I want to start with the news that you broke at DC report which is associated with a bank bailout that is huge and it's not just one bank. >> Well, we don't know actually if it's one or more banks. I mean, we have very good reason to suspect JP Morgan is at the center of this, but the story that we broke is that for more than five years, there were virtually no cash infusions into the banks uh that deal with the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Uh handful of transactions, most of them in the neighborhood of hundred million dollars, bupkas in American banking. And then on Halloween, more than $50 billion was suddenly infused into one or more banks. We think JP Morgan, but we don't know that. Since then, every third business day, basically, there's been a multi-billion dollar infusion. So we went from no business to tens of tens of billions of dollars altogether hundred billion dollars in less than two months. >> And and David just to be clear this information comes from reporting that was done by someone at DC report. >> Yes. James James S. Henry is our economics correspondent. Uh Jim is a Harvard educated lawyer who while in his 20s became the chief economist at Mckenzian Company, the biggest business consulting firm in the country. And for a while as a very young man, he was a direct report to General Electric's chairman Jack Welch. And he threw all that away 45 or so years ago to spend his life pursuing illicit finance, uh corrupt banking, etc. and Jim discovered this sudden change of pattern with all of these cash infusions into the banks. I then um discovered that on December 10th, the New York Federal Reserve Bank, that's the local branch of the central bank in the United States, adopted a new policy that was not reported anywhere except in some very specialized uh financial publications. Uh it essentially said that uh the limits we've put on how big of a cash infusion you can get in any day are now gone. unlimited amounts of cash will be made available on demand. They did limit individual banks and depending on how you read the announcement, which was very poorly worded, frankly, it's vague and hard to understand. Uh it appears that individual banks could borrow as much as $240 billion in a single day. Let me give you a little perspective on that. There there are six banks we call the two big to fail banks. uh JP Morgan, uh Bank of America, Wells Fargo, UBS, HSBC, uh there's one other um last year their total combined profits were $152 billion. So, one way of reading the new rule is an individual bank could borrow more than all the profits all those banks made last year. Now, if you read it more narrowly, they can borrow $80 billion. But either way, why would the Federal Reserve suddenly go from we have limits on how much cash you can get to there are no limits? Well, the only logical explanation for that is we're expecting huge demands for cash from the biggest banks. Now, why should you care as a someone who follows this show? This is what happened when the economy collapsed in 2008. And I wrote a piece to make clear on the public record. I saw this coming in 2004. Actually wrote two pieces in 2004. Um Allan Greenspan, who was the Fred chairman at the time, you know, said, "Nobody could have seen this coming after it happened." And gee, I don't know. I'm just a reporter. I saw it coming. So did some other people. U you didn't see it because of willful blindness. And at the moment, the reason you should be very scared about this, and I was on a a podcast earlier today with five people who are experts in this field, including Bill Black, the uh lawyer who figured out the savings and loan crisis back at the end of the 1980s and got on the show before high level bankers sent to prison. >> Yeah. um we all see the same thing that this may well be uh an early and ominous sign that there's a big huge crisis coming. And what all of us agreed were troubled by is when the economy collapsed in 2008 and some of the naysayers were saying well this could sink us for 10 years. Uh Ben Bernani, the head of the Fed, did a pretty good job of um mitigating the damage because he was a highly competent person who knew what he was doing and there were other highly competent people who knew what they were doing who mitigated the circumstances. Lots of terrible things done including huge giveaways to the banks. But we have not spent the last 10 years in a recession either. Now we have a clown car group of people and shortly Jerome Powell's tenure as the head of the Federal Reserve. He was appointed by Trump in his first term ends and you're going to end up with people who have no idea what to do. Trump will have no idea what to do. He he has a degree in economics but he didn't earn it. It was given to him by Penn. And we could really be in a terrible disaster here. And why would there be a big need suddenly for cash by the biggest bank in the country or other big banks? Well, JP Morgan, the biggest bank, uh, sold 5,900 tons of silver that it doesn't own, 171 million troy ounces. It sold it hoping to sell at a high price and then buy it back at a lower price because they thought the price would fall. Well, instead the price has nearly tripled. That means they're in what's called a short squeeze and there's not enough silver available to trade out there for them to replace all the silver that they sold. Uh, and as calls come in, they for for the money, they have to pony up cash. In addition, they made a bet