Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Paul Jay discuss the role of trade unions, taxes, and white supremacy in the outcome of the 2016 election

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PAUL JAY, TRNN: Welcome to the Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay in Baltimore. Well today the stock market went through the roof. I’m told it’s at a historical high. Higher than ever. Jumped 121 points on Tuesday to 18338 points. For anyone that doesn’t know the DOW if I understand it correctly is an index of the 30 top stocks. The 30 richest companies and how they’re doing. So the stock market goes berserk on the victory of president elect Trump and that’s because they have the experience of having a similar situation with President Bush and co president Cheney. We’re as I was told by a financier when I asked how come the elites aren’t turning on Bush and Cheney. They made an absolute chaos out of Iraq, US foreign policy in the Middle East is a complete mess, the economy also seems to be a mess. Why are you still supporting Bush-Cheney and he laughed and he said, well because we’ve never made so much money. It is a complete free for all. You want a tax break, pick up the phone, you get your tax break. You want a regulatory change, no problem. Call your congressman, call your senator, we’ll get you what you want. It was an orgy of money making and now you can see that’s exactly what people expect from a Trump-Pence administration and I think that point’s getting lost a little bit and why so many people of means, vote Republican in general because most of the pro-Trump vote is a traditional republican vote, much of which is of people who have money and have money in the stock market. I don’t think there’s any question from what we can see. He got a higher vote than normal for republican amongst workers. Particularly workers whose family income is over 50,000 dollars. There’s a category from 50-99,000 dollars. Trump more or less won that category in places like Florida and Ohio and as the income gets higher, you get into the more tradition Trump vote, the republican vote that went Trump. This is what the media pundits have been calling republicans going home. Home to someone who supports their values. Although I think the primary value, not the only but the primary value is we don’t want to pay any taxes and the lower taxes you promised us the more we will vote for you. Anyway, there’s a lot of reasons that explain the Trump victory and also a lot of things to talk about what comes next. And now joining us to discuss all of that is Bill Fletcher. Bill is the former president of the TransAfrica Forum. A senior scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies and an editor board member of BlackComentator.com. He’s worked for several labor unions in addition to serving as a senior staff person in the national AFLCIO. His latest book is They’re Bankrupting Us’ – And Twenty Other Myths about Unions. Bill is also the former host of The Global African. A show that we helped create and you can still find The Global African, I think you should, on the Real News website. Thanks very much for joining us Bill. BILL FLETCHER: It’s a pleasure Paul. Thank you. JAY: So Bill, as I said there’s a complicated web of things that happened here and I think one does need to separate two different sections of the Trump vote. There is the traditional Trump vote which has included generally better paid sections of the working class. Although generally not so much in unions. I think that’s one of the things that shifted apparently at least in Ohio, more unionized workers actually voted more for Trump this time than last time, than have ever done before. In fact, more than they voted for Clinton. But there is a traditional republican vote and a section of the working class. You can say there’s a rural vote. I mean talk about how you think this broke out and why? FLETCHER: So first of all, the union vote nationally seems to be around 51% for Clinton. So Ohio was more extreme as a pro-Trump area. One of the things about this election Paul which I did not realize until today was that overall turnout was about 55%. So it was around what it was in a 2004 elections. I thought that’s actually an interesting factory and one that ran contrary to what I was seeing just anecdotally. But I think that that’s something that we need to take a look at. JAY: Are you sure of the number? Because I’ve been seeing closer to 48-49%. It’s not that big a difference but – FLETCHER: Yea it’s something that I saw actually this morning in the Washington Post. But maybe they’re wrong. But I think that the larger thing about this election I think you were pointing out to a very important factor about issues of people returning to the republican party because of taxes, etc. But this campaign was a white nationalist campaign and it was unlike anything that most of us have seen since the George Wallace campaigns of the late 60’s through 1972. This was right wing populist, openly white nationalist. No real attempt to reach out to other segments of the population. Although some segments did vote for Trump. So it was very, very scary and there are people that talk about how this election reflected the anger of white workers who feel that their lives are collapsing. It seems to me that this election more reflected fear among a large segment of the white population of an economy that is not bringing them the American dream that they were brought up on. The second is this changing demographics which was implicit in what it was Trump was articulating. So I think that this is incredibly nerve wracking when we look at this. Now unfortunately Paul, the trade union movement, I think, by in large did not play a very exemplary role in fighting back against Trump. JAY: That’s a very kind way to put it because I was saying on