Mark's weekend podcast focuses on how George W. Bush's "ownership society" never materialized and how young people stuck in the nightmare of long-term renting are gravitating toward socialism. Contributing factor: all of the millennials who aren't as smart as they think they are: is it because Harvard gave all of them A's? And, as the US debut of "Song Sung Blue" approaches in Milwaukee, Mark discusses Lightning & Thunder and their unique Milwaukee story.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Speaker 2 (00:20):
One of the things that I talk about a lot
is how when we do things, we never think about
the long term ramifications of them, and when we get
to a certain point, there's never enough introspection of why
we got there. This all serves the left well, because,
as I point out, the left has always proven wrong
(00:42):
about things, but when they are proven wrong, they never
admit it. They just move on to the next thing
and go on and be wrong about that. One of
the things that we're in the process of being wrong
about is the move towards socialism and Marxism here in
the United States. This is an argument that obviously had
(01:05):
been won in America. Socialism became very popular in the
forties and the fifties, and the anti communist movement knocked
it down. It hit its nator its bottom point late
eighties early nineties, when the Soviet Union fell, the Eastern
Bloc fell, and virtually all Americans left, and rights celebrated
(01:28):
the return of freedom and the return of capitalism and
the proof once and for all that socialism and Marxism
is a disaster. Well it's back now. The Democratic Party
is becoming a Marxist party, Mamdani and AOC. That is
what the Democratic Party is. The remainder of the Democrats
(01:51):
showed no sign at all of resisting or trying to
knock down this oppressive, noxious part of their party. But
the bigger question, and the one that I want to
explore today on the podcast, is this. Why is it
back now? Part of the why is simple, you have
(02:13):
people in their twenties, thirties and early forties who've never
been told the truth about this because they were educated
by leftist teachers who never gave up on socialism and Marxism.
I get that part of it, but it doesn't answer
the second part. Okay, fine, they're people that were telling
this is the way to go. They're lefty educators that
(02:35):
tell you all sorts of idiotic things, but they don't
take hold. Why suddenly is this taking hold when it
hadn't taken hold for decades. I found an interesting piece
that I think puts this all together. I'll tease it
for a moment before I share some information with you
and then go back to it. Here's the tease. There's
(02:58):
an old saying about you need to have skin the game.
In other words, you need to have something at stake.
An example of that is the companies that go to
employee stock ownership plans and the business itself as employee owned. Well,
when the employees actually own the company, the thinking goes
(03:23):
they have a vested interest in being more tied into
the success of the company, as opposed to somebody who's
just going to work there for three months and go
somewhere else. Hold that thought, because I think one of
the growing trends in America tends to explain the embrace,
particularly in the big leftist cities, and that's where this
(03:45):
is all coming from. I don't see like democrats right
and left in rural Wisconsin saying that they're socialists and Marxist.
The big cities around the New York and all of that,
those are the ones that are going for this. There's
something going on in those cities. Sure that. In just
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dot com. The most perceptive Conservative in recent years was
Charlie Kirk. His loss is immense for a lot of reasons,
including his ability to understand and figure things out. There's
some people that are drawing attention to something that he
said a few months ago and tie it into this
(04:57):
context to the political debate about so called affordability. Now
we'll get to that at a moment. What you've noticed, though,
take Momdanni in New York. He the issue that he
used to sell Marxism in his campaign for New York
was affordability. Everything's too expensive. Now, I can argue, of course,
(05:21):
all the reasons why Marxism doesn't make things less expensive.
That it's what it instead does is it creates massive
product supplies, creates ultimately to terlitarianism. It ultimately fails terribly,
and the Marxists need to have a keep their grip
(05:42):
on control, so they start taking away everybody's rights. It
happens everywhere there's Marxism. But the bigger thing to look
at is why the affordability thing they've been able to
tie into Marxism. Let's start with this. The affordability problem
exploded during the Biden and it was the Democrats that
(06:02):
refused to be bothered by all the inflation that was
going on that are suddenly now complaining about the inflation.
There will be the permanent legacy of Biden. Well, prices
for you don't want prices to go down, that's deflation.
Deflation only occurs in a depression. What we have to
do is stop them from going any higher, which Trump
(06:23):
has been rather successful at doing. Nonetheless, this affordability issue
is there, and it's real, and it's especially real in
the big cities. Big cities have always been more expensive
to live in, obviously than the middle of nowhere, but
it's really bad there. Now. Some people are asking why
(06:43):
didn't they have this concern about affordability when we actually
had inflation. Well I have a theory about that too.
The left piece know we were having inflation when we
were having it. It wasn't like MSNBC was saying, inflation
is exploded. You may have noticed, and many people did,
that the price of butter was going up and the
price of everything else was going up, but it was
(07:05):
never particularly highlighted. And so many people on the left
are incapable of actually observing anything on their own. It's
only when they're told of something that they start reacting
to it. It's an entire class of society, about half
this country, that only does what it's told and only
thinks what it's told to think about anyway, that's where
(07:26):
the affordability came from. But let me go back to
where I want to take this. Why are people open
to the notion that Marxism is the answer to affordability.
That's where Charlie Kirk made a comment, and it's been resurrected,
(07:46):
and it's not being talked about in some conservative circles
as being prophetic before I read the comment. Let's back
into this. George W. Bush President. One of the things
that he tried to achieve that I think failed was
he kept talking about having an ownership society. Bush had
(08:06):
a number of ideas that sounded pretty good that didn't
work out. One of his ideas was to bring democracy
to the Middle East. Democracy didn't work in the Middle East.
I didn't know that at the time, but it's clear
that it doesn't. Bush kept pushing this opportunity society. He
(08:30):
pushed very hard for home ownership. He pushed very hard
for entrepreneurialism where people would own their own business. Again,
go back to the skin in the game argument. If
you own something and it goes up in value, you've
created your own economic security plan. For instance, if housing
(08:56):
costs are exploding, but you own housing, it's not a
bad thing for you. If you own a rental property
where the rents go from eighteen hundred dollars a month
to twenty seven hundred dollars a month, and you own
that property, well, that increase is making is keeping up
with all of your costs that are going up for
(09:17):
everything else. If you own a home that you buy
for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and fifteen years
later it's worth six hundred and seventy five thousand dollars,
that home is less affordable than somebody else, but you
own the thing that went up in value. Growth in
an economy only benefits from people who are actually participating
in the economy, and participating in the economy goes beyond
(09:40):
simply I'm gonna go buy something, you have to have
a stake in it. And the comment that Charlie Kirk
made dealt with how in the big cities in the
United States, so many people, including very affluent people, we're
all renting. You see this trend in every big city
(10:07):
that we have. You see it in Milwaukee. The housing
boom in downtown Milwaukee is almost entirely rental. That housing boom,
by the way, as I'll mention in a moment here,
I think, has finally ended. I can't say that I'm
right about this because I've thought that the housing market
in downtown Milwaukee was overbuilt for fifteen years. It finally is,
(10:29):
but it certainly wasn't when I started saying it. But
it's almost all rental, and it's everywhere in the United States.
You find these cities that are going to hell, Seattle, Portland,
San Francisco, New York. Almost everybody in New York rents. Oh,
there are some people who in some of the boroughs
own a small home. And then there are the rich
people that own there in their co ops on Madison
Avenue and all of that stuff. But the overwhelming majority rent,
(10:53):
and in many cases rent and pay a fortune. When
you read and pay a fortune, affordability crushes you. When
things become more expensive and you don't own anything, your
(11:14):
entire economic life is you paying for other stuff. Secondly,
you don't have any skin in the game. There's a
piece on Fox News that appeared a few days ago,
written by Taylor Penley that deals with the Charlie Kirk comment,
and I want to share it here. Resurface warnings from
(11:36):
the Late Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk about the
dangers of young Americans embracing socialism are drawing new attention
after New York City mayor elect Zoron Mamdani, a self
described Democratic socialists, met with President Donald Trump and the
White House quote and here's the Charlie quote, how do
(11:56):
we get more young people under the age of thirty
five to have equity in the system. Not the democrat
version of equity where they want to have redistribution, but
actually are they paying a mortgage, do they own stuff?
Or are they permanent renters. This is July eleventh, not
(12:17):
long before he was killed. Charlie Kirk said this, if
you don't own anything, what skin do you have in
the game. You're completely at the mercy of everybody else.
All those apartment buildings in New York that these people
are being priced out of, that they're reading and know
Mondani coming in, I'm gonna do rent control, trying to
(12:39):
make it free. Well, somebody owns all those buildings. You
had an entire generation, the millennials, that just turn their
noses up at the notion of owning anything. They were
late to home ownership, they were late to starting a family.
Some were entrepreneurial, but most were not. They were the
(13:02):
ones that had got all these college degrees at which
they were trained in nothing. They ended up going into
the gig economy, driving uber, doing door dash, doing all
of these part time things because they couldn't find an
actual job. The notion that they would start and own
their own company non existed to them. I wonder, I
honestly don't know. I wonder what percentage of new businesses
(13:24):
started in America in the last twenty years from college graduates.
When I see who started business, it's like people opening
an HVAC company. People in the skilled trades, young people. Okay,
I worked in this for six years. Now I'm going
to start my own business. Those are the people who
have the plutancial for long term prosperity. Now. The thing
(13:49):
with regard to rent, and why I think it becomes
such a strong talking point for the Marxists, is that
in many instances these people are rather well off, but
everything's going out the door in rent. When I see
some of the rents in downtown Milwaukee, it blows my mind.
(14:11):
People paying three four five thousand dollars a month, And
I think about the value of a home that you
could get. If that was your mortgage payment, it would
be through the rough. You'd have an extremely nice home,
the long term potential of it increasing in value, helping
you to be set for life. But instead you're paying
(14:32):
pretty much everything you have to live in this nice
place that you're renting, and now here you are, you're
forty five years old. You have nothing to show for
the income that you have. Your rent keeps going up,
the cost of everything else is going up. Of course,
capitalism isn't working for you because you're not right now.
Part of capitalism you don't need anything now. The exception
to this is the people who beat the system. There
(14:54):
are some people who rent and then set aside their
money for them. This doesn't apply if you rent instead
of owning and take all of the savings. You're not
paying homeowners insurance, you're not a mortgae in all of this.
And when you'd get a mortgage a ton of it
as interest, you're not paying any of that. If you're
(15:15):
setting that aside for your own nest egg and you
got all this money in the bag, or you invested
in stocks or whatever, you're still going to be fine
because you own something else. Putting money in your four
oh one K that's in the stock market, that's owning something.
You're owning these businesses and hopefully that the companies whose
socks have been going up in price. But the people
that are living and saving nothing, which is a lot
(15:38):
of these lefties who live in the big cities, they're
not participating in that either. The stock market, other than
two or three hiccups, is then nothing but go up
since nineteen eighty one. But how about all the people
that didn't participate in that, and all despite the fact
that they had a rather high income because they were
spending it all I think they're are the ones that
(16:00):
are most open to the Marxist ideas, and take a
look at these bigs. It's all renting. Back to the
Peace on Fox News, quoting Charlie Kirk, a permanent renting
class in this country is the prerequisite, is the leading
ingredient for radical politics that nobody wants to see. That's
(16:21):
Charlie Kirk. He's right about this. If you went into
New York and took a look at the voting percentages
of renters in the mayoral race, I guarantee you that
it was higher than the overall total vote. The percentage
from Mamdani guarantee you continuing, we need to reinvigorate the
(16:44):
ownership economy, and then all of a sudden, when you
own stuff, you're less likely to burn down Wendy's and
vote for candidates like Zora Mandami Mamdani, he's right about
that too. If you own a home in Kenosha, you're
probably less likely during the riots at Gonocehan to burn
Kenosha down than if a you didn't even live in
(17:07):
the city, or b you're just a cannon somewhere. Again,
you don't have any skin in the game in the
area that I live in Florida, it's tons of tons
of condos, and a lot of the condo owners rent
out their condos because it's been just the license to
(17:29):
print money because the underlying value of the condos until
recently had been going up. Everybody wants to live in
South Florida, so they're able to charge huge rent so
they're making way more than their mortgage payments and all
the properties that they've bought and so on they bought in.
