Marianne Williamson On Fixing America, Running for President & Her Favorite President | DSH #151

It is now a multipolar world, and the United States is going to have to become more humble now.

On one hand, that's difficult for us on an economic level, but America doesn't just get to walk around and say what we want anymore.

And many

times and ways in which we did, we abused our power.

I want to be a president who says,

This is a changing world.

We've got some very serious problems, but we are Americans

and we can fix them.

I would open the door, like the visual image I have, is that I would open the door of the Oval Office and say, come on, guys, we have four years.

We are back digital social hour.

I'm your host, Sean Kelly, with my co-host, Wayne Lewis.

What up, what up?

And our guest today, presidential nominee, Marianne Williamson.

Well, I'm not a presidential nominee.

I'm a presidential candidate for the Democratic nomination.

But you can keep saying that to sort of put it in the air.

Yeah, we'll manifest there, for sure.

You see, I'm where am I?

Hell yeah.

Thank you.

I really appreciate that.

I appreciate you.

Yeah.

So what's been going on with you lately?

What's on your mind?

Well, I'm in Las Vegas because Nevada is an early primary state and I came here from Detroit and Port Huron because Michigan's an early primary state

and so I'm spending a lot of time these days in New Hampshire and South Carolina Nevada Michigan

getting this thing done it's

an experience like no other

but I'm I'm not a novice at it anymore because I ran last time.

A little bit of a veteran.

Part of it is exhilarating

and part of it is

very sobering.

What did you learn the first time you ran that you're kind of implementing this this time around?

Well, it's not so much what I'm implementing.

What I learned was that the system is even more vicious than I feared.

There is a political media industrial complex

and

you know the role of a political party is to facilitate.

the process of democracy.

But too often, and I'm seeing it from the belly of that beast, beast, they're using their power to manipulate and even to suppress

the experience and the expression of democracy.

For instance, the president saying that he will not debate myself or his other opponent, Bobby Kennedy.

So that's sobering, and it's sobering to see how so much of mainstream media

chops wood and carries water for them.

How they erase a candidate, basically, like she doesn't exist invisibilizing like i can come in three points behind robert kennedy and a bull and but he's talked about and i'm not it's just it's um

you know you see how it works but then on the other hand what i saw last time which i see everybody as much this time is that people are wonderful and this time it's even

more interesting because last time, at least among the Democratic electorate, which is who I was speaking to,

there was such a panic to defeat Donald Trump that all they really wanted to hear about was who would defeat Trump, who would defeat Trump.

Because we were all, to some extent, I think,

living in retrospect with a bit of a naive,

at least hope, that if we just defeated Trump, then there would be a return to some semblance of normalcy.

And I think clearly now it's obvious that some cat had already been let out of the bag.

So I find people

more open this time

to an expanded conversation,

a realization that just tweaking things here and tweaking things there is

not going to provide the level of economic and social reform that is necessary.

I also feel that there is a rumbling underneath the surface of things, a deep realignment of our political realities and dynamics that neither political party is prepared to

deal with yet.

Wow.

That's scary.

So you feel like the media kind of favors certain candidates?

The media more than favors certain candidates.

That's putting it mildly.

But Trump was able to defeat them, right?

Yeah, well, no, actually, what happened?

I think Trump actually got defeated the second time.

The first time he was their guy.

Yeah, because as Les Moonves at CBS said at the time, bad for America, good for CBS.

So at the beginning, Bernie's rallies were the same size as Trump's, but they kept showing Trump because it was the one that got them clicks, it was the one that got them sponsors, that people were looking at on television because they had seen him

say you're fired so many times.

And also, early on in the process, Hillary Clinton thought he would be the easiest one to beat.

Yeah, and now

this time the same,

the erasure

of candidates that they don't want in the conversation is extraordinary.

But

as sobering as that is, as undemocratic as that is, it's not what the people want.

You know, you see poll after poll after poll saying they want to see other candidates, not just the president.

But even there, when they talk about who that might be, they only talk about younger clones of the president.

You know what I mean?

So, even when they say, no, we need more variety, when they talk about variety, they mean variety among the status quo in which there's real no variety at all, except

somebody younger, somebody shinier, somebody

basically the same corporatist democratic establishment.

Why do you feel we haven't had a woman as a president yet?

Why do I feel we have not yet?

Well, I tell you something, that whole question of misogyny has been on my mind in this race

more

than before.

It's, you know, I felt when it came to anti-Semitism, when it came to racism, when it came to so many forms of bigotry, I felt I had a pretty good visceral sense of how that works.

I never had a visceral experience, really, of misogyny like I have in this campaign.

DeSantis fires his campaign manager and they say, well, he's shaking things up.

Things have to get better.

If I have that experience or any, oh.

Out of control, crazy woman.

Yeah.

She's PMS and

a man doesn't say, yeah, he's shaking things up.

