Trump's trial is finally here! Adam Andrzejewski joins us to unpack the 34 charges against Donald Trump, and how they stack up against the other great war crimes of recent history: those of Biden, Obama, Bush and Clinton. We also have a look at how the crimes of Trump stacks up against those of Obama, Biden, and Clinton, and what are our true values? And, in a sense, how this spellbinding, hypnotising show is distracting us from deep, deep truths. Stay Free with Russell Brand is out now, and you can catch it on Amazon Prime and Vimeo wherever you get your favourite streaming service. If you don't already have an Amazon Prime membership, you can get a free trial copy of the show by clicking here. You can also get 10% off the first month with the promo code "WAKEUPWondering" and receive 10% discount when you book your first trial ticket through Amazon Prime on Audible. or Vimeo. This offer expires on December 31st, 2020, so make sure to check out the trial before then! You'll get access to all the trial coverage and all the details, including access to the full trial transcripts, all of the exhibits and documents, as well as all of our best tips and access to any of the best legal support. We'll be posting them on the show notes, so you can keep up to date with everything you need to know about the proceedings. Stay Free Stay Free With Russell Brand! - Stay Free, and stay woke up! Tweet Me! ! Timestamps: 5:00 - What do you think of this episode? 6:30 - How to get to the top of the mountain? 7:20 - What are your True Values? 8:15 - How do you want to be free? 9:40 - What's your True Value? 11:00 | What are you going to do with the truth? 12:00 15:30 16:30 | What does the truth about Trump? 17:15 | What is the truth that matters to you? 18: What is your true value? 19:40 | What's the truth you want? 21:20 | How do I know what s going on here? 22:00 // Is it possible? 26:40 27:10 | What do I think of Trump s trial?
00:01:16.000His speech from Mar-a-Lago has been delivered.
00:01:20.000We can now unpack the 34 charges and decide for ourselves whether they are misdemeanors or felonies and how they stand up against the great war crimes of recent history.
00:01:34.000We're going to be having a deep look at how the crimes of Trump stack up against the crimes of Biden, Obama, Bush and Clinton.
00:02:35.000There you go, the mainstream media unable to get Donald Trump's attention.
00:02:38.000You'll have noticed that every single detail is being amplified and magnified, essentially because there's very little to look at in reality.
00:02:46.000But now, we live in a world where at Jar Sosa 25 is able to extract an exclusive on the street.
00:03:05.000It's a persecution, not a prosecution.
00:03:08.000In a way, I think you can see right there, Gareth, not in microcosm, but in that opposition, the problem that we have now.
00:03:21.000The mainstream media once had sole access to information.
00:03:26.000Now we all have access to information as well as the ability to communicate it.
00:03:31.000So what the mainstream media now requires is either authority and legitimacy, which it can no longer make claim to because of the way that it is funded, because of its biases.
00:03:42.000So now what it needs is to be able to delegitimize the opposition.
00:03:48.000The fact is, is that a kid on the street has extracted more information from Donald Trump than MSNBC, than CNN.
00:03:58.000And so, in a way, the theatre and the performance of media has become more valid than its actual access to facts.
00:04:10.000Yeah I think one of the things that the mainstream media were really excited about with this case was that obviously cameras weren't allowed inside the courtroom and so one of the comments I think Robert Sherman who's coming up later was really excited and a piece that we were looking out of his yesterday where he was saying you know it's like the old days it's because people can't use social media inside the courtroom they're going to have to come straight out and report to the mainstream media so this was a chance for the mainstream media to It's extraordinary really.
00:05:11.000Their legitimacy is, I think, being not only eroded, but almost completely vanquished.
00:05:18.000When you see them Criticizing and condemning Russia for the arrest using the espionage act of that Wall Street Journal journalist while Assange remains in prison in Belmarsh.
00:05:33.000You recognize that the hypocrisy is so pronounced that there's barely anything that you can trust them on.
00:05:43.000They must know that putting Trump in this position gives him the opportunity to do stuff like this.
00:05:52.000If you are one of the virulently anti-Trump folk that really are passionate about your hatred of Trump, that see him as the epitome of the problem, I wonder how you feel when you watch him at Mar-a-Lago And he is able to say there was the first impeachment hoax, there was the hunt a Biden laptop thing, there was the attempt to ally me with Russian disinformation.
00:06:19.000I wonder how they are able to say no Biden is significantly different in these these ways.