an earlier interview yesterday that I thought the majority of the unions, not all the Nurses, communication workers, transit, post-es were exceptions. But the close alliance of the major trade unions both with the Obama administration and then with Clinton through their economic policies helped create this kind of such inequality, set the table of this section of the working class to vote for Trump. The big unions wound up defending the status quo instead of being a voice for change. FLETCHER: Well yes but let’s be clear. This polarization of wealth and income and everything starts in the 1970’s. Really accelerates under Reagan. And the unions, you’re right. There was a split Paul. A split that goes back to 2008. There was a whole segments of unions that in 2008 wanted to jump on the Clinton bandwagon right there. There was a split that ultimately led to the endorsement of Obama. Implicit in all of that was the idea that when Clinton ran, there would be a union support for her. Fortunately there were a number of unions, some that you mentioned, took a stand and pointed out that Sanders was the most logical candidate for organized labor. The deeper problem Paul in my opinion is that in almost all these cases, there was a failure within the union movement to actually have a debate. Within each of the movements and within the movement as a whole to have a real debate that engaged the members. What did the members feel about this? As a result, there was a disconnect. I think that in some unions, the disconnect was more significant than others when it came to who people ultimately voted for. JAY: I want to go back to your point about the white supremacist character of the Trump candidacy. While I don’t think there’s any question there was a white supremacist character to the Trump campaign, I do think that he did do something that I don’t think has been talked about enough. I think he did try to reach out to the conservative black vote who are concerned about crime. Who are concerned about taxes. But I don’t think people bought into it. I don’t think it actually effected the outcome all that much. But by having for example Sherriff David Clark at the republican convention who’s a black sheriff for the Milwaukee county with an incredibly vociferous law and order speech at the republican convention. There were several times Trump talked about people in inner cities, what have you got to lose, the policies of the democrats have done nothing for you. Which is more or less true. With very strategic or tactical objective of isolating Hispanics. Even trying to split blacks from Hispanics. That’s where the assault’s going to come. This next state of a Trump presidency, he has to live up to some of this, there’s going to be a real assault against Latinos. FLETCHER: No, I think that that’s right but I don’t think that he carried out any active outreach to African Americans. In fact, there’s this black republican journalist who writes a regular column and it’s almost pitiful because he’s always complaining that the republicans are not doing enough to reach out to African Americans. And one of his last columns right before the election was that despite the fact that the republicans weren’t reaching out to African Americans, he was going to vote for Trump. That to me was actually quite significant as an insider view. I think that what Trump did was for show. What you described was for show. It was not part of, it wasn’t even close to what Richard Nixon did. When he was articulating the whole black capitalism theme and reached out to a whole host of people to try to win them over. This was very, very superficial. JAY: I agree and also it’s a divide and conquer rhetoric. And also even this law and order message from the republican convention which I say Sherriff David Clark delivers, a black sheriff. Even though it’s coming from a black sheriff, we know that language is code ofr all the stereotyping of blacks and poor blacks as the only source of crime and so on. So the racism is very thinly veiled but right underneath the obvious. FLETCHER: No I think that that’s right and you see, here’s where I become concerned with some of their commentators that have offered views on this election. You have a guy who is misogynistic, racist, is a xenophobe, has a variety of legal difficulties and we’re told that he’s supposed to be a champion of the every day person. You have individuals that made decisions to vote for him as their representative as if these matters of misogynism and race, etc. did not matter. What does that say? That’s what I want to push people on. I think that you can’t just obsess on this issue of anger and the world is collapsing. Look, disproportionately, African Americans and Chicanos have suffered more than any other group when it’s come to the restructuring of this economy. That was not an issue in other elections. Almost no one was raising that. But now all of a sudden there’s this hoopla around this and we’re supposed to accept that white people are angry because the American dream is not becoming real for them. I think that’s where this issues becomes very disingenuous. JAY: Again, you have to kind of break up white people. Because white people who have higher paying jobs and who are wealthy have one set of motivations and people who are in the working class have another. I know within the working class and anyone that’s been in this situation knows this; unemployment is torture. Especially unemployment in a country where if you benefits have run out, it’s terrifying. If you have a job and you’re looking around and you’re seeing people around you losing their jobs, it is one of the highest causes of suicide, family break up, insomnia. I mean it eats at someone. Just eats at someone. For people that have jobs and are kind of in the media and all the rest of this stuff, you know it’s a statistic. It’s