He's got to be impulsive.

A woman, oh, God, what a horrible person she must be.

Wow, that's interesting.

You also have an interesting take on the public education system and colleges.

You want to get rid of all tuition, right?

I think that the point of public policy is to help people thrive.

That's how you have a great America support people in actualizing their greatness, which I believe is a potential within us all.

Starting really from birth, public policy should do everything possible to support people in self-actualization.

I think that's what the founders meant when they talked about the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

And every other advanced democracy has tuition-free

college and tech school.

We had that here in the United States until the 70s.

Florida had a good system, Texas, California.

This is one more example.

example of hyper-capitalistic tentacles moving into every corner of our society.

where can we find a profit center

absolutely that's and it's a soulless

money grabbing greedy trajectory it has no soul has no sense of of of ethics so isn't that what America was built on greed pardon wasn't that what isn't that what America is built on greed well America was built on two things and those two things are what are at play in every generation including ours on one one hand, you had the Declaration of Independence, which is the opposite of greed, which is a perspective of profound enlightenment and

expansion of opportunity for all men.

41 of the 56 signers, however, were slave owners.

Wow.

So that is our story.

Our story is that we are both and.

Our story is that we are, on one hand, based on these profound principles of genuine social enlightenment.

The idea that there could be a society where go do what you want to do, become what you want to become, good for you.

And if you're not hurting anybody else, have a great time.

Just that possibility, just that possibility that a nation could be based on that.

And there have been people willing to struggle, to sacrifice, even to die for that throughout our history.

However, there have always been, from the beginning, obviously, slavery being the embodiment of this, forces which for their own economic and or ideological purposes had no intention whatsoever of seeing those principles actualized because that would undercut their identity and their profits so

that struggle has been inherent in every age and i think it's important for us to see that historical context because that's all that's what's happening now it we're just reiterating that same struggle now we did respond to slavery with abolition and we did respond to the institutionalized oppression of women with the women suffragist movement.

We did respond to the overreach of capital from the first gilded age with the establishment of organized labor.

And we did respond to oppression of black people segregation in the American South with the civil rights movement.

But we're still oppressed, though.

But my, well, you're talking specifically about black people.

And just in general, I mean, I think there's a socially oppressed demographic that

is not

addressed as much.

But I know you're big on reparation.

May I say one thing, if I might, just

because my point was, it's our turn.

That is my point.

My point is that what we are going through is the same struggle in our time.

And when it comes to

black Americans,

they're different versions.

And when it comes to black Americans, I think it's really significant how history does not always move in a straight line.

There have been times with everything, particularly race, when we've moved forward.

And also we can see it with mass incarceration and other things where actually we've slid backwards.

And we're sliding backwards in many ways today, actually.

I would assume you would agree.

Absolutely.

So,

we have to rise up the way other generations have risen up.

So, do you think the government puts certain cultures against each other?

Yes.

I think,

I think, I don't, this is what I think.

I think the dynamic of corporate dominance,

what do you mean by that?

I mean we don't have universal health care because of the insurance companies.

We have people rationing their insulin because of the pharmaceutical companies.

We have carcinogens in our food, toxins in our water and air because of big food, big agriculture, big chemical companies.

We don't have proper gun safety laws because of gun manufacturers.

We have a profound crisis with the environment, in large large part because of big oil.

And we have militaristic, imperialistic misadventures because of defense contractors.

It's a matrix of corporate power that is, in essence, a matrix of corporate tyranny.

Now, one of the ways that they own

really our society is through the monopolization and conglomeratization of the mainstream media over the last few years.

So they tell the story

that is best for their corporate owners, their corporate owners being part of this large

corporate perspective in which short-term profits for huge corporations come before the safety, health, and well-being of the American people.

They, through their undue influence on the government,

through money, because of Citizens United, has turned our government into a system of legalized bribery.

So when you ask me, does the government do that, yes, but indirectly.

They're just doing the bidding

of their donors so is that why they put certain amount of money behind certain candidates because they're going to push their narrative absolutely gotcha that's scary yeah no it is so i hear your big um hear your discussion about um reparations for obviously black people um give me your concept of that because i i see hear and read so many different concepts how San Francisco is doing reparations, but it's based on last name, how long you live there, and it's more so like money-based.

But really, I feel as if when it comes to reparations, there's land involved too and the material aspect of it.

So what's your concept of when you say reparations?

Well, when the Civil War ended, it's believed that there were about at that time four to five million enslaved people.

And of course, this was an evil

institution that had lasted for almost 250 years.

Then you add to that that there was another 100 years of institutionalized suppression of black people in the American South.

If you were actually going to go back to the 40 acres and a mule that were promised,

you're talking about so many trillions of dollars.

And I think that if we're, you know, I read a book once which said, with vision you must never compromise.

Politics is the art of compromise.

