Good
morning and welcome to the Earl Ingram show.
As always you can join us at 855-752-4842.
That's eight five five seven five two forty eight forty two.
You can text us at that same number.
Hey, good morning to you.
Cardi.
What's going on, man?
Man, I have been waiting since Monday for this day to come early.
And I know you know that it's the weekend.
I know Saint knows that as well.
And it's finally Friday, man.
TGIF Friday, man.
How are you feeling today, brother?
Well, I guess I can't push back against it being Friday, but.
You know, maybe Sandy will.
So Sandy, does it mean you're doing something special on the weekend?
All right, it's Friday.
That means Friday's my co-host Sandy Williams.
Hey, good morning to you, Sandy.
How you doing, man?
Yeah, it was, you know, I was reading some stuff, Sandy, about why the Bucks won't play small ball.
Why won't they give it a go?
You know they can play Kuzma Yanis Damian Lillard Well Trent Trent Well, I mean I mean we were seeing this last night you and I
Yeah.
Yeah, they're very athletic
and And that was kind of something you and I and the world had been seen you got to give John Hortz Credit Sandy he really
He does know what he's doing.
He's a guy who can make something out of nothing, right?
Yeah, I mean, you know the people he well Middleton was obviously a major figure, but He's gotten a lot of new faces and pretty valuable ones and if you look at their draft level when they were drafted These are high draft picks as well.
I mean these were people with a lot of promise
Kevin Porter Jr.
was one of the top draft choices his year, and some other teams gave up on him, but he's a very talented guy, obviously.
Well, you know, Sandy, they're doing this without draft choices, without high draft choices.
They have no other choice but to rebuild the team the way they've done it, and they've actually done a good job of it.
Yeah, my sense is quite frankly that they're better right now than they were last year at the same time Even though the hopes their playoff hopes last year were higher than they are now I suspect that they might get better.
They might do better in the playoffs this year than they did last year.
I think they're gonna surprise some people the Denver Nuggets are a very good team, you know and And they did they handle them quite successful.
Well,
yeah Denver had won 10 out of the 11 games going into last night.
So
You know, I mean, they're playing a hot team.
But anyway, Sandy, before we get into all the different things we're going to talk about, Jeff Bezos has basically told the Washington Post he's going to control now their opinion columns and what they're writing.
And he basically wants to kind of move
them into the paper's opinion section with henceforth focus on defending personal liberties and free markets.
Sandy, what is, I mean, the media, we talk about government and we talk about all these other things Sandy, but they're taking away the freedom
Donald Trump has successfully created a Kool-Aid trough in Washington that people are lined up in front of drinking the Kool-Aid out of.
And people are literally, particularly the people of great wealth.
whose great wealth is dependent on potential government acquiescence to how they operate, right?
So Amazon is in the crosshairs of potential antitrust actions from Washington.
It's gotten so big.
I mean, it's mainly because of its success, but if businesses get too big, they can get split up regardless of their good intent if they have too much market power.
Amazon has immense market power now, and I'm sure Jeff Bezos is very afraid that a Trump administration could bring its antitrust guns in the direction of Amazon and create real problems, or potentially its efforts in AI.
All these guys that are the oligarchs that are hanging around Washington now have a lot at stake with respect to the government policies, and all of them have decided that they don't want to risk that.
And they all are currying the favor of Donald Trump.
So here's Jeff Bezos with this major newspaper who's now talking about, you know, in the same language that is used by JD Vance, you know, this protection of free speech in the name of avoiding the repression from the government is hardly protecting free speech.
We know Zuckerberg.
Same thing.
Here's a guy who knuckled under to Donald Trump.
These are the three guys.
the three wealthiest men in this nation, Sandy, coming together to take away freedom of speech to the
Well, Bezos, you know, he's not taking away the freedom of speech.
What he's doing is he's going to control the speech of Washington.
He's going to control the speech of the Washington Post so that it doesn't cross.
get crosswise with Donald Trump.
And so what he's doing is knuckling under to Donald Trump's control of the press.
But that's the Washington Post.
Jeff Bezos, people know him, but they know more.
They read the Washington Post.
They trust the Washington Post.
And yet many of the people who are now there, the head guy said, well, I'm leaving.
