and i said dan aykroyd was in "animal house" with john belushi. he was in other movies with john, but not "animal house." thank you, sir, may i have another? i'm very sorry. that will do it for us tonight and this week. now it is time for "the last word" with ali velshi tonight. good evening. >> it's a totally plausible thing to say. i wouldn't have given it another thought. your conversation with osha really interesting. somebody told me at one point, if osha systematically went through every business in the united states with an inspection, if it were sort of routine, you'd get an inspection about once every 100 years. that's how badly funded it is. and there is, you know, there are real efforts particularly in the time of covid and immediately post-covid to wrap that up and it is being met with a great deal of resistance from america's corporations. because they don't like regulation. but if it ever matters, in the 50-year history of osha, it matters now that somebody is there to keep those rules safe. thank you for drawing attention to that, rachel. >> thank you, ali. they very, very rarely do one of these temporary emergency rules. the last one they did was asbestos decades ago. if they do one on covid, it will be a huge deal. thanks, my friend. appreciate it. >> and it needs to be funded because it costs money to do that. have a great weekend. we'll see you on monday. >> exactly. breaking tonight, the treasury department has started to send qualifying americans their economic impact payments. some will receive those payments as early as this weekend. this is a big announcement at the end of a big week. >> the bill does one more thing, which i think is really important. it changes the paradigm. for the first time in a long time this bill puts working people in this nation first. >> changes the paradigm. how often have you heard that kind of thing? politicians often talk in hyperbole, but in this case it is not hyperbole, it's the truth. the american rescue plan does represent a paradigm shift in american politics. democrats learned from their mistakes and focused on passing the biggest bill possible on their terms, which is actually almost unheard of. bipartisan negotiations on obamacare, you will remember, dragged on for months before democrats ended up passing it with no republican support at all. in passing rescue legislation to get out of the financial crisis, democrats and then-vice president biden negotiated with republicans and ended up with a smaller bill, which history now shows probably hurt the recovery efforts. so this time, democrats were unapologetic about their goals. they loaded up the bill with policies that favored working people over the rich and the result is legislation that comes pretty close to matching the seriousness of the crisis we face. and the biggest part of it, the american rescue plan is expected to drive down the nation's poverty rate from 12.3% to 8.3%. that means 12 million americans will be pulled out of poverty thanks to this american rescue plan. one bill did that. it was just last month when american airlines announced that it was sending furlough notices to 13,000 employees. within a few hours of congress passing the relief package the company reversed course. executives said, quote, to those who had received notices warning of furloughs, those are happily canceled. you can tear them up, end quote. the ceo of united airlines made a similar announcement to 14,000 employees. that's 27,000 american workers who will keep their job thanks to this democratic legislation. amtrak has said hundreds of furloughed employees could be called back to work as soon as next month because of this legislation. local transportation authorities in new york and d.c. both said the package would protect against layoffs and service cuts. congress passed a law on wednesday and by thursday afternoon, tens of thousands of american jobs had been saved. that's not actually normal. that's not business as usual. it happened because of legislation that not a single republican in either chamber of congress supported. so what do republicans support? brace yourselves. republicans have decided to put their back into the estate tax. they believe that right now in this moment america's richest heirs need relief from taxes that may take a chunk out of their inheritance. millions are unemployed, tens of millions are awaiting vaccine, and the estate tax is the hill that republicans have decided they're going to die on. pun intended. mitch mcconnell and half the senate republican conference this week re-submitted a bill to repeal the estate tax which applies to the estates of the richest americans after they die. i'm not exaggerating. only 1,900 estates were valuable enough to owe this tax in 2018. over 90% came from the top 10% of income earners. democrats control both the white house and congress. not only will this legislation not succeed, it won't even get a vote. republicans know this, and still they're eager to champion this proposal. ten million americans are out of work and senate republicans are championing the cause of millionaires and billionaires. what's more, it's the first item on their agenda, the first thing that they want to introduce. it is not the 50th agenda item. it is not the 100th. the primary focus for republicans right now as i speak to you is to give another tax break to the country club crowd. if fiddling with the estate tax in the midst of a pandemic and a recession is your best idea, you are clean out of good ideas. this move proves that today's republicans are devoid of ideas. we know that the gop has become the party of no, blocking anything and everything that could help working americans. when they're not the party of no, they're the party of nothing. decrying fake scandals about dr. seuss, pushing for hearings on conservatorships because of a britney spears documentary. i'm not making this up. and talking nonstop about the two stupidest words ever put together, cancel culture. this is not a party of ideas, which is really sad whether or not you are a republican. how wonderful would it be if the two parties could have substantive, meaningful policy debates about the issues that matter and how best to address them. but right now only one party is doing that. and you know what? they're not about to stop. >> if you took the pieces of this bill and broke it into all the pieces, every one of those pieces standing alone would be viewed as a significant accomplishment. but it's all the work you have done for years to try to get us there. this law is not the end of our efforts, though. i view it as only beginning. >> all right. leading off our discussion tonight, sara nelson, president of the national association of flight attendants. she was the co-chair of the biden/sanders task force on the economy, and relevant to this particular discussion, has been a flight attendant for 25 years. so this is a happy week for her. she's one of the country's premier labor leaders. christina greer also joining us. thank you for being with us on a friday evening. christina, let me start with you because one would assume there are political costs to being on the wrong side of things. at these moments like this, a recession, a pandemic, a moment to come together, one would assume there would have been some efforts on the part of republicans to at least join hands and say we're part of this. when we look back at it in 10 years or 15 years, we were part of the effort to extract us from this after the disastrous administration that got us buried into this over the last year. why are we seeing nothing on the part of republicans? how is it that the estate tax is their number one priority right now? >> right. the daughter of a flight attendant. i just want to give a shout-out to all the men and women who protect us in the air. >> oh, wow. yup. >> but, ali, it befuddles us because so many republicans are so calcified in just working against democrats. and they