Episode 135 – The Flint Water Crisis with Jordan Chariton

Macro N Cheese – Episode 135
The Flint Water Crisis with Jordan Chariton
August 28, 2021

 

[00:00:02.750] – Jordan Chariton [intro/music]

They packaged it as a public regional water authority, but in practice, it was really privatization. Major banks underwriting the bonds for this new water system, wealthy investors, all that. And there was a problem, though. Obviously, it costs a lot of money to build a water pipeline. And Flint was broke.

[00:00:25.950] – Jordan Chariton [intro/music]

Congress and as you know, not easy to get Congress to do anything, but the Congressional House Oversight Committee, in response to our story, issued a scathing statement condemning Snyder and sources on the committee, told us, “We’re opening up a federal investigation as a result of your reporting.”

[00:01:35.210] – Geoff Ginter [intro/music]

Now let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43.140] – Steve Grumbine

Alright, everybody, it is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today I have my good friend Jordan Chariton joining us, and Jordan Chariton is the co-founder of Status Coup and has been a friend of mine for a number of years. And this is one of the hardest working SOB’s in the alternative media world. He actually does something that is a lost art even in the mainstream and that’s investigative reporting.

I have watched Jordan chasing stories all over the country. And many of you all probably remember Jordan from back in the day of the DNC where he took Donna Brazile to task right there on the floor is one of the most epic memories I have of the 2015-2016 primaries. Just an amazing moment in time.

And it’s just my honor to have him on the show, especially given our focus is predominantly on Modern Monetary Theory, but one of the things that jumped out is the Flint water crisis. And Jordan has been on this thing from start to finish. He has been the only one that stuck by it. And I remember when it first came out, I kept thinking, I was an MMT guy, there’s no operational reason that we cannot immediately fix all those pipes and give them clean water.

And all it has been is just a nonstop denial of service to those individuals to have clean drinking water. So I figured Jordan has spent many years covering this. I want to give you the full story about what happened in Flint and all the fraud and all the criminal behavior that harmed some of the most vulnerable citizens in the United States. So with that, Jordan, thank you so much for joining me today, sir.

[00:03:24.420] – Jordan Chariton

Thanks as always for having me.

[00:03:26.890] – Grumbine

Well. Considering it’s usually I’ve been on your show and it’s nice to bring you into my world here a little bit. I’d like to be able to do it a lot more. But this is such an important thing. You have really been breaking stories even as recently as this second. And with everything that’s been going on, why don’t we give our listeners an opportunity to understand what happened in Flint and what you’ve been chasing, kind of break it down throughout the course of time, and where we’re at today?

[00:03:55.070] – Chariton

Sure. I think the best way to describe this is, of course, it’s about a city, but it’s really about America because similar things are going on all over the country in cities like Flint. It’s not always water. That is the scandal or the cover-up, but it’s really the same playbook going on in many places that has gone on in Flint.

So for those that don’t know Flint similar to a whole lot of cities through deindustrialization, the offshoring of jobs, corporations writing trade deals, Flint went from being kind of the envy of the country in the mid 20th century -vibrant middle class, birthplace of the automobile industry – to basically bankrupt about a decade ago when Michigan Governor Rick Snyder took over as governor in 2011 and kind of an unholy alliance between Snyder, his administration and some local officials in Flint and the County Flint is part of. They essentially wanted to privatize the water system in Michigan under the guise of saving Flint residents money on water.

[00:05:10.710] – Grumbine

Neoliberalism.

[00:05:11.870] – Chariton

Right. Because water prices have been going up, Flint had received its water from Detroit for 50 years, and Detroit’s water system at the time a decade ago was like the third largest water utility in America. So pretty extensive. So Flint, because of the deindustrialization, white flight federal decisions, Flint was broke. And at that point, a city that was once well over 200,000 people was hovering going under 100,000.

So under the guise of this saving Flint money, creating our own water destiny, they decided to build a brand new water pipeline that would be on the same exact path as the Detroit water pipeline that had delivered clean water to Flint for 50 years. This was called the KWA Pipeline. They packaged it as a public regional water authority, but in practice, it was really privatization.

Major banks underwriting the bonds for this new water system, wealthy investors, all that. And there was a problem, though. Obviously, it costs a lot of money to build a water pipeline. And Flint was broke. So Flint was at its borrowing limit in 2014. It was not legally allowed to borrow any more money because it was broke nearly 12 to $13 million in deficit.

And I know federal deficit isn’t really a thing on the local level. They were well, well, in deficit. So basically, a mixture of Snyder’s administration and county officials essentially created a fake emergency order or a fake environmental crisis that would serve as the exception to allow Flint to exceed its borrowing limit and borrow money under the guise of cleaning up a lime sludge lagoon, whatever that means.

It would have only cost less than $100,000 to clean it up, but snuck into that environmental order for this unrelated lime lagoon was Flint being allowed to borrow $100 million to join this privatized water pipeline. So it was straight-up financial fraud. Technically, bond fraud because the bonds for this pipeline were created under false pretenses, which is illegal.