00:06:26.000I don't know how you can legitimize your condemnation anymore other than in the sort of Vulgarity of Trump say, because I'm talking about how they condemn and criticize him.
00:06:36.000Interesting what you're saying about the Hunter Biden, because obviously that was broken on.
00:06:40.000Twitter wasn't it and then repressed on Twitter and it's interesting at the moment with all the mainstream reaction to Trump and of course we saw Matt Taibbi recently in Congress and this issue of kind of mainstream versus social media or independent journalism is really playing out with this and you really see in the Trump case the way in which the mainstream media focus on such minutiae like whether or not Donald Trump stares in a certain direction or you know Moves from left to right.
00:07:09.000And yet at the same time, there's the kind of vilification of independent journalists like Matt Taibbi.
00:07:13.000And you really feel that that's where truth is coming from now.
00:07:16.000Independent journalism, even through like social media.
00:07:19.000And we're seeing it play out in front of us, the ridiculousness of the mainstream and its focus on the minutia.
00:07:25.000You're right, like they sort of, they question the credibility of a journalist like Matt Taibbi.
00:07:31.000But then, as you say, on the mainstream media, they try to sort of suck Yeah.
00:07:36.000analysis out of the angle of Donald Trump's head in a courtroom.
00:09:34.000The amount of press it's getting these days.
00:09:36.000Gosh, if you struggled to get a single dwelling, you'd have to sleep in a janitor's cupboard, in a closet.
00:09:43.000And this is a bit where he talks again.
00:09:45.000Again, if you don't like Trump, and I know loads of you absolutely adore him, but if you don't, I wonder how you deal with the Hunter Biden laptop thing.
00:09:53.000I wonder how you deal with the Steele dossier stuff, like the Clinton administration spent, or the Clinton campaign, excuse me, spent money on.
00:10:03.000And where we go later, when we're going to analyse this with a little more depth in a minute, we start talking about how successive American presidents in any properly judicious government would be facing trial for war crimes.
00:10:20.000Even if you feel like this is a super serious thing and that Donald Trump should be like, you know, banged up for misappropriation of campaign funds or double entry bookkeeping or hush money to Stormzy Daniels, how do you compare that with war crimes?
00:10:35.000We're going to look at that in some depth in a moment.
00:10:37.000Let's have a look at a bit more Mar-a-Lago stuff.
00:10:40.000Just recently the FBI and DOJ in collusion with Twitter and Facebook In order not to say anything bad about the Hunter Biden laptop from hell, which exposes the Biden family as criminals and which, according to the pollsters, would have made a 17 point difference in the election result.
00:11:03.000And we needed a lot less than that, like about 16.9.
00:11:06.000It would have been in our favor, not my favor, our favor, because our country is going to hell.
00:11:19.000He's able to bring up significant points that seem more important than the amplification of a misdemeanor to a felony.
00:11:29.000When he talks, too, about bringing the world to the brink of Armageddon, you feel like, what are our priorities here?
00:11:38.000Should we have a look at some of the charges in a little more DL.
00:11:43.000So we can try and get a handle on this thing.
00:11:46.000So the 34 charges hinge on hush money payments the former president allegedly made to porn actress Stormy Daniels.
00:11:53.000Yet paying hush money to prevent publication of an adulterous sexual encounter is not a crime.
00:12:03.000So did thousands of other high-profile Americans.
00:12:05.000None of them ever disclosed such payments on public corporate records.
00:12:08.000Okay, so that in itself is not distinct.
00:12:11.000In order to turn a questionable misdemeanor into an even more questionable felony, Bragg has had to allege that the reason Trump made false entries was to cover up other crimes.
00:12:20.000Here is where the indictment is at its weakest.
00:12:22.000Although the indictment itself does not specify which crimes were allegedly in Trump's mind, the statement of facts indicates that they generally related to election issues.
00:12:30.000But if it's that, then the Steele dossier, the Russiagate stuff, the Hunter Biden laptop, they all feel like they exist in the general environment.
00:12:40.000They're kind of comparable Uh, cases of, like, the use of funds or trying to manage the outcome of an election.
00:12:51.000The theory is that Trump hid the real reason for the hush money payments for the purpose of helping his campaign rather than to hide the adulterous affair from his wife, children and business associates.
00:13:00.000It's weak at best and nearly impossible to prove at worst.
00:13:06.000Okay, sort of not really enough distinction, but have a deeper look at this.