So at some point, and this is really not a decision for white America to make really, so much as it is a decision for black America to make.

And that is what at the negotiating table is what

one is willing and interested in pursuing.

So

my belief is that if I owe you money, I don't get to tell you how to spend it.

So who the money is given to and how it is applied and where, outside the purview of

expanded educational and

economic opportunity should be a decision made by black people, not by white people.

That's why my plan is for a reparations council that would be intergenerational so that the money would be dispersed over a period of 20 years.

The people on the council would be black leaders from everything from culture, art, politics, nonprofits.

real estate, business,

and this money would be dispersed.

and then it should be for black people, not white people, to decide.

Is it fighting off gentrification because whole blocks of real estate are going to be bought?

Is it going to be mainly to

historically black colleges?

This is the kind of thing which, to me, black leadership should decide.

What America should recognize, in my mind,

is simply that there is a debt.

For me, it's very transactional that way.

Germany paid $89 billion to Jewish organizations after World War II.

Wow.

I think that by the middle of the 20th century, even we had paid something like $22,000 to every surviving member of the Japanese internment camps.

$22,000.

To each one who survived, because it was recognized a wrong.

It's low, ain't it?

Pardon?

$22,000?

No, $22,000.

To each person?

To each person who had been interned in the camps.

And also remember when that was, too.

We're talking about right after World War II.

That's a lot of money, I think.

So that's like $100K these days, probably.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think the point is that by the 20th century, by the middle of the 20th century, it was understood, it was simply a mainstream belief internationally, really, that if one people has wronged another people,

that financial remuneration is reasonable.

And I don't understand why we would would not apply that to something as clearly egregious as slavery and other forms of systemic racism in the United States.

So what do you think the government's overspending right now?

Like you see a lot of hate off the United States.

We're overspending is huge tax cuts to the very wealthiest among us.

In 2017 they passed a $2 trillion tax cut.

83 cents of every dollar goes to the largest earners and highest earning corporations.

Now remember, just to give you an example, if you look at the five top pharmaceutical companies alone, last year their profit combined was $80 billion.

So we keep continuing to give these tax cuts.

Now there was a middle-class tax cut in that larger one, which should be put back immediately.

The rest of it should be repealed.

It's been established.

It will never pay for itself.

Now the canard was, you take these people's, you give them tax cuts and see the more money they have,

they're job creators.

But that is such

BS.

People realize that now.

Their business model is not job creation.

Their business model is job elimination.

Job elimination and worker exploitation.

Also, these corporate subsidies, we're giving billions of dollars in subsidies to corporations that are already making billions of dollars.

Amazon.

We should have a wealth tax, actually, 50 million or more.

Somebody should be asked for another 2%,

up to 1 billion, I think another 1%.

And then, of course, the one that we all can see, I mean it's right in front of us, is the incredible bloat and

price gouging of the Pentagon on the part of the proverbial military industrial complex.

Even 60 Minutes did an

expose recently about

the way that Raytheon and Northrop Grumman and Boeing, they basically are left to regulate themselves.

So we could cut, even many conservatives say we could cut 10%, I say we could cut 20%.

You know, these are the kinds of things.

You do the things I just said.

We have some cash on hand.

Where do you think we're underspending?

We're underspending.

We are the largest, we are the richest country in the world and the largest democracy, and we have the highest rate of poverty and child poverty.

We have, you know,

year, last year or the year before, they cut child poverty in half with something called the child tax credit.

And at the time, I was thinking, well, if you could cut it in half, couldn't you like get rid of it?

But even then, there was a big hoopla because they cut it in half with the child tax credit.

Six months later, that child tax credit expired and they did not bother to permanentize it.

It's extraordinary.

So to me,

we have populations in crisis.

I mean, I mean crisis.

You know, there is in

the issue of larger sociology or whatever you want to call it, this phenomenon of the screaming emergency and the silent emergency.

So COVID was a screaming emergency.

That's when everybody can see it.

But what we don't often recognize is how many people, millions of people in this country, their normal lives are a state of emergency.

So for instance, the President

canceled

the emergency,

the emergency status of COVID.

And since then, there have been millions of more people who have fallen off Medicaid, fallen off the SNAP benefits.

There is hunger in America.

Not starvation, thank God, but serious hunger in America, including hungry children.

In fact, if you go to any of my social media platforms now,

I visited the other day a soup kitchen in Port Huron, Michigan.

There's a video about it.

They have a $300,000 budget, and

they feed 500 people a day.

Wow.

And this is just one, pardon?

They're going to run through that three hundred thousand dollar budget i know i'm so impressed by that three hundred thousand dollars yeah that's clean it's extraordinary yeah it's great but these soup kitchens uh are just struggling uh these soup kitchens are over

it's it's horrible what we have you have in america 20

of us who make a living such that things are good yeah you know what i mean and we celebrate that and we celebrate the fact that people can make money in america we celebrate of course.