So in that deal, while the pipeline was being built, this brand new, unnecessary pipeline that Flint was going to join Flint could either remain as a customer on Detroit water pipeline in the meantime or go do something else. And they decided, let’s put plant in the short term while this pipeline is being built on the Flint River, which, if you know, people in Flint, Michigan, Flint River was just a dumping ground.

General Motors had dumped its waste in there for a century. Other industrial polluters had dumped even dead bodies routinely dumped in the Flint River. First time I got there, it looked greenish – the water. So this is what they decided to do to put them on the Flint River. Technically, kind of, sort of, they could have treated the Flint River water.

It would have never been as clean as Detroit’s water pipeline was delivering to Flint because that was water from Lake Huron which is like glacial water. Great Lakes, some of the cleanest, most pure water in the world in Michigan. But the Flint River, it could have technically been treated to be safe. But Snyder’s administration either intentionally or unintentionally, that’s an argument maybe for a different day, failed to ensure that proper chemicals would be added to the Flint River water – corrosion control chemicals.

As you know, the pipes underneath us all over the country are like 50 to 100 years old. They’re corroding. They’re very old. So without certain corrosion control chemicals added into water supplies all around the country, lead and other heavy metals, it would be like acid water just hitting those pipes with lead and other heavy metals leeching off the pipes. And that’s exactly what happened.

They didn’t add the proper chemicals and lead leached off into the water. And then, as a secondary issue, bacteria formed waterborne bacteria known as Legionnaires Disease, which is deadly. And a lot of times it’s misdiagnosed as pneumonia, but far, far deadlier. So lead poisoning of the residents, bacteria in that water, a whole lot of other contaminants that nobody ever tested for.

They were drinking that water for 18 months. Residents were protesting at city hall, at the state capital. But Snyder, his administration told him nothing to see here. It’s safe despite the fact that you’re getting brown water, despite the fact that your water smells, despite the fact that residents including children are sporting rashes all over their body. Residents losing hair.

I’ve spoken with residents that were getting nose bleeds. They were basically twisting themselves into pretzels to say “No, no. The data shows it’s meeting EPA regulations, not exceeding the allowable lead limit.” Yada, yada, yada. And then finally in 2015 in the fall, Snyder had to admit the water was toxic. They moved Flint back to Detroit’s water, but by then, the damage was done.

People had already died, but the full damage from lead poisoning doesn’t appear right away. It actually worsens over five, six years. So it’s basically been as the media and “Twitteratzi” and basically everybody shifted away to the last five years of the Trump reality show. And now whatever the hell is going on with the media and on the left, they basically abandoned this American city of majority black people that has been slowly dying for years, does not have Medicare for All.

And as my partner, Jen and I, because she’s worked on these stories with me…just broke well, several stories we broke, but this recent one, honestly, this is one of the biggest government cover ups of the 21st century. I would put it on par with Watergate. Watergate didn’t have a president.

Nobody would sneeze. This is a lot more corrupt than Watergate. And I’m sure we’ll get into that. So it’s essentially American citizens and undocumented people being poisoned and then a cover up which allowed government officials, media to basically move on and leave them to die.

[00:11:47.990] – Grumbine

This is a textbook case of environmental racism, to say the very least. But it’s also a textbook case of what the difference between public good and neoliberal public private good, where somebody’s got a profit motive based on your need, not your want, but your need. And so things they know people absolutely need they’re still profiting off of and making people very sick, and in some cases dying.

[00:12:17.470] – Chariton

Right.

[00:12:17.470] – Grumbine

That’s just preposterous. Let me just ask you this. So if you look back at your initial coverage of this in the way the story broke and way people were talking about, this was hot. Everybody was talking about it. And then just like the common 24 hours news cycle, some other shiny object captured everyone’s attention, but you stayed with it. What about this story wasn’t finished for you? What about this story made you continue to keep at it because you’ve been non stop with this?

[00:12:46.640] – Chariton

Yeah. So there’s a couple of things. Number one, I used to work for a part time in my life at Fox News, and then I went across the street to MSNBC and both were terrible for different reasons and the same reasons. But one of the things besides the right wing propaganda and then kind of the left wing propaganda that stood out to me was they were all covering bullshit and essentially two surface level stories on a loop. If you remember the old sports center, it was . . .

[00:13:17.380] – Grumbine

Oh, yeah.

[00:13:17.380] – Chariton

It was just the same exact episode over and over. That’s what cable news had become and print and all that. So when I kind of got disheartened and left corporate media, I don’t know if it was advice I got or just something that dawned on me, I said, to break through in this saturated media market, you really have to find a niche.

And a lot of people now are finding a niche in ways that I think are damaging. But you have to find a niche in terms of something that’s not being covered or maybe not sexy, but that you’re passionate about. And I started learning before I went to Flint about basically the water in America is contaminated all over the country, not just with lead, but a whole lot of other things.