unemployment. That kind of angst is almost an abstraction. So workers of any segment of society, it eats them alive really. So someone comes along and says I’m going to change the trade agreements, I’m going to bring industry back to Michigan, back to Ohio. There’s nothing else to offer because all Clinton was offering was more of the same . What happened hadn’t changed that much. FLETCHER: I wouldn’t say that she was offering more of the same. I think that what was interesting is the impact of the Sanders campaign on the democratic party, on her campaign. The fact that she was talking now about taxing the 1%, of going to deal with the issues faced by students in terms of student debt. I think that there was a lot more there. JAY: But people didn’t believe it from her. They might have believed it from Sanders but they just didn’t believe it from her. FLETCHER: But why should they have believed anything from Trump. You see that’s my point. Why should they have believed anything from Trump. Alright fine. If you don’t want to believe Hillary, okay, you don’t believe Hillary. Why on earth would you believe a word from Trump. One what basis? See that’s where it comes very murky I’ll give an example. I saw something from a worker, a unionized worker wrote a letter to someone in his leadership after the election. I guess. He said that he had voted for Trump. And he said that he’d voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 but now he felt that he had to do something for his son. So he was voting for Trump. I stared at the letter for a while thinking that okay, so basically what you’re telling me is that it’s okay that this guy’s a misogynist. That’s okay. It’s okay that he’s a racist. That’s okay. It’s okay that he’s a xenophobe. That’s okay. Its okay that he’s an islamophobia. That’s alright because he’s going to look after my son. What’s wrong with this picture? JAY: I think a lot of different political forces were saying that. I was interviewing a fellow that other day about why would the religious right embrace Trump? It’s clear he’s completely disingenuous about his religious belief. He’s disingenuous about his reaching out to evangelicals. It’s disingenuous on the question of abortion and so on and so on. It’s obvious this is a political gambit for him. Why does the religious right embrace him I asked this guy? And his answer I thought was pretty good. Because they’re not voting for him as a moral religious leader. They see him as a vehicle to achieve their ends. That he’s willing to deliver to them what they want politically to get their support and that they in a sense don’t really care who or what he is as a person or what he actually believes in. They’re just going to get what they want legislatively and they’re going to get the Supreme Court they want. Pence as VP he’s give them confidence that that’s going to happen. So, they can overlook everything else because they don’t really care. They just want what they want. FLETCHER: I think that there’s some truth to that. I have an additional theory that I would append to that which I’ll explain in a second. But I think that as Bill Maher said the other night. This whole thing shows the actual hypocrisy of these right wing evangelicals. I mean all the stuff about family values, it’s completely out the window. It has no relevance. Nothing. It’s just words. But actually my theory is this, I think that the right wing evangelicals expect that Trump is going to be impeached and that then they’ll have Pence. I think they’ll be making a calculation. JAY: I think that I agree with that. If not impeached he’s going to get extremely sick sometime in the next year. Or more likely, he will do what he’s told and Pence and gang are going to run this government and Trump will be out there getting to meet foreign leaders. FLETCHER: I think that’s right. JAY: Yea I think so too. We are going live on Facebook Live and I’m not sure if we’re in a position to take any questions. So someone tell me in my ear. Okay we’re being asked how can we ensure the democratic takeover in 2018 of the senate or the house? Let me add to that question a little piece. I thought President Obama was hurt this campaign. I thought it weakened Hillary and it also in fact weakened Sanders campaign and the inability of first of all of Hillary to critique the weaknesses. It’s far more than weaknesses of the Obama years and Sanders even when he was running was reluctant to critique what had gone on with Obama. For example, he’s critiquing Hillary for not pledging not to create a Wall Street finance team and then praising Obama how he dealt with the financial crisis exactly with a Wall Street finance team. Hillary because she wants to be the person with the Obama legacy would not critique the economic policies of Obama which we all know led to an increase in inequality. The Obama when he’s making his speeches, I thought he could have at least talked about like we tried to do this and we tried to do that. And the republicans blocked us in every way. Instead of that, he’s talking about the accomplishments as if the problems were kind of solved under his administration. This sounded so without any authenticity or validity in so many people’s lives. FLETCHER: So, I think Paul that what you’re describing in some ways is one problem that always happens. It was McCain’s problem vis a vis George W. Bush. You know how do you distinguish yourself from a presidency from your party? This is frankly just not easy. I think your point though about what Obama did and didn’t do in his speeches also reflects this idea that probably his handlers suggested that he needed to be positive. JAY: I think he’s out defending his legacy in a way that’s actually more important than trying to win this election. FLETCHER: Yea I think that there’s an element of that but I think that there’s this issue