The problem is, it's like a club, and not enough people can get in.

So this 20%

is like an island surrounded by a vast sea of economic despair.

I mean, despair, we have a housing crisis.

You have quite a housing crisis here.

It's too expensive, right?

Pardon?

To get a house these days, it's so expensive.

Absolutely.

Well, part of it is the commodification of housing by Wall Street, which should not be allowed.

And also, an eviction market.

They own what?

A trillion dollars in homes now?

That's crazy.

Right.

And we have now, we had over 3 million evictions last year.

Wow.

And so many people.

Houston Atlanta alone is 75,000 evictions this year.

That's crazy.

And they will, and it's soulless.

I was reading one story about a group of children who were home, and it was a rainstorm, and their parents weren't even there.

You know, those bastards just kicked those kids out.

Wow.

It's just...

And this is what happens when short-term profits, whether it's the real estate industry or any other Wall Street venture, is placed before humanitarian values and democratic values.

And that's really the crisis of this moment.

And I do think people are waking up to it on both left and right.

I also like your viewpoint on health care when you called it sick care, because you said this is not, health care isn't the problem, it's the people that are getting sick because of what we're doing with the food and the stuff that they legalize here that's not legal in other countries at all.

Like

banned, completely banned.

Absolutely.

I want you to touch on that.

Absolutely.

And on my website website at marianne2024.com, if you look at the issues, my health care plan is called the whole health care plan.

Because as you said, and as I said on a debate

in the last campaign, we don't have a health care system, we have a sickness care system.

We have a much higher rate of chronic illness than they do in other advanced democracies.

And it goes back to what you said.

We have 46% of our tap water is filled with PFAS, these

forever chemicals, carcinogens in our food.

If you look, recently there was an article about the ingredients in a bottle of ketchup here versus a bottle of ketchup in Canada.

Now, what you just said about other countries, there is a company called Saint-Gobain in Merrimack, New Hampshire.

And Merrimack, New Hampshire was the first place, it was on the last campaign, and it was the first time that I heard about the PFAS and this forever chemical and it doesn't break down and high cancer rates.

This is what's so interesting is exactly what you just said.

It would be illegal to do in France what they do in Merrimack, New Hampshire.

So it's a French company.

And so France says, you can't put vinyl chloride like that.

You can't spew it in.

And then that's okay.

We'll go buy a company in the United States.

And then our politicians are on the take, oh, they're going to create jobs.

And this is what we're doing.

Just like you said, there are companies

working in the United States doing things with our food where the GMOs would not be allowed in their own countries.

It's so obscene.

We are such

it needs to stop.

But you're pro-vaccine, right?

It's not about,

of course, I'm pro-safe vaccine.

Of course, I am.

Which vaccine?

So even.

Polio, smallpox, the vaccine, the childhood vaccines, like when I was a child, it's undeniable to me when you're talking about

measles and mumps and tetanus and all that.

I did get vaccinated for COVID.

All four.

No,

I got the two at the beginning, and then I got boosted.

So, how do you feel about the vaccine?

It's creating mitocarditis in the same people's voice.

There are questions.

There are questions.

I'm certainly not a doctor.

There are obviously questions, and I don't think the questioning should be suppressed.

And some of what you were just saying, even when I mentioned a couple stories to my own doctor, who's a medical doctor, said I've heard those stories myself.

I'm not weighing in on it, except to say it shouldn't have to be in America that

first of all, I think vaccines obviously save lives, and I think that infectious diseases is no joke, especially when you're talking about kids at school.

At the same time, yeah, those questions are out there, and they should not be suppressed.

And people talking about those things should not be suppressed.

I feel like we've all heard them.

Making them mandatory is the is the problem i feel like people should have an option well i don't but there weren't i mean in in situations there was i i didn't really see a problem where people said have the vaccine or have a q-tip up your nose i i thought it was reasonable enough to say or get tested

i i don't really see why that's unfair i feel though How do you feel about the prison system?

Because it seems like a lot of people come out of it worse than before they came in.

Yeah, because, first of all, when I was in college, there were 300,000

people incarcerated in the United States.

Today, there are 2.3 million.

And obviously, the racial issue, black and Latino,

I mean, anybody can see this.

It's called a prison-industrial complex for a reason.

The criminal justice system in the United States is not fair,

particularly not fair to people of color.

And more than that, even once people are incarcerated, it is more of a system of punishment than of rehabilitation.

My daughter went to law school in England.

And one semester she was in some program where they were working inside prisons in England.

And she said, Mommy,

the prisoners are not allowed to call themselves convicts.

If they call themselves convicts, the people who work the prison go, you're not a convict, you're simply someone who made a mistake.

Now, we have seen over and over in this country, and some states have them, some states do have them,

situations where people are taught ways of making a living when they leave, rehabilitative experiences, etc.

