Kamala Harris
Appearances
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Is everyone pretending to understand inflation (or just me)?
So I was raised as a middle class kid.
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Is everyone pretending to understand inflation (or just me)?
Because here's the thing. We know that we have a shortage of homes and housing, and the cost of housing is too expensive for far too many people.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
We have to believe in the power and the beauty of our democracy and our country and the ideals upon which we were founded. I will tell you, my motivation always is not to fight against something. It's to fight for something, to fight for the strength of who we are and the ideals of who we are.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
I'll say this. You know, there are good Republicans. There are bad Democrats. OK, so I'm not going to paint everyone with a broad brush, but this is what I will say. Democrats, as a general matter, believe that government should be robust enough to, yes, help people who are in need and to uplift the American people.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
And you look, by contrast, at some of the hypocrisy around generally what has been some rhetoric from the Republican Party. For example, they'll always talk about deficits. But if you track every presidential administration, it has been the Republican administrations that have built up the deficit, not Democratic administrations. Right.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
For example, even in this administration, they passed a tax bill, guys, benefiting the top 1% in the biggest corporations of America. And it's going to contribute, it's estimated $1 trillion to the deficit for the richest people who don't need it.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
Meanwhile, in America, even before this pandemic, in 99% of the counties in America, if you were a minimum wage worker working full time, you cannot afford market rate for a one bedroom apartment. Look at where we are in the midst of this coronavirus, where it's estimated over the next month, 20 million renters will not be able to pay their rent.
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"Kamala Harris"
15 million homeowners will not be able to pay their mortgage. And so what we're looking at is the difference of opinion, because what I have seen out of the Republican Party since I've been in the Senate these last three and a half years is is it's all about deregulation.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
It's about taking away the teeth from the EPA, which is about saying, let's bring down greenhouse gas emissions, because guess what? We all need to breathe clean air. It's been about deregulation of industries, including coal and oil. Again, same point, right? It has been about putting Betsy DeVos, are you kidding me, in the Secretary of Education, and to continue to try and privatize education.
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"Kamala Harris"
as opposed to invest in our children. And when we, as Democrats, talk about it, it's not about cost. It's about investment. You want to look at our friends in the private sector. You know those who are most successful? The ones who don't ask, what's it going to cost? They ask, what is the return on my investment? That's how Democrats think. What's the return on the investment?
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"Kamala Harris"
And the people of this country need to really ask the question, which they do every day. And I think this election is going to give them the answer. Who is standing by working people in America? Working people. People who work hard every day if they're working one job or three jobs. People who just want others to recognize the dignity of their work and their labor.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
Folks who just want to know if I work hard and I do the right thing, am I going to be able to keep a roof over my head and not worry about it? Am I going to be able to feed my kids and not worry about it? Am I going to be able to take a vacation once a year? And whatever. And just... Standing by working people. How do you do that? You have affordable child care. You have paid family leave.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
You do not try to destroy organized labor, but you support organized labor and collective bargaining. You support a public education system and fund it instead of right now, which is that public teachers, when school was in normal session, two-thirds were coming out of their own back pocket to help pay for school supplies.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
I'm so glad you brought this up. Listen, this is one of my big, big, big areas of concern, water.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
Okay, so here to your point, for generations, wars were fought over oil. In a matter of years, wars will be fought over water.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
And it is a diminishing resource. As a daughter of California, having gone through many droughts, I've experienced this thing personally. But to your point, we need to have water policy that invests in the storage of water, right? The capture of water, desalination, recycling, conservation. And to do these things is to be smart. And guess what the other thing about it is?
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
To do a lot of that, it requires building up the infrastructure around it for capture and storage. That's jobs. That's the creation of jobs. You want to talk about plumbers, that's the building trades jobs. That's carpenters. That's bricklayers. That's all of the folks who actually can do the work that is about also protecting our environment and a diminishing resource, which is water.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
Here's the thing that I hope. I hope that we don't have to do it alone. So many of these issues are issues that impact everyone, and they really at their core are not even bipartisan, they're nonpartisan. What we need to do to build back up our economy and invest in infrastructure, Right. America's infrastructure is 125, 150 years old.
