The Cody Willard Show Part 1: Farmer Bailout, Trade War Endgame, Activism
Here’s “Part 1: Politics” of the transcript for this week’s episode of The Cody Willard Show . You can read “Part 2: Markets, Stocks and Cryptos” of the transcript here.
You can watch this week’s full episode on Facebook here or on YouTube here.
The Cody Willard Show is my once weekly 45-50 minute live show that you can find on Facebook, YouTube, Twitch TV, Periscope, Twitter and elsewhere. We also publish it each week in podcast form on iTunes, Soundcloud and Stitcher. Here’s the Politics portion of the transcript.
Cody: Well, hello everybody, and welcome back to another edition of the Cody Willard Show. I have my trusted compatriot and executive producer, Chris McHugh, along for the ride.
Chris: Yeah. Administration unveiling the short-term bailout for tariff at farmers hours after President Trump proclaimed on Twitter, “Tariffs are the greatest.” (Watch this clip on YouTube here or on Facebook here.)
Cody: What’s amazing is that this is not the tariffs, which we’ve been talking the last couple of shows about, but this is a bailout, a bailout for the farmers. I can’t figure out how Libertarians can delude themselves into thinking Trump is a Libertarian, and this is a classic example. A $12 billion welfare package for farmers, and it’s not truly for farmers. That’s what they say it’s going to be. Just like with every other bill that gets passed, the devil will be in the details. Wait until you see what the lobbyists and the attorneys and the assistants to the senators (who are supposed to be writing that bill ) are putting in the actual bill that would send a $12 billion of welfare, of entitlements to giant corporations related to the farming industry. Some of it will trickle down to farmers.
What’s crazy about that is the farming industry is classically Republican, right? I mean stereotypically Republican, and you’ll hear them talk, not just farmers but Republicans in general and so-called Conservatives. They pretend they’re Conservative and Republican at the same time, which you can’t be, because of things like this, a $12 billion bailout welfare entitlement package. If you were a farmer, just like if you were a banker in the bailout, you should refuse the welfare. You should quit. You should be like, “No, I want to sell my stuff and I’m going to find other markets.” What are you? How can you ever complain about entitlements again if you’re a farmer or a banker on welfare?
Which all banks still to today you are. Every emergency welfare program they created in the financial crisis in 2008, still in existence right now.
You don’t think this $12 billion bailout package for the farmers is just more, the beginning of more socialism and welfare? And you don’t think that this is a classic example of the government making business, an entire industry, that’s already dependent upon the government, even more dependent upon the government? It is marrying industry to the government, and there’s another name for that. It starts with F. I drop the F-bomb. You can go google “Cody Willard calls out Jon Stewart” if you want to know what the F-bomb word is. That’s the term he said I once “dropped on Obama.”
Chris: The great trade war of the 21st century, how is it going to end? Talk to me, Cody. (Watch this clip on YouTube here or on Facebook here.)
Cody: This is a question from a Trading with Cody subscriber from the chat yesterday. If you want to be able to ask me the questions that I answer on these shows and/or make an actual topic on the show, it’s that. You go to tradingwithcody.com. You sign up. I take your questions. I’m in the chatroom most every day, and we have a special weekly chat where we all get, the community gets together and we talk. What I answered on there is there’s three, really, scenarios. Okay?
Let’s go best case scenario. The best case scenario is that tariffs around the world are dropped. Free trade. Government not involved. Economy’s actually booming. Prosperity goes through the roof. That’s not even what this is about, though. None of these tariffs are trying to get free trade. It’s the corporations, the global corporations that are selling products around the world that will be writing these bills, that will be full of protections and subsidies for the companies that are going to benefit from whatever the new trade deals are. There’s a hint of how the most likely outcome of this is. The best case scenario is that it all works out just like Trump says he’s trying to do. There’s a 0 to 1% chance of the best case scenario happening
The worst case scenario would be that we have a huge trade war. Tariffs go through the roof. Inflation creeps up. Investment, capital flow goes to a standstill. Small businesses, medium enterprises, big corporations are all worried. Nobody wants to invest. Nobody can afford anything. Capital gets restricted. Rates go through the roof. There’s a 1 to 6% chance of that happening.
The most likely, 90 to 95% chance of happening is that basically the global corporations that are going to either benefit or suffer from these things write the bills for the Republican/Democrat regime under the Trump. You can pretend he’s not a Republican. You can pretend he’s a Libertarian, but again, bailouts, welfare entitlements flowing upward, not downward. It’s all tied in together. The most likely outcome is that we got more of the same. We got a bubble blowing bull market where the average consumer and poor person suffers, and pays more than their fair share in taxes, and corporations, giant corporations, getting lots of protections and subsidies and welfare and tax breaks.
