The Cenk Uygur Presidential Run: Justice for America

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0:32Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians, to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

1:06Anyways, let's get to it.

1:15My conversation with Cenk Uygur on today's show is the perfect example that people have so much more in common than they realize if we just take the time to listen to one another. In our polarized society, we need people like Cenk to cut through the noise. His new book does exactly that. It's truthful, honest, and paints a picture of the aspirational America many of us hope to see again, no matter what side of the political field we find ourselves on.

1:49so joining us now on open book is Cenk Uygur he is the host and founder and CEO of the Young Turks he's written a soon-to-be bestseller justice is coming I love the title also love the lightning bolt how progressives are going to take over the country and America is going to love it I have to tell you as a conservative when I read the title I got scared I could feel my sphincter tightening up, okay, is, oh my God, this is going to be a disaster. Then I read the book, Cenk, and I'm like, okay, I agree with so much in this book. So I want to talk about that. And I want to talk about like, oh, people say, oh, now you're a rhino or something.

2:25No, I'm for, which I believe you're for, an aspirational economy where we give people the tools necessary to go forward, okay, and see if they can make something of themselves, okay, as opposed to letting them fall through the net, if you will, and smash themselves. Fair enough or no? Yeah, absolutely, Anthony. And I appreciate you being super open-minded about it, but you're not alone. A lot of conservatives who are reading it are saying, wait a minute, I kind of largely agree with a lot of these things. And it's partly because there's a difference between the Republican Party and just Republican voters, right, which I partly explain in the book.

3:02And so the Republican Party often misrepresents what Republican voters actually want. And secondly, there's huge misconceptions about progressives and what progressives want. And so when you get rid of a lot of the lies in the media and among the political parties, you wind up realizing, oh my God, we actually agree on a lot of things. Yeah. And journeys, I don't think are that dissimilar, but I want you to tell our viewers and listeners about your journey, dovetail it to the Young Turks. Talk to us about the Justice Democrats. Yeah. So I actually started out as a Republican when I was a kid. I came to the country when I was eight years old.

3:38And I grew up in a suburb of New York in central Jersey. And my dad ran a small business. And by the way, we were chased out of Turkey by communists. And so we started out as Republicans, logically so, right? And the media back then has made Ronald Reagan look like a demigod. So I thought, obviously, So you go with Reagan. Right. And I but I was a liberal Republican. I was liberal on social issues and conservative on economic issues. And so eventually the Republican Party left me. I mean, there's no liberal Republicans left, obviously. I think I sent me obviously. There's a couple hanging around.

4:10Right. And and when Bush started the Iraq war, I'm like, I'm all the way out. I don't want any piece of this. OK. And then I came to realize over the years that progressives actually have the right answer. So who are progressives? People like FDR, JFK, LBJ. By the way, Teddy Roosevelt, too. So there's Republicans and Democrats who've been progressives. It just means that you're sticking up for the average guy and not for the elites. And so, like, for example, FDR was vicious in fighting against the powerful elites. These days, they lie to you. The mainstream media does and tells you, oh, no, Democrats are supposed to be soft and weak and just float away like a goddamn cloud.

4:46Right. No, FDR and LBJ kicked the living crap out of their opponents, and that's how you're supposed to be. You're supposed to fight for the people. It's interesting. The word progressive is now thought of as a left-wing idea, but Teddy Roosevelt was a Republican. So rightly or wrongly, let me just test this theory on you. We're only as good as the lower part of our economic strata. And I think Teddy Roosevelt understood that. Believe it or not, Henry Ford understood that. It's a very famous story about Jacob Ries, the Dutch journalist in the early 1900s, showing Teddy Roosevelt, who was an aristocrat, the squalor in East New York, and the housing tenements that were actually collapsing on each other, on the immigrants.