00:13:11.000If you're watching this on YouTube now, click over onto watching us on Rumble, because we're going to look at this in a little more detail, comparing it not just to sort of other potentially frivolous or necessarily amplified misdemeanors, but to the most incendiary charge that could ever be levelled at a global leader, war criminality.
00:13:32.000Certainly a charge that's being levelled at Vladimir Putin, But is it a charge that could be levelled at recent US Commander-in-Chiefs?
00:14:22.000It's weird when they say high alert, it's just people with their hands in their pockets, people just standing around.
00:14:27.000This hyperbole is what much of the case is about.
00:14:30.000I've often thought that with the British monarchy, the crowns, the paraphernalia, is to distract you from the fact that these are just some people, actually.
00:14:39.000When you look at it cosmically, from outer space, the Queen, God rest her soul, How much of the amplification, hysteria, magnification of this case is actually serving entrenched systemic power?
00:14:53.000Is what Trump's done that bad when compared to what other presidents have done?
00:14:58.000We're talking on the scale of war criminality.
00:15:00.000So again, just for you lot, some of you really love Donald Trump and I'm okay with that.
00:15:04.000Some of you really hate Donald Trump and I'm okay with that.
00:15:08.000What I'm really interested in is change.
00:15:12.000Real change being delivered to all of us.
00:15:14.000A genuine conversation and the opportunity for people who hate Trump and love Trump to come together and recognise our systems are not working.
00:15:54.000Then I think it was this finger, the index, that went down next, and then the dirty finger, then the wedding finger, then this little pig he stayed at home though.
00:16:02.000As his motorcade made its way downtown, sources tell ABC News that apart from his secret service detail, the former president rode alone.
00:16:10.000No lawyers, no family, no advisors with him.
00:16:20.000He used only his own breath and farts to pump himself full of courtroom power for the arraignment, a word you now know about and care about.
00:16:29.000So the inflections, even around the minor details, inform us what the media outlet wants us to believe.
00:16:36.000The very fact that there's this much hysteria shows you something significant is happening.
00:16:40.000Even though it's ultimately ephemeral amplification that we're dealing with, there is something underneath it.
00:16:45.000And what I believe that is, and what Trump's success has always been based on, is all of us know the system is broken and it doesn't work.
00:16:53.000All of us can see that Biden was elected on a set of pledges and promises that he hasn't delivered on.
00:16:58.000I know loads of you that are political experts will go, well, hang on a minute, he did that big farmer thing.
00:17:03.000Yeah, that's not really made a difference.
00:17:11.000There was no one in federal prison for cannabis.
00:17:14.000All of the administration, all of the legislation, it gives the impression of change without affecting elite What I believe Trump is, was, perhaps will forever remain, is a kind of organic wrecking ball and rhetorical genius.
00:17:30.000My personal belief is that Donald Trump is not able to change the systems of corruption whether he wanted to or not.
00:17:36.000I also believe that these charges are ultimately a way of removing him from the presidential candidacy, I believe that's true, but the main thing, the potent energy that has to be addressed is people are sort of shuddering, shaking, vibrating with rage against this corruption and centralised power, whether it's media, political or financial, is trying to repress it and locate it all in the figure of Trump and these charges, which I know some of you think are serious and a lot of you think are ridiculous.
00:18:02.000Approaching criminal court in lower Manhattan, Trump posting on social media, seems so surreal.
00:18:18.000Can't believe I'm actually going to jail now.
00:18:20.000Gonna get the old fist ready for the fist pump.
00:18:22.000What he does brilliantly is he accesses us at the point of the personal.
00:18:27.000I believe that's where he has managed to harness all of this energy.
00:18:31.000If you are a pro-Trump person, then you can ask yourself what he did in office that was better than any of his predecessors, and I know perhaps you'll point to Record around not starting any new wars, for example.
00:18:41.000But what I will say is try to focus on systemic corruption rather than the individuals.
00:18:46.000That's what I'm trying to do, because I find this exciting as well, because it's a circus, because I've been grown on it.
00:19:44.000And while we settle for reform on one hand, like minor reforms, oh we got this healthcare thing through, or things are gonna get slightly better over here, powerful institutions and powerful interests are carrying on unimpeded.
00:21:37.000It's amplifying everything into significance.
00:21:39.000When that takes place, you better be sure that something else is happening.
00:21:43.000I don't mean in a conservative ...spiritorial way.
00:21:45.000I don't believe that there's any card race going, let's use this Trump trial and underneath it will slip through all this legislation.