Chris: Hey, Cody. Looking at the chatroom right now, and if you guys don’t know, you’re probably watching us one of these platforms. YouTube, Facebook, Cody’s personal Trading with Cody, the Cody Willard Show, Twitter via Periscope, and all that good stuff. Jeffrey C. Bornmane says, “EU down. China next, Cody.” But we do have a question here from Arthur Miller. He’s curious to know how much are tariffs will ratio to the 12 billion in farmer protection.
Cody: Look, there’s no way to quantify what the actual impact of the tariffs are.
By the way, I want to address the EU down, China next. Give me a break. The EU is not down. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. It’s not like they reduced and made it so that corporations and small businesses can freely send stuff to Europe. It’s just the tweak of it existing global corporate agreement.
Anyway, you can’t quantify what the actual tariffs are impacting the farmer industry or whatever right now, anyway, and regardless, you don’t create welfare programs if you’re a Libertarian, if you believe in Constitution. I mean, isn’t welfare programs what the Republicans and the people on the right media complain about all the time? “Waaaa, We can’t afford any more entitlements”? Well, all of a sudden they can find $12 billion of entitlements for farmers, because maybe tariffs are going to be impacting them or something? Meanwhile, apparently yeah, the guy just said, EU down. The soybean is going to be imported to more soybean, so wait, do we need the bailout package for farmers or not?
Look, don’t create bailout package. It’s a very slippery slope to Socialism. Oh, wait. We’ve got a mixed economy already, right? Well, those Republicans are taking full advantage of it. This is why I’m very anti-Republican and anti-Democrat. Power corrupts. The ability to send $12 billion welfare checks to an industry corrupts. You should not be okay with it. If you’re a Republican and you’re okay with entitlements for the farming industry — and again, it will be just crumbs, maybe 5 or 10% of that $12 billion will flow down to the small farmer, the small family farmer (and why does he even deserve any welfare anyway)? You don’t think other industries now are going to be lining up asking for more welfare?
Look, I don’t care how much the tariffs are impacting that particular industry. They’re going to impact me too. They’re going to impact you. They’re going to impact jobs. They’re going to impact all kinds of things, so do we all line up outside the government till? So we become a Socialist nation. That’s the slippery slope you’ve got to fight. Sorry, I’m just scared of it all.
Chris: Oh my goodness. Well, we’ve got lots of people on the chatroom here. I’m giving a shout out to Maria, Robert, Ally, Ed. They’re all just joining fresh and they want us to do a little bit “om” for Cody because he’s getting a little bit angry, which makes for good television, though. So why don’t we go back? Go back to a happy place, Cody, and for those of us vicariously living through your Facebook posts this weekends, looks like somebody had a good vacation.
Cody: We had four days. I haven’t had a vacation in a long time. My wife and I have to miss work –my wife misses more work than I do — taking care of our medically fragile, beautiful, happy, wonderful, joyous three-year-old, Trisomy 13 diagnosed. There’s a lot of adjectives for my baby, Amaris. She’s not even a baby anymore. She’s three years old.
I’m always happy when I talk about Amaris. Look, the point is we got to actually take Amaris and my older daughter, Lyncoln, four and a half years old, to a Michael Martin Murphy show. I have been talking about Michael Martin Murphy for several weeks on the Trading with Cody show. Here’s the song that has gotten me addicted. He just did the song. Michael Martin Murphy is great, his other music fine, but this song, it’s called Geronimo’s Cadillac. Listen for a second.
(singing)
Cody: “Oh, boy. Take me back. I want to ride in Geronimo’s Cadillac.” You know, the fact is Lyncoln and I got to meet Michael Martin Murphy before the show started. He was greeting people. They served a buffet. It was beautiful. It’s called the 3M Rocking Amphitheater. It’s Michael Martin Murphy’s property there in Red River, and it’s on a pond, as you could see there. Beautiful. He was out in front as they were serving us food and chatting with people, so actually, my daughter and I got to talk to him for a few minutes. He took Lyncoln over to the pond and showed her the ducks. Very nice, wonderful interaction, and sweet man.
But one of the things I want to hit on there is how political topics are framed today versus, say, in 1972, the year I was born, which coincidentally. It’s the year that song was published on his first album called Geronimo’s Cadillac. When I told Michael that I had talked to Lariat Geronimo and several of my other Apache friends about that song after I heard it a couple of months ago, he was very excited, frankly. I said, they feel like it’s a protest song, as I think that’s what Syrus had told me or someone a few weeks ago.