5:28And he really pushed for building code safety in New York as a public servant. And then he said, hey, if we don't protect these people, he told the robber barons as president, you know, they're going to come at your house with like tiki torches and shotguns if you don't give them good living standards. Henry Ford went back and said, no problem. I'm going to pay them enough to afford the car that they're producing and put them in a single family house and a good public school system and so forth. Why have we lost that? We could call it no police oblige or we could call what Roosevelt, they could call Roosevelt the traitor to his class.

6:02He's like, dummies, I'm trying to save capitalism. I'm trying to save the democratic system from your greed. Go ahead. What do you say to that? No, Anthony, you nailed it right there at the end there. So there's a couple of factors, but the overwhelming number one factor is greed. And it's run amok. And as I explained in chapter four of the book, we lost democracy because Chamber of Commerce came up with an idea to basically capture the Supreme Court, put activist judges on it, and in the long run, allow for legalized bribery. And when you allow for legalized bribery, corporations will buy all the politicians and will live under corporate rule.

6:36And in fact, other justices like Byron White warned of that. They said this is a mortal danger to our democracy. You guys aren't getting it. They're going to buy all the politicians. And that's exactly what happened. And why did that happen? Because of infinite greed. They cannot stop their greed. So Sheldon Adelson gave Trump$100 million twice, right? Through super PACs, et cetera, both in 16 and 20. Why? Because he wanted all of these things in return, right? He wanted to cross unions. He wanted to make sure that he paid low wages to his workers, but he paid lower taxes, especially the repatriation tax, because Adelson actually made most of his money in China.

7:10Like, see, nobody knows that. But the biggest political benefactor of Donald Trump made most of his money in China. Right. But he was allowed to buy Donald Trump. And if you think you can't buy Donald Trump for$100 million, you don't know Donald Trump. OK. Yeah, no, of course. You can buy you can buy a congressman for like, you know,$10 ,000,$5 ,000 donations. I mean, yeah, 100 percent. And then one other thing that happened, Anthony, is then corporations got super smart and they figured out, hey, we need good cop, bad cop, both in politics and in media. And as I read in the book, the good cop is the, you know, if you're so inclined, you know, the way that mainstream media paints it, Democrats are the good cops, Republicans are the bad cops, MSNBC is the good cops, and Fox News is the bad cops.

7:51But in reality, they're all on the same team. And that's why we live under corporate rule. But Anthony, most importantly, whether you're a Republican, Democrat, a server, or a liberal, the correct answer is balance. We have to have a society, a government, and an economy that is balanced. If you get out of whack, you get out of balance, then you go back to exactly what you were describing. People grabbing pitchforks. And by the way, so they say riots are the voice of the unheard, right? There's a famous Martin Luther King comment. But in 2020, we had riots on the left side, right? Because of George Floyd, et cetera.

8:24And then we had riots from the right-wing side on January 6th in 2021, right? So both are the voices of the unheard. I know no other person on the left will ever say that about January 6th, right? But the reality is both sides are super frustrated and ready to grab their pitchforks and do serious damage because no one in power will listen to them. It's interesting. You know, Corey Lewandowski and I used to go to Bernie Sanders rallies. We found that the same people that were going to Donald Trump rallies were going to Bernie Sanders rally. So this is a grievance. There's a group of people that were once economically aspirational in the country, Cenk, that now feel economically desperation.

9:05I want to test something else on you and then get into more specifics of the book. I think Citizens United is the Plessy versus Ferguson of our time. And I just want to explain that to everybody quickly. What was Plessy versus Ferguson? The court ruled you could have separate but equal systems for black and white people. It led to widespread segregation and it was a calamity for the African-Americans in terms of the ability to integrate into the economy, into the culture. 80 years later, Brown versus Board of Education repealed that and we started integrating the schools. Plessy and citizens are identical to me.