on cryptocurrency. In that case, they bet that crypto, like Bitcoin, was going to go up in price. Instead, the Bitcoin has fallen by roughly onethird. And all of this puts you and me and everybody else at risk because Congress repealed something called the GlassSteagall Act from the 1930s. The GlassSteagall Act said, "Hey, Wall Street, if you want to be in the business of underwriting stocks, which is a very risky business, you go right ahead. If you want to be in in insurance, you go right ahead. You want to be in retail banking, where we have our checking accounts and local merchants have their accounts, you go right ahead. But you can only be in one. Pick one. That's your lane." Because of the ideas that Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman brought about. No, no, no, no. bankers know what they're doing. How would they have be trusted with all this money if they didn't know what they're doing? You can put all three of those together and it creates terrible incentives. Uh the if you take risky gamles like selling silver short because you expect the price will fall and you can make a lot of money by selling high and buying cheap. Um the stocks the stock and the stock options of the executives and the board of directors go up. And if you make a wrong bet, um, then what happens is the government steps in and covers your losses. And that's corporate socialism. Um, Jim Henry, who dug this up, calls it um says that what we have are banksters implying gangsters. Uh, and he's been he spent decades, you know, exposing unbelievable corruption in the banking business. And right now there's no serious regulation of the banking business going on. Uh it's very clear the directions from this White House are, you know, you're not supposed to be bothering these business people. And so bureaucracies do what they're told. They're not. And this could be the earliest warning of a severe drop in the economy where the stock market falls by 20, 30, 50%. It'll recover eventually, but it falls. Lots of people lose their jobs, lots of people lose their homes. It becomes very difficult to borrow money. Um, the same thing we saw happen in 2008. And by some measures, Mark, economists have shown that the great recession of 2008 to 10 did more harm and more lasting harm than the great depression of 1929-32. And think about that. it more harm. The there's a professor at Santa Clair University, a business professor who's done a very detailed study of the great recession and he concludes that basically we lost two years of the complete economic output of the country at the time of it happened 20 I'm sorry 40 trillion dollar. So if we do it in today's dollars it would be about $60 trillion of economic output just gone. This is why Wow, you said so much. First of all, I love the >> Yeah, I'm sorry about that. >> No, no, no. It's great. I I love In fact, you you you anticipated a couple of questions I was going to have. Uh I I love the uh term banksters. First of all, I think that that's a I mean and and the other thing just as again as a digression or as an aside, it's interesting to me always when people who we certainly see in the banking world, uh the Jamie Diamonds of the world, the very uh well-educated Harvard graduates make these huge plays like the the silver uh futures, etc., And they're that wrong about crypto, about whatever there. In other words, you know, it's not as gamed as the system is, it's not a lead pipe cinch that wherever these guys put their money, it's it's going to be a profit. In fact, it's backstopped sadly by us. Well, and and in 2012, yeah, 2012. So, this is after the Great Recession. Um, there was a trade made in the London office of JP Morgan. When they realized it had gone badly, they went to a very Wall Street friendly journalist who wrote a story saying, "Well, they're going to have to announce at JP Morgan that a rogue trader uh made mistakes and it's going to cost them maybe a billion dollars." Well, a it was about $6 billion. And the company's claim, JP Morgan's claim was, well, we bought a hedge. A hedge is a way to reduce risk that the price will go very down or very up. You pretty much guaranteed a profit a certain zone and that it morphed into a speculative bet. Well, a hedge, and I don't think most people have any idea this. If you do, you should tell the audience. A hedge is a complicated legal document with all sorts of obligations and and dates and obligations to be met. And a hedge can no more morph into a speculative bet than my marriage can morph into a dog. That's what I wrote at the time. It it was an absurd thing. But most of the reporters who cover Wall Street, many of whom are very well- paid. The ones on TV are million-doll salary folks, they don't know anything about how banking actually works. They've never read the regulations and the statutes and and uh you know, they they depend on access and interviews. And since we broke our story, it was actually yesterday morning that we broke the story. We have been completely whited out. Uh that's a newsroom phrase meaning nobody picked up on our story except overseas. And um uh one of the reasons I want to mention this with you today is that if it turns out that we're right that there is big trouble coming, we get credit. Little tiny DC report which struggles to stay in business because we run it on a shoestring. Almost everybody including James Henry and I are volunteers. >> Wow. >> But we have to pay for you know the technical