You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM six forty.
This is KFI Bill Handle here on Tuesday Taco Tuesday, September the third. Some of the stories were looking at Britain is suspending some arms exports to Israel because well, frankly, Israel is losing a lot of support among the world because the number of Palestinians that have been killed by Israeli attacks over forty thousand now and reaching into that war. The latest that happened over the weekend is the demonstrations
in Israel. Hundreds of thousands of protesters hit the streets against what Benjamin Netanyahu pushed back and said, We're not going to cut a deal with the Jamas, with the Arrists and Hamas because they're not doing enough. They're the ones that are stopping the negotiations from going forward.
And he's just saying no, he's saying he will not give in.
And what set off the latest was six hostages, including one America. One American were found dead, and it's they were found dead, It's not as if they were killed during the initial raid October seventh, when the terrorist group overran the border and massacred twelve hundred Israelis.
This has to do with six that.
Were being held in tunnels, and what looks like happened is Israeli forces raided the tunnels and as Israeli forces got near the tunnel entrance itself, it looks like what Hamas did is execute the hostages minutes before the Israeli forces were able to enter the tunnels. And that seems to be a new level of horrificness that's going on. And what the protests are about is simply saying, cut a deal with Hamas, no matter what they want, you cut a deal. Hamas wants the end of the war,
Israel to leave Gaza completely. Israel says we have to maintain a presence there because Hamas has said over and over again, October seventh will be repeated over and over again until Israel is destroyed.
That's kind of fun. What does a government in Israel do with that?
And the families of the hostages, and you can't blame them because these are family members, saying it doesn't matter what Hamas wants.
You cut the deal, you get our hostages back. And that to out netting.
Who's holding firm, holding firm, and what makes it even worse, and this is where it's a new level. Hamas has said any attempt to rescue the hostages will then cause the immediate death of those hostages. We will kill them and they will return to Israel in coffins. Well, Israel has exploded and it's going both ways.
There are plenty of.
People that back up Natanyahu, and he certainly has a point, and he said we cannot let Hamas continue on.
The problem is Hamas will continue on.
There are those who are saying we should cut a deal because Israel has degraded Hamas's ability to create any kind of a war, any kind of an attack on Israel like it did. It will not happen again. Israel will be prepared. Others say that it doesn't matter. You have to kill these people, you have to cut off the head. And both sides have point, they really do. And Hamas is saying.
We're willing to negotiate.
For example, instead of five hundred Palestinians for each hostage, each civilian hostages were now down to only fifty Palestinian prisoners released, some of them, by the way, convicted of murder, some of this which convicted of planting bombs, planning the attack on civilians to try to kill as many as possible.
We want them all back.
Haya Sinhwar, who heads the militant group Hamas heads the military arm was one of the prisoners returned when negotiations happen. Remember Ghilid Shalit or Ghilad Shalit, who was that soldier was captured by Hamas. After six years, he was returned for one thousand Palestinian prisoners that were held them. Sinwar, who came back to head the Palestinian military. Natanyahu has
pledged total victory. He says it's their fault. Will have a cease fire if that includes the release of some hostages, a partial pull out of Israeli troops, a release of some prisoners held by Israel. But we're not going to have a full withdrawal. It simply isn't going to happen. And of course Hamas is saying that they offer great flexibility inclusing their demand.
Well, here's great flexibility.
Any attempt to free those hostages will cause the immediate death of any.
Hostages that are in that area.
And to show you what kind of absolute animals Hamas is, and even those of you who are in favor of Hamas, arguing that they had no choice because of the oppression, because of the years of being treated as second class citizens in Israel and being just oppressed, and they have no land and Israel has taken it all. Okay, you have a point. How do you defend number one? The killing, the massacre of twelve hundred and the holding on to bodies of dead Israelis for negotiation purposes.
Won't even return the.
Bodies to the families so they can lose, so they can be buried.
I mean, where do you go with that? Now?
Is Natanyahu going to collapse? Is the government going to collapse? Is he going to fail?
Who knows?