One of the big controversies though, is over whether or
(17:50):
not the buildings should allow the airbnbs and the other
short term rentals. Many of the buildings do not do it,
can write in the bylaws they don't allow the owners
to do short term rentals. Others do it because in
the very short term you can make a killing. I
take a look at what some people pay to spend
a weekend and fluid in an airbnb in it's as
(18:13):
much as like hotel rooms, but it's not in the
long term interest of everybody else who lives in the building.
It's the same as a neighborhood. How you like to
live next to somebody who airbnb their house out three
hundred and sixty five days a year, stating the obvious.
(18:35):
Somebody that's on a six day short term rental doesn't
give a crap about the condition of the place they're standing.
They beat it all up. What do they care. We're
becoming an airbnb society where nobody has laid their teeth
into anything. Paul's now in the rental locker business, this
(19:01):
storage business. Obviously, some people need to pay for storage.
Where's the money in the storage? Owning the ownit, not
reading it. It's the same for almost anything. So the
point that Charlie Kirk was making in this warning that
seems to be prophetic. If you want to have people
(19:21):
embrace capitalism and oppose self destructive policies like Marxism, which
leads to anarchy, they have to own stuff. And let's
go to the anarchy. By the way. The street takeovers
that we saw in Milwaukee this past summer, and that
occur all the time in Seattle and Portland, there were
several in New York City over the weekend. Fifty sixty
seventy cars come into a street that people have to
(19:43):
heighten their homes to terrify, and the police departments have
no ability to knock it down because they don't have
the fire power or the weaponry to deal with two
hundred people who have guns going crazy. Who's the most
bothered by this? Somebody who owns a home in that
block of New York. If you're a renter, okay, fine,
this is going I lay. If you're a renter, do
(20:04):
you care if people are burning your city down? Get
the flexibility. I you are on the place. You've got
what skin in the game now. I think what happened
with the millennials is as a group, and again we're generalizing.
There's always exceptions, but what happened with the millennials as
(20:25):
a group, their path into adulthood was delayed. I contend
by baby boomer parents. Many of them were living at
home when they were twenty seven years old. They call
mom and dad if they're pulled over by a cop.
(20:50):
I see some signs that there's a greater interest in
home ownership and property ownership and ownership of anything by
the gen zs. Not all of them, but for a
lot of these millennials. They didn't want to be tied down.
They didn't want responsibility. Well, that's the downside of owning something.
You have to be responsible for it. You don't want
to let it go to hell. But over the long term,
(21:11):
if you don't own anything, unless you're setting aside and
saving money, elsewise, you're crushed in an economy in which
things become more expensive. So you then bite onto policies
that will never ever work because you're looking for a
short term fix out of the mess that you're in.
(21:38):
What happens, of course, when you impose Marxism, which makes
includes price controls and make things free, is nobody has
an incentive to produce anything because there's price controls on them.
You can't make enough money by making that thing. This
seems to be what's going on with beef in America
so far as I can tell, and there isn't enough
of anything. And you up with the potato lines in Moscow.
(22:01):
I always bring up the potato lines in Moscow because
everybody saw those pictures of the potatoes. You'd see these
Russian women standing in line for seven hours to get
one potato, beaten down by the weather, haggard and as
ugly looking as you can be. Then we saw all
these Russian women who came to the United States when
they were in the twenties, after the Berlin after, you know,
the Soviet Union fell. They're all beautiful. So what we
(22:23):
learned is Russian women when they're young are rather beautiful.
But all the ones by the time there were fifty
when living under communism, looked like they were one hundred
and fifty years old. That's what shortages. It's what a
totally an economy that is always in a malaise due
to people. It doesn't work, Which brings me now to
(22:43):
where do you think we're going? You should know you
photo copied my material. You didn't do anything I was
Some of this has been stockpiled. It brings us to
South America. South America is thirty five years ahead of
us in the United States. What do I mean by that?
(23:04):
Thirty five years ago most of South America embraced Marxism
and socialism, and broadly speaking fifteen to thirty five years.
But Venezuela, Cuba, of course, started in the Caribbean, a
couple of the countries in Central America, Nicaragua back in
(23:26):
the eighties. Then the revolution in Venezuela. Brazil's now a mess.
Chile's gone back and forth. They embraced socialism and it's
been a disaster. The first country to turn was Argentina.
(23:46):
In its presidential election two years ago. Argentina elected a
conservative government. The president is named Mili m I l Ei.
Controversial guy also has I'm guessing his hairpiece because it
just it looks pretty goofy. He however, won reelection. His
government got a ratification of approval from the Argentine voters.
(24:09):
There is now it's a big story again in the
Wall Street Journal Chile. The conservative political party made significant
advances in the most recent election, and the story deals
about the right word turn in South America. So as
North America, certainly Canada and now fearfully the United States
turns to the left toward Marxism, South America is going
(24:30):
in the other direction. Well, we know why it's been
a disaster down there. And the pattern in all of
these South American nations that went marxisty is after coming
into the front door, being democratically elected, they then strip
away democratic rights. There are no elections. You have what
you have in Venezuela, in which it's government via gunpoint.
(24:53):
People try to escape bety have gotten out. The rest
of the people are living in abject poverty. The drug
dealers are the only force in the economy that's producing anything,
so they have an extraordinary amount of power. All of
that happens. See socialism, Marxism does it work. So once
they're in place, they can't allow you to have elections
(25:15):
because nobody's going to vote to keep it because everything
has gone to hell. The closest we came prior to
this point was the Carter years in America. Carter wasn't
a socialist, but the Democrats in the nineteen seventies were very,
very liberal, and they wrecked the economy. Everything was bad.
(25:38):
You had high inflation, high unemployment, and high interest rates,
and people felt as though their country was going to hell.
And Reagan was elected to undo all of that. We
never got to the point that South America is at now.
The danger we're facing now is Jimmy Carter was a liberal,
(26:00):
was incompetent. These Marxists that are coming around now are radicals.
They're true believers. Carter would have said I'm not a Marxist.
They would have considered it a slur. Until very recently,
Democrats kept denying that they were socialists, but now they
openly brag of it and admit it. And as I say,
(26:22):
all of this is going on at a time in
which the percentage of Americans who are homeowners is lower
than ever, And one of the reasons it's lower than
ever is that the values of homes has gone up
over the years. Housing prices are very high, rental housing
prices are extremely high. So the people who owned all
(26:45):
of these things that got way more expensive, they benefited
because their thing is worth way more. But those that
were crowded out are hurt the most. Trump came up
with this idea, and I don't think it's a good one,
but I under stan where he's coming from. The idea
of the fifty year mortgage. No, I don't think it's
a good idea because I just think having that much debt,
(27:05):
But I know why he's thinking of this. He's trying
to come up with a way to make housing affordable.
If you lower somebody's payment by stretching it over fifty years,
they're likely to buy. I know that the following points
sound stupid some of you out there, Oh, your points
(27:25):
sound stupid because this isn't really skin in the game,
But it works for me. I think one of the
reasons I won't say the only but I do think
the biggest the biggest reason that the Packers were able
to survive in Green Bay. There's nothing like this. There's
(27:48):
no other city of the size of green Bay that
has a pro football team, or for that matter, a
baseball or basketball team. Some of the lesser sports is
a couple like that. Green Bay is what one hundred
and ten thousand. How the pack survive by having the
team being owned. There are people who don't live in
(28:09):
Wisconsin to think the city of green Bay owns the team.
The team is owned by shareholders. Now it's an unusual
shareholder set up. As I said, the point's a little
stupid because the skin that a Packer shareholder has in
the game isn't real because if the Packers were ever sold,
you don't get anything and you can't even trade your stock.
(28:30):
But when you did put the money in, that skin
went into the game. There is the concept of pride
of ownership. The Packers would have left long ago if
they hadn't come up with this financially viable model. That
it is a financially viable model. Get the people who
(28:52):
like your team to keep putting in enough money that
you've got a going business. You don't need a billionaire
owner because you tens of millions of dollars that were
invested in by these shareholders all over the years. The
people who own the stock of the packers. Again, it's
limited skin in the game. It's not like say, if
(29:15):
I own a few shares of Microsoft, I actually own
something that I can sell, and where Microsoft goes up
in value, I can show a profit. It's not as
good as that. But by and large, when you have
a vested interest in doing well when the country does well,
you're and I think this is stating the obvious, you're
likely to be vested in capitalism and freedom than somebody
(29:40):
who has nothing to show up for their life. You've
got all of these highly educated people with these semi
worthless college degrees, feeling as though they're all under employed.
But they all want to live the good life, and
they tend to live in the big cities, the worst
place that they should live. It's really extended. It's even
(30:00):
those big cities, particularly cities like New York. One of
the things that hasn't worked is to tell the lefties
that are embracing Marxism, look around at all the other
places that have gone Marxist. Do you want to live
like that. It so far has not worked. I do
(30:22):
believe that it can work in national elections where many
people don't live in those cities. Telling somebody in New
York do you want it to be like Seattle didn't
work on them, But I think that that certainly works
on somebody sitting there in Germantown that they don't want
their country to be like Seattle in New York. So
(30:46):
the Democrats will face a problem if they run a
Marxist candidate for president, and their next candidate for president
may well be a Marxist, because that's where all the
momentum in the party is, and that will do really,
really well, But only in all of the places that
already everybody votes for the Democrats. Anyway. The Charlie Kirk argument, though,
(31:15):
again so prophetic, and he saw this coming again. His
comment was only a few months ago before them ninety one,
but he tied the embrace of Marxism to be end.
You know, one of Charlie had all these messages, one
of them go to church, another one young people get
married early in life, have children, And he kept saying
by a home, by a home, by a home, by
(31:36):
a home. This is a guy who what didn't graduate
from college. He thought college was semi worthless given what
it was that they were teaching. His message was resonating
with the younger people who listened to him, but it
was also largely into reaction to many of the mistakes
that those in the millennial generation made. It's certainly possible,
(32:00):
well that you could buy, you know, start a business.
You can go under you lose all your money. You
could also buy a home in the wrong neighborhood or
buy at the wrong time at the peak of a market,
and lose a fair amount of money. But over the
long haul, I would say ninety eight percent of the
people in America who bought a home made money in
(32:20):
the deal over the long haul. I don't mean one
to two years over the long haul, because now for
the long haul, well, look at houses where when when
I was a kid, I remember, I think I know what.
We moved from the shack across the river to the
suburbs of Kokana when it's not like closer to the
(32:40):
inner city. All those cities up there just have expanded
and expanded and expanded and expanded. It's like a ranch.
It was very, very hard to lose money. So why
do you think so many millennials didn't do it? As
I say, I just think that many of them wanted
to keep They didn't want to do they we wanted
(33:00):
to stay home. They wanted to have their freedom. They're
moving to adulthood was just way different than the generations
earlier than them. My generations move into adulthood was the
age of eighteen, and everybody got out of the house.
And the generation a little bit earlier than of those
that didn't go to college were all sent to Vietnam.
You were an adult right away. And the World War
(33:23):
two generation the same thing. They all came back and
they want to own a house. The people in the
World War two generation didn't own a house. There was
a term for them. Do you know what it was?
Loser bums. That's bums. I mean when I was a kid,
there were hardly any homes that were rental. They were all,
even the shacky ones, they were owned by the people
(33:45):
who lived in them. And again skin in the game,
suppose you want a little dumpy you know, I won't
even use the term very modest home in one of
our more affordable suburbs around here. You do not want
I have riots in your street. You don't want to
have murders. You don't want to have problems. You have
skin of the game. You live here and you own
(34:06):
your house. When you own nothing, when you have no
teeth at all in the United States of America, you
don't even have money in an IRA, that's lessen that.