I can't deal
Well, and in fact, Jeff Bezos was able to buy the Washington Post because the family selling it thought that he would have the independence that was derived from all of his wealth so that he could stand up to political pressure and make sure that the Washington Post, particularly its opinion side, would not kowtow to special interest.
And here we have just the opposite happening.
And it's a demonstration of when you
put too much power into the, into the hands of a president, he can act like Don Corleone.
He can be a mafia boss.
He's got a protection.
He's got the ultimate protection racket.
If he can control how government behaves with respect to any business or any, any, uh, any sort of operation in the country.
So Sandy, if, if, if the
freedom of expression and speech and, and we talk about the pillars.
of our society and those kinds of things.
You know, I don't know why Bezos, look, these guys have enough money that they shouldn't be so terrified.
But I guess I say they have enough money, but they don't think they have enough money.
Well, and then he's got his baby Amazon, you know his kids his creature the thing he created Amazon is precious to him Not only does it spin off a huge amount of money But I'm sure it is as far as he's concerned a complete extension of who Jeff Bezos is and he doesn't want to jeopardize it and apparently it's far more important than some basic principles of freedom of the press now
You know, the right will say, well, he's not he's doing this voluntarily.
But, you know, the whole notion of the press coutowing to the pressure from the government is is really press repression, you know, and it's the problem of it's not a free press when it has to knuckle under to a government that will turn on it in a way that will be damaging to it if it stands up to it.
You know, Sandy, you know, historically.
the the the media which was separate from our government was able to sometimes bring pressure on the government if the government was wrong.
Right.
I mean,
Well, you know, Sandy, when you when you look and see
that the president of the United States can determine who, who he has an arena with in the media.
Hey, that's Sandy Williams.
I don't want that guy in here.
He's got to go.
Yeah.
You know, that Earl Ingram, that guy, I don't want him in here.
He's got to go.
I mean, this is what they're doing, Sandy.
What bothers me is that this is a.
This is a drip, drip, drip, but it's much more than a drip, drip, drip of sort of what's going on.
This is a fire hose and it's happening in every direction.
And it is all about giving the president of the United States complete power over everyone and giving him the kind of power that allows him to repress those who would speak out against him.
Well, so
we, the American people,
You know, I always have to come back to that, you know, you know, Tom from LA always talks about, we eat people out of government.
Well, that may have been in theory, but Sandy, it clearly looks like whatever that was in theory is not going to be in practice anymore.
Ultimately hits the ground locally.
Okay.
And so we can say that, you know, this is national politics and what we ought to be focusing on is local politics because all politics is local.
Well, it turns out that everything has traction locally.
We don't experience it until we experience it personally, but we are going to experience a great deal of what's going on.
And we're going to, and these mass firings, this disabling of the government generally, is going to, we're going to experience it in the way we experience the things that government does that impact us.
And it's far more than just our local school districts and our local police.
And we can talk about that after the turn.
But, you know, I think that the problem is that if,
If we decide that we don't have to worry about what's going on nationally, because all that really matters is local, is that we will watch Rome burn.
We'll be playing the violin, but Rome will be burning.
You know, Sandy, Tony says, can't have dissenters if you don't let them talk.
And, you know, he's just kind of, you know.
know.
8-5-5, 7-5-2, 48-42, it's Friday.
I mean, it's Friday's with my co-host, Sandy Williams and you.
We're going to talk about the EPA.
Yeah, EPA.
And the fact that they're talking about getting 65% of it, the impact that'll have on you and me.
8-5-5, 7-5-2, 48-42.
You're tuning in to the Erlingham show.
I see trees of green, red roses too.
I see them bloom for me and you.
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.
All
right, welcome back to the Erlingham Show.
As always, you can join us at 855-752-4842.
Text us at that same number.
It's Tuesday.
That means Tuesday is my call.
Sandy wins.
Even though Sandy...
If you listen to the lyrics of that song, and I love that song, and the lyrics are so simplistic, and, you know, Lewis Armstrong and his voice and, you know, stands the test of time.
But those things that he talked about.
He was talking about the environment.
He was talking about the world.
He was early in that game because America had gone through the industrial revolution and to some extent almost prided itself on the industrial pollution that was the mark of prosperity in almost every city in America.