of being positive. See, one of the things that among some of these political circles you’ll hear is that you’ll have to be careful about the complaints you make about what you’re unable to do. Because people will sometimes interpret that as your powerlessness. This is something that comes up again and again. JAY: Focusing on this question, what to do in 2018? It seems to me that if the Sanders type movement, if the only way to really – who knows, Trump could make such a mess out of this and these off years there could be a recession, there could be an unpopular war. But failing, I mean not failing. One hopes that doesn’t happen. But in any case, there needs to be a real honest critique of Clinton economics, of neoliberalism. It has to be an honest critique of the Obama years and these right wing democrats have to be primaried the hell out of or why on earth are they going to win when they couldn’t win this time. FLETCHER: I agree. So, what I would say and I would say to the question that your person asked is that beginning immediately there need to be a state by state strategic discussions among a broad array of progressive forces that are interesting in turning this back and actually winning progressive power. This is not simply about the next congressional race. The midterms or certainly it’s not about what happens in 2020. It really is about building power. So, when I’m thinking about this, one of the reasons I think this state by state is so important is because you have an element of the right that has been pushing for years towards the idea of convening another constitutional convention to change the US constitution. There’s somewhere between 6 and 8 states away from being able to call that. This is because of republican controlled state legislatures. So the fight at the local level, the fight around state legislatures and governorships becomes very very important. That’s not something that can be directed by anybody from Washington. It needs to something that’s handled at the state level. It’s about grassroots organizing. So in that sense, I would say to this question, that I am actually optimistic. I believe that this really can be turned around. But at least for the next 2 years, if not 4, there’s going to be a lot of misery. One of the things we have to guide against is people falling into despair. The second thing we have to guide against is appeasement of the Trump administration, which will almost immediately happen. There will be people that will run to the administration, looking to cut a deal and to say please save our particular program, save our community, save our particular institution, we’ll work with you when we have to be in counterattack mode. JAY: Okay are there any other Facebook questions? Will the democrats learn for this? Well let me give you a quick little one myself and then I’ll turn it over to Bill. But then again there’s no such thing as the democrats. If you’re talking about the corporatocracy that runs the democratic party, they’re only going to say maybe we should’ve had Biden, maybe we should’ve had a different person represent us. They can’t learn from – the only thing they can learn is should we have had a democratic candidate that perhaps had more, could deliver a phony economic populism that sounded more authentic than coming from Hillary. They can’t change who they are. What do you think Bill? Then there are a lot of democrats who are not the corporate leadership and the question is are they going to learn something and what would they learn from this? FLETCHER: Well I want to go back to the very beginning of what you said and I think that this is critically important because it keeps coming up when I hear people say, well the democrats put the wrong candidate forward, etc. etc. There are multiple parties within the democratic party. The democratic party and the republican party are political blocks. They’re not really political parties. They’re alliances. So within the democratic party, this particular alliance is dominated by people like Hillary Clinton. There are other factions or segments of their party that have different interests. The congressional progressive cacaus for example. You have some elements of the congressional black caucus. So you have these different forces that are within them. So, in that sense there will be different lessons that each of these factions will learn from this experience. JAY: Bill let me ask you an extension of this question. Will the trade union leaders other than the ones that supported Sanders, are they going to learn anything from this? Because if they majority of unions had backed Sanders from day 1, he probably would’ve won that primary unless there was some even more exaggerated rigging of some kind which I certainly wouldn’t rule out. I don’t think the elites would let this party out of their hands without clutching it from their gripping dead fingers. But that being said, just four unions. You can see the power of unions, even in a country which is what? 8% of the private sector unionized. Maybe 11% with the public sector. Even such a small section unionized. 