When you own nothing, you're an open target for people
who push greed. Look at all these other people. They're
(34:27):
making all this money and you're not. Well, it's true,
they are making all this money and you're not. All
your money is going to the rent you're paying for
the place that you can't afford to live in because
you want to be in New Yorker. You want to
be here, or you want to be in this high
falutant place. The answer isn't to embrace Marxism. The answer
perhaps is that you would all of the other people
(34:47):
who are actually making money are doing. But when you're
forty four now you feel you're so far behind the
eight ball you can't ever catch up. So some Marxist
comes around in sells you a bill of goods, and
you're gonna fall for it, the same way that people
that Cuba fell for Castro the same way that the
Russians fell for lenin the same way that the nicer
(35:10):
Rogmans fell for Ortega. And I better stop these examples
because they'll run out of communists too. Uh well, that's
that's my point. That's my point. Belling's rule. The more
screwed up the city is, the more radical the mayor is.
(35:31):
I mean, it just holds. New York right now is
not as bad off as Chicago, but it will be,
that'll be, and that'll be the question is Brandon is
Johnson the mayor of Chicago, more radical than I'm Nadi?
They'll make a battle to the left and you'll be
able to measure it in the murder rate. And how
much the business is falling apart and business is leaving
end the economic decay. Times Square returning to what it
(35:54):
was in nineteen seventy nine, is opposed to the family friendly,
tourist mecca that it is now. And then ultimately the
Potato Line. You remember those pictures of the Russian women
standing in the Potato line and bad, everything's fallen, and
they none of them met anybody, but boy, it ended
(36:15):
the whole politics of envy because they couldn't be jealous
of the rich because nobody was just the only people
that were rich were the people that ran the country. Oh,
they have a great ability to make themselves rich. So
you get these billionaires, third generation foreign billionaires like Mamdani
that weren't raised in this country that come from and
hate America. Oh, they'll take care of themselves, and they'll
(36:38):
handle government jobs and government contracts, and all of the
stuff that's going to be free is going to be
provided by people that areround the doal of the government.
That part all works. You're listening to the Mark Belling podcast.
Now here's the next part of this. One of the
(37:00):
big problems that we face in this country are people
who are stupid but think they're smart. I mean, that's
just generally a problem in life. I've said this many times.
Idiots generally are not dangerous. There's not much harm they
can do because most idiots know they're idiots. If you're
somebody who's not very smart, that you're very very cautious
(37:20):
and you try very hard not to make a mistake
and you ask for help all the time. It's the
people who think they know something but don't are very,
very dangerous. Jason Riley Collum of the Wall Street Journal.
We all know about the great inflation that's gone on
at the big universities. This one is about Harvard twenty
(37:42):
four to twenty five. In other words, the academic year
that ended this past May, the percentage of a's courses,
the percentage of grades in courses at Harvard that were a's,
sixty sixty percent of the grades and all of the
(38:06):
courses were a's. Well, it's no wonder they all think
they're smart, and no wonder they all graduate and they find,
in their shock, they can't find a job. They out
only are at Harvard. They're getting all a's. The column
actually tracks how fast this number has gone through the moon.
(38:26):
Let me read his column. It's well written, he writes.
You can always tell a Harvard man, the old saying goes,
but you can't tell him much. That includes, apparently, that
he may not be as smart as his grades suggest.
A recent internal Harvard report found that more than sixty
percent of grades given to undergraduates in the twenty four
to twenty five academic year were a's. Up from and
(38:48):
then they go to two decades ago. This just blows
your way. Two decades ago would be let's see no.
Two thousand and five. We're not even talking the seventies.
Of the eighties, it was twenty four percent, then twenty
years ago twenty four percent. But one in four of
the grades at Harvard were a's. Now it's three and five.
(39:10):
That's not gradual. That's an incredible spike, to the point
that I think it makes the grades meaningless. I have
a theorist the weather handing out all of these a's,
but we'll get to that in a moment. The median
grade point of graduation, which was three point twenty nine
and three point eight five, is now three point eight three.
(39:31):
That's the median. I remember when four point zero was
considered to be perfect. The median is now three point
eight three. That means that there's a whole lot that
are in this tight little range above three point eight three.
But the old Gurris and Kila line from with have
a prairie home companion that I quote all the time,
(39:53):
Lake Wobegon, where all of the children are above average.
It's possible that these outcomes stem from Harvard admitting smarter
and more diligent applicants. That's what some of the people
who have found all this say, well, Harvard's got really
really smart people. They're doing a work. How could we
help it? If everybody in the class is doing a work.
(40:14):
I can't give this kid a C just because I
have to give out a certain amount of c's. If
they all mastered the work, I have to give them
the a's. That's the argument that's always been made. My
retort to that is, maybe the course is too simple
if everybody's mastering it. Secondly, what's the point of the
A from the student who did excellent work if everybody
(40:38):
gets the A? Now, I believe one of the things
that drives this grotesque grade inflation. There's a lot of things.
You know, student evaluations have become very very important. The
students are likely to rank highly a professor who gave
an A than a professor who flunked them out of
a course. You also have the whole which college you're
(40:58):
going to go to. It's a very competitive thing. Harvard's
hard to get into, but if you know that if
you do make it in, you're gonna get a bunch
of a's, it may make you likelier to go there
than a college that the a's aren't given out like candy,
So they all feel the same pressure to hand out
the a's, And then there's the whole sense of liberalism
and entitlement in which people have the sense that they
(41:18):
deserve the AA or I'm a woman, I'm this, I'm that.
Why are you not giving me an A when this
white person over here got it. But this adds to
the issue that we were talking about earlier about all
of the people who feel this sense of going nowhere,
even though they have these degrees and they're living in
(41:39):
the big cities and so on. There are a whole
lot of people who think that they did extraordinarily well
in college and their elite, when in fact they just
did the same as everybody else that was in there. Now,
the one thing that's still hard is getting in. And
(41:59):
one of the things that makes it hard, and it
gets into a discussion that we had earlier in the
week with regard to the H one B visas. You've
got a lot of foreign students who come in and
often highly educated, it's easier to get in. That part
is still difficult. Harvard has not raised it's student bodied
two hundred and seventy five thousand. It's still a tough
(42:19):
institution to get into. And so is Stanford, and so
is Yale, and so is MIT. But once they're in there,
the a's are handed out, and the end result of
this is a sense of arrogance from the people that graduate,
(42:41):
in which they assume that life is going to be
easier for them than it turns out to be. Little
did they know that they're entering a job market where
everybody else in the field also has all of these a's.
I'm going to change the subject about as radically as
(43:03):
you could change a subject. Well, I mean, I can
go to a break, but we don't have a break
to take, so I'm just gonna change the subject. Do
you want me to change the subject. This is something
that surprises me. It was like three years ago that
they announced that they're gonna make a movie about thunder
and lightning. I mean, I admit when I heard that,
(43:26):
I just assumed it wouldn't be very good. Didn't you
assume that it wouldn't be very good? Yeah, I mean
I just thought it wouldn't be very good. First of all,
they make a zillion movies, and somebody said they'm gonna
make a movie. You don't know if it's like a
movie that's being done by an actual big movie studio
or is this like something that somebody's gonna post on YouTube.
It isn't gonna be it's done for a film class.
I don't know. Paul says, I should call them Lightning
(43:52):
and Thunder people. By the way, mix up who is
who you have straight? Who is who was Claire Thunder
or was she Lightning? That you don't that part you
don't know. Lightning and Thunder was a Neil Diamond tribute band.
It was a husband and wife a couple, Mike and
(44:12):
Claire Sordino, who became like huge celebrities in Milwaukee. Like
I talked about this a lot when I started doing
my show and I got to be really really famous,
and I mentioned the Milwaukee has hardly any celebrities. There
was like me, There was Bou Black, a couple of
people on TV. And the thing about all of our
celebrities is that we were known anywhere else. There were
(44:33):
a few people that were from Milwaukee, like say l Jiaux,
who were world famous who they went on because in
their field, But by and large, our famous people were
famous only in Milwaukee, and Lightning and Thunder were two
of them. So anyway, they were this Neil Diamond private
band and they just got really really hot at the
local clubs and they play Summerfest. And to this day,
(44:56):
I don't remember if I've ever talked to Claire. It
was zillions of years ago. But I did talk to
Mike and it was during one of the many health
struggles that they both had. I mean, the reason this
makes for a movie is it's hard to find two
people that had more bad things happened to them and
their life just became a what soap opera isn't even
(45:17):
the right word. It was a matter of dealing with adversity.
She lost her leg, there was a bad automobile accident.
Then he got cancer, and it's, I guess, the stuff
that movies are made of. And they got a couple
of I don't know. They always say a list. I
don't know if these are a list stars, but they're
close Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson. Would you say, you
(45:39):
say that's a list or is that like a list?
I mean, when I think of a list, who's like
the biggest star of the world right now, who's really big,
like Brad Brad pitt is is he's now, He's is
he over the hill, Brad Pitt, he because he would be.
He would have been a list forever and ever. Yet,
So in other words, this isn't being done by nobody's Kate,
(46:00):
Kate Hudson's are pretty yeah, Kate, Tom Cruise would be.
Do you think Hugh Jackman's at the Tom Cruise level?
You think he is? Okay? Well, they made this movie
in because they're a Neil Diamond tribute banded Mike kind
of look like Neil Diamond, and she's in the band
and she's the partner, and they did Neil Diamond stuff
and they did other stuff and they made a movie
(46:21):
about them, and they got these two borderline A List
celebrities to do the movie. It has not been released, However,
the reviewers have seen it and the reviews that are
coming in are very very good. There's these aggregate services.
I think Rotten Tomatoes is one of them, and so on,
and like I said, the general public has not seen
it yet, but when the reviewers that have seen it
(46:42):
so far are giving it very, very very high marks.
The The movie is having its American premiere next week
in Milwaukee at the Oriental Theater. We are it's very
very amusing. Are they gonna put it? And now there
(47:03):
is actually a red carpet at the Oriental Theater, but
it's not a red carpet, if you know what I mean.
Are they gonna have like a red carpet and block
off the streets and they're gonna be people winding around
in tux sedes. We have glitterati like, are they gonna
bring Joan Rivers back from the dead and have her
stand at the thing and so on. One of the
reasons I suspect now is I just think that you
just can't move the Oriental Theater upscale. Secondly, Kate Hudson's
(47:24):
not coming, but Hugh jack But is, and the director
of the film, Morgan Brewer is excuse me, Craig Brewer
is also going to be here, and that will be
the American premiere. They actually had one, and I think
in London that they all went to about a week
and a half ago. The movie itself is released nationwide,
(47:46):
and this is important on Christmas Day. The Christmas Day
movies the studios released, these are the ones they think
are gonna be huge because that period between Christmas and
New Year's is the busiest week of the year. For movies.
The other big time to release a movie is early
on the summer, like the summer Blockbuster. Kids are out
of school and so on. But that period around Christmas,
the movies that are released then are the ones that
(48:07):
really really huge. And this isn't a straight to Netflix
thing or anything like that. This will be in theaters
and I obviously haven't seen it, although I am going
to the I am going to this premiere, the premier event. Yeah,
it's well, everybody's coming on to this and it's all
part of the you know, to get publicity and they
want obviously they want everybody in Milwaukee to go. It's
(48:29):
a good way of jump starting then will be so
you know, Hugh j Ackman's going to Cops and this,
that and the other things. So they're having the premiere and.
Speaker 1 (48:38):
It just.
Speaker 2 (48:41):
I've talked about this a lot. When something happens in
Milwaukee that makes national lose, it's always a tad weird
isn't the right word, but unusual. A husband and wife
that do a Neil Diamond tribute act. That's not the
normal type of celebrity, but it's exactly what you would
think that would come out of Milwaukee and it kind
(49:01):
of becomes embraced by the community in the same way
Bob Yuker was the biggest sports celebrity that we ever had. Well,
he wasn't any good as a player. He became a
guy that was funny. It was like a Milwaukee kind
of thing. And yeah, I like I said, I don't
know if the movie is going to be any good,
but the reviewers say that it will be. The thing
I think that's tricky is, you know, almost all movies
(49:23):
like this, you see the rise to the top, which
is the good thing, and then you see all the
rock and vh one used to do documentaries about rock bands.