00:21:50.000I'm just meaning the whole spectacle itself.
00:21:53.000While our eyes are here, it's business as usual.
00:21:55.000You better believe billions are moving around.
00:21:57.000You better believe that the truly powerful are doing their thing right now.
00:22:02.000Whether you believe he's a martyr or the worst person ever to have lived, I believe when it comes to the truly powerful, you don't know their names.
00:22:08.000His shoulders slumped, hands in his lap, flanked by his lawyers.
00:22:12.000Shoulders slumped, hands in his lap, heart broken inside, a silent tear, a look into the middle distance, a broken man.
00:22:20.000Trump sat boldly with an erection firing little seeds of justice out of the tip of his purple dick because that's red and blue combined because he's the messiah of a bipartisan new dawn.
00:22:34.000Pleading not guilty to those 34 felony charges that he repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal criminal conduct that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election.
00:22:48.000I mean even when you just read that, that does sound like concealed damaging information, bit Hunter Biden laptop, used funds, bit steals dossier.
00:22:56.000Now I know if you're a super pro-democrat person then you're going No!
00:23:35.000No one's talking about that because on the significant issues, they all agree.
00:23:39.000Trump orchestrated a criminal scheme with his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen and his friend, former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, to pay hush money to at least three people, including porn actress Stormy Daniels.
00:24:41.000And you sort of have been trained not to care about that.
00:24:44.000And that tells you something very, very significant indeed.
00:24:47.000We just accept that when you're in that position, you do things that are unimaginable, that by any sensible metric would be illegal.
00:24:56.000So if we're going to talk about the illegality of these 34 misdemeanors and amplifying them into felonies because they could have led to other crimes and they could be about concealing information in order to XYZ, forget that it sounds pretty similar to some stuff that the Democrats have done.
00:25:10.000Why are we talking about that when what we could be talking about is building a better world where it's not business as usual for American presidents to bomb and kill children and then be rehabilitated as cozy uncles?
00:25:22.000Trump may be the first former president to face criminal prosecution, but that fact in and of itself is a damning condemnation of the US system of impunity that has long permeated our system of American exceptionalism.
00:25:34.000So the very notion that underwrites this from a liberal, neoliberal perspective is Trump may think he's above the law, but oh no he's not.
00:25:43.000Whoever you are, don't matter if your name's Trump or Joe Blow, you're gonna face justice.
00:25:49.000The case against Trump would be a mere footnote of history, albeit a wild one, if the US actually believed in holding presidents and other top officials accountable for their crimes, including those committed in office.
00:26:01.000George W. Bush continues to enjoy his rebranded life as the nice painter man who can joke around with Ellen DeGeneres.
00:26:08.000In fact, most people probably think Ellen DeGeneres is worse than George W. Bush now because she's rude to the staff.
00:26:13.000What she didn't do, Backstage at the Ellen Show is bomb children and sheer hugs with the Obamas.
00:26:20.000Dick Cheney is somehow still alive and popping his head out to remind us that his dark soul is still lurking.
00:26:27.000The truth is that all of them should be serving substantial prison sentences for directing and orchestrating the gravest of criminal activity, war crimes.
00:26:35.000And what that tells you is when corruption is that extreme, it is systemic.
00:26:39.000If a system can accommodate illegal wars and war criminality, it is the system itself that needs to be held accountable.
00:26:47.000If Cheney, Bush, Obama, Clinton, both of them, are all war criminals, then that tells you, uh-oh, we're going to have to redress the system.
00:26:55.000If you address and change the system, you start to impact the truly powerful organizations and institutions that control it.
00:27:03.000So Trump For all of his amazing rhetoric, or, you know, depending on your view, his heinous crimes, is a sideshow that stops you addressing the system itself is corrupt and needs to be changed.
00:27:15.000And as long as you're caught up in this from either perspective, you're not going to hold these people and this system accountable.
00:27:20.000Trump's prosecution is not evidence that our much vaunted justice system can actually be applied fairly and evenly to all, even a former president.
00:27:28.000What it really shows is that it's possible to prosecute a cartoonish villain, even one who served as president, who happens to be widely despised by the so-called adults in the room.
00:27:38.000When Barack Obama first took office, he assured the CIA that no one would be prosecuted for running a secret global kidnap and torture regime under Bush and Cheney.
00:27:47.000We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards, Obama famously said later.
00:27:51.000So Obama, remember all that excitement.