know that their constituents actually want that. so they're worried about their primaries. they don't want their opponents back home to ever be able to say this person voted with the democrats. and we have seen political science literature, you know, track this quite significantly and substantively where especially white americans consistently vote against their own interests. they vote against health care when they need it. they vote against gun control when it's affecting their communities. they're voting against environmental controls. there is no surprise democrats always have to start off their presidencies with some massive stimulus to get the country going back again because republicans take all of the money and these tax breaks that do not trickle down to the american people. they give them to the wealthiest americans who vote for them and then the democrats have to come and clean up. time and time again, this is the cycle we see with the executive elections every time we switch from republican to democrat and back to republican again. i think the republicans right now know that there are no electoral consequences for them at the voting booth for voting against the needs of their own people. as long as they can say i voted against democrats and i tried to make particular democrats one-termers, they will be rewarded. >> fascinating about that. but thank you for the first few minutes of the show mentioning that the trickle down economics project doesn't work. what does work, sara nelson, is something you and i have been talking about probably for a year. that is the idea that if you provide companies with the funds to keep their employees employed because whether it is your colleagues at flight attendants or mechanics or pilots or owners of the company, business suffered through no fault of their own and there is nothing they can do to goose it until this pandemic starts to end. so the bottom line is there is nothing trickle down about that. you need to give the companies money to keep people employed, and that's what we saw this week. >> ali, that's exactly right. we did this last march because we have 80% of the workers in the airline industry unionized, so we had enough power to say to the corporations, you are not going to get this done without us, so you have to do it on our terms. even under trump and mcconnell regime, we were able to get a workers first package for the aviation workers that made sure that all of the relief went to our paid benefit, that there could be no reduction to our hourly rate of pay and we even put a cap on stock buybacks and executive compensation. but it was only 1.25% of the c.a.r.e.s. act last march. and now these principles have been injected to the rest of this relief plan, and that's what congress has taken up, and that's what president biden is talking about. trickle down is dead and we're going to build from the ground up and get the relief to the working people. >> and yet, christina, the myth continues about the gop being the party of the working people. in fact, at the cpac conference, ted cruz was talking about this. he said the republican party is not just the party of country clubs, the republican party is the party of steel workers, construction workers, pipeline workers, police officers, firefighters, waiters and waitresses. but that's not how it's looking. that's not how these policies play out. >> no, not at at all. i will paraphrase lbj where he said, if you can convince the poorest white man that is better than the negro, you can pick his pockets all day long. i think the republican party has done a great job of looking at their middle class and upper class voters to say, you are better than these immigrants. you are better than these people of color. they have been able to pass policies detrimental to the people in their own party time and time again. we saw that over the course of four years. so, yes, there are a wide breadth of diverse folks within the party economically, but all the policies of republicans over these past -- it's not even four years, these past 40 years have been working against the people in their party except for the folks in the upper echelon. so ted cruz can say that all he wants. this is also a man that flew to mexico for vacation and was able to fly right back when he got busted. there is a lack of respect that republicans have for their own voters and republican voters don't see it time and time again even when those policies work against them. >> so, sara, we talked about the fact that you were on a committee, a biden/bernie sanders committee to blend some policies. but before that you were actually at the table as you said last march when you were talking to congress about the initial bill. i guess to the point that this bill was passed without any republican support and, hence, it was probably bigger than it would have been, what's the right approach now going forward? because we haven't got a $15 minimum wage in this country, we do not have extended health insurance for people. all things that are near to your heart as a labor leader. how do democrats go forward? do they do what you did last march, try and sit down with republicans and carve out something that works or do they go really big, understanding they're not getting republican support at all? >> one thing i want to be really clear about is that we went to the table with the corporations, not necessarily with the republicans. and this was a democratic plan last march. and if it were not for nancy pelosi coming screaming back across the country to stop mcconnell's plan from going forward and shoring up and chuck schumer coming and bringing all the democrats together and stopping that corporate giveaway that mcconnell had put together, then we wouldn't have had those negotiations last march and we wouldn't have been able to fight for the workers first program that we have. we brought capital to the table. so what the president is doing right now is talking about the fact that he is labor's president and that he's putting workers first. and the fact that the democrats moved quickly to get relief to the american people, this is very different than what we saw during the great recession. this is targeted at working people. this is actually getting to those steel workers that ted cruz was talking about. let's be really clear. this past month ted cruz did something that he's never done before. he was actually shamed into changing his ticket to come back to texas. he didn't even stand up for his wife or his father in the past when they were disregarded by president trump. >> right. >> but working people are starting to understand that they can hold their elected representatives accountable, and they're doing that and democrats understand that when they actually take action and get help in the hands of people, people are stronger, and they're also going to remember who helped them. this can't just be a battle of words and policies and academics. this has to be about truly getting help to the front lines. that's what this package is doing. it is going to make us stronger for those fights because we have got to get this minimum wage passed. we have to do these things. but you have to give people the understanding when they vote there actually is a result, and they're getting a result to them. and that will build more and more power. >> thank you to both of you for kicking us off tonight. we appreciate your time as always. have yourselves a great weekend. coming up, arizona republicans have put forth more than 20 voter suppression bills. under the presence of fighting virtually nonexistent voter fraud. but one arizona republican may have given the game away when he said, quote, everybody shouldn't be voting. arizona secretary of state katie hobbs and voting rights attorney turned congressman colin allred will join us next. will join us next. no, buddy! only pay for what you 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