It was all the same thing, the rise to fame,
then the collapse and tragedy and then the resurrection. No,
I don't know how they make this the happy ending thing. Claire,
(49:44):
it's still alive and still performs, but shenew she had
obviously health issues, and yeah, she lost her leg and
Mike passed away. And how you tell the story without
the tragic part overwhelming the good part. But obviously they
they must know what they're doing. So the movie's got
(50:05):
a Christmas relief. It has its American premiere, and that
just means that's when you know, I don't know how
many seats the general public are going to be able
to get to for that, but they release the things
in dribs and drabs in the upper premiere, all in
an attempt to build publicity and so on. So hopefully
it'll be as good as the advanced notices would indicate.
(50:26):
I want to cover this story briefly. There's been a
lot of coverage of the collapse of the Neutral project.
Neutral is this company from Madison that said it was
going to build several high rises on Water Street in Milwaukee.
The first one has become a hole in the ground
that has become an embarrassment for the city. The developers
(50:48):
from Madison, the lead developers twenty seven years old. The
company's name is Neutral. He evidently ran out of money
and they had already started construction. They dug the hole
in the ground and there's a crane that costs a
lot of money. The contractor was CG. Schmidt. They stopped
doing work because they said they wanted to be paid.
Neutral didn't say much of anything. Now the cranes been
(51:09):
taken away and the project has failed. There are now indications,
according to the business journal that Neutral is facing problems
with a couple of its other projects. Well, let me
comment on this. First of all, even in a boom time,
this project didn't make any sense. I said when it
(51:30):
was announced that I thought that there was zero you'll
call me saying this zero chance of it happening, zero zero.
I talked to a developer that I didn't identify, and he
said that this proposal makes sense in Dubai, but nowhere
in the United States, and certainly not in Milwaukee. They
were going to do multiple high rises and take that
entire area near the market center for the performing arts
(51:51):
and turn it into this massive housing zone. And they
weren't going to be small units, they were going to
be high rises. In the first one, the Edison project
was the Edison was the first one to go up,
and it never got off the ground. All they have
is the whole the part of it is the City
of Milwaukee and Mayor Chevy and lafay at Crump, they
head of DCD. These are people who've never spent a
(52:13):
day in their life in the private sector, and they
never knew that this project was not doable, and that
they didn't realize that the developers didn't pass the smell test.
Some guys in their twenties do become superstar developers. There
are the Donald Trumps in the world, but these guys weren't.
But secondly, and this is my key, the biggest reason
this thing has stalled is because we have finally overbuilt
(52:35):
the downtown Milwaukee housing market. Now. I don't think they ever,
even the best of times, could have done five buildings,
but maybe the first one would have happened. Here's what's happening.
We have several high rises recently completed that are nowhere
near filled. The Couteur, which was delayed forever, finally built
(52:56):
and then opened now over a year ago, remains with
massive vacancies. If you go on their website, it lists
all of the apartments that are still available for rent.
It's a zillion of them now. A lot of them
with the good views toward the lake are gone, but
the vacancy rate is high. There's a facility on Van
(53:16):
Buren Street that's opened called Nova. It's got lots of
units available. Whether or not there's an economic component to
this or not, I don't know. I just think, like
anything else, you finally reach the point of critical mass.
We have all these housing units that over the last
thirty years have developed in the Third Ward of Milwaukee,
(53:38):
all the high rises that went up and downtown on
the Lower east Side, and because they were all successful
and all did well, more and more developers did them
until you run out of people to live in all
of these places. And the fact that you've got two
buildings that are nowhere near least I suspect what happened
is that developers of Neutral could not get financing from banks, lenders,
(54:01):
or investors to bank rule this because they saw the
two projects that are already finished appear not to be
going very well. What I think has happened is, at
least for the immediate period, the downtown Milwaukee housing boom
has finally. I'm not going to say there's any it's
(54:21):
just there's no more people to come in and rent
these places. If you keep building new units, it isn't
You can't fill up simply with somebody who lives in
one Downtown Milwaukee apartment to move to another, because you
need to need new people to justify all of the
new construction that you're doing with them. And I think
it finally maxed out from the perspective of Milwaukee. That's
(54:42):
the end of any kind of residential growth because there's
not any other part of the city that's had residential
growth at all. The only thing that's propped up the
south side has been illegal immigrants moving in the northwest side,
and portions of the inner city have become ghost towns.
But there's been this trend that you've seen in a
lot of places in the United States that started with
(55:02):
the millennials they have and then empty nester baby boomers
people living in downtowns. What's happened in some of those
cities is the cities have gone to hell San Francisco, Seattle,
Los Angeles, and people are moving out. We haven't had
the same component of going to hell in Milwaukee. I
think that this is more a case of it just
finally got overbuilt. I will be surprised if any major
(55:27):
new project that's primarily residential and I said major, I
don't mean fifteen twenty units major happens in the next
several years. So I think that this project here neutral
is the canary in the coalman A Milwaukee says it's
looking for a new developer. I don't know they're going
to find a developer I don't know anything's going to
happen there for quite some time. The first thing that
(55:50):
they can try to sue this developer, but you can't
get blood out of a turna van. If this company
was simply a guy who was in over his head
who eat a couple of projects in Madison, things were
going well, so we know things. He can create the
World Trade Center of Milwaukee here and did it after
all the money was there to be to be made.
(56:13):
Little story to cover here. There's a piece in the
Wall Street Journal on the takeover of CBS News by
Barry Weiss. For those of you who haven't been following
this closely, Barry Weiss was a reporter for the Wall
Street Journal in the New York Times. Left of center,
but she believed strongly in freedom of expression. And when
she was at the New York Times, she was the
(56:33):
op ed editor. She was the person in charge of
getting putting in columns that weren't written by columns for
the paper. And she printed it, and she greenlight greenlit
a column by senator from Arkansas might have been Cotton
that there was just an eternal objection to and there
was a huge falling out and the staff of The
New York Time. Couldn't Times, couldn't stand that any conservative
(56:55):
voice was in that paper at all. Since being forced
out of The New York Times, Berry Weiss is not
a podcast and other things in which she's drawn attention
to leftist media bias. She's becoming one of the queens
of the anti woke movement. CBS News was bought by Paramount.
Paramount was taken over by David Ellison, the son of
(57:16):
Larry Ellison of Oracle. David Ellison is not a leftist,
and he realizes that the only way to make CBS
News or any of these networks viable is to get
rid of the leftist bias. CBS News has some things
going for it, sixty Minutes and a few other brands
that have some value, but it and all of the
other networks have been killing themselves by being so overtly biased.
(57:38):
So Berry Weiss was brought in with a mission of
fixing this. Now I've said, I think it's very hard
to fix the mainstream media. The problem with the mainstream
media is the people who work in the mainstream media.
To simply tell them not to be biased, it's as
hard as telling somebody who eats too much. To stop
eating too much. It's like telling somebody hooked unfeded all
(58:00):
to stop using fentanyl. Should I come up with more examples?
Or as the point already clear? Well, she's in there,
and according to the story on the Wall Street Journal,
she told her colleagues that quote, I want to blow
this place up. Now, this will be interesting to watch.
Can you take something as leftist as CBS News and
(58:22):
remake it into a viable, fair and balanced news organization? Now?
If they can, I think they'll be successful. Whether or
not she can succeed in doing it or not is
another question. Let me quote from the Wall Street Journal
piece for a sense of Barry Weiss's approach to leading
CBS News in her first weeks on the job. Consider
a phrase the new editor in chief has used at
(58:43):
are as a rallying cry in meetings with colleagues. I
want to blow this place up. Wis the former New
York Times. I want to correct that, I want to
blow this up. She didn't say place blow this up?
Weis The former New York Times columnst turned anti woke crusader,
is working to overhaul the organization's evening news program. Counter
what she sees as a left leading bias in legacy
(59:04):
media and make the newsroom operate more efficients efficiently. She
has been given a mandate for change by David Ellison,
the new owner of CBS parent company, Paramount, which bought
her news and opinion platform, The Free Press for one
hundred and fifty million dollars. At the time of her appointment.
Ellison said he capped Weis to bring CBS news to
brings to CBS quote news that reflects reality and journalism
(59:28):
that doesn't seek to demonize but seeks to understand. Weiss
is operating with eInsight, with Ellison's full backing. Now the
story goes on and I do 'tenough time to dive
into it in more depth than that. As I said,
I'm skeptical that this can work. However, what there are
here are deep pockets. The owner of Paramount, David Ellison,
(59:52):
his dad Larry Ellison, just fell from two to three,
is the third richest person in the world. Barry Weiss
herself sold her company, Free Press for one hundred and
fifty million. So you have people who have very very
deep pockets here to ride out whatever internal objection that
there is and to be in this for the long haul.
(01:00:18):
If they are successful in turning CBS News into a
credible news organization, I think that they will then make
large amounts of money. But that if the challenge of
taking a huge leftist news see with Fox News when
(01:00:40):
they put it on the air, it was easier to
do because anybody who wasn't a died in the ideo
ideological liberal was hired by Fox, but they got all
of them. Secondly, Fox didn't take the on EIR News
product and try to do much with it. It simply
put on all these talk shows that were hosted by
conservatives that were out at night, and they tried, like
(01:01:03):
the Dickens, especially when Roger Rayles was there, to keep
the bias out of the news programs. But to do
it with the other large news organizations in a field
in which ninety percent of the people who go into
it are leftists is a really hard thing to do.
It's like taking a public school and trying to make
it not liberal. You're constantly fighting all of the leftist
(01:01:26):
teachers who want to teach leftism in the classroom. Which
she has going for her at CBS is this Her
owner is on her side, Her owner hand picked her
she's got a lot of money herself. And the people
who work at CBS are in a field in which
the jobs are being slashed right and left. So if
(01:01:46):
they want to keep their jobs, they don't have the
ability to be as arrogant as people who had a
greater amount of job security. This is the Mark Belling podcast.
This is the Mark Belling Podcast. We're releasing the podcast
on Friday, and we're rolling into the teel end of
(01:02:09):
the Thanksgiving weekend. I always contend that the worst day
of the year is this coming Sunday. Now, if you
don't have to travel, you're not doing anything. What do
you care? But it was conceint it's a perfect storm.
First of all, the airports and everything else are clogged
because people and the Thanksgiving weekend not on the Monday,
but they all come home on the Sunday. The airports
(01:02:29):
are always a mess. It's filled with people because it's
the end of November. The weather is often crappy, which
creates delays everywhere, and for people who want to drive
in Wisconsin, it's the end of deer hunting. See, you've
got all of these people that are coming back on
the roads, coming back from deer hunting, and you have
people that are traveling in Hopefully we'll get through all
(01:02:49):
of it. I'm way back when I had to go
to Washington, d C. For a meeting. This is in
the nineties, and the meeting was starting the Sunday night
of the end of Thanksgiving weekend. It's a Monday on
Tuesday meeting. And I remember that we were flying out
of Milwaukee with this is mid This is how far
back it was. Midwest Express or it might have been
Midwest Airlines then was still around. So we had a
NonStop to New York and we landed in New York.
(01:03:12):
It was at it was at National I don't think that.
I don't think the name had been changed yet to Reagan.
That's how far back it was. And we landed and
it was a driving rainstorm at Washington, and this is
you know, people going back to Washington, and any Sunday
night is huge because they're all coming back for government
on Monday and so on. We got to the airport
and it was just wall the wall people. Everybody's like,
(01:03:33):
we're in winter clothes and all this stuff. And this
is before there's uber and you step outside and you
need a ride and it was just pouring down rain.
And the other stories that I have where we used
to some friends of mine and I used to have
like a get together every Thanksgiving weekend. You come back
on Sunday and fighting the traffic of all of the
(01:03:53):
deer hunters. The I don't know if they've changed this yet,
but the stretch of the interstate between Toma and Man
that's for both. It's ninety and ninety four together. So
not only do you have two interstates that are combined together,
you've got all these people that are sort of coming
from the north and heading back towards southeastern Wisconsin and
toward Chicago. Ede free would just stop. And it's happened
(01:04:14):
for years and years and years. So if you're not
traveling on Sunday, you're probably better off. That's it for
this week's podcast. We'll be back with another one on Monday.