4 unions: the nurses, the transit, the communication workers, and the [posties]. Just 4 unions almost beat Hillary Clinton. And they played a very important role along with social media and grassroots organizations. But the unions were very – imagine if the majority of unions had backed Sanders, what a challenge that would’ve been within the democratic party. Are these leaders going to learn anything from this? FLETCHER: See Paul, I think there will be different conclusions that people are going to come to in the trade union movement. One conclusion that I can almost guarantee is an idea that the unions should be less partisan. I don’t mean that in a progressive way. I mean that they should pull back and only advocate on issues that directly concern them and maybe be much more open to interacting with the republicans. That will be a conclusion. That conclusion has already been arrived at over the years by some unions. I think it’s going to increase. There will be others that will focus their summation on different things that were done wrong in the campaign. But they won’t focus on the central thing about how it was that the endorsements were arrived at in the first place. I actually think that what will have to happen and I think that there’s elements of this already. There are going to have to be a few insurgencies. I think it’s much like the fights that took place in the union movement in the 1980’s around policies on central America and South Africa, etc. It’s going to have to be fights within the union movement around the process of endorsements, around the politics, the direction. That I’m sure I can guarantee you, will happen. JAY: I had a lunch once. I mentioned this on the Real News before with the President of a big international union and his DC political consultant. I said to them look I always imagined – something you kind of said earlier – I’d always imagined both parties but talking about the democratic party, it’s a class alliance. You have working class, mostly represented by the unions, allied with a section of the elites in order to stop the right wing of the elites and a right wing section of the workers from taking power. In exchange in this alliance over the years, the democratic party, the conditions for workers are just a little bit better and that seems to be enough with the unions because the fear of what the far right will do, is stronger than that. I said but I don’t understand why you don’t, you the unions, don’t contend for this within the democratic party. Why do you essentially seed leadership control to Wall Street? His answer was cause the right is so threatening and they’re the ones with the money and we can’t fight the right without Wall Street’s money. Well something’s changed here. Sanders has shown you don’t need Wall Street money to contend. He opened up a whole path of money raising which changes that formula and it’s clear that this – we interviewed Tom Ferguson the other day, he was saying this alliance between Wall Street and identity politics is done for the democrats. This is one of the lessons of this Trump election. So, will the trade union leaders realize that they don’t need that Wall Street money anymore and even with it, they couldn’t win. Even with a preponderance of the elites supporting Clinton, they didn’t win. Or are these leaders just too enmeshed in this comfortable lifestyle that they don’t want to challenge all of this. FLETCHER: Okay so two points. One is, I don’t really know what Frank meant by the alliance between the democratic party and identity politics. JAY: No, no. He said the formula of Wall Street money. I assume he meant identity politics meaning being able to increase a vote amongst blacks because of Obama and then they expected to increase votes for women because of Clinton. FLETCHER: We should come back to that point. See the answer that you were given by that trade union leader, I don’t think was – I don’t want to say was disingenuous. I think it’s only a small part of the problem. From my experience in the trade union movement, despite the bluster of many trade union leaders, there is a willingness to kowtow to the establishment politicians. There is a sense that we have to cut the best deal we can with them and part of this all goes back to Samuel Gompers and the rejection of the idea of any kind of labor independence. It was always about labor lobbying one or another side of the elite. That was the basic theory that Gompers helped frame American around. It was a rejection of efforts in the 19th century towards labor independence. For better or worse. There was some bad aspects to that. But that’s a point to keep in mind. So, you now come to 2016 and you have this long legacy of that the labors relationship with this elite is one of lobbying as opposed to the idea that labor needs to have an agenda representing the working class. Not just representing our particular union. The autoworkers, steel workers, SCIU, whatever. But the labor should be at the Vanguard of representing the interests of workers. That thinking is by in large not there. I mean there’s a few leaders but by in large it’s not there. That’s why I don’t think what you were told is completely accurate. I would sit in executive councils meetings in the ALFCIO. This is in the 90’s. I would watch the way that some of these leaders would fall over themselves when Bill Clinton or Al Gore or one of these other characters would come into their meetings. I mean this was like watching children at Disneyland. JAY: I saw the same thing when union leaders would go to the White House under Obama and be consulted. They would just come back with stars in their eyes even though the one piece of legislation they were promised, the Employee Free Choice Act which could’ve been passed in the first 2 years of the Obama administration was never even brought forward. Let me just ask a final question. I think we’re going to have to wind this up. While Obama promised the Employee Free Choice Act which was supposed to make it easier to organize trade unions, I know one of the great fears of the unions is now with Trump that you might have a national Right to Work legislation. Can you explain what that is and why unions are so concerned about it? FLETCHER: Sure. So Right to Work is a provision that comes out of the Taft-Hartley amendments to the national labor relations act passed in 1947 and was implemented in 1948, which gives stated the right to deny unions what’s called a union security agreement. A union security agreement is where you have as a condition of continued employment, a worker becomes a member of the