Cenk Uygur

And it turned out, by the way, two days before he dropped out, his inside advisors inside the White House said, yeah, near 0% chance of winning. So we were right all along. You got a lot of criticism for that, by the way. But yeah. Yeah, we can come back to that. Yes, I did. And which makes it Tuesday for me. I get a lot of criticism for everything.

uh and by the way democratic party you're welcome um so but uh biden's a really interesting example i'm really glad you brought it up so the video on tiktok was just showing by and then by now and you're right biden was so dynamic when you see how dynamic he was we did like side by side right and then you see him now going like you're barely finishing anyways Right.

You're like, oh, that's not the same guy. I get it. Right. So and I got like five million views because because it resonates. They're like, yeah, yeah, of course. Right. But when he first started to the point you were making, Lex, he want to. In fact, I know because I talked to him about this. His very first bill was anti-corruption. Why? Because at that point, everything changes in 1976 and 78.

It's Supreme Court decisions that basically legalized bribery. But remember, Biden is ancient. So he's coming into politics at a time when money has not yet drowned politics. And in fact, the American population is super pissed about the fact that it's begun. They don't like corruption. So early Biden, because he's reading the room, is very anti-corruption.

And the first bill he proposes is to get money out of politics. Okay? But as Biden goes on for his epic 200-year career in Washington, he starts to get not more conservative, more corporate, because he's just taking more and more money. By the middle of his career, he has a nickname, the Senator from MBNA. Okay. MBNA was a credit card company based in Delaware.

And the reason he had that nickname is because there isn't anything Joe Biden wouldn't have done for credit card companies and corporations based in Delaware, which are almost all corporations. Okay. So he became the most corporate. senator in the country, and hence the most beloved by corporate media. And corporate media has protected him his entire career until about a month ago.

So for example, in the primaries, both in 2020 and 2024, if you said the senator from MBNA, I guarantee you almost no one in the audience has heard of it. If you heard of it, good job, you know politics really well, okay? But the reason you didn't hear of it is because the mainstream media wouldn't say that's outrageous of Joe Biden to be such a corporate stooge. They'd say,

That's outrageous of you to point out something that's true and something we reported on earlier, okay? And so they protected him at all costs. Now, finally, when you get to this version of Joe Biden, he can't talk, he can't walk. He bears no resemblance to the young guy who came in saying that money in politics was a problem. Now he's saying money in politics is the solution.

And in 2020, he said, well, I can raise more money than Bernie. I can kiss corporate ass better than Bernie. I'm the biggest corporate ass kisser in the world. So I'm going to raise a billion dollars and you need to support me. Now, of course, he doesn't say it in those words, but that was the message to the establishment. And Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Obama, Clyburn, everybody goes, oh, that's right.

Biden, Biden, Biden, Biden, not Bernie. I don't know that there's anybody in the country who instinctually dislikes Bernie more than Barack Obama.

So first of all, they're giant corporations. So they're all multi-billion dollar corporations. In the old days, we had... incredible number of media outlets. So you go to San Francisco, there'd be at least two papers and there'd be a paper boy, and I'm going all the way back, paper boy on each corner and they're competing with one another. Literally, they'd be catty corner, right?

And one guy's going, oh, here are all this details. They're trying to get an audience. They're trying to get people interested. So they're populist, they're interesting, they're muckrakers, they're challenging the government. Fast forward to now, or not now, but About a decade ago, five years ago in that ballpark, now there's only six giant media corporations left and it's an oligopoly, right?

And they're all multi-billion dollar corporations. They all want tax cuts. Half of them are also, especially about 20 years ago during the Iraq war, half of them are defense contractors, right? So they're just using the news as marketing to start wars like the Iraq war. And then GE, which owned MSNBC makes a tremendous amount of money, so much more money from war than it does for media.

That media is a good marketing spend for these corporations. Now that's part of it that they themselves want the same exact thing as the rest of corporations do for corporate rule, lower tax cuts, deregulation so they can merge, et cetera. But the second part of it is arguably even more important. So where does all that money in politics go? So for example, in 2022, it's just a midterm election.

No presidential should be lower spending. A ridiculous $17 billion are spent, okay, on the election cycle. Where does the $17 billion go? Almost all of it goes into corporate media. mainstream media, television, newspapers, radio. They're buying ads like nuts. So we have a reporter at TYT, David Schuster. He used to work at MSNBC, Fox News, et cetera.

And David once did a piece about money and politics at a local NBC news station. And his editor or GM spiked a story. And David goes into his office and asks him, so why Why? This story is true. It's a huge part of politics. If we're going to report on this issue, we got to tell you what's actually happening. So he says, David, come here.

He puts his arm around his shoulders, takes him to the big newsroom, and he goes, you see all this? Money in politics paid for that.

Like we all know, I mean, now as we talked about earlier, we see it with our own eyes, open auction, any country, any company, anybody that has money, the politicians will now literally say, I am now working for this guy, as Trump says, because he gave me a strong endorsement, which means a lot of money, right? And so, and the press never covers it, almost never, right?

So you're telling me you're doing an article on the infrastructure build or build back better, et cetera. And you're not going to mention the enormous amount of money that every lobbyist spent on that bill? That's absurd. That's absurd. That's 98% of the ballgame.

And the reason they hide the ball is because they don't want you to know this whole thing is based on the money that they are receiving. And by the way, one more thing about that, Alex, it's that the ads themselves, actually, they work well. and they work pretty well, but that's not the main reason you spend money on ads.