Speaker 1 (01:04:28):
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Speaker 2 (00:20):
One of the things that I talk about a lot
is how when we do things, we never think about
the long term ramifications of them, and when we get
to a certain point, there's never enough introspection of why
we got there. This all serves the left well, because,
as I point out, the left has always proven wrong
(00:42):
about things, but when they are proven wrong, they never
admit it. They just move on to the next thing
and go on and be wrong about that. One of
the things that we're in the process of being wrong
about is the move towards socialism and Marxism here in
the United States. This is an argument that obviously had
(01:05):
been won in America. Socialism became very popular in the
forties and the fifties, and the anti communist movement knocked
it down. It hit its nator its bottom point late
eighties early nineties, when the Soviet Union fell, the Eastern
Bloc fell, and virtually all Americans left, and rights celebrated
(01:28):
the return of freedom and the return of capitalism and
the proof once and for all that socialism and Marxism
is a disaster. Well it's back now. The Democratic Party
is becoming a Marxist party, Mamdani and AOC. That is
what the Democratic Party is. The remainder of the Democrats
(01:51):
showed no sign at all of resisting or trying to
knock down this oppressive, noxious part of their party. But
the bigger question, and the one that I want to
explore today on the podcast, is this. Why is it
back now? Part of the why is simple, you have
(02:13):
people in their twenties, thirties and early forties who've never
been told the truth about this because they were educated
by leftist teachers who never gave up on socialism and Marxism.
I get that part of it, but it doesn't answer
the second part. Okay, fine, they're people that were telling
this is the way to go. They're lefty educators that
(02:35):
tell you all sorts of idiotic things, but they don't
take hold. Why suddenly is this taking hold when it
hadn't taken hold for decades. I found an interesting piece
that I think puts this all together. I'll tease it
for a moment before I share some information with you
and then go back to it. Here's the tease. There's
(02:58):
an old saying about you need to have skin the game.
In other words, you need to have something at stake.
An example of that is the companies that go to
employee stock ownership plans and the business itself as employee owned. Well,
when the employees actually own the company, the thinking goes
(03:23):
they have a vested interest in being more tied into
the success of the company, as opposed to somebody who's
just going to work there for three months and go
somewhere else. Hold that thought, because I think one of
the growing trends in America tends to explain the embrace,
particularly in the big leftist cities, and that's where this
(03:45):
is all coming from. I don't see like democrats right
and left in rural Wisconsin saying that they're socialists and Marxist.
The big cities around the New York and all of that,
those are the ones that are going for this. There's
something going on in those cities. Sure that. In just
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dot com. The most perceptive Conservative in recent years was
Charlie Kirk. His loss is immense for a lot of reasons,
including his ability to understand and figure things out. There's
some people that are drawing attention to something that he
said a few months ago and tie it into this
(04:57):
context to the political debate about so called affordability. Now
we'll get to that at a moment. What you've noticed, though,
take Momdanni in New York. He the issue that he
used to sell Marxism in his campaign for New York
was affordability. Everything's too expensive. Now, I can argue, of course,
(05:21):
all the reasons why Marxism doesn't make things less expensive.
That it's what it instead does is it creates massive
product supplies, creates ultimately to terlitarianism. It ultimately fails terribly,
and the Marxists need to have a keep their grip
(05:42):
on control, so they start taking away everybody's rights. It
happens everywhere there's Marxism. But the bigger thing to look
at is why the affordability thing they've been able to
tie into Marxism. Let's start with this. The affordability problem
exploded during the Biden and it was the Democrats that
(06:02):
refused to be bothered by all the inflation that was
going on that are suddenly now complaining about the inflation.
There will be the permanent legacy of Biden. Well, prices
for you don't want prices to go down, that's deflation.
Deflation only occurs in a depression. What we have to
do is stop them from going any higher, which Trump
(06:23):
has been rather successful at doing. Nonetheless, this affordability issue
is there, and it's real, and it's especially real in
the big cities. Big cities have always been more expensive
to live in, obviously than the middle of nowhere, but
it's really bad there. Now. Some people are asking why
(06:43):
didn't they have this concern about affordability when we actually
had inflation. Well I have a theory about that too.
The left piece know we were having inflation when we
were having it. It wasn't like MSNBC was saying, inflation
is exploded. You may have noticed, and many people did,
that the price of butter was going up and the
price of everything else was going up, but it was
(07:05):
never particularly highlighted. And so many people on the left
are incapable of actually observing anything on their own. It's
only when they're told of something that they start reacting
to it. It's an entire class of society, about half
this country, that only does what it's told and only
thinks what it's told to think about anyway, that's where
(07:26):
the affordability came from. But let me go back to
where I want to take this. Why are people open
to the notion that Marxism is the answer to affordability.
That's where Charlie Kirk made a comment, and it's been resurrected,
(07:46):
and it's not being talked about in some conservative circles
as being prophetic before I read the comment. Let's back
into this. George W. Bush President. One of the things
that he tried to achieve that I think failed was
he kept talking about having an ownership society. Bush had
(08:06):
a number of ideas that sounded pretty good that didn't
work out. One of his ideas was to bring democracy
to the Middle East. Democracy didn't work in the Middle East.
I didn't know that at the time, but it's clear
that it doesn't. Bush kept pushing this opportunity society. He
(08:30):
pushed very hard for home ownership. He pushed very hard
for entrepreneurialism where people would own their own business. Again,
go back to the skin in the game argument. If
you own something and it goes up in value, you've
created your own economic security plan. For instance, if housing
(08:56):
costs are exploding, but you own housing, it's not a
bad thing for you. If you own a rental property
where the rents go from eighteen hundred dollars a month
to twenty seven hundred dollars a month, and you own
that property, well, that increase is making is keeping up
with all of your costs that are going up for
(09:17):
everything else. If you own a home that you buy
for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and fifteen years
later it's worth six hundred and seventy five thousand dollars,
that home is less affordable than somebody else, but you
own the thing that went up in value. Growth in
an economy only benefits from people who are actually participating
in the economy, and participating in the economy goes beyond
(09:40):
simply I'm gonna go buy something, you have to have
a stake in it. And the comment that Charlie Kirk
made dealt with how in the big cities in the
United States, so many people, including very affluent people, we're
all renting. You see this trend in every big city
(10:07):
that we have. You see it in Milwaukee. The housing
boom in downtown Milwaukee is almost entirely rental. That housing boom,
by the way, as I'll mention in a moment here,
I think, has finally ended. I can't say that I'm
right about this because I've thought that the housing market
in downtown Milwaukee was overbuilt for fifteen years. It finally is,
(10:29):
but it certainly wasn't when I started saying it. But
it's almost all rental, and it's everywhere in the United States.
You find these cities that are going to hell, Seattle, Portland,
San Francisco, New York. Almost everybody in New York rents. Oh,
there are some people who in some of the boroughs
own a small home. And then there are the rich
people that own there in their co ops on Madison
Avenue and all of that stuff. But the overwhelming majority rent,
(10:53):
and in many cases rent and pay a fortune. When
you read and pay a fortune, affordability crushes you. When
things become more expensive and you don't own anything, your
(11:14):
entire economic life is you paying for other stuff. Secondly,
you don't have any skin in the game. There's a
piece on Fox News that appeared a few days ago,
written by Taylor Penley that deals with the Charlie Kirk comment,
and I want to share it here. Resurface warnings from
(11:36):
the Late Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk about the
dangers of young Americans embracing socialism are drawing new attention
after New York City mayor elect Zoron Mamdani, a self
described Democratic socialists, met with President Donald Trump and the
White House quote and here's the Charlie quote, how do
(11:56):
we get more young people under the age of thirty
five to have equity in the system. Not the democrat
version of equity where they want to have redistribution, but
actually are they paying a mortgage, do they own stuff?
Or are they permanent renters. This is July eleventh, not
(12:17):
long before he was killed. Charlie Kirk said this, if
you don't own anything, what skin do you have in
the game. You're completely at the mercy of everybody else.
All those apartment buildings in New York that these people
are being priced out of, that they're reading and know
Mondani coming in, I'm gonna do rent control, trying to
(12:39):
make it free. Well, somebody owns all those buildings. You
had an entire generation, the millennials, that just turn their
noses up at the notion of owning anything. They were
late to home ownership, they were late to starting a family.
Some were entrepreneurial, but most were not. They were the
(13:02):
ones that had got all these college degrees at which
they were trained in nothing. They ended up going into
the gig economy, driving uber, doing door dash, doing all
of these part time things because they couldn't find an
actual job. The notion that they would start and own
their own company non existed to them. I wonder, I
honestly don't know. I wonder what percentage of new businesses
(13:24):
started in America in the last twenty years from college graduates.
When I see who started business, it's like people opening
an HVAC company. People in the skilled trades, young people. Okay,
I worked in this for six years. Now I'm going
to start my own business. Those are the people who
have the plutancial for long term prosperity. Now. The thing
(13:49):
with regard to rent, and why I think it becomes
such a strong talking point for the Marxists, is that
in many instances these people are rather well off, but
everything's going out the door in rent. When I see
some of the rents in downtown Milwaukee, it blows my mind.
(14:11):
People paying three four five thousand dollars a month, And
I think about the value of a home that you
could get. If that was your mortgage payment, it would
be through the rough. You'd have an extremely nice home,
the long term potential of it increasing in value, helping
you to be set for life. But instead you're paying
(14:32):
pretty much everything you have to live in this nice
place that you're renting, and now here you are, you're
forty five years old. You have nothing to show for
the income that you have. Your rent keeps going up,
the cost of everything else is going up. Of course,
capitalism isn't working for you because you're not right now.
Part of capitalism you don't need anything now. The exception
to this is the people who beat the system. There
(14:54):
are some people who rent and then set aside their
money for them. This doesn't apply if you rent instead
of owning and take all of the savings. You're not
paying homeowners insurance, you're not a mortgae in all of this.
And when you'd get a mortgage a ton of it
as interest, you're not paying any of that. If you're
(15:15):
setting that aside for your own nest egg and you
got all this money in the bag, or you invested
in stocks or whatever, you're still going to be fine
because you own something else. Putting money in your four
oh one K that's in the stock market, that's owning something.
You're owning these businesses and hopefully that the companies whose
socks have been going up in price. But the people
that are living and saving nothing, which is a lot
(15:38):
of these lefties who live in the big cities, they're
not participating in that either. The stock market, other than
two or three hiccups, is then nothing but go up
since nineteen eighty one. But how about all the people
that didn't participate in that, and all despite the fact
that they had a rather high income because they were
spending it all I think they're are the ones that
(16:00):
are most open to the Marxist ideas, and take a
look at these bigs. It's all renting. Back to the
Peace on Fox News, quoting Charlie Kirk, a permanent renting
class in this country is the prerequisite, is the leading
ingredient for radical politics that nobody wants to see. That's
(16:21):
Charlie Kirk. He's right about this. If you went into
New York and took a look at the voting percentages
of renters in the mayoral race, I guarantee you that
it was higher than the overall total vote. The percentage
from Mamdani guarantee you continuing, we need to reinvigorate the
(16:44):
ownership economy, and then all of a sudden, when you
own stuff, you're less likely to burn down Wendy's and
vote for candidates like Zora Mandami Mamdani, he's right about
that too. If you own a home in Kenosha, you're
probably less likely during the riots at Gonocehan to burn
Kenosha down than if a you didn't even live in
(17:07):
the city, or b you're just a cannon somewhere. Again,
you don't have any skin in the game in the
area that I live in Florida, it's tons of tons
of condos, and a lot of the condo owners rent
out their condos because it's been just the license to
(17:29):
print money because the underlying value of the condos until
recently had been going up. Everybody wants to live in
South Florida, so they're able to charge huge rent so
they're making way more than their mortgage payments and all
the properties that they've bought and so on they bought in.
One of the big controversies though, is over whether or
(17:50):
not the buildings should allow the airbnbs and the other
short term rentals. Many of the buildings do not do it,
can write in the bylaws they don't allow the owners
to do short term rentals. Others do it because in
the very short term you can make a killing. I
take a look at what some people pay to spend
a weekend and fluid in an airbnb in it's as
(18:13):
much as like hotel rooms, but it's not in the
long term interest of everybody else who lives in the building.
