Cenk Uygur

So that's why you need actually balance. The second reason you need balance other than independent thought is because the answer is almost never black and white. And that gets into a really interesting nuance because black Mainstream media, in my opinion, is the matrix and its job is to delude you into thinking corporate rule is great for you and we should never change it.

And the status quo is wonderful. So they have created a false middle. what mainstream media calls moderate is actually, in my opinion, extremist corporate ideology. So, for example, they'll say Joe Manchin is a moderate. None of his positions are moderate other than potentially gun control in West Virginia. He's not for gun control.

The people of West Virginia are not for gun control, generally speaking. And he uses that. And they usually have these shiny objects where they're like, you see this? I'm a moderate because of guns. Or I'm a moderate because I'm a Democrat from West Virginia. But wait, let's look at your positions. You're against paid family leave. That polls at 84%.

So you're a radical corporatist who say that women should be forced back into work the day after they have birth. You're against a higher minimum wage. You're for every corporate position, and they all poll at 33% or less. So Joe Manchin is not at all a moderate, and this applies to almost every corporate Republican and every corporate Democrat.

They're all extremists in supporting what I call corporatism. So you have to get to a balance in order to get to the right answer.

Yeah. I really believe in capitalism. I don't think that there's really a second choice. Where it gets super interesting is the distinction between capitalism and socialism, because that's not at all as clear as people think it is. And people often say socialism and communism as synonyms when they're not synonyms, right? And so I view it as... There's basically four distinct areas.

It's obviously a spectrum. Everything is a spectrum, right? On one end, you have communism on the left, and on the other end, you have corporatism on the right, okay? And I would argue that capitalism is in the middle. And so... Communism, we know, state owns all property. You're not allowed to have private property. So I will piss off a lot of people in this show.

And so I'm asking for their patience. Please hear me out. And because don't worry, I'm going to piss off the other side too. Okay. So communism makes no sense at all. Totally opposed to human nature. It never works. It always evolves into dictatorship because it is not... built for human nature. We're never going to act like that. It's not in our DNA.

You could try to wish it into existence, and they have, and it never works. And it's because once you have almost no rules in terms of, oh, we're all equal, even though communism eventually winds up having an enormous amount of rules, right? Right. Uh, it creates a power vacuum when you say, Hey, there's no structure of power here, right? We're all equal. It's a flat line.

One guy usually gets up because that's human nature and goes, eh, I don't think so. I think if you're going to leave a power vacuum, I'm going to take that power vacuum.

That is exactly it, Lex. You got it exactly right, in my opinion. So that's why communism never works and can never work. So they it's an idea of like, we're all going to work as hard as we possibly can and take only what we need. where, when, when has that ever happened in the history of humanity, right? We're just not built that way.

So, okay, we can get into that debate with my friends on the left, et cetera. Now, corporatism is just as extreme and just as dangerous, and that is basically what we have in America now. What we have in America now, and this is another giant trick that the Matrix played on everybody, that they did in a shell game,

And all of a sudden, extreme corporatists like Manchin and almost every Republican in the Senate Or moderates. Oh my God, Mitch McConnell all of a sudden is a moderate and et cetera. As long as you're not a populist. Populists are never moderate, okay?

But if you love corporations and corporate tax cuts and everything in favor of corporations, you're magically called a moderate when you actually, according to the polling, have super extreme positions that the American people hate. And by the way, that's part of the reason for the rise of Trump. We can come back to that, okay? But the second shell game is,

taking out capitalism, putting in corporatism, but still calling it capitalism. Okay, so what is corporatism? It is when corporations slowly take over the system and create monopoly and oligopoly power. So that snuffs out equality of opportunity. So how do they do that? When people say the system is rigged, They oftentimes can't explain it that well.

And then mainstream media goes, oh, you sound conspiratorial. Yeah, I wonder how. Yeah, super easy to explain it. Here's one of dozens of examples, carried interest loophole. So that is for hedge funds, private equity, the top people on Wall Street, that's part of their income. They get two and 20, right? So 2% is a flat fee, no matter what happens to the fund.

And 20% of the profits of the fund goes back to the people who invested it. It's not their money. It's not their investment. What they're getting is actually just income. It should be taxed at the highest rate. But because of this loophole, it's taxed at a much lower rate, at around 20%. So do you know at what income level you go above 20% if you're a regular Joe? It's at $84,000 a year.

So these billionaires are getting the same tax rate as people making $84,000 a year. It's unbelievably unfair. And that's corporatism taking over and starting to rig the rules. I'm going to pay less taxes. You're going to pay more taxes. Okay. So again, I can give you dozens of those examples. So, and mergers so that they get to oligopoly power.

That's how you rig a system, lowering the corporate tax rates. making sure that there is no real minimum wage, making sure there's no universal health care. We all become indentured servants of corporations. They take away power from the average guy, give it to the most powerful people in the world. But the most important distinction, Lex, is that corporatism hates competition.

It wants monopoly and oligopoly power. Whereas capitalism loves competition and wants to free markets. And I remember, you know, we started Young Turks back in 2002. So we've been around for 22 years, longest running daily show on the internet ever. And so we were pre Iraq war and Iraq war starts and Dick Cheney starts handing out no bid contracts.