And then in 2016, I was actually at a progressive conference when a Flint resident came up to me, and this was after Rachel Maddow had been there doing her town hall, and the media cavalry had come in for two weeks and then left. So this resident came up to me and said, “This is not getting better despite what Obama was saying, and Snyder was saying. It’s getting worse and the media is not covering it.”

So at the time, I convinced Cenk, who’s my boss at the time with the Young Turks, to send me there. And within, I don’t know, an hour or two of going into resident homes and speaking with them, I realized that this is not just a water crisis, but this was a mixed bowl of everything, corruption, environmental contamination, privatization, the control demolition of the working class, which is what lead Flint to be in such dire straits.

I realized that this, to boil it down, basically had all the ingredients of everything wrong with this country, including racism. So to me, it was never just about a city with toxic water. It was about what led to it, the corruption that led to it, the privatization that led to it, the neoliberalism that led to it. And the other part was just the media basically enabling it by not covering it, not really investigating it.

So that’s one reason at first I started covering it aggressively and stayed on it. And the other reason is simply, I don’t believe journalists should be neutral robots. I think it’s always been a lie that journalists don’t have opinions or emotions. I think you should have opinions and emotions, because if you don’t, you’re kind of a sociopath. And I’ve sat on porches with children who can’t count to ten anymore.

I’ve sat with 30 something year old women or men who frankly look like they’re in their sixties, now. I’ve returned to a resident’s home that I interviewed because I left my laptop and they opened the door and I thought they were having a heart attack. But in reality, it was just their nightly heart palpitations due to the water. I mean, I could give so many examples. I’ve seen children that can’t stand up straight anymore because of the spine damage and the back pain.

I just interviewed a woman a week or two ago when I was there who had to have a tracheotomy. She was in her fifties. Six months after the water was switched, her throat started hurting and it aggressively got worse to the point where they had to do a tracheotomy. So it’s kind of a mix of A – if we have another world war, it’s going to be over water, not oil, because there’s already water shortages and water privatization.

But the other thing is I can’t in good conscious stop fighting for justice for people that have been left to die. So I get asked a lot like, why don’t you cover this in other places? Well, first of all, I’m not an octopus. I don’t have eight tentacles. I have covered water stories in other places, but there’s only so much I could do or Jen could do. We can’t be everywhere. But secondarily, although it is true that other places have this water contamination, I think it’s kind of minimizing Flint in a way to compare it to other places because it’s not like other places.

This was a man made decision through greed, corruption, financial fraud that led to mass death – that is, by the way, Steve, untold. We don’t know how many people died. It did not have a registry to track people’s health. Every time I go there, you hear about more people dying from rare cancers, liver failure, all sorts of things at relatively young ages with no family history of these illnesses. So, bottom line, I cover it because I can’t be neutral to Americans being poisoned and then left to die.

[00:17:44.240] – Grumbine

When you go back to that exact time frame, and there was another major water issue going on, and that was the Dakota Access pipeline. And the hashtag was water is life. And you had water protectors. You were covering that as well. And this was all converging at about the same time.

So I think one of the things that this story had for it was a convergence of an understanding that without clean drinkable water, this should be obvious, but with two visible situations of not only government corruption and that jack-booted thug mindedness out there at the Dakota Access pipeline, the combination of that brought water to the forefront.

And not too long after that, you had Nestle trying to take all the good water in California. And then you’ve got wildfires going because we don’t have water. There’s no irrigation. There’s a lot of things that were pointing towards water and this particular thing also happened right in line with the hurricane that blew through Puerto Rico as they were having water issues, and they were having to rebuild that island in many ways. All these things come back to greed.

And the fact that our federal government never stepped in to help these things out is beyond me. When you see that kind of a health crisis going on and for our federal government to basically turn its back. I mean, yes, Trump was an office at that time, but there were a few moments through the Trump presidency, where you, Ironically were like, wow, did he do that?

So it wasn’t beyond the possibility that Trump may have stepped in and done something with us, but no one did anything about this. So now you’ve established what happened and why, talk to me a little bit about the coverage? Because I know one of the things that has jumped out at me on this is the amount of effort you personally have to do to get this story in the hands of mainstream media. I’ve got tons of documentation, video footage, interviews, I got the story, and I think the only ones that really picked it up were The Intercept.

There may have been a couple others, and I’ll leave you to tell me what those are. But the point is you’ve been banging on doors, pleading your case, and I’ve seen a few groups pick the story up recently, at least to bring you on to talk about it. But most alt media is looking for their own, like you were saying, find your own niche. They’re not looking to help anybody else out with their niche.

It’s so weird in that sense that it’s almost like giving you a foothold somehow or another hurts their brand. I don’t know. It’s weird. Nobody’s touching it. So I feel guilty because I don’t do as much video anymore for my own purposes. But I wanted to get you on here and give you a full hour plus to be able to tell the story, and hopefully we can get this word out as well and help in any way we can. I just think it’s so important.

[00:20:41.480] – Chariton

Yeah.

[00:20:42.120] – Grumbine

Take it from there.