union and the basic theory of union security is that workers since the union has to represent all the workers, in a particular bargaining unite like a factory, a hospital or whatever, irrespective of their political views, irrespective of their membership status. Because of that, the union needs the resources in order to conduct the representation. The analogy would be that you have a town where you say to people you have to pay taxes because we need taxes in order to have sewer water, police fire, education. What Right to Work is attempting to do and has done successfully in much of the country is to say that no, no, no, if you get hired somewhere and there’s a union, you should not have to pay anything. However, the union is obligated to represent you, using the union’s own resources. That’s why people talk about freeloading. So it’s not really a Right to Work at all. It doesn’t give people any Right to Work. What it does is it gives people a right to be greedy. That individuals will be represented and will have to be represented by their union but the worker doesn’t have to pay anything towards that. Just think about it like, could you imagine that in a town or a city? There’s no other institution in this country that would permit something like that. JAY: The objective here is you defund and weaken the resources here. FLETCHER: So yes Paul, I’m sure that there’s going to be an effort in that direction and what unions need to be thinking about is not, well maybe it’s we get down and kneel and pray on everything that this won’t happen. Unions have to start figuring out okay, let’s plan out a worse case scenario. If this happens, what does it mean that we have to do differently in order to gain the resources. What does it mean that we have to differently in order to organize more workers because even in situations and I’ve seen them in situations that are so called open shock where workers do not have to join the union, there are unions that have been able to get upwards of 95% of the members of the workers there to sign up. It is not impossible to put in means that the unions have to operate differently. JAY: Maybe it’s actually a good pressure in some ways because it forces unions to actually interact and educate the workers that are in the place instead of just the cashing the tragic threats. FLETCHER: It could be but only if – see if employers were kept out of the process of workers deciding on union membership, then maybe Paul, maybe it would be okay. But the problem is if you have a combination of Right to Work plus employer intimidation of workers who want to join and form a union, you have the worst of both worlds. JAY: Okay well this is just the beginning of a discussion on many issues. So we’ve been going Facebook live here. For people that aren’t watching us live because we are going to replay all this at the RealNews.com. We will be doing more of this Facebook Live. And if you like our Facebook site page, you will then get a notice when we go live. So we went a little longer than we usually do because we’re going live. As I say, we’re going to do more of this so go like us on Facebook and you’ll know when we’re going live. Thanks very much for joining us Bill. FLETCHER: Pleasure, always Paul. JAY: Thank you and let me remind you we just started our year end fundraising campaign. We’re a little more ambitious in this campaign. We’re going to try to raise, we have a matching grant of $250,000 and we’re going to try to match that and reach 500,000. You have to understand that it cost something in the range of about $200,000 a month to run the Real News which is lunch money compared to corporate news. It’s even a relatively small amount compared to much of the alternative and independent news operations. But it’s a lot for us. So, if you want us to be strengthened and let me also add something which we didn’t discuss in this interview but we are working very hard to raise significant funds to create a global climate change bureau and if it was ever needed and it was before this election, it’s now desperately needed now. If there’s a state I will keep repeating almost every time I do an interview. Before this election, 7 top scientists said if all the agreements in Paris were adhered to, if all the countries fulfilled their pledges of the Paris Agreement we would still reach 2 degrees of warming in 2050. Around 34 years from now. Not the end of the century. Well we know now in all likelihood if Trump follows through on what he’s going to do and he’s appointed one of the major climate deniers as head of his environmental and science transition team, that he’s going to rip up the Paris Agreement. So, the Paris Agreement was already not nearly sufficient and now it’s going to be more or less exploded. So we’re reaching 2-3% and then some by 2050 and by the end of the century, worst case predictions may well prove to be true. There needs to be a mass mobilization on this issue. That isn’t for us to organize at the Real News. But we want to create a global climate change bureau so that we can help facilitate this and from the point of view from reporting on a sense of urgency, reporting on what effective solutions look like and connecting how all the various issues and problems facing people all connect with the climate crisis and the solutions of the climate crisis, new green economy some people have called it, certainly appears to be a large extent the solution for many of the other problems. At any rate, thanks for joining us on the Real News Network. And as I say we’re going to be doing more of these live broadcast and if you like what we’re doing, please now is the time. Go find the donate button either here on Facebook or come to the Real News website. It might be easier. RealNews.com and the time is now. Thanks for joining us.

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