Corporations are ready to attack now that John Fetterman is performing
extremely well in his Senate race in the state of Pennsylvania.
Now, since he supports a single payer healthcare system, you can imagine
that private insurance companies like Cigna are not too happy about him.
And so, it turns out that they have basically created this
political action committee that is led by one of their consultants
to put out all sorts of smears and propaganda against Fetterman.
While also ensuring that they raise enough money for
his political opponent in the primary of course, Conor Lamb.
Conor Lamb is the conservative Democrat in that race.
Now, the super PAC, Penn Progress and we'll get back to the name of this
political action committee in just a moment.
Says it is supporting conservative Democrat representative Conor Lamb in
the Pennsylvania race because he represents the party's strongest
chance to flip the seat, which is not true.
Despite the group's own polling data finds that Fetterman,
the lieutenant governor is trouncing Lamb in the primary and
performing better than Lamb against at least one top Republican candidate.
And that's by the way, according to Politico.
And the numbers really do speak for themselves,
not only is Fetterman doing way better than Conor lamb in the polling,
he's also doing much better than him in regard to campaign donations.
So Fetterman's campaign ended last year with $5.3 million on
hand while Lamb had raised $3 million.
Penn Progress recently warned donors that Fetterman is leading Lamb by 30 points and
even winning among Democrats who want a moderate candidate.
So on one hand, they're like, no,
listen homies were definitely supporting Conor Lamb, he's got the best shot, okay?
We gotta support him.
And then, they talk about their own data that shows how well Fetterman is doing
compared to Conor Lamb because it turns out that voters,
whether we're talking about moderate voters,
whether we're talking about conservatives, whether we're talking about progressives.
See that we are living under a broken economic system, health care system
that doesn't work and Fetterman of course, is very vocal about that.
And before I get to you and hear your thoughts Farron,
I thought I would share this video with the audience because
it shows you just the kind of politician Fetterman really is, let's watch.
>> One cold hard fact is that John Fetterman is a blunt talking,
self described progressive intent on also breaking through with swing
voters in the rust belt.
His pet issues include a higher minimum wage.
>> If you believe that a human being should toil for 725 an hour, vote for
the other person.
>> And legal marijuana, which he says is a winner for either party.
>> Called the political bazooka.
>> Yeah, they're arguing over these small wage issues when
they're leaving the bazooka of legal weed.
They're on the table for the other side to grab like South Dakota,
arguably the most conservative state in our country voted for
legal weed straight up and down on the ballot.
>> In a state that has a severe opioid problem,
why are you talking about legalizing another drug?
>> Because it's not a drug, its a plant.
It's a gateway to finding a completely natural alternative to
the kind of relief that had brought so
many people into this toxic spiral with opioids in the first place.
>> And of course it shouldn't come as any surprise that private health insurance
companies and
pharmaceutical companies don't want the federal legalization of marijuana.
Something that people can rely on for
medicinal uses rather than pharmaceutical drugs.
Farron, this is so par for the course,
it reminds me of what they did to Nina Turner in her congressional race.
>> Yeah, it's the same blueprint.
We see this happen all the time when you have this good
progressive candidate that's actually talking about issues that matter,
proposing solutions that work and actually benefit people.
So, my God, we gotta go out there and
we gotta stop him because the latest poll from the Hill and
Emerson college out today, he's beating Conor Lamb by 23 points right now.
Lamb is getting destroyed right now, so of course, they pull out all the stops.
We gotta go crying to the corporate masters and say, please do something,
we don't want any of this good stuff.
And it makes no sense to me, right?
We're gonna propose an $813 billion military budget at a time
when US is allegedly not involved in war for the first time ever.
We still are, we know that but there's always money for that.
And then Fetterman and some other sitting politicians too,
they propose these real things that have real impacts on people's lives.
And immediately, these corporations come out, guns blazing trying to hide
what it is they're doing, who is doing what behind the scenes.
Who is funding this even like you said,
trying to switch it up with a name like Penn Progress.
>> Right, [LAUGH].
>> No, first of all, we've gotta have more transparency in this country with
regard to these super PACs which God knows will never get.
But they don't want things to change because as much as they are terrible for
every one of us.
Things could not be better right now if you're a corporation in the United States,
you're making money, hand over first your profits in 2021 off the charts.