9:42We've created a separate but equal democracy. So someone like Sheldon Adelson, no problem, here's$100 billion under the auspices or$100 million under the auspices of free speech, but he's now got more power in the democracy than his one vote. And I guess what I'm asking you, do you believe that? Because since Citizens United, if you look at corporate welfare and you look at crony capitalism, it is absolutely through the roof. The politicians are bought and paid for. Big food is putting dog shit into our food. Big pharma is allowed to lie about all kinds of stuff because they're lighting up the Congress.

10:16Am I wrong about this or right about this? Generally right. So look, Plessy v. Ferguson was one of the worst decisions of Supreme Court history, obviously, and that's why you're referencing it. And I just want to give the caveat, of course, that the suffering of black people in this country is unparalleled, right? And as much as we suffer under corporate rule, we're not in chains and they don't take our kids away and sell them, right? Now, having said that, you're not wrong that they created a two-tier system and one tier, which is a tiny, tiny tier, the top, not even 1%, it's really the top 0.1%, they give the most political donations and get the most favors.

10:55Those guys rule us all. They have primaries before we have primaries, And they give us our options and they say, here's the two senators you can choose from. Yes, I paid both of them. Ha ha. Go ahead and have your democracy. Right. And the rest of us, you know, look, there's a super depressing study in the middle of the book. I mean, I give tons of hope at the end. Right. Because I think we can turn it around. But in the middle of the book, the study of Princeton and Northwestern, they started about 20 years of policy, and they concluded that the bottom 90 % of Americans have literally zero effect on American government policy.

11:31Well, that's not a democracy. That's a two-tier system where we're all basically working as chattel for corporations. And Byron White warned about this, too. He said corporations are something that we created and the government need not permit its own creation to consume it, is what he said. And that's what happened. Corporations consumed us. And by the way, this isn't capitalism. This is corporatism. And corporatism destroys capitalism. It hates free markets. It loves monopolies. And that's exactly what's happening right now. And it creates cronyism and a result of which it reduces the competition.

12:06You know, to start my firm Skybridge today, it would nearly be impossible, Cenk. The first nine employees would have to be lawyers and compliance people. And so they've killed the ability to create the competition. And the banks know that. The larger companies and I know that. OK. And it's just a disaster. Hey, can I tell you something quick about that? Yeah. So I was talking to another progressive friend who's also a successful businessman. And he cares enormous about the climate and about getting things right, et cetera. And he said, you know, what's interesting is that regulations, of course, we think on the left are necessary to make sure we don't have monopolies, make sure you don't have dog crap in your food and all that stuff.

12:52But sometimes overregulation can be done by giant corporations to help them kill off their competition from small business. They like it. Yeah. The bank snicker at the regulation. They'll go on television and say, oh, we're for deregulation. And they're laughing, put more regulation on the burner. Yeah. So the answer is balance. Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You said something in the book I read. I was like, you're so right about this, but I want you to explain why. OK, I'm going to give you the exact quote. Elections are decided by donors far more than they are by voters.

13:26So tell us why. Yeah. And by the way, there's a poll that shows that 93 % of Americans agree with that. The only reason why we don't all think about that 24-7 is because corporate media, which is, as I explained in the book, both mainstream media and right-wing media like Fox News, they never, ever talk about it. Because all the money from corruption goes straight into their pockets. The politicians raised, like last midterm elections,$17 billion, and they spend it all on media. They buy ads with it. So the media has 17 billion reasons to not tell you about the obvious corruption. But as I explained, the American people caught on anyway.

14:02And that's why the establishment and mainstream media, et cetera, have lost all credibility. So the donors decide elections. Well, as I explain the book in the House, I give examples. The recent elections, 97 % of the people who had more money won. So it didn't matter if they were Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal. It didn't matter if they had experience or no experience. The only thing that mattered was how much money they had. After Justice Democrats, which I co-founded, they run without corporate PAC money. So we brought that number down to 87 % for an election. Right. But now it's rising back up again.