But it was creating a mess.
So let me...
That takes us to the fact that the EPA they want to cut 65% of the environment of environmental protection agencies So before we get into all of it and I want to contrast What the last president was doing compared to what this president is doing
as it relates to environmental protection.
You know, you know, Sandy.
With with Joe Biden, you can say whatever you want to say about him.
But he was starting to move in the direction of addressing.
The ills of the environment.
I spent a career, I spent a lifetime watching this process of.
the environment and the issues associated with an unregulated world and what it does to the environment and then what happens when you introduce some sensible regulation to try and cure it.
You and I were born long enough ago so that we remember the industrial sewer that was the Milwaukee River.
Milwaukee River used to be lined with industries and one of the reasons they were all along the Milwaukee River was that they could dump their waste.
into the river.
So we had tanneries.
Where now there are apartments, there used to be leather tanneries.
And leather tanneries are very dirty process.
They use chrome to make sure that the high doesn't rot when it becomes leather.
They do all kinds of things that, number one, have terrible odors.
And number two,
have created lots of waste, which are toxic waste, which they would simply dump into the Milwaukee River.
Summer in Milwaukee in 1955 had a terrible odor to it.
You couldn't go down to the area near North Water Street along the river in the summer on a hot day without essentially almost putting a handkerchief over your mouth so you could survive the terrible smell.
And the air also suffered.
We had coal burning power plants surrounding the city.
And in the winter and in the summer, there was grit in the air, smog.
I mean, and California, of course, was famous for its smog.
You couldn't see beyond your nose some days in Los Angeles because of the smog in the air.
And it wasn't until 1972.
Under the actually the Nixon administration and with the Republican Congress that are a mixed Congress that they passed the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act and until those two federal laws were passed In which there was there was an agreement that the federal government would try to set up unified standards across the country It was a race to the bottom
States would compete for industry to locate there by telling them that they would be unregulated, that they could operate more freely in this jurisdiction.
And so what happened was the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act set up standards that would be unified across the country so that Mississippi couldn't lure business from Wisconsin by telling them, not only do we not have unions down here, but don't worry, we won't.
regulate the water that comes out of your plant.
We'll give you a pass on all that.
And so it allowed the race to the bottom to stop.
And in the matter of 10 years, the Milwaukee River, the Wisconsin River, the Fox River, the Cuyahuga River in Cleveland that used to catch on fire, all of these things
we're moving in the direction of becoming much, much cleaner to the point where all of these rivers now are almost capable of supporting swimming, okay?
It's like the Seine River in Paris where, you know, you can use these water bodies have purified to the point where you can fish in them and there are fish.
And you could even consider eating the fish, which, of course, we should all remember that there used to be a time when you were warned that you couldn't eat the fish that you caught in the vicinity of Milwaukee or any of the major cities in the country.
You know, Sandy, the fact that these things are moving in the right direction is what we should focus on.
You know, as you stated, I remember the Milwaukee River and that stench.
and the phone that was on the river.
You go down to the Milwaukee River now, people are frolicking.
They're doing the warm summer days, the boats are down.
People paddle boarding?
Yes.
You know, people are, you know, it's a recreational water body now instead of an industrial sewer.
And we should know that that was because
That was because the EPA was created and the EPA was holding all of the state's feet to the fire.
And that the industry in Wisconsin knew that they were gonna be subject to regulations that were the same sort of regulations as a business in Georgia or Mississippi or Arkansas or wherever.
And so they agreed to it.
And they went in the direction of cleaning the environment up.
Well, look what they did, Sandy.
They built an absolute...
beautiful river walk that is getting ready to be expanded.
And there's commerce up and down that river that you would have never thought ever possible.
8-5-5-7-5-2-4-8-4-2.
It is Friday.
And that means Friday's my co-host Sandy Williams and you on The Earl Ingram
Show.
Welcome back to the Arling Room Show.
As always, you can join us at 855-752-4842.
You can text us at that same number.
It's Friday.
That means Friday's my co-host Sandy Williams.
Sandy, the music.
That was actually all about the environment and the problems of pollution.
that were so prevalent in the United States, and somehow we have a short memory.