And in those cases, the rate of recidivism is much lowered.

But if you are looking at this only from a consciousness of punishment, then often what you get is a very high rate of recidivism.

And of course people just leave and here's $100, good luck to you.

We don't want to have parties.

They come right back.

No, they come right back.

Some of them actually prefer to come back because at least it's a place to sleep.

Now, this is an example in my mind of what I've seen.

throughout these areas.

You could talk about regenerative agriculture.

You could talk about dealing with people who are at-risk use.

You could talk about people who are coming out of prison.

You could talk about almost any field or experience or circumstance in this country.

There are people who know what to do.

There are people who are already practicing the techniques.

They know what to do to rehabilitate lives.

We have had for the last 50 years, we have had policy after policy that actually hurts people, that actually tears people's lives down, that destroys our earth, that destroys our air, that destroys our food.

People are waking up to this now.

We've had 50 years of destruction and now we need 50 years of generations who are bent on repair.

The problem we have is not that the repairers aren't out there and particularly in the younger generation,

people are ready to go.

Young people are ready to be farmers.

They want to be organic farmers.

I mean it's amazing what's happening out there.

The problem is here are the problem solvers and here are the policymakers.

And they're not connecting because the people with power don't always call on the problem solvers except in very performative ways.

Oh, we're going to give you a prize and invite you to a, you know, maybe you even get to sit next to the first lady.

Problem solvers have to solve the problem their way.

Well, but wait, yeah, so those problem, the problem solvers don't have the power because the people in power aren't calling them actually into the room because they don't serve the short-term profit maximization goals of their corporate donors.

They serve the goal of survival of the species, but they don't serve.

So that's how I see my being president.

I would open the door, like the visual image I have, and then I would open the door of the Oval Office and say, Come on, guys, we have four years.

Yeah, but even then, that's not enough time.

So, probably not.

What would be, if you were president today, what would be the first executive order that you would sign?

The first thing I would do is I would cancel the Willow Project.

Willow Project.

So, explain what the Willow Project is.

Okay.

So, the Willow Project is an $8 billion

ConocoPhillips oil extraction project on the north slope of Alaska.

We are already in a climate emergency and I would declare a climate emergency.

Wow.

We already have people in this country dying of this heat and people all over the world.

We are moving in a direction which

within years means that you could have whole swaths of continents probably in the global south where the heat makes

that land uninhabitable.

So you have implosions.

This is in the U.S.

That's probably Africa, actually.

But we're already, we're in

serious problems everywhere.

Vegas is hot.

So you have implosion of food systems, you have implosion of economies, which could create hundreds of millions of climate refugees.

We are

on the way to the iceberg.

We're just headed right towards it.

So

the president

You know, they love to say the corporatist Democrats say he's a climate president and he recognizes it's an existential threat.

And they base that on the fact that he has made, admittedly, and

wonderful,

some very healthy investments in green energy as part of the Inflation Reduction Act.

Although it's tiny compared to the defense budget, and by the way, the Defense Department is the single largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases on the planet.

Wow.

But even though he's got these investments in green energy, then he approves the Willow Project and he is given more oil drilling permits than even Trump did.

Biden, right?

Yes.

So those things nullify all of the benefits of those green energy investments.

And so I would declare a climate emergency.

That's crazy.

So how do we reverse the climate emergency?

How do we fix it?

Well, we have to do massive investment.

Massive investment.

Not healthy, I mean massive investment in green energy because we have to make a just transition from a dirty economy to a clean economy and we need to do it now.

We need to a mass mobilization and I think many people, including your generation, are ready to do this.

Everywhere I go, I ask people, I say, how many people in this room is either

you are either a young person who has said or you have heard a young person say that under normal circumstances you would be thinking of having a child.

But given the state of the environment, you don't think it would be a reasonable.

Yeah, I've heard that a lot.

Have you ever said that or heard that?

Yeah.

I don't have a kid.

I don't have a kid.

Exactly.

So when you see how many people raise their hand in every room all over the country, I ask people to keep their hands up and then I say,

this is not normal.

This is not normal.

Yes, we need to declare a climate emergency.

So this is an example.

If you look at Biden, you look at RFK and you look at me.

we have three very different views on a lot of things, and this is why we should have debates.

So Biden says we're investing in green energy, and then he's hoping you won't know about oil drilling permits.

We need to be ramping down fossil fuel extraction, not ramping it up.

Robert Kennedy says, at least in a tweet I saw, he said the discipline of the free market would handle it, which,

although that was, I was.

Okay, that's what he thinks.

And I believe we need to declare a climate emergency.

Declaring a climate emergency means the president and the government has the power

to place before

short-term profit maximization for, let's say, oil companies, their transition

to production of green energy, which they could do, and they know they could do it, and they're just slow footing it, and the government is helping them slow foot it because they want to squeeze every dollar out of the old way

before they have to to make the change.