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"Kamala Harris"
Everybody will benefit from building back up our infrastructure. And that's a ton of jobs. In fact, Joe Biden has great policies around that. What we need to do around investment in our public schools. Listen, our babies K through 12 could give a you know what, who we voted for in the last election.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
They just want to be able to go to school, you know, when we can get past this pandemic in particular. And get an education that allows them to reach the capacity that they, you know, their God-given talents. These are the things that I hope we can actually agree on in a bipartisan way and deal with and put aside the ideology and just get to fixing some of these problems that are really practical.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
You're right. We don't have a system for testing. Well, because guess what? The administration doesn't have a national system for testing. What? You know, let's start there. We need to have a national system for testing. We need to have a national system for contact tracing.
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"Kamala Harris"
I mean, I wasn't a part of that decision, but I'll tell you this. I do feel that members of Congress shouldn't get the benefit of something before the The president should follow through on a statement he made months ago, which is everyone who wants a test can get it because that's just not the case in America right now. And that's why we see these surges. And also we need immediate tests. Right.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
So that you actually get the result within hours of taking the test, because getting it seven and 10 days later, it does no one any good because you're exposed to the virus, even if you were negative at the time you took the test.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
Well, nobody can anymore. All the gyms shut down. You want to know what I did during the virus? I got a little fold-up bike, and then I was using water bottles as my weights.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
Let me tell you something, and I'll tell you this about campaigning also. I mean, I love campaigning. I say that campaigning, you meet the angels walking among us, like people who are just quietly doing really great things without any requirement of fame or notoriety. Thank you. Good, good people. And, I mean, that's what, back to the earlier point, that's what gives me my optimism.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
We can't let the bad guys ruin the day, right? There are so many good, wonderful, incredible people. And it is they who, you know, motivate me. And listening to their stories, if I see them at the grocery store or wherever, that also motivates me.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
Oh, that's hard for me. I mean, Giants, but A's, you know, I was born in Oakland. Yeah, I know.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
I mean, no, everything. You know, I'm always kind of exploring new recipes. But, you know, I mean, my go-to, I can do like a great roast chicken or there's a bolognese that I make for four hours.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
My whole life. My mother was a great cook, and I just kind of learned it by her side. Oh, I love to cook.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
But you know what? That's it. My mother, when I was very young, she was like, kid, you like to eat good food. You better learn how to cook. Yeah.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
Yeah, Doug is my sous chef. And so we got to the point where I was like, honey, you should just like master three different things and then just make those all the time. And so that's kind of where we are. And I gave him that advice that one time that he was cooking and I was under the fire alarm fanning with my briefing documents for like five minutes.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
It's great to be with you guys. Thank you. What an honor. Awesome to meet you. Thank you. I'm a huge fan of all of your work.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
It's intense. It's really intense, Jason. I mean... People are suffering out there. People are suffering.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
No, you're absolutely right. And some of these bills – now, what Trump did is not a bill. It's an executive order. It's basically a memo. And so there's a whole issue with that in terms of the legal effect of what he's done and does he actually constitutionally have the power to do what he did.
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"Kamala Harris"
But putting that aside in bills, you're right. I mean, they can be thousands of pages sometimes and the details matter every time. So yes, there are staffs of very smart people who are familiar with the language, familiar with how a word will be interpreted based on how it's always been interpreted.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
And they will work around the clock scanning through and actually reading through each of those documents. But sometimes the loopholes are well disguised
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
And so you can see in the PPP, for example, so in the Paycheck Protection Program that we instituted that was intended to give relief to small businesses, and so many small businesses, real small businesses, did not get the benefit of it because they don't have the relationship with the fancy banker, right? They're not on a first-name basis with the banker. They may go to a community bank.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
They don't have lines of credit. And, you know, 90% actually of minority and small women-owned businesses did not get the benefit of the PPP for that very reason. So the details do matter. And what we try to do certainly and what I try to do is when we have figured out that there's a hole in it or a loophole, fix it for the next time.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
You're totally right. So for example, okay, so for example, the issue of the United States Postal Service, right? So you guys may have heard, that's one of the biggest issues right now that is weighing on people, which is that this administration is basically cutting the budget of the United States Postal Service. So what does that mean?