14:36And so if there was honest media coverage about politics, all they would talk about is the donors because the donors control the politicians nearly 100%. The rest of it is all fake debates, fake theater. Well, like you said, there's too many vests in interest that that's not going to happen, you know. And so let me fire this at you. I want to get your reaction to it. I think the GI Bill was one of the most progressive things that we have done in our country's history. We took Jews and Italians and Turks and Irish that were growing up in the Bowery or lower middle class. They came out of the military.

15:09They could go to school. They became doctors and lawyers and accountants. And they all were in traditional blue collar working class families became white collar and literally transformed America. One, do you agree with that? And then secondarily, what are some programs that we could do today that would have that type of GI Bill effect on the society? Yeah. So first of all, yes, I totally agree. Second of all, I have a proposal that I talk about on the show every once in a while. It's not in the book. But I think that after high school, everybody should be forced to do one year of service. And so you could either choose the military, you could choose the Peace Corps, or you could choose something like AmeriCorps where you serve inside the country as a teacher or volunteer of some sort, right?

15:54And the reason for that is I'm not very pro-military at all, right? Like I'm in favor of the military that defends us. I'm not in favor of a Pentagon that enriches itself and engages in offensive wars. So I'm not trying to drive people to that kind of mission. But the reason that I'm in favor of it is because we've got to bring the country together. We have lost track of each other and we have lost our bonds. You know, what happened in the wars, the one silver lining was we brought black people and white people together. We brought kids from the Bronx and West Virginia and California and Kansas that didn't know each other, didn't share the same culture together.

16:31And they became brothers and sisters and they fought together and they bonded and they became a country and they became one culture. Now that culture is frayed and we're now in our own bubbles. We've got to bring people back together so that we can have a shared bond and a shared goal. Well, there's no question. And just to buttress that, George McGovern, who was a Democrat from the Dakotas, he loved Bob Dole. And he said, we served in the army together. And we may have been different ideologies, may have different philosophies. But of course, McGovern went on to write that very famous Wall Street Journal editorial.

17:07He had started a bed and breakfast in Connecticut and it failed. and he blamed some of it on the burdensome regulation. And he said, geez, if I had known how hard it was to be an entrepreneur, I probably wouldn't have put through all that burdensome regulation when I was in the Congress. And so what we're finding, Jack, and this is the thing I really respect about you, is that we have a lot more in common. When I came out of the Trump administration and I finally turned on Mr. Trump and had to explain why I could no longer support him, you invited me on the show. I don't know if you remember this whole conversation.

17:38And And obviously you had some harsh opinions of him and we talked about my evolution. I got it totally wrong. I thought Trump could have been a transformative politician and broke this sort of party fever, if you will, and just started really just focused on trying to do the right thing for America and then doing something that FDR did is he went over the top of everybody, went right to the people, explained to them what the hell he wanted to do. And then they wrote to their congressmen and senators and said, hey, we're going with this guy. So get out of the way. Is there a politician in our lifetimes that can do that?

18:14And then the next question is, when are you running for president? Soon. So let me tackle it one by one. So first off, I get that idea that Trump was going to be a non-regular politician and that he could have been transformed. Now, I didn't buy into it from day one because I always thought that Trump was a con man. And, you know, Trump University, Trump charity, it's just one con after another after another. And so he's been doing this his whole life. So I thought, oh, no, they're going the wrong direction. Right. And so the idea is right. And that's why when people read the book, yeah, I'm super tough on Republicans in different parts.

18:48But I'm also super fair to conservative voters. I explain where no one on the left or the mainstream media explains, which is that the conservative voters had the right instinct. The politicians are full of crap. The media is full of crap. Corruption is rampant and they hate corruption. And I love them for it. But they just got misdirected towards Trump. And so they were dying for an option that was not the establishment. And when Trump stuck his middle finger, tiny little middle finger out of the establishment, the crowd went nuts. Right. But then Trump being Trump, instead of directing that back towards the people and try to help others like Teddy Roosevelt did, like Franklin Roosevelt did.