costs of these things. Um, we take even less money than you do. And >> that that says a lot. I I would say uh also that we're going to >> We were there first. >> We were we will link to the story under this video and I'll also of course I'll tweet it and put it on social media. But more to the point because I think a lot of people check out these videos. We'll have a link to it right under the video. A depressed Canadian says the great recession also fueled right-wing populism like the Tea Party of 2010 2012 which gave us their nominal leader in Trump and and that that was actually astroturf uh you know fake grass uh this was not a grassroots movement. It was funded by the Koch brothers but they did a very good job of making it appear it was a grassroots movement though it was not. And you'll notice it's pretty much faded away and been replaced by uh MAGA. And the people who are in MAGA fall basically into two categories. There are the cynics, typically those with education and money, who see an chance to exploit something. And the rest of it is people who they don't know anything, but their economics are terrible and they now have an enemy to blame for it. Anybody who was in MAGA, it's your fault. Um but the that's one of the dangers. One of the dangers in 1929 was are we going to follow the Europeans and become a fascist or communist country uh because of the economic damage done through these uh through you know casino capitalism. I mean and and one of the things that's been very nice today is that a whole bunch of websites because I and some other people have been trying to monitor what gets picked up about this. There's post after post that says things like David K. Johnston doesn't publish BS or if Johnston says it, you can rely on it. And a few people said, "Well, I don't know." And I've gone in and said, "Go read the story. The the graphic is there for you to see uh the the details and the dates." Of course, JP Morgan, we went to five different spokespersons. Nobody's gotten back to us, and I don't expect they will. They only talk to friendly journalists. And the New York Fed uh tried to tell a journalist, one one we know of who called them because they came back to us and said, "Oh, this is routine. A repo, these are called repo deals where you swap securities for cash. These go on all the time. They're absolutely ordinary." And and the person said, "No, wait a minute. Your own chart shows essentially no deals for more than five years and then suddenly this explosion of deals." >> There it is. We we'll have to get back to you about that. Um um um >> there's the repo chart that David's talking about with nothing going on then all of a sudden off the scale >> Yeah. >> from July. >> And you know in in the collapse in 2008, one of the key things that happened is there were uh what were called credit default swaps. So, if some loan I've made were to sour, I'm going to make a swap with somebody else to reduce my risk, to hedge my risk of loss. Well, there were so many credit default swaps sold because of nice fat fees for relatively little work that something like 10 times the total value net worth of the planet was in these swaps. So, as soon as they begin to fail, it's a house of cards. They all fall apart. Right now uh there are very good indications that we have um all sorts of these speculative bets on crypto particularly but silver some other commodities at levels that exceed um the total value of the available uh commodities and that's exactly what happened before and by the way four years before the collapse in 2008 I wrote two stories in the New York Times short little stories But in the Sunday paper that essentially said to anybody who was reading them, housing prices are overly inflated and cannot continue at this rate because of a very simple metric. Uh you know, you you if you make $100,000 a year, you can't finance a million-doll house. You don't qualify. And wages were growing at about onethird No, I'm sorry, I got that backwards. House prices are going about 30% faster than wages for a long period of time and it just can't continue. That's just not possible. U there has to be an adjustment down the road. Uh but Alan Greenspan, the uh you know the uh head of the Federal Reserve at the time when when the collapse came said nobody could have seen this coming. Yeah, right. I'm a reporter and I saw it coming >> back then. David, and then I'll get to this one. What was the right way in which the economy needed to be treated? What was the right way to stop that bleeding? >> Well, I I think that um several things should have happened. Uh I think that first of all the the Bush administration in its closing days wanted to get something like 700 almost 800 billion dollars and be able to spend it as it saw fit with a proviso that no one could challenge or question what they were doing. And the head of treasury at the time is a former head of go former head of Goldman Sachs, the biggest uh investment bank. And I was the first person to jump on that and say, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's uh uh that's not at all right. You have to be accountable for what you do." Um but I think the key things that should have happened is we should have prosecuted a lot of these bankers. Uh Bill Black, who I'm sure you've had on the show, >> Yeah. was the guy who figured out what was going on in the savings and loans back in the late 80s and the 2008 collapse was 175 times bigger. >> Yeah. And in