, espionage, sabotage, propaganda and corporate law. Since I've actually taken a corporate law course I can say that that is probably more difficult than any of those other things. Their place of birth is Island in the Mediterranean. That's very nonspecific. I did check a map of the Mediterranean and I think this might be referring to Corsica which was the birthplace of Napoleon. So there might be a little bit of a French connection here which follows through with the rest of their file card. This section says spell out the name Tomax in capitals and hold it up to a mirror. It reads Zamot. The name holds true for the actual brothers. Each is the mirror image of the other except for a scar on Zamot's face. Both twins served with the foreign legion paras in Algeria before the officers push. This is referring to the Algiers push of 1961 also referred to as the generals push. It was a failed coup d'etat to overthrow the government of Charles de Gaulle. They honed their mercenary skills in the Bush Wars of Africa and South America which may be a connection to Wild Weasel who also fought in the Bush Wars of South America. They were too smart to be soldiers forever. Went to Zurich to become bankers. This line is referring to the Zurich bankers also known as the gnomes of Zurich. They're Swiss bankers that are known to be secretive and manipulative. They quickly found the ins and outs of international finance to be too haphazard for their tastes. They preferred a situation they could control. Cobra was willing to give them access to that control. Now they command legions, but their legions wear three-piece suits and fight their battles in executive boardrooms. This reference to their legions and three-piece suits is probably the connection to the Crimson Guard. Now these Crimson Guard troopers are elite troopers but they also work undercover and they often wear suits and they basically disguise themselves as normal members of society. These then are the most fearsome of the Cobra adversaries. They don't fight with steel and claw backed with muscle and honest sweat.   Essentially, Tomax and Zemont are the financiers of Cobra. They fill an important role in a terrorist organization and a role that you wouldn't think about necessarily if you're playing with these toys, but of course Cobra has to have some way to get their money. It's kind of similar to the way Destro is Cobra's arms supplier. You might not think of how a terrorist organization would get its weapons, but of course they have to have some method and Destro fits that role. Essentially, Tomax and Zemont get the money that is used to buy the weapons from Destro. Tomax and Zemont are twins and they are some of the most cliched characters in all of G.I. Joe and that's saying something because there are a lot of cliched characters in G.I. Joe. As they were depicted in the cartoon and the comic book, Tomax and Zemont feel each other's pain and they can read each other's thoughts. They kind of communicate telepathically. A very close friend of mine has an identical twin and he talks about some of the weird things that people say when they find out that he has an identical twin brother and some of the things they say are like, do you feel each other's pain? Can you read each other's thoughts? Things like that.  And here it is. They embody all of the cliches surrounding identical twins. A bit more subtlety in handling the characters would have been nice, I think. Let's look at this design. It is a very weird design. It's so strange. All the bright reds and blues, the armor on the shoulders, the silver boots. I mean, it looks beautiful. I mean, it's a gorgeous design. It just looks so impressive. But it's hard to imagine anyone dressing like this under any circumstances in the real world. When they were introduced in the comic book, they were in a circus setting, which I think actually fits their costumes better than a financier. You could see them as circus performers, more than you could see them as bankers. If you ever walk into a bank and you're greeted by somebody dressed like this, turn around and walk out. I don't really see these guys as Crimson Guard Commanders. I think they were kind of shoehorned in that role. I see them more as their own independent characters getting money for Cobra through any nefarious means necessary. If I were to rate these guys, even though I really prefer more realism in G.I. Joe and even Cobra, although Cobra gets a little bit of a pass, they can go a little bit more science fiction than the G.I. Joe team, I still rate these guys really high. They just look so cool. I love this look. They're very impressive looking. That was my review of Tomax and Zemont. I hope you liked this video. If you did, make sure you give the video a thumbs up, subscribe, and like the Facebook page. Thanks again to Audrey for helping. So Audrey, what did you think of this review? It's... The leaders of the Crimson Guard, the evil twin brothers, Tomax and Zemont, and they're getting away in the Cobra Baron. The Juggles, Gotham. With the G.I. Joe Minitank. G.I. Joe. The brothers sold together, Cobra Baron, G.I. Joe Minitank, and Joe figures sold separately from Hasbro.