[00:20:43.380] – Chariton

So before I get to the media, because I could do seven hours on that, there is an MMT angle here which I know you’d be interested in. Your audience might be. So one of the major reasons that this has gone on and on and on, seven and a half years later, they have not replaced all of the busted pipes. The only pipes they’ve replaced, by the way, are the service lines. So that would be the water distribution pipes from your curb entering your house.

They didn’t touch the main pipes underneath the street, and they haven’t replaced residents interior plumbing in their home. So it’s not like this toxic water just skipped over the mains under the street or your interior plumbing. So honestly, it is completely false. The media has regurgitated this. The state of Michigan has regurgitated this. It’s completely false to say the water is safe to drink because A – we have shown a lot of lead and copper testing were manipulated which I can get into later.

The data was falsified, basically. But Jesus can bless the water through brand new service line pipes, but if your pipes inside your home that were badly damaged are not changed, you still have led and other heavy metals leaching off into the water. But putting that aside, part of why this has dragged on for seven and a half years and the infrastructure hasn’t been completely gutted and replaced is cause then President Obama and FEMA did not grant Flint a federal disaster declaration.

They granted it as a federal emergency, but not a federal disaster under the excuse of while federal disasters are for hurricanes and earthquakes and human natural disasters, but Flint was not a natural disaster. So under this, in my view, absurd distinction, if they would have issued that federal disaster that opens the floodgates for the federal Army Corps of Engineers to go in there and dig everything up and redo it a lot more funds from the federal government to go to Flint.

It basically hamstrung the recovery and rebuilding because the whole city’s infrastructure was busted, basically. And again, seven and a half years later, the pipes have still not been replaced. So from a federal perspective, as we always talk about, of course, they had the money to do all of this. They could have sent the Army Corps of Engineers in the next day.

Each Flint resident could be getting a monthly stipend or Medicare for All. Libby, Montana, which is 96% white, they had an asbestos disaster which killed hundreds of people. And it’s Senator as part of playing hardball a decade ago during the Obamacare negotiations, he said, “I’m not voting for it if my residents in Libby, Montana don’t get Medicare for All or universal health care.” And they did.

But the Flint residents didn’t get that. They didn’t get the Army Corps of Engineers coming on. They don’t have any call of what you want UBI or reparations for their poisoning. And that is a direct result of this false notion not only that it wasn’t a natural disaster, which I think can be argued, but that we don’t have the money to do this. Well, let me tell you something.

The 25 billion we just increased the military budget by if that went to Flint, this would have been fixed a while ago. So I just wanted to put that out there because part of it is this falsehood that we didn’t have the money to do this or it wasn’t this kind of disaster. And on the media, this wasn’t just in Flint, but I have experienced this basically from day one of actually traveling and covering stories.

It’s kind of like a Twilight Zone, because I remember I was at Standing Rock and I’d be out watching Native Americans bang on drums and sing and be shot at for it and rubber bullets and tear gas and grenades in some cases and freezing water. And then I go back to the hotel/casino, which is the only place we can get Wi Fi, and you turn on the TV and it would be Don Lemon on a panel on what Trump Tweeted.

And it’s like, are they in the same country I am, or am I in the same country they are? And of course, it’s intentional. There’s corporate incentives not to cover those kind of stories like Standing Rock, Flint. But the same thing has happened in Flint. I’ve been there 18 times since 2016, and each time I go, it’s always remarkable to me that I’m literally the only media there still covering this, still digging.

Even the local media there long ago stopped covering this. And even when they did cover it, they were basically doing stenography for the Snyder administration or the EPA. So this recent story we broke, it’s remarkable because we literally broke a major government cover up, and the facts are not under dispute. Nobody has challenged it.

Not Rick Snyder, not his health department, not his environmental department, not the current administration of Gretchen Whitmer. There has been no denial because we obtained documents from the criminal investigation, heavy, heavy amount of reliable sources that showed a multilevel government cover up, including the governor taking part.

As a result of that, Congress, and as you know, it’s not easy to get Congress to do anything, but the Congressional House Oversight Committee, they, in response to our story, issued a scathing statement condemning Snyder. And sources on the committee told us we’re opening up an investigation, a federal investigation as a result of your reporting.

That on its own would be a front page news story in the local Michigan media, the national media reporting the revelations that we found Congress’s statement reminding people what happened in Flint, also connecting it to the pandemic because Flint is disproportionately vulnerable to an airborne illness because of their immune systems are already compromised.

Add on to Congress the last Flint Mayor on the record told us on video that the current attorney general in Michigan is helping Governor Snyder quote, “get away with murder.” So these aren’t like grey area things, Steve. These aren’t things like, oh, well, you know, you say tomato, I say tomato. And you might think this should be covered, but it’s not really a new story.

This is obvious, blinking red lights major news that it’s now nearly a month. Wednesday will be a month since we published this. The Detroit Free Press – silence. The Flint Journal – silence. Detroit News – silence. New York Times – silence. Washington Post – silence. Associated Press  – silence. Frankly, most of independent media – silence. CNN, MSNBC Rachel Maddow, who somehow won an award for her Flint coverage.