So what exactly is green energy?

Is that solar energy?

Yeah, solar, wind, geothermal, all of those things that people are talking about.

So he invests in green energy, but he also asks for more oil permits.

Him?

President Biden, that's exactly right.

Wow.

That's exactly right.

The first thief terrorist.

So like, that's counterproductive, right?

Yeah, a little bit.

Yeah, a little bit.

So how do you plan on taking on these huge restrictions?

Yeah, I was just about to ask you.

You can't unless you declare an emergency.

You need a president who just goes in there and says, we're going to do it.

That's the point.

You can't.

You can't unless you declare a climate.

So if you declare it, wouldn't they have to take a vote?

No, the president comes in there.

I'll give you an idea of something happened in World War II.

So at the beginning of World War II, Hitler's on the march.

Roosevelt sees, oh,

we're going to have to get in there, right?

The United States had

hardly any army at all.

And

England had nothing.

And Hitler had been building his military for five years, and every time he invaded a country, he was able to absorb their industrial power.

So Roosevelt, he knew we just got to make this happen.

So he calls in the big three automakers from Detroit.

And he says, gentlemen, I need this many ships.

And I need this many tanks.

And I need this many planes.

And the big three said, oh, President Roosevelt, we are patriotic Americans.

And as soon as we sell our quota of cars this year, we're going to be there for you, sir.

As soon as we sell those cars, we're going to make those planes and those ships and those tanks for you.

To which he responded, I don't think you understand what I'm saying.

I need this many tanks and this many cars.

and this many no this many tanks this many ships and this many planes and you will not be selling any cars until i have them in other words, it was a national emergency, and that superseded

the normal capitalistic procedures of that moment.

Now, ultimately, what he realized is that he needed to partner with those guys, and I would as well.

If you look at people, right now we have a dirty economy.

What does that mean?

That means that

We have so many thousands of people whose jobs are at least indirectly associated with big oil.

But a lot of those jobs can be laterally transitioned.

They are research.

They are development.

They are manufacturing.

Just research green energy.

Manufacture green energy.

Use the technology.

We could do this.

We're Americans.

But we've been taught to limit our political imaginations.

And whether it comes to that or universal health care or anything else, we're taught things are complicated, which are simply corrupt.

And it's time for we, the American people, to intervene.

Marianne,

How would you have handled the BRICS situation and why hasn't Biden

BRICS in regards to our currency being pulled out of other countries them no longer using our money?

The BRICS you're talking about, the BRICS has been the companies that are coming together like Brazil and India and China.

What do you mean the BRICS situation?

They're coming together now.

Well, they're not using our currency anymore.

Listen, it is no longer a unipolar world.

It is now a multipolar world.

And the United States is going to have to become more humble now.

On one hand, that's difficult for us on an economic level.

But America doesn't just get to walk around and say what we want anymore.

And many

times and ways in which we did, we abused our power.

We squandered our moral authority.

We squandered our military respect.

And

the United States has no power to say, don't do that.

This is a new world.

And,

you know, I feel sometimes like what Republicans want is for you to think things are even worse than they are.

Because you're supposed to believe that your fellow Americans are your enemy, and they're not.

But the corporate Democrats want you to believe, there's no problem here.

Just put a lid on it.

Any kind of real-life rumbling of, we think something's wrong.

I want to be a president who says,

This is a changing world.

We've got some very serious problems, but we are Americans

and we can fix them.

And you're right, it's going to take a lot longer than four years.

But with my administration, we would begin the process.

You would feel, I wouldn't be able in those four years to turn the ship around entirely, but you would tell

we started around the curve.

And then, after four years, hand it over to a younger generation.

And what's your take on cryptocurrency?

You know,

it's funny because we're living at a time

where it's so in the zeitgeist and that it's so much a part of what's going on now that theoretically you have to have an opinion.

But at this point, I'm still hearing both sides so much.

I hear that it's the great democratization.

I have friends and I've read articles.

It's a great democratization.

And I also have friends and have read articles.

I mean, there are some bad actors out there.

Right.

And some regulations on those bad actors are not inappropriate.

On the other hand, there are those who argue that some of the bad actors are people that we think of as the good actors.

So

I'm in a process of learning.

About crypto?

Yeah, I'm in the process of learning and forming, and people I respect have very different opinions.

Which former presidents stand out to you as great leaders that you want to model after?

Roosevelt,

Lincoln.

Roosevelt, Lincoln.

I mean, obviously, Jefferson, although we know Jefferson certainly had some issues, but you can't deny

what was created.

But in terms of the functioning of the presidency, definitely Lincoln and

Jefferson.

You like the older school guys, no one in the recent years?

I mean, Jimmy Carter, there were some good things about Jimmy Carter.

The Obama that ran in 08

was,

you know, I was as excited and passionate as anyone.