It's the same as a neighborhood. How you like to
live next to somebody who airbnb their house out three
hundred and sixty five days a year, stating the obvious.
(18:35):
Somebody that's on a six day short term rental doesn't
give a crap about the condition of the place they're standing.
They beat it all up. What do they care. We're
becoming an airbnb society where nobody has laid their teeth
into anything. Paul's now in the rental locker business, this
(19:01):
storage business. Obviously, some people need to pay for storage.
Where's the money in the storage? Owning the ownit, not
reading it. It's the same for almost anything. So the
point that Charlie Kirk was making in this warning that
seems to be prophetic. If you want to have people
(19:21):
embrace capitalism and oppose self destructive policies like Marxism, which
leads to anarchy, they have to own stuff. And let's
go to the anarchy. By the way. The street takeovers
that we saw in Milwaukee this past summer, and that
occur all the time in Seattle and Portland, there were
several in New York City over the weekend. Fifty sixty
seventy cars come into a street that people have to
(19:43):
heighten their homes to terrify, and the police departments have
no ability to knock it down because they don't have
the fire power or the weaponry to deal with two
hundred people who have guns going crazy. Who's the most
bothered by this? Somebody who owns a home in that
block of New York. If you're a renter, okay, fine,
this is going I lay. If you're a renter, do
(20:04):
you care if people are burning your city down? Get
the flexibility. I you are on the place. You've got
what skin in the game now. I think what happened
with the millennials is as a group, and again we're generalizing.
There's always exceptions, but what happened with the millennials as
(20:25):
a group, their path into adulthood was delayed. I contend
by baby boomer parents. Many of them were living at
home when they were twenty seven years old. They call
mom and dad if they're pulled over by a cop.
(20:50):
I see some signs that there's a greater interest in
home ownership and property ownership and ownership of anything by
the gen zs. Not all of them, but for a
lot of these millennials. They didn't want to be tied down.
They didn't want responsibility. Well, that's the downside of owning something.
You have to be responsible for it. You don't want
to let it go to hell. But over the long term,
(21:11):
if you don't own anything, unless you're setting aside and
saving money, elsewise, you're crushed in an economy in which
things become more expensive. So you then bite onto policies
that will never ever work because you're looking for a
short term fix out of the mess that you're in.
(21:38):
What happens, of course, when you impose Marxism, which makes
includes price controls and make things free, is nobody has
an incentive to produce anything because there's price controls on them.
You can't make enough money by making that thing. This
seems to be what's going on with beef in America
so far as I can tell, and there isn't enough
of anything. And you up with the potato lines in Moscow.
(22:01):
I always bring up the potato lines in Moscow because
everybody saw those pictures of the potatoes. You'd see these
Russian women standing in line for seven hours to get
one potato, beaten down by the weather, haggard and as
ugly looking as you can be. Then we saw all
these Russian women who came to the United States when
they were in the twenties, after the Berlin after, you know,
the Soviet Union fell. They're all beautiful. So what we
(22:23):
learned is Russian women when they're young are rather beautiful.
But all the ones by the time there were fifty
when living under communism, looked like they were one hundred
and fifty years old. That's what shortages. It's what a
totally an economy that is always in a malaise due
to people. It doesn't work, Which brings me now to
(22:43):
where do you think we're going? You should know you
photo copied my material. You didn't do anything I was
Some of this has been stockpiled. It brings us to
South America. South America is thirty five years ahead of
us in the United States. What do I mean by that?
(23:04):
Thirty five years ago most of South America embraced Marxism
and socialism, and broadly speaking fifteen to thirty five years.
But Venezuela, Cuba, of course, started in the Caribbean, a
couple of the countries in Central America, Nicaragua back in
(23:26):
the eighties. Then the revolution in Venezuela. Brazil's now a mess.
Chile's gone back and forth. They embraced socialism and it's
been a disaster. The first country to turn was Argentina.
(23:46):
In its presidential election two years ago. Argentina elected a
conservative government. The president is named Mili m I l Ei.
Controversial guy also has I'm guessing his hairpiece because it
just it looks pretty goofy. He however, won reelection. His
government got a ratification of approval from the Argentine voters.
(24:09):
There is now it's a big story again in the
Wall Street Journal Chile. The conservative political party made significant
advances in the most recent election, and the story deals
about the right word turn in South America. So as
North America, certainly Canada and now fearfully the United States
turns to the left toward Marxism, South America is going
(24:30):
in the other direction. Well, we know why it's been
a disaster down there. And the pattern in all of
these South American nations that went marxisty is after coming
into the front door, being democratically elected, they then strip
away democratic rights. There are no elections. You have what
you have in Venezuela, in which it's government via gunpoint.
(24:53):
People try to escape bety have gotten out. The rest
of the people are living in abject poverty. The drug
dealers are the only force in the economy that's producing anything,
so they have an extraordinary amount of power. All of
that happens. See socialism, Marxism does it work. So once
they're in place, they can't allow you to have elections
(25:15):
because nobody's going to vote to keep it because everything
has gone to hell. The closest we came prior to
this point was the Carter years in America. Carter wasn't
a socialist, but the Democrats in the nineteen seventies were very,
very liberal, and they wrecked the economy. Everything was bad.
(25:38):
You had high inflation, high unemployment, and high interest rates,
and people felt as though their country was going to hell.
And Reagan was elected to undo all of that. We
never got to the point that South America is at now.
The danger we're facing now is Jimmy Carter was a liberal,
(26:00):
was incompetent. These Marxists that are coming around now are radicals.
They're true believers. Carter would have said I'm not a Marxist.
They would have considered it a slur. Until very recently,
Democrats kept denying that they were socialists, but now they
openly brag of it and admit it. And as I say,
(26:22):
all of this is going on at a time in
which the percentage of Americans who are homeowners is lower
than ever, And one of the reasons it's lower than
ever is that the values of homes has gone up
over the years. Housing prices are very high, rental housing
prices are extremely high. So the people who owned all
(26:45):
of these things that got way more expensive, they benefited
because their thing is worth way more. But those that
were crowded out are hurt the most. Trump came up
with this idea, and I don't think it's a good one,
but I under stan where he's coming from. The idea
of the fifty year mortgage. No, I don't think it's
a good idea because I just think having that much debt,
(27:05):
But I know why he's thinking of this. He's trying
to come up with a way to make housing affordable.
If you lower somebody's payment by stretching it over fifty years,
they're likely to buy. I know that the following points
sound stupid some of you out there, Oh, your points
(27:25):
sound stupid because this isn't really skin in the game,
But it works for me. I think one of the
reasons I won't say the only but I do think
the biggest the biggest reason that the Packers were able
to survive in Green Bay. There's nothing like this. There's
(27:48):
no other city of the size of green Bay that
has a pro football team, or for that matter, a
baseball or basketball team. Some of the lesser sports is
a couple like that. Green Bay is what one hundred
and ten thousand. How the pack survive by having the
team being owned. There are people who don't live in
(28:09):
Wisconsin to think the city of green Bay owns the team.
The team is owned by shareholders. Now it's an unusual
shareholder set up. As I said, the point's a little
stupid because the skin that a Packer shareholder has in
the game isn't real because if the Packers were ever sold,
you don't get anything and you can't even trade your stock.
(28:30):
But when you did put the money in, that skin
went into the game. There is the concept of pride
of ownership. The Packers would have left long ago if
they hadn't come up with this financially viable model. That
it is a financially viable model. Get the people who
(28:52):
like your team to keep putting in enough money that
you've got a going business. You don't need a billionaire
owner because you tens of millions of dollars that were
invested in by these shareholders all over the years. The
people who own the stock of the packers. Again, it's
limited skin in the game. It's not like say, if
(29:15):
I own a few shares of Microsoft, I actually own
something that I can sell, and where Microsoft goes up
in value, I can show a profit. It's not as
good as that. But by and large, when you have
a vested interest in doing well when the country does well,
you're and I think this is stating the obvious, you're
likely to be vested in capitalism and freedom than somebody
(29:40):
who has nothing to show up for their life. You've
got all of these highly educated people with these semi
worthless college degrees, feeling as though they're all under employed.
But they all want to live the good life, and
they tend to live in the big cities, the worst
place that they should live. It's really extended. It's even
(30:00):
those big cities, particularly cities like New York. One of
the things that hasn't worked is to tell the lefties
that are embracing Marxism, look around at all the other
places that have gone Marxist. Do you want to live
like that. It so far has not worked. I do
(30:22):
believe that it can work in national elections where many
people don't live in those cities. Telling somebody in New
York do you want it to be like Seattle didn't
work on them, But I think that that certainly works
on somebody sitting there in Germantown that they don't want
their country to be like Seattle in New York. So
(30:46):
the Democrats will face a problem if they run a
Marxist candidate for president, and their next candidate for president
may well be a Marxist, because that's where all the
momentum in the party is, and that will do really,
really well, But only in all of the places that
already everybody votes for the Democrats. Anyway. The Charlie Kirk argument, though,
(31:15):
again so prophetic, and he saw this coming again. His
comment was only a few months ago before them ninety one,
but he tied the embrace of Marxism to be end.
You know, one of Charlie had all these messages, one
of them go to church, another one young people get
married early in life, have children, And he kept saying
by a home, by a home, by a home, by
(31:36):
a home. This is a guy who what didn't graduate
from college. He thought college was semi worthless given what
it was that they were teaching. His message was resonating
with the younger people who listened to him, but it
was also largely into reaction to many of the mistakes
that those in the millennial generation made. It's certainly possible,
(32:00):
well that you could buy, you know, start a business.
You can go under you lose all your money. You
could also buy a home in the wrong neighborhood or
buy at the wrong time at the peak of a market,
and lose a fair amount of money. But over the
long haul, I would say ninety eight percent of the
people in America who bought a home made money in
(32:20):
the deal over the long haul. I don't mean one
to two years over the long haul, because now for
the long haul, well, look at houses where when when
I was a kid, I remember, I think I know what.
We moved from the shack across the river to the
suburbs of Kokana when it's not like closer to the
(32:40):
inner city. All those cities up there just have expanded
and expanded and expanded and expanded. It's like a ranch.
It was very, very hard to lose money. So why
do you think so many millennials didn't do it? As
I say, I just think that many of them wanted
to keep They didn't want to do they we wanted
(33:00):
to stay home. They wanted to have their freedom. They're
moving to adulthood was just way different than the generations
earlier than them. My generations move into adulthood was the
age of eighteen, and everybody got out of the house.
And the generation a little bit earlier than of those
that didn't go to college were all sent to Vietnam.
You were an adult right away. And the World War
(33:23):
two generation the same thing. They all came back and
they want to own a house. The people in the
World War two generation didn't own a house. There was
a term for them. Do you know what it was?
Loser bums. That's bums. I mean when I was a kid,
there were hardly any homes that were rental. They were all,
even the shacky ones, they were owned by the people
(33:45):
who lived in them. And again skin in the game,
suppose you want a little dumpy you know, I won't
even use the term very modest home in one of
our more affordable suburbs around here. You do not want
I have riots in your street. You don't want to
have murders. You don't want to have problems. You have
skin of the game. You live here and you own
(34:06):
your house. When you own nothing, when you have no
teeth at all in the United States of America, you
don't even have money in an IRA, that's lessen that.
When you own nothing, you're an open target for people
who push greed. Look at all these other people. They're
(34:27):
making all this money and you're not. Well, it's true,
they are making all this money and you're not. All
your money is going to the rent you're paying for
the place that you can't afford to live in because
you want to be in New Yorker. You want to
be here, or you want to be in this high
falutant place. The answer isn't to embrace Marxism. The answer
perhaps is that you would all of the other people
(34:47):
who are actually making money are doing. But when you're
forty four now you feel you're so far behind the
eight ball you can't ever catch up. So some Marxist
comes around in sells you a bill of goods, and
you're gonna fall for it, the same way that people
that Cuba fell for Castro the same way that the
Russians fell for lenin the same way that the nicer
(35:10):
Rogmans fell for Ortega. And I better stop these examples
because they'll run out of communists too. Uh well, that's
that's my point. That's my point. Belling's rule. The more
screwed up the city is, the more radical the mayor is.