Silence of the Lambs. So we’re really honestly, I’m not going to lie to you. I’m really frustrated. I’m really angry. In a normal journalistic system, the hard part would be actually building the sources, getting the evidence, getting it published somewhere, because that’s a whole other story. A lot of these outlets, even if you hand them the story on a silver platter, won’t touch it.

But the easy part should be then getting it picked up in news outlets, other news outlets doing further investigation, kind of carrying the baton from you. Hopefully it going viral, but it’s backwards now. Not that it’s easy to get the information and break it. But that honestly has become the easier thing. And it’s literally a herculean effort to get news outlets to cover it. Democracy Now hasn’t covered it either.

Breaking Points did a little 20 second thing on it. I don’t expect TYT to, but they haven’t covered it. I mean, I could go down the list. Very few people have covered even in independent media. And it gets to a point where I mean, I’m not going to stop, but you kind of lose hope. I feel like I’m in a Twilight Zone because what would one have to do? Would a reporter have to find video of the former governor of Michigan pouring lead in the water for them to cover it?

So it’s very disheartening to the point where Jen and I literally just rabble roused and knocked on the Flint Journal’s door a couple of weeks ago, and I just gave it to their main news person. We handed them a packet, like broken down for a four year old what our story is about. I said, I am absolutely stunned that Flint’s hometown paper is basically suppressing information. We’re talking life or death information here from the residents did the same as a Detroit Free Press. Still silence.

[00:29:51.030] – Intermission

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[00:30:39.720] – Grumbine

Me and you have talked about this. We do another podcast called The New Untouchables: The Pecora Files, and we’ve been doing an incredible amount of investigative work there as well. We have whistleblowers. We’ve got court testimony that’s been unredacted that guys could go to jail for putting out there. We’ve got experts from Bill Black on down. We put this in everyone’s hands. No one will touch it. So I completely feel your pain on that one.

[00:31:07.760] – Chariton

And I got to tell you, for me, I’ll give you an example. We were just there about a week or so ago, and I interviewed residents that I’ve been keeping in contact for years that I also interviewed some people that I never spoke with. And one of them, her name was Ariana Hawk, and her son was on the cover of Time magazine in 2016 with rashes all over his body when Time and other media, were actually covering this.

And literally, before we started the interview, she was fuming not at me, but because she was hearing about what we just broke for the first time, from me, not from her media locally. She didn’t see it on Facebook. So it gets to a point where whether it’s the people of Flint or fill in any other city, how are people to act, protest, demand justice if they have no idea what has recently been revealed or who knew what, when or who tried to cover up the criminal poisoning of them.

This is just one case, but I got news for you. I would say probably 90% of Flynn has not a clue what we just revealed. Which to be clear, we found top officials in Snyder’s administration their phones were erased right before the launch of the Flint criminal investigation, including his press secretary, which is a pretty high level position close to the governor.

We found top officials in the Health Department when prosecutors got their phones, mysteriously they had no messages on them for all of 2014 through October 2015, which was the period Flint used the Flint River. We found that the officials of the Environmental Department allegedly dump their phones at the state IT Department quote “wiped clean” right after Snyder’s press conference in Flint announcing Flint’s water was toxic.

We found the governor himself refused to hand over major key documents to prosecutors for three years, including his daily briefings, which obviously all of these things, phones erased, missing messages, phones wiped clean. Snyder not handing over things. This is a digital crime. You’re going to find out who knew what when through text messages, phone calls, emails.

These things weren’t written on a Post-it. So this is destruction of evidence, tampering with evidence, obstruction of justice and not a peep in the national or local media. And I just compare it. Steve, can you imagine if Trump’s press secretary his people at CDC, the EPA, if their phones are erased in January 2020?

[00:33:51.590] – Grumbine

Full blown impeachment.

[00:33:53.700] – Chariton

For their messages were erased. Like we’re talking right before COVID went global. Do you think the media would be silent?

[00:34:01.290] – Grumbine

Hell, no.

[00:34:02.380] – Chariton

Oh, forget impeachment. They’d be calling for criminal prosecution. And frankly, rightfully so.

[00:34:08.980] – Grumbine

Absolutely.

[00:34:10.090] – Chariton

But that would be the case of Donald Trump. When state officials in Michigan and this topic is Flint, I said Watergate cause Watergate wasn’t this layered. You got the governor’s office, you got the health department, the environmental department, frankly, the attorney general’s office of Michigan, they’re all involved in a massive cover up, and Watergate didn’t kill anyone.

I’m sorry to say this did and continues to do. So it’s just unconscionable. I kind of feel to tell you the truth sometimes, and I’m not saying this to elevate me or Jen. I kind of compare it to, like, Amy Goodman and Democracy now on a very lonely island in 2002.

[00:34:53.160] – Grumbine

Yeah.