Michael thought that was pretty cool, and so when he got up there and he introduced that song, he mentioned that there was a gentleman that had requested it and said, “Some people think this is a protest song, and it is.”
Then he said, “I used to be a civil rights activist.”
But his sons had introduced him at the beginning of the show, among other things, talking about many of his accomplishments, but they that they call Michael “a cranky conservative cowboy.”
Then throughout the show, Michael talked about global warming and how he clearly doesn’t believe in it. It was exactly what you would hear the Republican talking points on any right-leaning media. He talked about how he thinks we need more cows because he thinks it’s healthy for the grass. He doesn’t think the carbon from cattle is a problem. The plants use carbon. But he talked about those things, and he talked about cowboy culture. Every topic, when he did — and he hit several political themes when he was up there throughout the show — they were all classic Republican-leaning.
I’ve struggled with trying to wrap my head around how you go from being a proud and rocking civil rights activist to probably loving the $12 billion bailout package for farmers.
The Democrats are worse in many ways than the Republicans. I’m not a Democrat, I not a Republican, and I never will be. Even though the Democrats are no longer even framing things as “civil results movements,” I know a Democrat lobbyist I went to lunch with several years ago that I love. He’s a good friend, but he told me, unless the entity has millions of dollars in funding or revenue, he’s not going to lobby for it.
So who’s going to lobby for the poor people? Nobody is lobbying for the poor people, and I think in the ’60s people did. I think people lobbied for and fought for in an underground guerilla kind of fashion, and I don’t mean violent, but activists.
We’re not activists anymore. It’s hard to be an activist. It’s easy to let people feed you your viewpoints and feed you what they think is important to talk about in general. We’re talking about bailouts and tariffs all day every day. We don’t talk about how, as Michael Martin Murphy himself wrote 46 years ago, “the white men stole their land and they won’t give it back, and they gave Geronimo a Cadillac.” They tried to put Geronimo on welfare too. Slippery slope, man.
Chris: All right. Just checking out the active chatroom here. Shout outs to Benjamin, Estgher, Adam. Arthur here says, “It’s healthy to have your perspective, Cody, and keep the Republican/Democrat regime in check. Just don’t let it limit your MMA game.”
Cody: What’s MMA in this case… is it mixed martial arts? Arthur Miller, get more specific so we have context for your comment.
Maybe he’s just thinking I’m going to go MMA on the Republican/Democrat regime, which I’m not because I don’t … no violence, man. Just activism.
Chris: He specifies. “Sometimes it takes several disciplines to take on your dynamic opponent.”
Cody: This ain’t mixed martial arts. This is mixed political arts.
Chris: That’s right. No blood. Here’s a comment in the chatroom. Adam says, “The White House press conferences are like watching financial networks. It’s not about what you said yesterday. It’s about what you say today that matters. LOL.” I wonder if he was really laughing out loud when he said that. I feel …
Cody: I just want to be clear that’s not anything different from under Obama or Bush or Clinton or the other Bush or Reagan or Carter. Every president we’ve had in my lifetime, it’s all a game show.
Chris: You know, Cody, I’m just looking at The Wire, things that are crossing right now. White House bars CNN correspondent from open press event.
Cody: What does it matter? What does it matter? It’s all a side game. That’s a joke. It’s not left or right. CNN is not against Trump. CNN is not against the Republic/Democrat regime. You listen to anything on CNN, they are all about Republicans and Democrats. None of them ever speak for the independent. None of them are questioning the globalist. Forget globalists. Trump pretends he’s an anti-globalist, so that’s a loaded term. I’m not even going to use that. They try to pretend they’re not just in the pockets of a giant corporate Republican/Democrat regime system. The CNN guy is not going to ask Trump anything meaningful. He’s not going to call out the Libertarian lacking, the hypocrisy of a $12 billion bailout. I mean, give me a break. It doesn’t even matter. Let’s not even discuss that.
Chris: That shall be done. We won’t even discuss it. It’s interesting here, as you go. I wonder what Fox News vas on their headlines right now versus CNN. CNN reads, top of the fold, above the fold, Michael Cohen sent up flares, but Trump never came to help. Go over to Fox News, what do they have? Their app is not loading. Oh, Zuck. Financial news right at the top, Zuck loses $16 billion in five minutes, and there’s a little picture of him. He’s looking down.
Cody: I’m sure that Zuck is not exactly like, dancing and partying and thinking this a wonderful day, but this is, he lost $16 billion on paper and he wasn’t going to be able to send … that’s not a real number.
More on Facebook in part 2 of the transcript, which is all about the markets, stocks and cryptos.