00:28:02.000But secretly, while all the fanfare was happening, Obama had assured Cheney, Bush, and the powers behind them, nothing's gonna change, they don't need to worry about those war crimes.
00:28:11.000What that tells you is it's a continuum, a continual line.
00:28:15.000Later he referred to the heinous program as, we tortured some folks.
00:28:21.000Imagine for a moment that people that are being tortured don't exist beyond some wall in your imagination.
00:28:28.000Imagine that there's someone that you love was tortured as a result of that regime and that Barack Obama would just seamlessly take the baton from Bush, Seamlessly pass it to Trump.
00:28:39.000That there's a baton that passes through.
00:28:41.000I know those of you that love Trump believe that what he is is an anti-establishment radical.
00:28:47.000Have a look at his time in office and we can continue that conversation.
00:28:51.000What I am contesting is the system is so robust that it can accommodate the fluctuations between the Democrat and Republican Party because it owns both of them.
00:29:38.000Joe Biden's first strike and his expansion of the US drone war occurred just weeks into his presidency when at least four members of the Popular Mobilization Forces were killed in strikes in Syria and Iraq.
00:29:49.000Previously, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi steadfastly refused to even consider impeachment proceedings against Bush.
00:29:55.000The system depends on such bipartisan impunity.
00:30:27.000No prosecutor is reviewing Trump's rollback of US limitations on killing civilians abroad, and there will be no indictment for the women and children killed under his watch.
00:30:36.000So there were some, according to this.
00:30:37.000If he goes down legally, it would be for his tawdry or white-collar style infractions, but not for any war crimes he committed as president.
00:30:46.000In fact, the US government threatens to use force against any international body that even thinks of doing so.
00:30:52.000History has proven a knack for timing, and around the same moment Trump was learning of his impending criminal charges, Russian President Vladimir Putin was hit with a war crimes indictment by the International Criminal Court or ICC.
00:31:04.000Putin's invasion of Ukraine has created an interesting predicament for the US Empire on these matters.
00:31:09.000President Joe Biden said last year that Putin is a war criminal and has suggested he should stand trial for the Ukraine war.
00:31:15.000He should be prosecuted as a war criminal, right?
00:31:25.000But Biden's administration has slow-walked cooperating with the ICC.
00:31:29.000In fact, the Pentagon has blocked such cooperation for fear that prosecuting Putin would set a precedent that other nations could readily cite to demand equal application of the law to US officials and personnel.
00:31:42.000All the while that the Biden administration is saying that Putin is uniquely a tyrant and a war criminal, Secretly, they're like, we better not prosecute this because we're war criminals, because the system is corrupt, because the type of change that's required will never be discussed by us.
00:31:56.000So whether it's Putin is a baddie, or Trump is a baddie, or Clinton is great, all of that rhetoric is fine because it's inconsequential.
00:32:03.000When it becomes consequential, like, yeah, let's stick Putin before a court.
00:32:16.000Enjoy your TV show while the system is doing just fine.
00:32:20.000Since the end of World War II, the US government has waged a judicial proxy war over its vanquished enemies and less powerful nations under the banner of international justice.
00:32:29.000The Nuremberg Principles, which governed the trials of Nazi and Imperial Japanese war criminals, represented a powerful framework for holding even the most senior officials accountable for war crimes.
00:32:39.000But there was a crucial caveat built into the system.
00:32:43.000These principles were designed never to be applied to the US and its allies.
00:32:47.000Since 2002, the US, by its own law, will never subject its personnel or those of its allies to the ICC, and reserves the right to conduct a military operation inside the Netherlands, where the court is based, to liberate its own accused war criminals.
00:33:01.000My God, if it ever happens, they're sending in the Navy SEALs.
00:33:04.000But they would never, you know, use that to blow up a pipeline.
00:33:08.000That must have been Russia blowing up their own pipeline as a sort of prank on Russia.
00:33:15.000position on international prosecutions has been to oppose a permanent international court that would have jurisdiction equally over all war criminals, regardless of their nationality or position of power.
00:33:26.000That would be justice, rather than a television show, which we all enjoy, but let's remember it's a television show.
00:33:31.000Instead, it's encouraged ad hoc tribunals set up to prosecute war criminals from places like the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and other African nations.
00:34:01.000The whole purpose of this from the U.S.
00:34:03.000perspective is to ensure that these laws will never be applied to Americans or their friends.