[00:34:54.630] – Chariton

Questioning the Iraq war. The drum beat to war, the intelligence, Bush, Rumsfeld, Powell, and they were castigated for it. But Amy Goodman continued because she had integrity and didn’t just lazily regurgitate whatever unnamed sources i.e. Dick Cheney told them. I kind of feel sometimes, like, obviously it’s much different. It’s not a war, but I feel like we are the only one screaming into a cave here.

[00:35:23.810] – Grumbine

It’s funny because I’m doing an incredible amount of historical reading in terms of understanding theory to develop a more mature political analysis that allows me to see arc of revolution and all the different things that create the material conditions that allow people to finally get to the point where the contradictions of the existing system are so great that people have had enough and they take action.

Unfortunately, as bad as it is, as bad as it’s been through a pandemic, as bad as it’s been on so many levels, there is still more than enough people doing A-OK that they walk by the bodies and don’t say a thing. They just keep on moving and going to work. And it’s because of that that we genuinely lack not only the power in some respects, because we are in a duopoly, whether we like it or not, we are in a first past the post system.

I hate it. I despise it, but that’s what it is. And it would take those people in office to vote that system out. There’s some things you can do locally, then at the state level, but many of those things are minor in terms of the grand scheme of things. Somehow or another you would have to legitimately change the federal level, and there’s no appetite for it.

The average person gets off work to kick their shoes off at the front door. They sigh and they plop into the couch, and then they turn on MSNBC. As gross as that may be to many people, that’s what happens.

[00:36:53.560] – Chariton

Or 90 Day Fiance.

[00:36:55.390] – Grumbine

Yeah, exactly. Yes. Reality TV is real, right. And with that in mind, I hate to break it to all of our friends. These people vote. They show up to vote. They may not show up to your rally. They may not show up to a protest. They may not be in the streets, but they show up and they vote.

You see all these people showing up the Bernie Sanders rallies, but what’s not happening because we’ve gotten so strident and acerbic and we’ve forgotten that we have to sell our ideas no matter how common sense and logical they appeal to our own brain. These people that aren’t showing up at rallies and aren’t watching alternative media are voting for the Shontels of the world.

They are definitely influenced by the Clyburns of the world. They’re not influenced by the Nina Turners of the world. And so if you take an honest assessment of that, you’ve got to say, we’re nowhere near the arc for revolution. Number two, we’re nowhere near organized for a third party right now. I’m not telling anybody Dem Enter. My focus is not electoral.

My focus is organizing for long term power so that we have the ability to pivot from that to electoral success. But even with that in mind, we don’t have what we think we have. The optics of those rallies is not the same as the silent millions and such in this country that sit at home and are not paying attention and vote the way the party bosses or the Sunday morning talking heads tell them to vote.

And that’s exactly what’s happening. And so any amount of power we’re going to have, it’s going to really depend on us organizing for power.  Doing that, in my opinion, long term strategy and eating our own all these cranky fraud squad things while they have let me down immensely, this is not a commercial for them, but it’s doing nothing to help us get anywhere ahead.

I do agree that you should point out hypocrisy and inaction, but this whole idea of owning Libs is more of a pastime than an organizing technique. And I think that until we find a way past that, I don’t see a path forward to be honest with you. I think it’s more of the same. And there’s no guarantee the story ends with a happy ending.

I mean, the original Little Red Riding Hood was a story about kids getting devoured by wolves. It wasn’t about the woodsman coming and cut them out and popping them out. That’s the propaganda. The real story was during that French Revolution people were getting their asses eaten alive because there was no food. There was no water. We’re seeing that now.

People have bought into a fake narrative, and that has become the story of the day. It’s happening with Covid. You see the Covid deniers. You see all the other insanity that goes with that. And honestly, Jordan, it takes 10,000 words of truth to debunk one well-placed tweet of trash. And it’s an amazing feat to watch the thousands upon thousands of clicks and likes on garbage where the important stuff is just ignored. It’s infuriating.

[00:39:58.700] – Chariton

I have several different responses to that. First of all, you were mentioning you’ve been reading up on history, so I don’t know if everybody in the progressive movement knows this thing, but you really should. Henry Wallace was FDR’s vice President. He was agricultural secretary before that, and he was literally Bernie before Bernie. He was speaking out against racism, speaking up for civil rights in the 1940’s.

[00:40:25.040] – Grumbine

Yes he was.

[00:40:25.040] – Chariton

Speaking up against imperialism and the military industrial complex in the 1930’s and 40’s and the people were on his side. He had the people to the point where heading into the 1944 Democratic Convention, FDR’s health was failing. Whoever would be on the ticket with FDR had a very realistic chance of replacing him as President if his health failed.

And this was also shown in Oliver Stone’s “Untold History of the United States.” The DNC convention in 1944 overwhelmingly, the delegates wanted Henry Wallace overwhelmingly to the point where he was crushing Harry Truman and other people in initial delegate counts. But the difference was they were not as organized as the party bosses.

