A portion of our Young Turks Main Show from April 04, 2017. For more go to http://www.tytmembership.com.
Hour 1: Cenk hosting. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Keith Ellison, and Pramila Jayapal are trying to pass a bill that would provide free college for students of families making less than a $125,000 a year. Cenk says that it’s things like this that makes Bernie Sanders the most popular politicians in America. If Democrats fought for issues like this, they would be much more popular among their constituents, and it would be a great investment in future generations. Donald Trump halted all U.S. grants to the United Nations Population Fund, an international humanitarian aid organization that provides reductive health care and works to end child marriage and female genital cutting more than 150 countries. Cenk says this move illustrates that Trump and the Republicans don’t actually care about women. In 2016, the funding provided access to contraceptives to 800,000 people around the world and prevented an estimated 100,000 unsafe abortions and 10,000 maternal deaths, according to the organization. Mike Pence has presented a new healthcare bill to the Freedom Caucus that cuts the Obamacare mandate that would require insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions. Ditching those protections would let insurers charge exorbitant rates for people with pre-existing conditions while also offering plans that don’t offer key services, like maternity care, hospitalization or lab services.
The United Arab Emirates arranged a secret meeting in January between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian close to President Vladimir Putin as part of an apparent effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and President-elect Donald Trump, according to U.S., European and Arab officials. While Prince refrained from playing a direct role in the Trump transition, his name surfaced so frequently in internal discussions that he seemed to function as an outside adviser whose opinions were valued on a range of issues, including plans for overhauling the U.S. intelligence community. He appears to have particularly close ties to Bannon, appearing multiple times on the Breitbart satellite radio program and website. Cenk makes connections between Erik Prince, Trump, and Russia, which further explains why Betsy Devos, Erik Prince’s sister, was appointed as Trumps education secretary, in Prince’s hopes that Trump would lift sanctions on Russia. Cenk hopes that they are able to trace Trump’s financial transactions for this. Carter Page met with and passed documents to a Russian intelligence operative in NYC in 2013. Cenk discusses Page’s connections to Russia, including a transcript of how stupid a particular Russian spy thought Page was.
The Interior Department said Monday it is scrapping an Obama-era rule aimed at ensuring that coal companies don’t shortchange taxpayers on huge volumes of coal extracted from public lands. Essentially the government is taking coal from public land, and selling it at a much higher price outside of the country and shortchanging taxpayers in return. This will deprive states of much-needed revenues. Jeff Sessions and the DOJ have put a new policy in place that would stop the government from exercising oversight over non-federal law enforcement. They claim the cops the oversight was meant to stop are just a few bad actors, despite evidence of a systemic probably of police abuse.
Cenk reads tweets. Trump is taking away workplace protections, most of which will affect women. Trump’s order undoes paycheck transparency and a ban on forced arbitration clauses for sexual harassment, sexual assault or discrimination claims — which helped women workers remain safe on the job. While people thought Ivanka Trump would be a champion of women within Trumps administration, she has failed to do so. Cenk and Ana say she is complicit to his administration because she is voluntarily working for it and not speaking against the issues the administration is perpetrating against women.
A WWII vet has come out at the age of 90 as a transgender woman. The only person she had come out to prior was her late wife in 1987, who would buy her dresses and jewelry. Cenk and Ana talk about how touched they are by this story. The vet talked about how she was so scared of how the world would treat her, so she didn’t come out until now. Cenk says that it’s incredible how in this world, it takes more courage to come out as transgender than to fight the Nazis.
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