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"Kamala Harris"
So I actually sent out a question to all of my Twitter followers and online folks. And I said, tell me how, if you own a small business, how is this impacting you? Whoa. So these small businesses, they have a product that they sell and they ship it out and they say, promise you overnight delivery. It's not getting there overnight. Right. So then what ends up happening?
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
Their Yelp score starts going down because people are like they say it's going to be overnight, but it's not. Don't get this product. Right.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
They end up having to pay reimbursement for people or late fees. All of this not of their doing. So it is hurting, I mean, tragically hurting small businesses.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
In real time, in real time. While we're supposed to be propping up the economy in small businesses,
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
And, Jason, historically reliable and historically reliable. I mean this is one of the great public institutions we have is the postal service where everyone, regardless of your income, has a guaranteed access to communication and to commerce. Right. Not based on how much money you have, but, you know, everyone is charged the same rate.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
I mean, yeah, so here's the thing. I'm always welcoming anybody, including, of course, the private sector that wants to step up and support our democracy in any way possible. But I also believe that there are certain essential government functions that should not be privatized. And one of them is the Postal Service. The others are public education, public health, and public safety.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
They should just not be privatized. We do not want people to have a profit motive in order to deliver basic and essential services to the American people. Because if you attach a profit motive, you will see that those who have will do better, and those who do not have will do worse. So that's where I go.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
Listen, I think what you're speaking to are what we designed as the checks and balances in our government so that where there was abuse of power by any one branch, there would be a commensurate check on that abuse of power.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
One could argue, though, that we have been in the midst of a constitutional crisis in that those checks and balances have not been reinforced, meaning that we have seen abject abuse of power by the executive branch and this president, Donald Trump.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
But Congress as a whole has not held him accountable because it takes both the House and the Senate to do a lot of the things that actually would enforce that accountability. And right now the Senate is run by a bunch of folks who are doing his bidding. And so that's why I really do go to the point of the election, which is in less than three months.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
But this is where the accountability also rests in, I think, the greatest power in our country, which is the people.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
The people, and the people have great power, and I think they always are ultimately the check on an imbalance or an abuse of power within our systems. And so that means getting people registered to vote. It means emphasizing early voting because I am concerned about the manipulation of the U.S. Postal Service.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
We don't want ballots being counted weeks after the election because it's predictable that this guy will create incredible chaos. Look, there are going to be a lot of obstacles.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
Let's start with the fact that the United States Supreme Court in 2013 gutted the Voting Rights Act and took the teeth out of it, the teeth that were in place to track states that had a history of suppressing the vote, in particular the black vote. And what happened after 2013 is in at least two dozen states, the state legislatures put in place rules that were about suppressing or deterring voters
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"Kamala Harris"
People of color, students, indigenous voters from actually voting. So that obstacle is here. I serve on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Believe me and the United States intelligence community, Russia interfered in the election of the president of the United States in 2016, and they will do it again.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
And the Russians. The intelligence community's investigations showed us that the Russians also targeted black voters.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
So here's the problem that I see, and overall it is this. The government was designed to be there in particular when the people are in need, to support them and lift them up and carry them through moments of crisis like this. And there has been an abject failure You can look at it across the board.
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"Kamala Harris"
You look at it with a president who, from the beginning, called the coronavirus a hoax and muzzled public health professionals and did not put in place the Defense Production Act to make sure that we would have U.S. manufacturing of everything from masks to ventilators.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
You can look at it when the president has his attorney, Bill Barr, who's supposed to be the people's attorney, the attorney general, in court right now trying to get rid of the Affordable Care Act that will, when they get rid of it, take away health care from over 20 million people in the midst of a public health crisis.
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"Kamala Harris"
Right. And so, I mean, these are the reasons I say that we have to really see that right now the American people need their government to work. They need an extension of unemployment benefits. Democrats have been fighting for this. People, 30 million people right now are on unemployment either because they are unemployed or underemployed. Why do I say underemployed?
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
Because we have a lot of people in our country right now, a lot of people who work two and three jobs on a regular basis. We have to elect Joe Biden the next president of the United States.
SmartLess
"Kamala Harris"
And we have to do that for so many reasons that are about, one, correcting course around the economy, around the public health crisis, but also restoring some integrity to our government and its highest offices.