They were not as organized as the Democratic machine and the mayors that were there. And the party bosses who are basically making deals behind the scenes to pay off delegates. We’ll give you X, Y, and Z if you flip your vote to Harry Truman. And by the end of it, Henry Wallace was replaced as Vice President. Harry Truman was made Vice President.

And I think less than a year later, FDR died. Putting aside how different the world would have been if Henry Wallace was President, we’re talking probably Vietnam never happens. The military industrial complex build up is, at least for a while, does not happen.

[00:41:54.520] – Grumbine

Let’s not forget the bomb.

[00:41:56.590] – Chariton

The bomb, diplomacy might have been a thing around the world, but that was a case of we actually have the will of the people, but we’re not organized enough to combat the machine. So bring that to 2020, right. A lot of these, quote, unquote “Normy Democrat voters.”

I said when Bernie ran when he launched his second campaign, I said he has no chance if he doesn’t pluck 7 – 10% of these “Normy Democrats Hillary voters” to him. It doesn’t matter how many non voters he brings out, which he did bring out more non voters. But there’s just more of these consistent older voters and moderate voters than in one election cycle redefining politics and getting more non voters to come out.

And in fact, if you remember, Bernie Sanders was actually closing the gap with Joe Biden on older voters. The Bernie Sanders campaign was sending blistering ads against Joe Biden for documented times. He called for privatizing Social Security, freezing Social Security. That was working. David Sirota was like a human grenade on social media pushing this out, working for Bernie’s campaign.

And Bernie was actually closing the gap among older Normy Democrats who care about the policies close to them. Shock. Well, Bernie Sanders. He won Iowa. Yes, he won Iowa. Won New Hampshire, crushed in Nevada and was for the first time ever literally on the brink of clinching the Democratic nomination before South Carolina. What happened?

Said on 60 Minutes, largest news audience in the country. A lot of older, Normy Democrats watching that show. And instead of not changing his policies, but tweaking his message blasphemy to the purist, but tweaking his message to actually meet the voters that had escaped him in the last election 2016, and he still needed to convince, instead of tweaking his message to speak directly to him, he took bait and gave an education on Fidel Castro.

And I know for a fact his campaign top campaign officials were watching in horror. Not because he wasn’t right about Castro, and it was a good thing that he gave health care and education to Cubans, but because he literally just fell into the biggest propaganda boogie man that these older voters get triggered by. And that was asked to him intentionally by Anderson Cooper.

I say all this because he was actually making headway to get these voters, which would have been critical in not just South Carolina, but Super Tuesday by saying, you know what, Anderson? I’m not running for President of Cuba, and I’m not going to focus on Cuba tonight. I want to speak directly to this audience, a lot of them who have been misled about me, my views, my policies.

If he would have done that, we might be having a very different discussion. And why I save that all is because in that case, the progressive candidate did not tweak their message at all. And then because that campaign and the progressive movement at large was not organized again, that word organize to combat the very predictable, frankly, coalescing of candidates, Obama playing kingmaker behind the scenes to get people to drop out, we wouldn’t tweak our message.

So we remain pure and we were not organized. And the same thing goes for Nina Turner. You could see it a mile away that super PACs and all these external factors were going to come in like an army against you. And frankly, they did not have a great ground game. They did not have a plan to combat that disinformation. They honestly didn’t go on TV with negative ads against her opponent until almost the end.

So this is a matter of Progressives need to decide. Do you want to be pure? And this is important. Try to will older voters, moderate voters, black voters, just will them over to your mentality that we need a revolution and we need to burn down the two party duopoly because that’s not going to happen. You’re not going to break generational thinking and generational propaganda. All of these groups have been fed.

Or do we want to meet them where they are and not change our policies, but say whatever the hell we need to say to make these people comfortable and get them to consider voting for us. And Bernie failed to do that towards the end. And I think Nina was not organized. And then you extrapolate that to the outside electoral politics. It’s amazing, Steve.

For a long time, you don’t have one worker strike in America. Now, you have Alabama, Topeka, Kansas, South Dakota, what the Amazon workers in New York are doing right now that I’ve been covering. It’s not a general strike, but it’s something. So imagine if the Sunrise Movement protesters out there marching, standing outside Pelosi’s office, Black Lives Matter protesters, Medicare for All protesters, the force to vote people. Put them all together for a second.

Imagine if even a quarter of them boycotted Walmart or Amazon or fast food, big banks, not for a day, for a week, for a month and recruited other people to join. Trust me, that would get you change very quickly, because the donors will not stand for even a dip in profits on a quarterly basis.

They will not stand for any loss of revenue or profit in just one quarter. But instead, we’re continue to march and have our voices heard without adding a threat to that. So this disorganization on the political end and pretty much no organization outside of politics is we are where we are.

[00:48:00.320] – Grumbine

You got it. So let me ask you this question. Just bring this home. We have very little time. IPCC Report just came out and it’s not good, and we’re not organized. And again, thousand forms of the story doesn’t have to end well. It can end really badly.