the SNL at SNL to which you've referred people did go to prison, people were prosecuted. Well, because of Bill, uh, almost 900 highlevel bankers, not not run-of-the-mill people, I mean CEOs and COOs of companies, chief operating officers, went to prison. They were convicted and went to prison. Um, when the 2008 collapse came, Bill was persona non-graded. No one would speak to him. The Obama administration came in. Uh Eric Holder, the corporate lawyer who became attorney general, said, "Oh, we're going after everybody on Wall Street." He was told by the inspector general, "No, we're not. You're not going after anybody on Wall Street." Uh the FBI during the Bush administration literally put out a statement saying that there are two kinds of mortgage fraud in America. Both of those frauds involve corrupt borrowers. What Bill showed was the corruption was the bankers who were looting their own companies. and he later wrote a book, The Best Way to Rob a Bank, Own One. >> Yeah, it's a great title. >> There should have been massive prosecutions. Barack Obama said on 60 Minutes, "Well, all of these things are terrible, but they're not crimes." And when that happened, I remember flying out of my chair and going, "Fraud is always and everywhere a crime." >> Sure, >> Obama made a decision. He wanted to rebuild the economy rather than get retribution. So people like Jaime Diamond still have their jobs and they're fabulously wealthier today. And the six too big to fail banks have a much bigger share of American banking. So we should have protected ordinary people. Number one, we should have infused the banks with the cash that they needed. But under ownerous terms for the top managers, you know, you can't get any more stock options or cash in any of your stock until you've repaid these notes on ownerous terms. I analyzed one of the terms that was in the public record where Warren Buffett put up some money and the federal government put up money and with a little chart and I showed that the federal government just gave away the store whereas Warren Buffett made a very smart deal for a lot of money of the kind you can make when your borrower is in trouble financially. And so they mitigated it. We didn't have a 10-year long recession mark, but nobody was held to account for this. And one of the things I point out at DC Report is that as the rules exist now, there's every incentive for the people Jim Henry calls banksters to take these dangerous bets because they make them richer if they pay off. And if they don't, well, the government's going to have to step in and save you because otherwise the whole economy will go into a long recession. >> Yeah. Socialize the losses. Uh uh a Eagle Tarion. Uh I think it's hard for me to see the uh the name on the small screen. 1929 written by Andrew Ross Sorcin. A must- readad history. Yeah. >> Yeah. I the the the the the reporter who is considered the most friendly to Wall Street, the one who wrote the earlier book that basically said, you know who the victims were of the 2000 economic collapse? It was the bankers. The Wall Street bankers are the ones who were the victims. >> Who who who said that? It was >> Andrew Ross Sorcin. >> Okay. So, this the guy who wrote this book. Yeah. Um >> he is, you know, he has a he's on TV. He is very very sympathetic to Wall Street and well, everything he writes is literally true. It's the it's the tone and the approach. And of course, it's made him a very very wealthy and influential man. uh because you know he he provides to these people what they want. I mean JP Morgan you know is ruthless in trying to make sure that you tow the line with them that you don't write what they don't want. And I believe me I've been on the front line of that without ever speaking to anybody at at JP Morgan but clearly being told that you know they wanted to get me. Uh and I'm not the only this happened to Jim Henry. Uh, I have no doubt that that that that they're not uh they're not happy to hear that David K. Johnston's written anything about them, but I uh on Sorcin, everything I'd seen and read was him suggesting that we are basically dealing with an overheated market and that we're another >> I think he's absolutely fundamentally right about that. The the level of the stock market compared to the profits reported by companies are completely out of whack. um and the only reason the economy isn't in deep trouble right now because more than a million people have been laid off this year, the polite term for fired. Um is because of these massive investments being made in artificial intelligence. And what's going on there is a race to create the big monopoly of the future. So you've got Microsoft, Meta, uh Alphabet, which owns Google, and uh Facebook. Um there's one more company I'm missing. Anyhow, four big companies pouring unbelievable sums of money, hiring some coders who reportedly are getting million-dollar signing bonuses because they believe whoever gets the win on artificial intelligence will have an effective monopoly and the profits will be off the chart. Um, a lot of that money will turn out to be wasted. And uh people who use the internet regularly, if you're on this show, you know, you know that uh right now AI is at a stage where it produces ridiculous results. Um I I said to AI today uh that I wanted to send an email to Mark Thompson and it kept saying um you don't have a listing for Charles Dayton. I even reset my phone and repeated it and thing crazy things