00:34:08.000And now that stance is revealing its moral bankruptcy in the face of Putin's crimes in Ukraine.
00:34:13.000All of this has made a farce of the notion of international law.
00:34:17.000The prosecution of Trump should thus serve as a reminder that the US does not actually believe in holding its most powerful citizens accountable for even the most serious of acts.
00:34:58.000America has a long history of war crimes.
00:35:01.000America does not represent the people of America.
00:35:05.000America represents the corporations, globalist corporations that have no more allegiance to you as American citizens than they do to me as an Englishman or people from Shit hole countries like Rwanda or the Netherlands or Yugoslavia.
00:35:18.000Those places are just corporate dominion.
00:35:21.000And while we're locked into this show trial, which I'll admit is fantastic and fascinating, watching Donald Trump, who I'll admit is fascinating and amazing, whether you like him or don't like him, you're watching him, the ratings are going up, Business is booming.
00:37:18.000What I want to ask you about primarily is, given the nature of the charges that Trump faces, it's worth investigating whether they are particularly unique or particularly pronounced or specifically and Obviously worse than the types of crimes that ordinarily take place within political campaigns and campaigning.
00:37:40.000Can you give us any sort of references that perhaps contextualise Trump's charges?
00:37:47.000Well, it's a sad day for the American people on a lot of levels, Mr. Brand, but specifically, you know, I'm from Illinois.
00:37:53.000It is the Super Bowl of corruption, and our governors are legendary for their corrupt practices.
00:37:59.000At a recent point, four out of our last nine governors served time in the federal penitentiary.
00:38:05.000And so, you know, we've got a unique perspective on this.
00:38:08.000It is a new era of brass knuckle politics across the entire country. So for
00:38:13.000example, if you're Hillary Clinton, if you have the Clinton Foundation and it's based
00:38:18.000in Little Rock, Arkansas, Pulaski County, there's a prosecutor there. And you better
00:38:23.000be able to justify your quarter billion dollar endowment or the 75% drop in your
00:38:31.000fundraising between the time you left Secretary of State's office and 2020.
00:38:36.000If you're Nancy Pelosi, and if you are, you know, if there's a new Republican president, you'll probably get a knock from the Securities and Exchange Commission, and they're going to ask you to justify your stock market trades.
00:38:50.000If you're President Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, the entire family on a new Republican president, I mean, this opens up a whole Pandora's box.
00:38:58.000It is a troubling moment in the history of the country when a local prosecutor goes after a former U.S.
00:39:06.000president and leading contender in a major party and decides to arrest I suppose so.
00:39:14.000So what you're saying is, is you have to have a legitimate and transparent authority to conduct an investigation like this.
00:39:23.000And it's clear, even from the examples that you have cited, that there is no moral authority.
00:39:30.000That how would Nancy Pelosi and Paul Pelosi stand up to rigorous investigation?
00:39:35.000How would The Hillary and Bill Clinton Foundation look under scrutiny in their relationship with some of their donors.
00:39:45.000And more broadly, there is so much systemic corruption, the relationship between politics and finance and the military industrial complex,
00:39:55.000lobbying itself, the number of people in Congress that own stocks and shares in companies they regulate.
00:41:36.000Now, I wanted to ask you a little more about earmarks, which I believe you're going to demonstrate to us is a great example of bipartisan corruption.
00:41:47.000At the moment, I don't even know what earmarks are.
00:41:50.000Will you please, as you have done ever since the moment I first clapped my hungry eyes upon you, educate us, Adam?
00:41:57.000Well, earmarks are the currency of corruption in Congress, Mr. Brand.
00:42:01.000So, earmarks, they were dead for 10 years.
00:42:04.000There was a ban on them because they were so abused in the past.
00:42:08.000Earmarks is quite simply a legal bribe, doled out to maximize the power of the House Speaker.
00:42:16.000on these big spending bills, the omnibus, minibus spending bills, to make them bipartisan on the votes.
00:42:22.000So you give away a member pet project in their district, and then you grease the skids for the vote.
00:42:28.000So in the last omnibus spending bill in December of this year, it was a $1.7 trillion bill.
00:42:35.000There was 7,500 earmarks in that bill, costing the American taxpayer $16 billion.
00:42:42.000And some of the examples are just absolutely outrageous.
00:42:45.000So you've got You've got a million dollars on a macadamia nut research earmark in Hawaii by the U.S.
00:42:54.000You've got a million dollars doled out to the Great Blacks in Wax Museum by Kawame Nfume, a congressman from Baltimore who actually has a wax statue in the museum.