We're getting hit with inflation, we're getting hit with gas prices,
oil companies are making more money than they know what to do with.
And all the politicians want us to do is blame the other people,
Republicans are blaming Democrats, Democrats are blaming Republicans.
It's the corporations, right?
>> Mm-hm.
>> Those are the people that we need to be directing our anger at and
we need to be supporting the politicians who aren't afraid to stand up to them,
which isn't a lot of them.
So we need to protect the ones that do.
>> Yeah, and the thing that I really appreciate about Fetterman is, dare I say,
a quality that Trump had that appealed to the right wing, which was how relatable.
It sounds ridiculous because of who Trump really is as a person but
his form of communication, which can come across as pretty idiotic to people
like us resonated with his constituents because he seemed accessible.
He seemed like a real person as opposed to some fake polished politician who
doesn't really believe in anything.
And so, what exactly is the plan here?
What is Penn progress planning on doing?
Well, as you can imagine,
they see that the voters in Pennsylvania don't really like Lamb.
They're not donating to him, they want the silence of the Lamb.
But instead Penn progress is like,
well maybe we can get some outside funding and not rely on voters in the state.
So, Penn Progress has set a fundraising goal of $8 million while
the group only raised $35,000 last year.
Super PACs can raise money quickly as we know because they're permitted to
accept donations of any size.
Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville of course,
is making an appearance here.
He has started promoting Penn Progress according to Politico.
In an email from Carville to potential donors,
he said that Lamb was set to join a call with super PAC's supporters.
And by the way,
they're also trying to paint Fetterman as some dangerous socialist.
They say, while Fetterman might actually be Democrat's best chance to take
the seat, Politico obtained a slide deck prepared for
donors showing that Penn Progress is preparing to attack him as a socialist who
supports a government takeover of health care.
And listen, for people like us, that doesn't sound scary,
I want nothing more than to have a single payer healthcare system.
Words like socialist doesn't scare young voters, doesn't scare us.
But it is unfortunately still scary for some of the older voters,
maybe even some of the independent voters that of course,
the Democratic candidate would need in order to win the Senate race.
And so, we'll see how this plays out.
Fetterman has such a strong lead but it isn't far fetched for
him to experience the same fate that Nina Turner did.
And we gotta prevent that from happening.
We gotta fight back and we gotta apply pressure to anyone we might know in
Pennsylvania to do what they can to support Fetterman.
Because he would be far better for the state of Pennsylvania and for
the country if he got that Senate seat.
>> He really would and I almost feel sometimes when you talk about Carville
wants to get involved derail Fetterman.
I feel like Democrats, these old school Carville type people,
they would rather actually lose a seat than have a good, real progressive.
Traditional Democrat, 60 years ago what Fetterman is talking about,
that was just a regular old Democrat.
It wasn't radical, it wasn't extreme but
they would rather lose than see somebody like him succeed.
Because of course it would mean that their outdated, that their views,
their ideas, their concepts are no longer accurate.
Carville's still working off the same playbook he's been using for 30 years.
It won you two elections because Ross Perot siphoned off enough voters for
Bill Clinton to win, which is something that does not get talked about enough.
Had it not been for Perot, wouldn't have won, but Carville still takes credit,
look what I did, I got this guy in there for two terms.
Clearly I'm the best, I'm the smartest, everybody listen to me.
No, you're an old husband who hasn't had a good idea in years and people need
to stop paying attention to him and he just needs to retire at this point.
>> Well, I couldn't agree more.
My favorite thing about Carville's when he whines about wokeism in
the Democratic Party and it's like, why do you think Democratic politicians mostly
focus all of their energy on so called virtue signaling or culture war stuff?
It's the same reason why we see it on the right wing, they pretend like they wanna
represent the best interests of disenfranchised communities.
They claim they wanna protect people's rights if they're part of the LGBTQ
community.
But when push comes to shove, once they're in a position of power,
they do very little to actually protect these groups.
Just like Republicans use those very issues from a right wing perspective,
I see Democrats doing the same thing.
And of course, yes, I'm talking about corporate Democrats like Nancy Pelosi
kneeling in a kente cloth to pretend like she actually cares about police reform.
But then they don't actually do a damn thing about police reform.
That's what the Democratic Party,
the mainstream corporate Democratic Party has become.
They want to keep the status quo.
They're funded by the same corporations that Republicans are funded by.
Let's keep it real.