like that happen. >> Yeah. Yeah. No, it's the voice recognition is is trouble, but so is the factual the factf finding is off, too. I mean, I'll get stuff back from them that all the time is way off. >> And then when I correct it, it'll say good catch. Uh, you know, it was like, wow. >> Well, in fact, somebody on one of the social media today said that they went to AI and it said that I didn't write this article. It's a fraud. and and I I posted, well, you need to check your AI because it's what the uh software writers call delusional. Um anyway, it's I don't want I want to be clear about Andrew Ross Sorcin. He's factually completely accurate all the time. It's a function of the tone and approach you take to it. And um you know, I that troubles me a great deal. >> Sure. But he's fundamentally right that we are in something eerily similar to both 1929 and 2008. And the scary part, the really scary part is in 1932, we elected a president who brought in a team of people who knew what to do to repair the economy. In 2008, well, they didn't prosecute people. Uh they did nonetheless prevent a long-term decline. Not this gang in the White House today. They have no idea what they're doing. They They are complete Philistines. The Washington Post just reported that they're seeking emergency permission to tear down 12 historic buildings in Washington. Why? They could be used in an active shooter situation. Uh >> that's the Department of Homeland Security. It's crazy. I saw that piece. Yeah, it's uh but but you're right. the clown car that is there as you suggest isn't is no match for the kind of crash that you suggest we are you know sort of on the precipice of and and for those who are in our audience hanging on to what we have you know we've built through a life and we still have mortgages and still have commitments of one sort or another. Is there high ground in an economy that's teetering? Um, well, time is always the recovery. If you go look at a market stock market chart, if you've got your money in the Vanguard 500 or similar fund, which is what Warren Buffett and other people recommend most people should do, including me, um, if you're not going to spend the money in the next three or five years, don't worry about it. It's going to fall in price. It'll come back up. If you sell when you're at the bottom, you will never recover. So, um, pardon me while I >> turn off my phone. I thought I turned it off. Um, the, um, uh, so the, uh, uh, money market funds are not safe. In 2008, uh, they did what's called breaking the buck. The money markets are always set to be a dollar per share and then you get whatever interest is on top of that. So, if it's a dollar two, you get two pennies of interest. and uh they broke the buck, but it came back. So, is this your retirement money? Just don't worry about it. And in fact, look at it as an opportunity to put more money in while prices are cheap if you if you don't lose your job because you can buy cheaply. But if you're, you know, if you're my age, I just turned 77 Christmas Eve. Uh you don't have >> There you go. That's great, >> right? You don't have that that very long-term outlook. So, it depends on your circumstances. Um, but I would not do things if I unless I had to. I would not go buy a new car today unless I need to because my car is failing. Um, I wouldn't take on a new mortgage. I certainly wouldn't borrow money to go on a vacation or finance a wedding or something. Um, I would try to hoard cash. um increase your savings even if the bank's only paying you 1% interest because uh if the economy gets in trouble there's nothing better for you than cash um and I and I think we will I mean it could be tomorrow and it could be two years from now but the current conditions as Andrew Ross Sarkin points out in his book 1929 and we've been pointing out they cannot continue. >> Yeah. Well, I mean this reporting at DC report is is really strong. We'll have a link to it under this video. Uh, look, we've talked a lot about Trump and this incoming administration when we were beginning this year. Uh, they wasted no time in pardoning all the J6ers. They wasted no time in pardoning some of the biggest white collar offenders uh in the history of uh of white collar offenses. Uh the Justice Department is stocked with henchmen for Trump, as is the FBI, as uh is essentially every other institution in Washington. They just recalled all the diplomats from overseas that were appointed during the Biden administration. >> All the career the career diplomats. >> The career diplomats, thank you. Uh that they'll get reassigned or uh and then apparently many of those positions will be populated by Trump appointments. Uh uh so as we finish the year, David K. John, and by the way, I'm I'm gratified to learn that you're Christmas Eve. I'm the day after Christmas, so we have Christmas bookended with our birthdays. Uh um give me a uh a state of this year. Uh Trump has done tremendous damage to some serious uh uh long-standing American institutions. What stands out to you? >> Well, let me rely on the title of my 2018 book, The Middle Book in my Trump Trilogy. It's Even worse than you think. And it is. It's vastly worse than you think. Uh first of all, they are selling pardons. I don't think anybody can miss that they are selling pardons. And while Trump may not be liable, I think he can be despite the Supreme Court ruling that he has immunity for official acts. Giving a pardon is an official act. Taking