00:43:09.000You've got You've got a million dollars doled out for a new stairway, not to heaven, but to the beach in Mondo Beach, California, so the surfers can hit the waves faster.
00:43:20.000You've got a million dollars doled out for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio.
00:43:26.000You've got $3 million doled out for the hip-hop museum in New York.
00:43:30.000You've got $3.5 million doled out by the Republican U.S.
00:43:33.000Senator Susan Collins in Maine for the Irish Heritage Museum.
00:44:49.000The National Institutes of Health, the U.S.
00:44:51.000Army, everyone agreed had helped fund the development of that drug.
00:44:56.000UCLA had received those federal grants, and they had pioneered the technologies to help that drug actually come to market.
00:45:03.000They had licensed it to the pharmaceutical company, a foreign one from Japan, so you have a foreign pharmaceutical company to boot.
00:45:10.000And so they felt this was a great, honest face, this would be a great textbook example to see if, for the first time in history, NIH would use its power to regulate and knock down the price of that drug.
00:45:21.000In Japan, for example, it's $30,000, not $190,000 a year.
00:45:22.000Well, the Biden administration decided not to use it.
00:45:28.000And look, I think it's because this ran right up against the Pfizer footprint, against the Pfizer fiefdom.
00:45:37.000So UCLA, which had licensed the technology to the pharmaceutical company, had collected a half billion dollars between 2012 and 2016 on royalties.
00:45:47.000But then they sold their future royalty stream out through 2027 for over a billion dollars to Royal Pharmacy, who was then quickly acquired by Pfizer.
00:45:58.000Even though the patent for the drug is held by the Japanese pharmaceutical company, the U.S.
00:46:05.000So now, Russell, you have Pfizer, when they make a sale since 2016 in the United States, not only do they reap the profit from their sale of the pill, but they also reap on the backside a piece of the royalty payment as well.
00:46:19.000They're double-dipping every sale on that pill.
00:46:21.000So I don't think the Biden administration wanted to get in the way of Pfizer.
00:46:25.000Double dipping is unhygienic in any language, isn't it?
00:46:29.000It's disgusting to hear of the double dip going on at a time like this during a high-profile case involving a pornography actor.
00:46:40.000It's disgusting to hear that the double dip is being practiced so flagrantly.
00:46:45.000Adam called you Russell then for the first time.
00:47:20.000I mean, we need, I want to throw a gauntlet challenge down to President Biden, House Speaker McCarthy, To embrace the transparency revolution, declare war on waste.
00:47:32.000I think they'll find it a target-rich environment at every level.
00:47:35.000This is a book that was done by Peter Grace at the behest of Ronald Reagan back in the mid-1980s.
00:47:42.000And what they found was, when they took a look at federal spending in the 1980s, that 30 percent, 30 cents on every dollar was wasteful spending.
00:47:51.000And nobody You mean nobody today believes that that situation is any better?
00:48:30.000Now, almost as if we're a genuine news channel, we're going to go directly to... Well, no, we're not going to go directly.
00:48:38.000We're going to see... Like, we've been dabbling in mainstream media for a little while now.
00:48:42.000We spoke recently to an Australian journalist who was live at those Parisian riots.
00:48:49.000You know like all of the the media actually outnumbered the public outside the courtroom where Donald Trump was about to be arraigned and he's now been arraigned and like you I didn't use the word arraigned until about 48 hours ago well here we are co-opting and hijacking our own correspondent Robert Sherman before we talk to him let's see him in action on the mainstream media before seeing a different side to a man that I believe to be incredibly handsome And lucid.
00:49:17.000Let's look at Robert Sherman doing the news.
00:49:19.000No matter how you slice it and no matter how you feel about it, this will be a historic day for the United States.
00:50:20.000You had media outlets coming in from Germany, Japan, Australia.
00:50:24.000I mean, you see some of these images, people just crawling on top of one another to get the same photo that the person right next to them is going to get.
00:50:32.000I've never seen a scene like this before.
00:50:35.000Do you feel pressurised to amplify particular details?
00:50:40.000Because, let's face it, not much really happened.
00:50:42.000Donald Trump came, he waved a bit, he went into a courtroom.
00:50:46.000Do you feel under personal and professional pressure to create a narrative out of, in a sense, just ordinary details?