And I think part of the problem is that the government hasn't done a very good job of explaining to us, the people, about all the things that they do for us that have seriously local impacts.
And one of the agencies where the impacts are essentially all local is the Environmental Protection Agency.
And before that agency was existed, our localities were a mess, and they were headed in a terrible direction.
My personal legal career involved one November in 1972 being asked to write a memo about the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act, which had just passed.
And I suddenly became the environmental law expert in my law firm because there was no such thing as environmental law until those two
laws passed and the federal government began to say, you know, we're going to establish uniform standards across the country to try and help all these localities clean up.
And, you know, I worked with paper companies and others, all of whom had recognized the problem, but weren't ready to roll up their sleeves and clean up their businesses unless all of their competitors had to do the same thing.
and the federal law offered that opportunity and so I worked with a bunch of Wisconsin's biggest employers, the paper industry, all of whom were
if not enthusiastic, very willing to participate in this cleanup program because it was uniform across the country.
And we were no longer involved in a state by state race to the bottom to try and make laws as relaxed as possible to attract industry in a way which was very negative for the localities.
So let me,
because I spent 34 years in industry,
and worked at a major plant that produced auto frames, the number one frame producer in the world.
Huge, huge plant, A.L.
Smith, Sandy that you're familiar with.
A.L.
Smith, and in many places like it, prior to EPA Sandy, dumped waste where they were.
Something called Brownfields.
Yes, well, you know Sandy it even occurs right now still to this day where they When they when they turn the oil into gasoline what are those things call I can't think of it refiner refineries refineries Sandy refineries in communities, right?
I mean the damage that they cause the oil fields
And once they're done with the oil fields, they leave all of this.
The EPA is there to
Well, interestingly, the United States, the paper industry in the 1970s, where they went to find out how to clean up was to Europe, because Europe was aware of this problem well before the United States and had started regulating it so that the paper industry in Europe was...
far cleaner than the paper industry in the United States.
And there were lessons to be learned across the world as to how to clean up our industry.
So the fact is that the marketplace doesn't.
cure this problem.
It takes government regulation to get industry to get comfortable with the notion that they're going to be expending money, that their competitors will be expending as well, and that they therefore are willing and fully willing to do it.
And the same is true with the protection of workers.
We should understand that child labor laws kept children from working in industry long, long ago.
And until child labor laws restricted that practice,
poor people of America were being exploited children were going to work in factories rather than going to high school because they needed to you know because it was a source of income and paltry income at that and then and then the workers who did work that went to work worked in dangerous places many of them were paid on piecework meaning they'd get paid for each item that they created rather than by the hour and so they were highly incented to work very very fast and that fast work results
in many lost fingers.
If you worked in a punch press factory, you had to push the thing in, pull your hands out, hit the pedal to make this punch come down, put your hands back in, and it's remarkable, but almost everyone who worked in that industry before they put controls on those equipment would put their hands in, hit the pedal, and didn't get their hands out before they lost their fingers.
So Sandy,
you're talking about my life as a young man.
34 years when I walked into this plant and now I get right to you 34 years I walked in the plant and When I walked in the plant at 18 years old a snotty nose kid it was called the butcher shop Because we we actually were the number one Press operation in the world alesmith those punch presses you're talking about forming things
And so when I walked into the plant, most of the guys had lost fingers, arms.
You know, they couldn't hear because there was nothing to deal with safety.
And so OSHA, the EPA in addition to the creation of OSHA in the early 70s, made it possible for a guy like me to spend 34 years in there, Sandy, walk out and still be able to hear.
and still have all of my digits.
Yeah.
Right?
I mean, that's what, that's what OSHA.
That's what the
I mean... Well, yeah.
I mean, the fact was that workers needed protection.
They almost needed protection from themselves, because if you're doing piecework, you want to work as fast as possible on that little control that makes it a little more inconvenient to do your work.
Maybe you want to turn that control off, the one that keeps your hands from being under the punch press when you push the pedal.
And so, you know, the fact is that uniform regulation across the country...
is very important to achieving any sort of effective local regulation because you want everyone across the country to face the same kind of regulation so that it isn't a race to the bottom.