But the pressure not only internationally, but the pressure domestically is growing more and more in Israeli families, as I said, are saying it doesn't matter what Hamas wants. You cut the deal with them, you get our hostages back.
We don't care.
Well again, they have to have a pass, even though I don't believe in it. I don't believe Israel shit cave on this. I don't have a family member. It's easy for me to say, sitting here in Los Angeles behind a microphone Costco as you know, is my favorite place to go to. As a matter of fact, I'm
doing a Costco run today. And in addition, when you go to Costco, in addition to getting a palette of toilet paper or paper towels, or getting bags and bags of frozen food and frozen burritos, you'll notice they have a pharmacy and people are well.
Are those of us who go to.
The pharmacy know that it is well? It's Is it a secret? Not really.
You'd think there'd be lines and lines, and they're not.
But it turns out that Costco pharmacy, the price of pharmaceuticals.
Is low low.
For example, I take ambient zulpidem and I was out of it. I had my prescription and the Costco was too far away, so I called the local CBS and the local Walgrens. At Costco, thirty pills cost me eleven dollars ninety nine cents. At CVS, it was one hundred and twenty five dollars. At Walgrens it was one hundred and forty dollars. This is for thirty generic pills. And so what is happening is Walgreens and CVS and ride Aid are basically imploding. They are imploding, they're cutting costs,
they're closing stores. Now, this reflects challenges in an industry, and these challenges we're brewing four years and they're shutting down stores. Walgreens in June said a quarter of the company's eighty six hundred US stores were underperforming and a good number of them are going to be closed down. One of the other things, CBS has a store every corner. It's like Starbucks.
I don't get it.
You have a CVS and then a quarter mile away you have another CVS, and I guess people go to CVS not as much because the cost has gone up. At the same time, they're trying to cut costs and they're between a rock and a hard pat place. One of the things that is makes up drugs so expensive is well, first of all, you've got giants like Amazon and Walmart that's going on for drugs, certainly Costco and other places where you get pharmacy pharmaceutical So what do they do.
Well, here's what happened.
The companies depend on something called Pharmacy Benefit Managers PBMs, who have control over how much pharmacies get reimbursed for the drugs they sell to customers, and they basically are the middleman between insurance companies and the pharmacies. And they were there to help lower prices. Well it's turned around. What they're doing now is helping to increase prices. Our system is broken, completely broken. The big pharmaceutical companies make
all their money in the United States. Why because they can? Okay, this is the old philosophy is why do dogs lick their gonads? Because they can? And that's precisely the point in this country. Go to any other country, you'll see the same drug packaging is just in a different language, and you're going to pay a third, a fifth, a tenth for the same drug.
Why because it's controlled in those other countries.
And here we go back to why I believe we need a single payer, which is another way to describe national health. I've always used the example of France and Germany and Italy and the UK. The government negotiates, there are any middlemen. The government negotiates And can you imagine how much power when you have any entity representing thirty million people talking to a pharmaceutical company. Yeah, well here
we don't have that. Not only do we not have that, Medicare for the first time is able to negotiate prices from the pharmaceutical companies for those of us who are over sixty five. Before that, it was illegal for Medicare to negotiate prices on behalf of Medicare patients. Impossible. You couldn't do it by law. So it's now turning around. And as I said, Costco is where I go because look at that price.
And I use ulpidem but also antibiotics.
You know, when I go to the dentists because I had my heart thing, I have to take antibiotics.
When I get my teeth cleaned, I go to Costco.
It's eight bucks for a whole bottle full of antibiotics. Thirty bucks at a Walgreens or Ride Aid. By the way, Rite Aid is the one that's in the most trouble. The other day, I went to Rite Aid and I wanted to get.
A toothbrush because I was out for some reason.
My toothbrush broke, and so I'm going in there and the place was empty, empty.
There was no one in the store. And this is a big store, and I couldn't see anybody.
Can you imagine going to a major pharmaceutical, a major pharmacy a major drug store and they sell everything else, of course, and there's nobody in there. How does a business stay alive, Well, they don't, they don't. Ride Aid has filed for Chapter eleven bankruptcy. They did that in twenty twenty three, and they just announced plans to shut down eighteen more locations because you've got creditors. Lawsuits are
happening over the opioid prescription. That's also what's killing all of them, and all three of the big ones Walgreens, CVS, and.