But once he got there,

he leaned into

being one of them.

That's kind of how I felt about him, too.

Well, he's a spokesperson.

And most presidents are, just spokespersons.

They're not going to be a part of the person.

That's why you need to elect someone who's not part of that system.

That's why we need to elect someone that's just not part of that system, has no tie to it.

How do you disconnect from a system

that

was created so that it can and will be a system and that the person in front of it will be the spokesperson for the system?

How do you disconnect from that?

Because it seemed like when you do that, you actually create more problems than not, not just for society, but for yourself.

Because then they're bringing up allegations.

You got obviously assassination.

You have all these problems that come with not following their rules.

You're absolutely right.

It's true.

And there are days when I think, what, you must be crazy to even want to do this.

And that's why the words are.

Are you crazy?

Are you crazy?

Either that or, you know,

the word meshugana means partly on a mission from God.

It also means crazy.

I think anybody who runs for president, we were talking about this before.

You have a respect for anyone who would take this on.

It's difficult.

And the allegations and the smears and the lies, it happens now as a candidate.

And you're right, as a president, it would be so much more.

But, you know, a friend of mine said, I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees.

I don't want to die knowing that in the final analysis, as my father used to say, I let the bastards get to me.

I'm old enough to see what's going on here.

Or young enough to see what's going on here.

Well, I think that there's beauty in every age, but there's something about knowing this is your last chapter.

And are you, you know, I think a lot of people in my kind of the boomer generation don't want to feel that in the final analysis we forgot to do what we came here to do and that's why I think there's such a a connection and a relationship between boomer certain boomers myself included and Gen Z

because

neither one of us understand

why young people should have to live at the effect of bad economic ideas left over from the 20th century.

I remember the 70s when the average worker could afford a car, could afford a house, could afford a yearly vacation, could afford for one parent to stay home if they wanted, and could afford to send their kids to school.

Sounds great.

Yeah, I remember that.

So

I'm with you in like, what happened?

Yeah.

What happened?

But what keeps you fighting so much?

And

this is maybe a rhetorical question, but why do you care so much?

I think all of us care I think I don't think so yeah I hear you I you're right okay I'll take that back I think many I think many people deep down care

who

are not apathetic they're just paralyzed because if you only look at things from with the external eye the system is locked up But I look at things like abolition and women's suffrage and the civil rights movement and the labor movement and things were achieved by people in situations where there was no reason to believe they could succeed.

History is riddled with that and American history is riddled with that.

Absolutely.

What is that line of Martin Luther King?

Faith means taking your first walk on the staircase even though you have no idea where it's going to go.

I am just not the kind of person who's going to see something as,

you know, Martin Luther King said your life begins to end on the day you stop talking about things that matter.

Now also in terms of what you said, you were right.

If I win the presidency,

I will be vehemently opposed.

I will be vehemently opposed, but the same forces that opposed, would oppose me opposed Roosevelt.

It's the same forces.

Like I said, it's the same forces all the way back to the beginning.

And the difference between me and some people who could be elected president president is, and by the way, Roosevelt called them the economic royalists.

The difference is that I would take Roosevelt as my role model because he said, I welcome their hatred.

And that's why I would go in there.

I would not be seeking to fulfill the role of the presidency.

with any intent to run again because you couldn't do what I want to do if you've been thinking about getting reelected.

And, you know, the president doesn't have a magic wand.

The president shouldn't have a magic wand.

It's not like all the things I want, universal health care, tuition-free college, free child care,

paid living wage, guaranteed housing, guaranteed living wage.

All of them would not be, you know, magically.

No, not in four years.

No, but then, but it doesn't have to be me personally.

I mean, so that would not be a reason to tell you have to stay eight.

No, what I could do is give a battery charge,

especially using the bully pulpit and especially talking to younger people.

That's why I said I can help get us around the corner and then you take it.

Spark the thought.

Pardon?

Yeah, spark the thought.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

I see what you're saying.

So is it for

you?

It's more so like implementing the thoughts of the people and

giving your, what you feel like would work and then allowing someone else to come in.

Well, no, you still have four years of presidential power.

But that flies like that.

Well, your first year.

You can do a lot in four years.

Yeah, I mean, four years is still four years.

You still have cabinet agencies that you get to pick your people.

My people would not be representative of corporate forces.

Like our current Department of Defense is headed by a man who used to be a board member at Ravion.

We would not have people from Big Ag in the agricultural department.

That's one place where Bobby and I do a line.

It's corporate capture of so many of these agencies.

And I would have the power of executive power.

I would be able to go in there and day one, deschedule marijuana from a Schedule I I drug.

I would be able to call for

an audit of every cent at the Pentagon.

I would be able to cancel all union contracts that the government has with union busting companies.

President has a lot of power.

I could convene the greatest minds in America on early childhood because everything's in the first 10 years.