And this is what governments should have done a better job of.
of describing to the people of this country the importance of uniform federal regulation across the country in so many different categories so that we don't have a race to the bottom.
We have a process that protects all of our workers equally across the country and affects our employers equally across the country.
And that's one of the ways that our country's economy has changed a great deal since
1890 when Donald Trump apparently wants to return our economy to the world of tariffs to a world in which there's no government regulation, a world in which states are the only source of regulation.
I can tell you from my personal history that that course of action will be very bad for localities, very bad.
Hey, Al from Milwaukee.
Al, thank you.
You say what, sir?
Good morning.
Good
morning.
First of all, let me say, Sandy, I started working for General Motors in a drop forge when I was 16 while I was still in high school.
I worked third shift and got off work, cleaned up and then went to school.
But I did that till I went into military.
But when you described all of the degradation of the rivers and all of that, and you're talking about
Rivers that you could light fire to you're talking about the city of Flint, Michigan and Saigon law and Pontiac and Cadillac, Michigan because
General
Motors Mobile Factory General Motors Ford Chrysler That's where they were and all discharge out of all those plants went straight into the waterways and the tributaries of those
And we could not fish.
We couldn't swim.
We couldn't get into water at all back in those days.
And here more recently, when the foreign car companies started moving into the United States, in some areas in Alabama and Kentucky, these same things were going on.
When I was in Birmingham, Alabama, I have relatives there.
They've got a Mercedes plant that's almost 30 miles long along the highway, and they don't have big rivers down there.
And people are complaining about the pollution in the water and the wells and all of that.
So this is not something that used to be, it's something that's still going on, it's just moving to different parts of the country.
Yeah, and what you point out is absolutely with the point I was trying to make which is that Pollution has its effect locally, you know, it you know, it's a national problem But it has its impact locally and and so the federal government is the important entity that causes this to get fixed and and reducing the workforce of the EPA by 65% can only
disable that agency from being able to do what it's supposed to do.
And that's really the intent, I think, of these huge manpower cuts, is to disable what the people who dislike government call the administrative state, to make the administrative state incapable of doing what it was created by the people to do.
And it's going to have some terrible consequences.
And my fear is that what we need is the government to start
putting out an annual report that tells us all of the things that it is doing for us so that we lose this current concept which is that the government is simply bloat so that we can get rid of all of it and it won't have any consequence on us personally or locally and good riddance.
So Sandy let me let me ask you because you know I too live during those times and now all of this
We have to explain the government has to explain to the citizens What it does That's only because Republicans came up with this there was none of that ever mentioned in the years and the decades before What we've just started hearing from Republicans about our government
But first of all, the level of taxation as a percentage of GDP in this country is at a low over a 75 year period.
The federal workforce has not increased in number wise at a material level over the past decades, okay?
So we're not in a circumstance where this government is a creeping cancer.
that has become this problem over time.
The government is now what it has been over the last 50 years.
It's simply been doing its job for 50 years, but rather quietly.
You know, Sandy, here's a guide quickly.
Hundreds of NWSNOAA employees fired as we head into tornado season.
More firings coming today.
People aren't gonna, they're gonna, they're gonna realize that these things
the hurricane season all those things are going to come right
well and and the and that federal employees do not simply sit at desks moving pieces of paper from one corner to the other these people first of all the NOAA and these these are agencies filled with with specialists meteorologists people of high training uh people who are trained to try and uh
bring those agencies into the 21st century with computer science.
And, you know, this is just all a misconception.
I mean, I'm sure that our government can stand every four years in analysis of the efficiency of its operations.
But our government is there for very good reasons, and I can speak to some of them
personally.
4842.
It's Friday.
Hang on.
You're tuned in to the Arlingham show.
My
co-host Sandy Williams.
you
you visit American City you will find it very pretty just two things of which you must beware don't drink the water and don't breathe the air pollution, pollution they got smog and sewage and mud turn on your tap and get hot and cold running crud see the hollywoods and the sturgeons being wiped out
to buy detergents.
Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly, but they don't last long if they try.
Pollution, pollution, you can use the latest to
the best.
To their lingam shows, always you can join us at 855-752-4842.
Text us at that same number.
It's Friday, it means Friday's my call.
