I just walked out of a conference meeting with my colleagues on the way to the war
room and they were yelling at me, saying, well, you're just doing this for
outrage and fundraising.
And I'm sitting there thinking to myself, you all go and prostitute yourself to
lobbyists for money and you wanna criticize me because hundreds of thousands
of Americans all over this country give me 10, 15, $25 at Mattgaetz.com.
Shame on you, you come to this place least and go and shine the shoes
of the special interest and then you go do their bidding with your vote card.
>> I love throwing out a shame on you after he just shamelessly plugged his
website to get more donations,
he goes into that saying, I already get tons of donations but Mattgaetz.com.
Anyway, Matt Gaetz has kind of a point there.
Certainly the vast majority of politicians on both the Democratic as well as
the Republican side are 100% there for the bidding of their donors.
And Matt Gaetz can sort of lord it over all of them, or most of them,
I should say, because he doesn't take corporate Pac money.
I don't know how accurate his 10, 20 bucks at a time sort of pitch for
his funding is, but he at least has that.
And there are not a lot of Republicans,
there aren't even that many Democrats necessarily that can say that.
But I do want to jump ahead just a little bit to demonstrate the continued
influence of industry, even in areas where you might think the news cycle,
the focus of the American people would make change a little bit easier to get
unsullied by corporate hands.
So you might remember we've had a series of horrendous destructive train
derailments in the past few months here in the US.
It is made clear that increased regulation in terms of safety systems, brakes, all of
that, particularly when they're carrying hazardous chemicals, is necessary.
And so there's been legislation that's sort of been working its way through
to accomplish a little bit of that, and
that has not been safe from industry hands and industry concerns.
Republican Senator JD Vance just openly admitted that he has modified the bill not
for the interests of constituents or the interests of safety, it's not based on
testimony from safety experts, it's just because the industry didn't like it.
So let me give an example of that.
One of the new regulations in the bill was to upgrade tank cars that carry flammable
chemicals so that they're less vulnerable to leaks and punctures if a train derails.
For some reason in America, there's people that think that that might be good
right about now, after we had a toxic cloud hundreds of feet tall spewing
chemicals over an entire area of America.
So that was in there, but it didn't last unfortunately.
In a previous version of the bill, the old tank cars were set to be phased out by
2025, to be replaced by ones that would comply with this regulation.
But on May 10, Vance and Senator Maria Cantwell amended the bill to push back
the adoption of safer tank cars until 2027 or 2028.
So to be clear, a Republican and a Democrat working together to eke out
a few more years where the railroad companies can make a bit more money.
And if that means that maybe they dump hundreds of thousands of gallons of
the most toxic substances on the face of the earth in your community and
then it gets set on fire, well, I guess that's a you problem,
it's certainly not a problem for that company.
And you can go Jordan, I'm sure you can come up with a lot of examples like this.
We see it basically every day in the rare opportunities when the legislature
actually chooses to do something, it is going to be affected by industry.
>> Absolutely, and in both of these cases, these are examples of right
wing populists talking out of both sides of their mouths and
illustrating ultimately how hollow they are.
First, Matt Gaetz, he wants to talk about how he doesn't take corporate Pac money.
Sure, that's true, but he still takes Republican Pac money,
the House Leadership Fund, he still takes money from them,
which takes money from corporations, special interests, and billionaires.
He also takes individual donations, the max contribution from billionaires,
CEOs, and people representing special interest groups.
It's not that he's just totally sworn off of corporate money,
there are many progressives who will return those donations if somehow a CD,
business interest or lobbyist or whatever,
donates to them individually, they will return that money.
But not Matt Gaetz.
>> No. >> He wants you to think that he's for
the people because he's not taking money directly from the pacs.
Well, they just take an extra step and ultimately get there and
then their CEOs will just donate directly to him.
He admitted his strategy, he's doing it for attention to raise money.
And that's why he does these kinda stuff,
that's why he says these outlandish things.
And that's ultimately why, as a hollow right wing populist, he attacks
marginalized groups because that riles people up, who then ultimately donate.
But really he's still doing the bidding of these corporate interests because he's
taking their money.
On- >> Continue, sorry.
>> On JD Vance, it's the same thing, he wants to be a populist.
He tried to differentiate himself from the rest of the Republican Caucus in
the aftermath of East Palestine.
But here you could see how money influences his decisions and
you can see that they have the money and the resources to update these things.
Now, just like the brakes and
just like they had the resources to give all of these people who work for
these rail lines paid sick leave, they ultimately can do that.
They're making record profits and they don't want to because they wanna make more
and more money as long as they possibly can.
And they know that any infrastructure or
capital investment would potentially affect their bottom line.
No, they wanna do stock buybacks, they wanna increase their dividends,
they wanna make more and
more money because that's ultimately the role of capitalism in the society.
It's this unsustainable dream where these companies make infinite
amounts of money and continue making more than the prior year.
It's ridiculous, but this is the consequence.
>> Ultimately unsustainable, for a bit, sustainable.
Let's demonstrate very briefly how it's sustainable.
As I said, Vance was very open about this process.
He says the bill has changed a lot from what I introduced just a few short
months ago.
We've made a number of concessions to the rail industry,
a number of concessions to various interest groups, which is why we have so
much bipartisan support in this body.
Yeah, you found some other Democrats that also bow down to industry, great,
wonderful.
But also we have a lot of support from industry.
Let me ask this is a rhetorical question, because he's probably not watching,
I would guess, should it have a lot of support from industry?
It's to regulate the industry in the wake of multiple horrendous disasters.
How on board do we want them to be?
[LAUGH] They didn't willingly do this, they had opportunities.
We could have avoided all of this trouble if they had acted differently.
Remember, I didn't cause the derailment, you didn't cause the derailment,
they caused the derailment.
Why are they getting to dictate the regulations after their tragedy?
And in terms of the sustainability, he's got a lot of support from the industry.
And it's not just verbal, it's not just rhetorical, if you take a look at this,
this is the top money receivers from the chemical and
related manufacturing industry.
And what do you know, JD Vance is on that list.
To be fair, Tim Ryan also is topping that list, but in his defense,
I guess JD Vance has been in office less time, so
I guess he sold [LAUGH] out faster, but it's not good either way.
And as of right now, that bill, what's left of it, is gonna go to the Senate,
it's gonna require 60 votes obviously, because all legislation does.
John Thune, by the way, who is the party's whip,
is a former rail lobbyist who has opposed the legislation.
So that's great, he's a rail lobbyist like so many Americans are.
It's representative democracy, everyone.