We want America to be amazing in 20 years, do a lot more for children now.

I want to establish the Department of Children and Youth.

I want to establish a Department of Peace.

I could get a lot done.

And most most importantly, I'd have that bully pulpit.

We need a president who says it like it is.

You know, when I talk like I'm talking here, everywhere I go,

I say to the audience what I'm sure is true in this room.

I didn't say anything you don't already know.

Yeah.

I didn't say anything.

Maybe I gave a...

Statistic here or there.

We all know this.

Nobody's saying the quiet part out loud because we've been trained.

I'm sorry.

I says, is your concept of what we're asking is what you believe, what your vision is of what we're asking you.

I mean, obviously, we've heard it before, but everybody's belief system and what they feel is see fit for us is different, you know?

Yeah.

You mentioned descheduling marijuana.

What's your stance on psychedelics?

I think they should be legal and they should be regulated.

Which ones?

Look, when I was born, darling.

I guess this younger generation, you think you're the first ones who read Nom Chomsky.

You think you're the first ones who took medicine.

There's a lot of benefits to them, especially the mushrooms.

Well, they're finding amazing things like with veterans.

Yeah.

No, there's no doubt about it.

And so much of the research, Rick Doblin and Michael Pollen, it's time.

It's a good thing what's happening.

I love that.

I feel like no president has that stance on psychedelics.

Yeah, no, they...

I mean, most of them haven't experienced them or like even do the proper research.

So they just kind of go off of the representatives.

Like, what do you got to do?

Regulated.

Regulated, and kids be careful.

So kind of like like how medical

yeah well i i would deschedule marijuana immediately oh so you would make it public everywhere

i think we should have a very serious conversation about just ending the drug war decriminalizing everything yeah not everything though it's not working

well but what about like cocaine heroin meth and all that stuff if you decriminalize then you regulate you it could there are those who would argue that things would act we'd have a less of a problem if we decriminalized and regulated

Why'd he say that?

Because, first of all, even take the southern border.

So, most of the horror that people are trying to escape from the southern border is because of the drug cartels.

So, the fact that it's a black market is only helping the drug cartel.

Gotcha.

So, if you decriminalize it, it's like they would go out of business.

Decriminalize.

This is the one area where I say let the

one area where

private sector, private sector handle it.

Yeah.

Wow.

What if they come out with a new drug then?

Part of it.

They always come out with a new drug.

What if they come out with a new drug?

And that's in the black market.

But once again, if you have, and I mean this very seriously, it's actually not a joke, any of that.

If you have a regulatory system and you have the private sector and regulation,

Once again, I look at that area like I look at a lot of things, and it's time for Americans to go, what we're doing is not working.

It's not working.

Look at what happened in New Hampshire with the opioid crisis.

So, New Hampshire had 500,000 opioid deaths,

and

everybody realized the predatory behavior of the pharmaceutical executives at Purdue Pharmacy, the Sackler family.

They got them, and the attorneys general all over the country came and they got some huge multi-billion dollar settlement.

I don't think it was anywhere near what it should have been, apparently, but

and then they were gonna, you know, tighten, you know, really handle this with the psychopharmacologists and the pharmaceuticals and the doctors.

We're gonna stop the bleed.

Yeah.

Guess what?

They started again?

Hardly went down.

Yeah.

Hardly went down.

In other words, we have to address the underlying causes that make people not want to be in this world.

That's why, even when we were talking about criminal justice before, that's why for me, fundamental economic reform reform

is the bulwark of societal repair.

You see poverty, not only do we have poverty, we have near poverty, and we have those who are afraid of falling into near poverty.

And you have 70% of Americans who say they live with chronic economic stress.

Wow.

So

with, you know, if you live, you know, look at debt alone.

You have one in four Americans living with medical debt.

You know, the American dream used to be I could buy a house and have a picket fence.

The American dream for millions of people now is

that maybe I could get out of debt before I die.

So look at the stress, look at the anxiety.

So we have to ask why are so many people addicted, not only

how to stop the flow of the drugs, because at a certain point, and especially with the Chinese so intent,

we have to, in that area, as in so many, address clause and not just symptoms.

Marianne, it's been an honor having you here.

Is there anything you want to close off with?

Thank you.

That's the first thing I want to say.

Thanks for coming.

And thank you for

a conversation about things that matter.

And I hope that people who do feel,

I know it's very tempting to think the system is all locked up, but there's one thing and one thing only, actually, that can override that, and that is we the people.

So if anybody feels like, yeah, I want to hear this campaign,

yeah, please go to marian2024.com and sign up and throw a buck.

Perfect.

I always say, you know, if everybody who likes my TikToks sent in a dollar every once in a while, we would be able to override the

media cancellation that I experienced in too many cases.

Thanks so much for coming on.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Appreciate you.

Thanks for watching, guys, and I'll see you guys next time.

Peace.