Sandy Wimms, Sandy, your music selection.
a satirical singer back in the 60s.
And he was singing about something that really mattered back then and matters now as well, which is pollution.
We were talking about how it is that the federal government has all of its traction actually locally.
And one of the main ways, one of the main things that it does with respect to local conditions is regulate the environment.
Let's go to...
Jim from Brookfield.
Hey, good morning, Jim.
Thank you for the call.
You say
what?
Good morning, Earl and Sandy.
Happy Friday.
I say two comments.
One, I just want to follow up on what Sandy just referenced, that there's this false narrative out there that is being painted by Moscow and the Trump administration, that the government employees, the federal government employees, are just a bunch of overpaid, underworked paper pushers.
And when all these cuts are finalized and the ramifications start trickling down, people are going to realize
that they're not going to be able to get the veterans were not able to get their benefits.
Undue time, people may not get social security checks on time.
There's already long lines at national parks.
We're going to lose consumer protection.
But these individuals are not just a bunch of overpaid paper pushers.
They actually do services for us to the American public and protect us from the big businesses like Elon Musk who's running roughshod over us.
Okay, so that's just one quick comment.
But secondly, on Tuesday, Mr. Trump announced he's going to control the press corps, which for over 100 years has been an independently chosen press corps.
that covers the president on Air Force One in the overall office or whatnot.
They're gonna change that.
They're gonna eliminate a lot of the traditional wire services like AP, UPI and whatnot and bring in new streaming outlets.
Okay, I get it that they do need to update things after 100 years and adjust for social media, but you know what they're gonna do is just bring in streaming services that only...
spew their talking points and a favorable to them, you know, Joe Rogan, whoever.
So that's something we really need to be aware of that once the narrative coming out of the press corps from Washington on Air Force One in the overall office or that once that's controlled, we're not going to find out a lot of what's going on in Mr. Trump's Oval Office.
Hey, Jim, thank you very much for the call.
Sandy, you want to respond to any of that?
absolutely.
Access to public figures, access to things that are happening, when they're happening, and the control of access has always been a lever that
that politicians have used to the extent they can.
And the White House and the press corps have been careful up until now to make sure that the presidential lever doesn't include excluding from access a general group of press that would reflect a cross-section of the American press corps.
And what's happening now is that the president is saying, I'm going to control access.
absolutely and access will be doled out to those who are kind and sympathetic to the White House and those who are not can get find the door.
And that is the same kind of repression that is involved with telling industry that either
knuckle under, stop, stop belly aching, or I will turn the guns of government on you.
I mean, this is all the same sort of power politics, using levers of power to make sure that that you can repress contrary
views.
So Sandy, 13 minutes ago, Donald Trump to make English official US language.
Sandy, what are we dealing with
I mean, to some extent, this is eye-washed, but this is a response to a Bill Clinton executive order that required that agencies provide multilingual support to the many immigrants who come to this country who need multilingual support.
The White House's answer to that question is, well, they can still do it.
Well, yeah, they can do it.
The question is whether they will do it.
And this is, you know, there was a lot of...
consternation about Ukraine adopting the Ukrainian version of its Cyrillic language rather than allowing Russian to be used in Ukraine as a sign of ultranationalism, okay?
And here we are doing it in the United
States.
So Sandy, so this he just came up with 13 minutes ago.
So he throws this out.
because the price of meat has gone through the roof.
The price of food has gone through the roof.
They talked about it with Biden, but it's certainly even higher than it was with Biden.
He's not addressing any of that, Sandy.
So
stuff out.
This really doesn't make a difference, right?
English has always been the national language, whether it was official or not.
It never has been described as the official language from an official standpoint.
I guess now it is.
Okay, big deal.
But Tom, Dick and Mary, it doesn't do anything for their problems unless what they are buying into is this notion that the cultural war is far more important than what...
what happens at their dinner table.
You know, Sandy, and then if if he throws this kind of stuff out and he controls the media, nobody's asking him about the price of food.
You know,
Because he doesn't want to he doesn't want to be exposed for the 855.
That's
say.
48-42.
All right.
You're tuning into the earling.
So nasty questions.
And you'll be ready for Medicare The city streets are really quite a thrill If the hoods don't get you, the monoxide will