Where are we in terms of ever seeing Progressives in power? Is this the boolean moment where you’re either choosing reform, where you go with candidates and work with them internally, since we don’t have enough for a revolution, or do we take that non electoral approach while doing whatever we can to get the most progressive people in the office? Where are we at?

[00:48:42.610] – Chariton

I’m not going to sugar coat it. We’re in the abyss. I mean, we are in the abyss. Unfortunately, I think that all of what we’re talking about essentially march to nowhere, which is just defeatist Nihilism, it is zapping energy, hope, the possibility of organizing from large swaths of the left. This does not mean there aren’t other corners of the left that are still doing stuff.

When I was out covering Nina’s campaign in Cleveland recently, there was a lot of people from around the country that came here, and it was really inspiring to me to see like, oh, no, it’s not all doom and gloom. There are people actually still doing things trying to get candidates that they believe in elected that stand for our policies.

There are workers that I’m seeing like Amazon and other places that are finally saying enough and organizing together to demand things and threaten the corporate profits of their employers. But on electoral level right now, we are way worse off than we were, frankly, before Bernie, because not only do we not have a leader, but we have a growing portion of our movement succumbing to darkness.

[00:50:01.560] – Grumbine

Libertarianism.

[00:50:02.570] – Chariton

Yeah. Succumbing to darkness and choosing to say, “Ah.”  You’re seeing it. Ah, it doesn’t matter. They’re all corrupt. They’re all . . . It doesn’t matter if they have a D next to their name. They’re all sellouts. They’re all frauds. We’re never going to change this. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, I say to that if that’s how you feel, then just roll up in fetal position, stop watching these political shows and check out.

[00:50:29.640] – Grumbine

Yeah.

[00:50:30.980] – Chariton

That’s how you feel. But I got new for you. Feeling that way,  of course, we all have our moments where we’re hopeless, cynical. I sure do. I mean, I’m out there seeing this misery and corruption, but I just don’t see practically how is it going to get us what we want any quicker by just checking out and saying to hell with it all. It’s not. So to me, we need to bring back a word that has been banned on the left. And that word is nuance.

[00:51:05.240] – Grumbine

Yes.

[00:51:05.930] – Chariton

We need to bring back an idea that none of this is mutually exclusive, Steve. I mean, believe it or not, you can organize for a third party, volunteer, help with ballot access what have you while simultaneously trying to elect candidates regardless of they’re running as a Dem, Green, Marshmallow, whatever elect candidates that might improve the progressive movement and might improve our numbers and our leverage. Who knows? Maybe Nina Turner would have got in there and knock some sense into the squad who’s kind of succumbed to this long game strategy.

[00:51:47.740] – Grumbine

Right.

[00:51:48.470] – Chariton

So none of this is mutually exclusive. You can be on the side of economic boycotts, organizing outside while still choosing to vote or still choosing to donate to certain politicians. I think nuance has really been distorted as somehow being a sell out. All I could do an all Jen can do, and all Status Coup can do is just do what we’ve always done and that’s get out there and give the microphone back to the people.

Try in whatever way we can expose corruption and truth. And I’m never going to sell out for clicks or for expediency. Have lost subscribers and members because of that, because I don’t just jump on the bandwagon. But I think there is no real in the field independent investigative journalism anymore. And I think that’s a big part of how we get out of this, exposing and putting a face to what the commentators are talking about.

[00:52:45.560] – Grumbine

Oh, this was a wonderful time, man, and I did get the opportunity to talk to you. So I love this. This is great. You’ve been with me when I was doing video years ago, but it really is nice because you do great work. So with that, I want to thank you so much for joining me today. Tell everybody where we can find you and how we can support your work.

[00:53:06.130] – Chariton

Yeah. Status Coup. You might not see it on YouTube because they hide it, but we are on YouTube, so that’s YouTube.com/StatusCoup, C-O-U-P; @StatusCoup on Twitter. If you have the means, we are funded by you. We have no corporate investors or wealthy plutocrats funding us, and we have, frankly, more expenses than pretty much everyone, because travel is a bitch.

Just the last two reporting trips we took, we did a two week reporting tour through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia that ran us six seven grand with three people car, gas, food, hotels, equipment. It adds up. This past trip we took for a week probably cost us four or five thousand. Not to mention, unfortunately, Jen had to stay back when Colin, our cameraman and I left because she has long haul COVID.

She was really suffering, but she got really sick there and didn’t know if she had contracted Covid again. So she quarantined until she got the test back, so that added on five, six extra days of hotels and food and all that. But overall, if you actually support people actually getting out there investigating things, interviewing real breathing human Americans rather than wealthy plutocrat pundits. StatusCoup.com/join, you could fund this journalism for $5 a month and we appreciate you having us.

[00:54:33.730] – Grumbine

You got it, man. Just suffice it to say we really appreciate your work, and we appreciate the friendship and the partnership. Really. So with that Jordan, until we next meet, I will talk to you soon. And folks, this is Macro N Cheese. Steve Grumbine, Jordan Chariton. We’re out of here.

[00:54:56.900] – Ending credits

Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing, by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Mindy Donham. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.