(35:31):
I mean, it just holds. New York right now is
not as bad off as Chicago, but it will be,
that'll be, and that'll be the question is Brandon is
Johnson the mayor of Chicago, more radical than I'm Nadi?
They'll make a battle to the left and you'll be
able to measure it in the murder rate. And how
much the business is falling apart and business is leaving
end the economic decay. Times Square returning to what it
(35:54):
was in nineteen seventy nine, is opposed to the family friendly,
tourist mecca that it is now. And then ultimately the
Potato Line. You remember those pictures of the Russian women
standing in the Potato line and bad, everything's fallen, and
they none of them met anybody, but boy, it ended
(36:15):
the whole politics of envy because they couldn't be jealous
of the rich because nobody was just the only people
that were rich were the people that ran the country. Oh,
they have a great ability to make themselves rich. So
you get these billionaires, third generation foreign billionaires like Mamdani
that weren't raised in this country that come from and
hate America. Oh, they'll take care of themselves, and they'll
(36:38):
handle government jobs and government contracts, and all of the
stuff that's going to be free is going to be
provided by people that areround the doal of the government.
That part all works. You're listening to the Mark Belling podcast.
Now here's the next part of this. One of the
(37:00):
big problems that we face in this country are people
who are stupid but think they're smart. I mean, that's
just generally a problem in life. I've said this many times.
Idiots generally are not dangerous. There's not much harm they
can do because most idiots know they're idiots. If you're
somebody who's not very smart, that you're very very cautious
(37:20):
and you try very hard not to make a mistake
and you ask for help all the time. It's the
people who think they know something but don't are very,
very dangerous. Jason Riley Collum of the Wall Street Journal.
We all know about the great inflation that's gone on
at the big universities. This one is about Harvard twenty
(37:42):
four to twenty five. In other words, the academic year
that ended this past May, the percentage of a's courses,
the percentage of grades in courses at Harvard that were a's,
sixty sixty percent of the grades and all of the
(38:06):
courses were a's. Well, it's no wonder they all think
they're smart, and no wonder they all graduate and they find,
in their shock, they can't find a job. They out
only are at Harvard. They're getting all a's. The column
actually tracks how fast this number has gone through the moon.
(38:26):
Let me read his column. It's well written, he writes.
You can always tell a Harvard man, the old saying goes,
but you can't tell him much. That includes, apparently, that
he may not be as smart as his grades suggest.
A recent internal Harvard report found that more than sixty
percent of grades given to undergraduates in the twenty four
to twenty five academic year were a's. Up from and
(38:48):
then they go to two decades ago. This just blows
your way. Two decades ago would be let's see no.
Two thousand and five. We're not even talking the seventies.
Of the eighties, it was twenty four percent, then twenty
years ago twenty four percent. But one in four of
the grades at Harvard were a's. Now it's three and five.
(39:10):
That's not gradual. That's an incredible spike, to the point
that I think it makes the grades meaningless. I have
a theorist the weather handing out all of these a's,
but we'll get to that in a moment. The median
grade point of graduation, which was three point twenty nine
and three point eight five, is now three point eight three.
(39:31):
That's the median. I remember when four point zero was
considered to be perfect. The median is now three point
eight three. That means that there's a whole lot that
are in this tight little range above three point eight three.
But the old Gurris and Kila line from with have
a prairie home companion that I quote all the time,
(39:53):
Lake Wobegon, where all of the children are above average.
It's possible that these outcomes stem from Harvard admitting smarter
and more diligent applicants. That's what some of the people
who have found all this say, well, Harvard's got really
really smart people. They're doing a work. How could we
help it? If everybody in the class is doing a work.
(40:14):
I can't give this kid a C just because I
have to give out a certain amount of c's. If
they all mastered the work, I have to give them
the a's. That's the argument that's always been made. My
retort to that is, maybe the course is too simple
if everybody's mastering it. Secondly, what's the point of the
A from the student who did excellent work if everybody
(40:38):
gets the A? Now, I believe one of the things
that drives this grotesque grade inflation. There's a lot of things.
You know, student evaluations have become very very important. The
students are likely to rank highly a professor who gave
an A than a professor who flunked them out of
a course. You also have the whole which college you're
(40:58):
going to go to. It's a very competitive thing. Harvard's
hard to get into, but if you know that if
you do make it in, you're gonna get a bunch
of a's, it may make you likelier to go there
than a college that the a's aren't given out like candy,
So they all feel the same pressure to hand out
the a's, And then there's the whole sense of liberalism
and entitlement in which people have the sense that they
(41:18):
deserve the AA or I'm a woman, I'm this, I'm that.
Why are you not giving me an A when this
white person over here got it. But this adds to
the issue that we were talking about earlier about all
of the people who feel this sense of going nowhere,
even though they have these degrees and they're living in
(41:39):
the big cities and so on. There are a whole
lot of people who think that they did extraordinarily well
in college and their elite, when in fact they just
did the same as everybody else that was in there. Now,
the one thing that's still hard is getting in. And
(41:59):
one of the things that makes it hard, and it
gets into a discussion that we had earlier in the
week with regard to the H one B visas. You've
got a lot of foreign students who come in and
often highly educated, it's easier to get in. That part
is still difficult. Harvard has not raised it's student bodied
two hundred and seventy five thousand. It's still a tough
(42:19):
institution to get into. And so is Stanford, and so
is Yale, and so is MIT. But once they're in there,
the a's are handed out, and the end result of
this is a sense of arrogance from the people that graduate,
(42:41):
in which they assume that life is going to be
easier for them than it turns out to be. Little
did they know that they're entering a job market where
everybody else in the field also has all of these a's.
I'm going to change the subject about as radically as
(43:03):
you could change a subject. Well, I mean, I can
go to a break, but we don't have a break
to take, so I'm just gonna change the subject. Do
you want me to change the subject. This is something
that surprises me. It was like three years ago that
they announced that they're gonna make a movie about thunder
and lightning. I mean, I admit when I heard that,
(43:26):
I just assumed it wouldn't be very good. Didn't you
assume that it wouldn't be very good? Yeah, I mean
I just thought it wouldn't be very good. First of all,
they make a zillion movies, and somebody said they'm gonna
make a movie. You don't know if it's like a
movie that's being done by an actual big movie studio
or is this like something that somebody's gonna post on YouTube.
It isn't gonna be it's done for a film class.
I don't know. Paul says, I should call them Lightning
(43:52):
and Thunder people. By the way, mix up who is
who you have straight? Who is who was Claire Thunder
or was she Lightning? That you don't that part you
don't know. Lightning and Thunder was a Neil Diamond tribute band.
It was a husband and wife a couple, Mike and
(44:12):
Claire Sordino, who became like huge celebrities in Milwaukee. Like
I talked about this a lot when I started doing
my show and I got to be really really famous,
and I mentioned the Milwaukee has hardly any celebrities. There
was like me, There was Bou Black, a couple of
people on TV. And the thing about all of our
celebrities is that we were known anywhere else. There were
(44:33):
a few people that were from Milwaukee, like say l Jiaux,
who were world famous who they went on because in
their field, But by and large, our famous people were
famous only in Milwaukee, and Lightning and Thunder were two
of them. So anyway, they were this Neil Diamond private
band and they just got really really hot at the
local clubs and they play Summerfest. And to this day,
(44:56):
I don't remember if I've ever talked to Claire. It
was zillions of years ago. But I did talk to
Mike and it was during one of the many health
struggles that they both had. I mean, the reason this
makes for a movie is it's hard to find two
people that had more bad things happened to them and
their life just became a what soap opera isn't even
(45:17):
the right word. It was a matter of dealing with adversity.
She lost her leg, there was a bad automobile accident.
Then he got cancer, and it's, I guess, the stuff
that movies are made of. And they got a couple
of I don't know. They always say a list. I
don't know if these are a list stars, but they're
close Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson. Would you say, you
(45:39):
say that's a list or is that like a list?
I mean, when I think of a list, who's like
the biggest star of the world right now, who's really big,
like Brad Brad pitt is is he's now, He's is
he over the hill, Brad Pitt, he because he would be.
He would have been a list forever and ever. Yet,
So in other words, this isn't being done by nobody's Kate,
(46:00):
Kate Hudson's are pretty yeah, Kate, Tom Cruise would be.
Do you think Hugh Jackman's at the Tom Cruise level?
You think he is? Okay? Well, they made this movie
in because they're a Neil Diamond tribute banded Mike kind
of look like Neil Diamond, and she's in the band
and she's the partner, and they did Neil Diamond stuff
and they did other stuff and they made a movie
(46:21):
about them, and they got these two borderline A List
celebrities to do the movie. It has not been released, However,
the reviewers have seen it and the reviews that are
coming in are very very good. There's these aggregate services.
I think Rotten Tomatoes is one of them, and so on,
and like I said, the general public has not seen
it yet, but when the reviewers that have seen it
(46:42):
so far are giving it very, very very high marks.
The The movie is having its American premiere next week
in Milwaukee at the Oriental Theater. We are it's very
very amusing. Are they gonna put it? And now there
(47:03):
is actually a red carpet at the Oriental Theater, but
it's not a red carpet, if you know what I mean.
Are they gonna have like a red carpet and block
off the streets and they're gonna be people winding around
in tux sedes. We have glitterati like, are they gonna
bring Joan Rivers back from the dead and have her
stand at the thing and so on. One of the
reasons I suspect now is I just think that you
just can't move the Oriental Theater upscale. Secondly, Kate Hudson's
(47:24):
not coming, but Hugh jack But is, and the director
of the film, Morgan Brewer is excuse me, Craig Brewer
is also going to be here, and that will be
the American premiere. They actually had one, and I think
in London that they all went to about a week
and a half ago. The movie itself is released nationwide,
(47:46):
and this is important on Christmas Day. The Christmas Day
movies the studios released, these are the ones they think
are gonna be huge because that period between Christmas and
New Year's is the busiest week of the year. For movies.
The other big time to release a movie is early
on the summer, like the summer Blockbuster. Kids are out
of school and so on. But that period around Christmas,
the movies that are released then are the ones that
(48:07):
really really huge. And this isn't a straight to Netflix
thing or anything like that. This will be in theaters
and I obviously haven't seen it, although I am going
to the I am going to this premiere, the premier event. Yeah,
it's well, everybody's coming on to this and it's all
part of the you know, to get publicity and they
want obviously they want everybody in Milwaukee to go. It's
(48:29):
a good way of jump starting then will be so
you know, Hugh j Ackman's going to Cops and this,
that and the other things. So they're having the premiere and.
Speaker 1 (48:38):
It just.
Speaker 2 (48:41):
I've talked about this a lot. When something happens in
Milwaukee that makes national lose, it's always a tad weird
isn't the right word, but unusual. A husband and wife
that do a Neil Diamond tribute act. That's not the
normal type of celebrity, but it's exactly what you would
think that would come out of Milwaukee and it kind
(49:01):
of becomes embraced by the community in the same way
Bob Yuker was the biggest sports celebrity that we ever had. Well,
he wasn't any good as a player. He became a
guy that was funny. It was like a Milwaukee kind
of thing. And yeah, I like I said, I don't
know if the movie is going to be any good,
but the reviewers say that it will be. The thing
I think that's tricky is, you know, almost all movies
(49:23):
like this, you see the rise to the top, which
is the good thing, and then you see all the
rock and vh one used to do documentaries about rock bands.
It was all the same thing, the rise to fame,
then the collapse and tragedy and then the resurrection. No,
I don't know how they make this the happy ending thing. Claire,
(49:44):
it's still alive and still performs, but shenew she had
obviously health issues, and yeah, she lost her leg and
Mike passed away. And how you tell the story without
the tragic part overwhelming the good part. But obviously they
they must know what they're doing. So the movie's got
(50:05):
a Christmas relief. It has its American premiere, and that
just means that's when you know, I don't know how
many seats the general public are going to be able
to get to for that, but they release the things
in dribs and drabs in the upper premiere, all in
an attempt to build publicity and so on. So hopefully
it'll be as good as the advanced notices would indicate.