00:50:57.000No, not at all, especially over at Art Network, because this was something that we really talked about here, is that, look, have you had this narrative coming in that there would be, you know, all of this activity happening here, you know, the potential for riots and things like that?
00:51:10.000And we said, look, unless the narrative actually happens, don't play into it at all.
00:51:16.000So we try to stay away from that as much as possible and just give you the facts.
00:51:20.000That's good, because we're trying to do that here.
00:51:22.000We sort of like see ourselves as, I suppose, an anti-establishment news organization that looks to create alliances from across sectarian divides and infuse our content with the potential for spiritual awakening.
00:51:38.000We've got no one on the ground, and that's where we could collaborate.
00:51:41.000You, the Shermanator, could be regularly essentially doing what you're doing anyway, but then doing a bit of it for us as well.
00:51:49.000Maybe for cred, and if it came to it, possibly for money.
00:51:55.000No, it's pretty unbelievable scene that you had out here today.
00:52:01.000But as you said, you know, a whole lot for nothing.
00:52:03.000And I think one point to make here as well is that, I mean, you see all these scenes of the people who were outside as well.
00:52:10.000I feel compelled to tell your viewers that at least four out of five people who were out here yesterday were either members of law enforcement or members of the press.
00:52:19.000I mean, yeah, you had demonstrators who were out here, both for and against the president.
00:52:24.000But I mean, press certainly outnumbered protesters.
00:52:29.000In a way, it's like the spectacle is creating and consuming itself.
00:52:35.000It's almost like if there were no media and no law enforcement there, the event kind of wouldn't be happening.
00:52:44.000I'm sure that you're familiar with the writing of Jean Baudrillard.
00:52:47.000Certainly, if you watch this channel, we're always banging on about him.
00:52:50.000Because he talks continually about how the media is creating a sort of synthetic reality that we're all existing in.
00:52:57.000And when you look at the work of someone like Chris Hedges, you realise that you're not capable of fully understanding the horror of war, nor would we like to.
00:53:05.000So war is kind of simplified to a sort of game.
00:53:08.000Justice is simplified to a kind of game.
00:53:11.000And all of us are in our own ways participating in it.
00:53:15.000Do you ever feel compromised, Robert, or do you feel like you're able to keep in alignment with your personal principles even when participating?
00:53:25.000As you know, I accept that we are also in the reporting of a sensational story that's doubtless being amplified for the purposes of entertainment rather than justice, say.
00:53:36.000And you know, I mean, that is what you have to do as a journalist.
00:53:52.000You have to just call the balls and strikes as they happen out here, which is what we've been trying to do.
00:53:58.000But, I mean, of course, you know, there are some people who don't do that.
00:54:00.000And there's some people who do, you know, stoke the flames a little bit.
00:54:03.000I would push back, though, and say one thing, though, is that a large part of the reason that so much of this attention came down here was because of the former president putting so much, so much of a limelight on this case with some of the things that he put on social media a couple of weeks ago.
00:54:18.000Of course, the indictment brought a lot more attention to that, but it's not as if the limelight just is created by the press.
00:54:27.000There is a starting point as well, and sometimes we just come out here.
00:54:50.000And we are just really trying to tackle the complexity of being respectful of various and often opposing mainstream and alternative news perspectives.
00:55:06.000But I can see and feel that you're really open to that.
00:55:09.000So in a sense, this could be the beginning of a longstanding and eventually,
00:56:21.000We're going to talk also about how one of the things that Trump said that was I would say somewhat iconoclastic and challenging was that you don't even need NATO.
00:56:34.000That's the kind of rabble-rousing stuff that Trump came out with that caused so many people to condemn him and so many people to adore him.
00:56:42.000If you want, you can sign up to Locals for weekly guided meditations, live podcast recordings.
00:56:47.000There's all sorts of stuff that we do here.
00:56:50.000We're going to be having a break We're going to have a break soon.
00:56:53.000Over the time of Easter, whether you consider it to be a pagan festival or a Christian festival, or simply something that's happening in your hemisphere, we're going to have a little break to regenerate and renew ourselves.
00:57:04.000So we're on on Thursday, we're on on Friday.
00:57:06.000Friday we're going to have a fantastic show.
00:57:08.000I think we're going to have an interview with Rainn Wilson from the office, talking about his new book, about spirituality and stuff.
00:57:16.000These books are coming out in a little while.
00:57:17.000So we've got some fantastic shows coming up this week.
00:57:20.000Join us tomorrow, not for more of the same, but for more of the different.