19:25No, he absorbed it all for himself because that's in his nature. And it's me, me, me, me, me, me. It's he's unbelievably selfish. Right. I can't believe that you guys like the right wing can't see it. It's it's maddening. On the other hand, look at what people don't want to see, like what they won't acknowledge when they don't want to see it. Joe Biden is now 13 points lower than when he barely beat Trump in the Electoral College. And every Democrat's going, I don't see it. I don't see it. The Democratic leaders, none of them are running against him. Everyone in the media until very recently was like, nobody better run against Joe Biden.

20:00Joe Biden is going to, he's the only one that can beat Trump. First of all, are you saying that there's no Democrat in the country that could beat Donald Trump, who always has like an unfavorability of minimum 55 %? That is damning of the Democratic Party. I don't believe that. And I think anybody who believes that is nuts. I think the only person who could lose to Trump is Joe Biden. So he beat him by four and a half points last time and barely won the Electoral College. And now he's losing by a point or two. And he doesn't have the charisma to turn it around. Democratic Party, wake up. So the correct answer, of course, would have been Bernie 2016.

20:32OK. And so 2020, he got into the cultural stuff a little bit more than he should have, etc. Economic populism that he had in 2016 was nearly perfect. Yeah, they weren't going to give it to him. No way. Yeah, because he wasn't really a Democrat for them. Yeah, no, look, he's actually the traditional Democrat. He's much more closer to FDR, JFK, et cetera. These new guys are corporate stooges, but that's why they weren't going to give it to Bernie. The media hated Bernie Sanders because he's not in favor of corporate rule. And by the way, that's also why they hate Donald Trump. So since we're in this dire straits where nobody's got any good options and both the media and politicians stuff these two terrible options down your throats.

21:13So I got so frustrated, Anthony, and I asked tons of people to to run. I asked like half a dozen strong progressives to run. They didn't want to do it. Then I got to the point where I'm like pleading with Democratic governors. Jesus, any of you can beat Biden or Trump. Right. Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania beat a Trump clone by like 15 points. Andy Beshear is a Democratic governor of Kentucky. Pritzker's got a billion dollars in a popular governor of Illinois. We can go on and on. And so I beseeched them. And it didn't work because they love obedience. The Democratic Party has become like the party of authoritarian rule.

21:48If the dear leader says it, you must bow your head. That is not what the Democratic Party is supposed to be about. So I got so frustrated. I was like, all right, God damn it. Then I'm going to consider going. And so right now I'm talking to staff. I'm talking to lawyers. i'm talking compliance i'm i'm getting ready and so is it 100 no uh but is it am i leaning in that direction yes am i getting ready to do it yes is it an act of desperation yes like do i think jank uger a name that you know five percent of the country might love but a huge percentage of the country hasn't heard and can't even pronounce and then i got a great chance of winning this thing?

22:23I don't know. But I do know this. I want to give the people an option, an option of not Biden, not Trump, and someone who's honest. And everybody knows this about me, no matter where you are on the political spectrum. I'm going to fight for you. I'm a goddamn fighter. I don't sit around and go, oh, golly gee, there was nothing I could do. No, I fight like hell. And I don't do it for me. I do it for you. And that's a giant, giant difference. And I've proved it a hundred times. And every time I get pilloried by the press and everybody else, and I come back for more because somebody's got to do it.

22:582024? Or when do you want to do this? Yeah. Like right now? Yeah. I'm not playing. Look, I think Biden has a 90 % chance to lose. I think we're whistling past the graveyard. But again, I love it. And you're probably going to end up getting my vote because it's such a disaster out there. And I actually think you're a sensible guy and you have enough emotional security and intelligence to bring in some more people around you. So, but how do you break through the demo publicans? Okay. Which is this sort of uniparty duopoly at the top, you know, the, he's the sitting president. You're going to run as a Democrat, I'm assuming, right?