(50:26):
I want to cover this story briefly. There's been a
lot of coverage of the collapse of the Neutral project.
Neutral is this company from Madison that said it was
going to build several high rises on Water Street in Milwaukee.
The first one has become a hole in the ground
that has become an embarrassment for the city. The developers
(50:48):
from Madison, the lead developers twenty seven years old. The
company's name is Neutral. He evidently ran out of money
and they had already started construction. They dug the hole
in the ground and there's a crane that costs a
lot of money. The contractor was CG. Schmidt. They stopped
doing work because they said they wanted to be paid.
Neutral didn't say much of anything. Now the cranes been
(51:09):
taken away and the project has failed. There are now indications,
according to the business journal that Neutral is facing problems
with a couple of its other projects. Well, let me
comment on this. First of all, even in a boom time,
this project didn't make any sense. I said when it
(51:30):
was announced that I thought that there was zero you'll
call me saying this zero chance of it happening, zero zero.
I talked to a developer that I didn't identify, and he
said that this proposal makes sense in Dubai, but nowhere
in the United States, and certainly not in Milwaukee. They
were going to do multiple high rises and take that
entire area near the market center for the performing arts
(51:51):
and turn it into this massive housing zone. And they
weren't going to be small units, they were going to
be high rises. In the first one, the Edison project
was the Edison was the first one to go up,
and it never got off the ground. All they have
is the whole the part of it is the City
of Milwaukee and Mayor Chevy and lafay at Crump, they
head of DCD. These are people who've never spent a
(52:13):
day in their life in the private sector, and they
never knew that this project was not doable, and that
they didn't realize that the developers didn't pass the smell test.
Some guys in their twenties do become superstar developers. There
are the Donald Trumps in the world, but these guys weren't.
But secondly, and this is my key, the biggest reason
this thing has stalled is because we have finally overbuilt
(52:35):
the downtown Milwaukee housing market. Now. I don't think they ever,
even the best of times, could have done five buildings,
but maybe the first one would have happened. Here's what's happening.
We have several high rises recently completed that are nowhere
near filled. The Couteur, which was delayed forever, finally built
(52:56):
and then opened now over a year ago, remains with
massive vacancies. If you go on their website, it lists
all of the apartments that are still available for rent.
It's a zillion of them now. A lot of them
with the good views toward the lake are gone, but
the vacancy rate is high. There's a facility on Van
(53:16):
Buren Street that's opened called Nova. It's got lots of
units available. Whether or not there's an economic component to
this or not, I don't know. I just think, like
anything else, you finally reach the point of critical mass.
We have all these housing units that over the last
thirty years have developed in the Third Ward of Milwaukee,
(53:38):
all the high rises that went up and downtown on
the Lower east Side, and because they were all successful
and all did well, more and more developers did them
until you run out of people to live in all
of these places. And the fact that you've got two
buildings that are nowhere near least I suspect what happened
is that developers of Neutral could not get financing from banks, lenders,
(54:01):
or investors to bank rule this because they saw the
two projects that are already finished appear not to be
going very well. What I think has happened is, at
least for the immediate period, the downtown Milwaukee housing boom
has finally. I'm not going to say there's any it's
(54:21):
just there's no more people to come in and rent
these places. If you keep building new units, it isn't
You can't fill up simply with somebody who lives in
one Downtown Milwaukee apartment to move to another, because you
need to need new people to justify all of the
new construction that you're doing with them. And I think
it finally maxed out from the perspective of Milwaukee. That's
(54:42):
the end of any kind of residential growth because there's
not any other part of the city that's had residential
growth at all. The only thing that's propped up the
south side has been illegal immigrants moving in the northwest side,
and portions of the inner city have become ghost towns.
But there's been this trend that you've seen in a
lot of places in the United States that started with
(55:02):
the millennials they have and then empty nester baby boomers
people living in downtowns. What's happened in some of those
cities is the cities have gone to hell San Francisco, Seattle,
Los Angeles, and people are moving out. We haven't had
the same component of going to hell in Milwaukee. I
think that this is more a case of it just
finally got overbuilt. I will be surprised if any major
(55:27):
new project that's primarily residential and I said major, I
don't mean fifteen twenty units major happens in the next
several years. So I think that this project here neutral
is the canary in the coalman A Milwaukee says it's
looking for a new developer. I don't know they're going
to find a developer I don't know anything's going to
happen there for quite some time. The first thing that
(55:50):
they can try to sue this developer, but you can't
get blood out of a turna van. If this company
was simply a guy who was in over his head
who eat a couple of projects in Madison, things were
going well, so we know things. He can create the
World Trade Center of Milwaukee here and did it after
all the money was there to be to be made.
(56:13):
Little story to cover here. There's a piece in the
Wall Street Journal on the takeover of CBS News by
Barry Weiss. For those of you who haven't been following
this closely, Barry Weiss was a reporter for the Wall
Street Journal in the New York Times. Left of center,
but she believed strongly in freedom of expression. And when
she was at the New York Times, she was the
(56:33):
op ed editor. She was the person in charge of
getting putting in columns that weren't written by columns for
the paper. And she printed it, and she greenlight greenlit
a column by senator from Arkansas might have been Cotton
that there was just an eternal objection to and there
was a huge falling out and the staff of The
New York Time. Couldn't Times, couldn't stand that any conservative
(56:55):
voice was in that paper at all. Since being forced
out of The New York Times, Berry Weiss is not
a podcast and other things in which she's drawn attention
to leftist media bias. She's becoming one of the queens
of the anti woke movement. CBS News was bought by Paramount.
Paramount was taken over by David Ellison, the son of
(57:16):
Larry Ellison of Oracle. David Ellison is not a leftist,
and he realizes that the only way to make CBS
News or any of these networks viable is to get
rid of the leftist bias. CBS News has some things
going for it, sixty Minutes and a few other brands
that have some value, but it and all of the
other networks have been killing themselves by being so overtly biased.
(57:38):
So Berry Weiss was brought in with a mission of
fixing this. Now I've said, I think it's very hard
to fix the mainstream media. The problem with the mainstream
media is the people who work in the mainstream media.
To simply tell them not to be biased, it's as
hard as telling somebody who eats too much. To stop
eating too much. It's like telling somebody hooked unfeded all
(58:00):
to stop using fentanyl. Should I come up with more examples?
Or as the point already clear? Well, she's in there,
and according to the story on the Wall Street Journal,
she told her colleagues that quote, I want to blow
this place up. Now, this will be interesting to watch.
Can you take something as leftist as CBS News and
(58:22):
remake it into a viable, fair and balanced news organization? Now?
If they can, I think they'll be successful. Whether or
not she can succeed in doing it or not is
another question. Let me quote from the Wall Street Journal
piece for a sense of Barry Weiss's approach to leading
CBS News in her first weeks on the job. Consider
a phrase the new editor in chief has used at
(58:43):
are as a rallying cry in meetings with colleagues. I
want to blow this place up. Wis the former New
York Times. I want to correct that, I want to
blow this up. She didn't say place blow this up?
Weis The former New York Times columnst turned anti woke crusader,
is working to overhaul the organization's evening news program. Counter
what she sees as a left leading bias in legacy
(59:04):
media and make the newsroom operate more efficients efficiently. She
has been given a mandate for change by David Ellison,
the new owner of CBS parent company, Paramount, which bought
her news and opinion platform, The Free Press for one
hundred and fifty million dollars. At the time of her appointment.
Ellison said he capped Weis to bring CBS news to
brings to CBS quote news that reflects reality and journalism
(59:28):
that doesn't seek to demonize but seeks to understand. Weiss
is operating with eInsight, with Ellison's full backing. Now the
story goes on and I do 'tenough time to dive
into it in more depth than that. As I said,
I'm skeptical that this can work. However, what there are
here are deep pockets. The owner of Paramount, David Ellison,
(59:52):
his dad Larry Ellison, just fell from two to three,
is the third richest person in the world. Barry Weiss
herself sold her company, Free Press for one hundred and
fifty million. So you have people who have very very
deep pockets here to ride out whatever internal objection that
there is and to be in this for the long haul.
(01:00:18):
If they are successful in turning CBS News into a
credible news organization, I think that they will then make
large amounts of money. But that if the challenge of
taking a huge leftist news see with Fox News when
(01:00:40):
they put it on the air, it was easier to
do because anybody who wasn't a died in the ideo
ideological liberal was hired by Fox, but they got all
of them. Secondly, Fox didn't take the on EIR News
product and try to do much with it. It simply
put on all these talk shows that were hosted by
conservatives that were out at night, and they tried, like
(01:01:03):
the Dickens, especially when Roger Rayles was there, to keep
the bias out of the news programs. But to do
it with the other large news organizations in a field
in which ninety percent of the people who go into
it are leftists is a really hard thing to do.
It's like taking a public school and trying to make
it not liberal. You're constantly fighting all of the leftist
(01:01:26):
teachers who want to teach leftism in the classroom. Which
she has going for her at CBS is this Her
owner is on her side, Her owner hand picked her
she's got a lot of money herself. And the people
who work at CBS are in a field in which
the jobs are being slashed right and left. So if
(01:01:46):
they want to keep their jobs, they don't have the
ability to be as arrogant as people who had a
greater amount of job security. This is the Mark Belling podcast.
This is the Mark Belling Podcast. We're releasing the podcast
on Friday, and we're rolling into the teel end of
(01:02:09):
the Thanksgiving weekend. I always contend that the worst day
of the year is this coming Sunday. Now, if you
don't have to travel, you're not doing anything. What do
you care? But it was conceint it's a perfect storm.
First of all, the airports and everything else are clogged
because people and the Thanksgiving weekend not on the Monday,
but they all come home on the Sunday. The airports
(01:02:29):
are always a mess. It's filled with people because it's
the end of November. The weather is often crappy, which
creates delays everywhere, and for people who want to drive
in Wisconsin, it's the end of deer hunting. See, you've
got all of these people that are coming back on
the roads, coming back from deer hunting, and you have
people that are traveling in Hopefully we'll get through all
(01:02:49):
of it. I'm way back when I had to go
to Washington, d C. For a meeting. This is in
the nineties, and the meeting was starting the Sunday night
of the end of Thanksgiving weekend. It's a Monday on
Tuesday meeting. And I remember that we were flying out
of Milwaukee with this is mid This is how far
back it was. Midwest Express or it might have been
Midwest Airlines then was still around. So we had a
NonStop to New York and we landed in New York.
(01:03:12):
It was at it was at National I don't think that.
I don't think the name had been changed yet to Reagan.
That's how far back it was. And we landed and
it was a driving rainstorm at Washington, and this is
you know, people going back to Washington, and any Sunday
night is huge because they're all coming back for government
on Monday and so on. We got to the airport
and it was just wall the wall people. Everybody's like,
(01:03:33):
we're in winter clothes and all this stuff. And this
is before there's uber and you step outside and you
need a ride and it was just pouring down rain.
And the other stories that I have where we used
to some friends of mine and I used to have
like a get together every Thanksgiving weekend. You come back
on Sunday and fighting the traffic of all of the
(01:03:53):
deer hunters. The I don't know if they've changed this yet,
but the stretch of the interstate between Toma and Man
that's for both. It's ninety and ninety four together. So
not only do you have two interstates that are combined together,
you've got all these people that are sort of coming
from the north and heading back towards southeastern Wisconsin and
toward Chicago. Ede free would just stop. And it's happened
(01:04:14):
for years and years and years. So if you're not
traveling on Sunday, you're probably better off. That's it for
this week's podcast. We'll be back with another one on Monday.
Speaker 1 (01:04:28):
The Mark Belling Podcast is a production of iHeartRadio Podcasts,
Production and engineering by Paul crown Forest. The Mark Belling
Podcast is presented by you Line for quality shipping and
industrial supplies. You Line has everything in stock. Visit you
line dot com. Listen to all of Mark's podcasts, always
available on the iHeartRadio, app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you
(01:04:51):
listen to your favorite podcasts s,
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