money is not an official act. So I think he can be prosecuted for this. um that and remember we pardoned a guy who was convicted of bringing 400 tons of cocaine into this country. Um they are uh not paying attention to cyber threats. Uh Pete Hgsth announced the Pentagon was going to stop putting all this effort into who's trying to break into the Pentagon's computers, which goes on tens of thousands of times a day, including by foreign governments. Uh they >> by the way what was the what what was the political reasoning or the twisted perverse reasoning on the part of heath in that >> announcement? I I do not remember but I I think he didn't see cyber as part of the warrior ethos and lethality. >> Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. um uh the uh uh the economic damage that is being done because of the tariffs that Trump continues to tell people and and I continue to get emails from people, you know, the tariffs mean China is paying our taxes. No, you're paying the tariff. The Chinese aren't paying a dime. And by the way, the Chinese just hit their first trillion dollar export year. They're just pivoting away from us and doing business everywhere else in the world. And at the same time, they're putting more money into science. And they are making massive loans to poor countries, which are going to give them tremendous leverage over countries in Asia and Africa going forward. They're buying up water rights and land so they can grow crops if the climate change, as we expect, gets much worse. Um, and and Trump has no clue to what's going on here. He is an appallingly ignorant man. So, I think things are much worse than they even appear. Um, I think Donald's mental decline, and remember, I've known him for 37 more than 37 years now, is getting rapidly worse. Uh, his rants and things are all indicative of serious dementia issues. Um and and with a handful of exceptions like Marjgery Taylor Green and Lauren Boowart of all people, uh the Republican establishment continues to bow down to Trump. And on the Democratic side, the two leaders on Capitol Hill, Hakee Jeff and Charles Schumer, continue to represent what some people call the corporate Democrats. Uh they're not in touch with what's going on here. And so I I think that next year will be economically worse. I point out that Jamie Diamond Diamond of JP Morgan Chase said about six months ago that the American economy is deteriorating and he hasn't changed his position about that. So I I'd be very concerned going forward. Um I would be especially concerned about things like measles uh which we had essentially eradicated. Measles is an incredibly deadly disease. Uh when I was a boy in the 50s, parents were just terrified about polio, measles, and mumps. And lo and behold, we now have measles in the Bay Area. >> Yeah. >> The San Francisco Bay area. Um unheard of for for more than a decade. Um uh we we're we're not properly going to be vaccinating children. uh we are putting uh women at risk if they get pregnant and you know about one in six pregnancies just that we know of because you got to be pregnant for a while because you know before you know you're pregnant about one in six known pregnancies just on its own doesn't work out but the the Trump administration doesn't get that they don't understand biology and and we're infuriating our friends I mean the Danes now have people on duty 24 hours a day to monitor everything that comes out of Trump's mouth. Uh he's renewed his suggestion that we might just seize Greenland, which is owned by Denmark. Um he's talked about invading Mexico and he won't, you know, clearly threatening a war, which he has no authority to do in Venezuela. And so long as the the Republican leadership bows down to him, he's going to continue in his dictatorial ways. So I'm I I I'm I'm sorry. As somebody who is an incurable optimist, I often say nobody has eight children as I do unless they're incurable optimist. Um I I actually see very dark period in at least in the next year. Um, if the Democrats can avoid their habitual uh snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and actually get control of the House and the Senate, then Trump is stymied and uh things he can do will be very limited. He'll do some terrible things, but he'll be highly limited and there will be investigations that will lead to prosecutions for people. Um, but you know, that means people have to not go, "Oh, I don't want to hear about politics. You know, it's all dirty. I don't care." They're all the same. They're not all the same. And that's the whole point of citizenship. We're not going to have some king, whether it's George III or demented Donald, tell us what to do. We're going to choose our own fate. And we can choose. We absolutely can choose to throw away our liberty, to throw away our prosperity, and to decide to live like people did in the Soviet Union, like they live today in China, uh, under a dictator who doesn't care about you one wit. >> Yeah. Isn't it true? You're here. Uh, David, thank you for a great year and I look forward to next year. Again, links to the new piece from DC Report with some uh revelations when it comes to the future at dcreport.org, but also under this uh video. Thanks, David K. Johnston. >> Thank you. >> All the best. Happy New Year. >> Hi, it's Mark and I thought that was great. Hit the notification bell. You'll know whenever there's a new video being dropped. 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