Ride Aid, although I don't know how big Rite Aid is anymore.
They don't have the same financial positions where CBS is the strongest. They are looking at their footprint, how big there's are, what their business model is, the lowering margins and changing consumer trends. And at the same time, when you talk about drugs that are new on the market, the astronomical cost of drugs.
And it's to the point where.
Every single drug that's out there you see on TV if you can't afford the drug, Astrozenica or Eli Lilly will help you get the drug.
What does that tell you when.
Every single commercial says if you can't afford the drug, that's pretty much everybody isn't it.
But they don't tell you on those commercials because they.
Will tell you how wonderful you are and you're dancing around and you're having a great time, and thirty seconds of that commercial are the disclaimers.
You will die, you will lose your limbs, you.
Will have a hacking cough, your stomach will fall out of your body. Whatever they do, they have to tell you that. What they don't tell you is how much a course of that drug is.
That they don't tell you.
For example, the drug and I don't see the commercial anymore that cures hepatitis C. It's not just a vaccine. It is an outright cure. After you got hepatitis C, man, that was when you look at that.
And you go, what a breakthrough.
What they didn't tell you is the eight week course that it took. You have to do an eight week course. I don't know how many injections per eight weeks. That cost a very affordable one hundred thousand dollars. But if you can't afford it will help you. I don't even know what that means. All right, Now, here's a job for you, and that is working for the California highway patrol. One in six of those jobs are vacant, even in
light of historic raises and a new hiring campaign. By the way, one in six are vacant, much higher than in twenty sixteen, and the last two years have been massive, massive races raises. Gavin Newsom agreed to a new contract with the union that represents the officers that's expected to cost four hundred and eighty million dollars over the next
three years because of raises enhanced pay incentives. He's been promoting a recruiting program called CHP one thousand, and he launched that in twenty twenty two to hire hundreds of new officers. So let's go and examine how much money you can get. Let's start with twenty twenty three officers got an eight percent wage increase.
That's their biggest raise in twenty years. Now.
There aren't too many of us that have gotten eight percent wage increase. Matter of fact, CONO and I much what kind of wage increase have we gotten in the last four or five years.
Nada.
No, it's got to the point now and by the way, iHeart isn't alone in this. Corporations have come to the point where you know, you just get a stay at your job is considered a raise, and that is so many corporations are doing that because they're simply demanding.
More of their workers.
So there aren't too many of us that have gotten eight percent raise. In twenty twenty two, they got a six percent raise.
Okay, and you have.
Twenty twenty two to six percent raise and twenty twenty three another eight percent raise.
Are you ready for this?
Rookie CHP officers, which is why you may want to line up to get this job, can expect to earn up to one hundred and seventeen thousand dollars first year on duty, according to the CHP. Now, I'm assuming that's an insane amount of overtime. But even the Legislative Analyst Office can't explain why the vacancy rates skyrocketed by ninety four percent between twenty fifteen and twenty twenty three. Twenty nineteen, five percent of the positions were unfilled today over sixteen
one in six. Now, part of the problem is that and that's just the way it works with the CHP. I got to tell you this agency is really sweet in.
Terms of the workers.
They have what is called a favored Nation clause in their contract. By law, CHP officers are based their raisins are based on the average compensation at five other law enforcement agencies La County Sheriff's LAPD, San Diego, Oakland, San Francisco PDS and you put all those together the average wage.
Then the CHP gets a raised the next year.
So if LAPD gets a raise, it raises the average. And for some reason it's hard to get cops. And I don't know why. Well, maybe because cops are hated. That may be one thing, because it's considered more dangerous than it was before. Officer Krupski on the street is no one knows who the cop is. They used to have walking cops who had their own neighborhood and everybody in the neighborhood would know who they are. Every local
donut shop a cop would walk in. Of course, they wouldn't pay for donuts, which is why all police officers looked like they had dandruff.
They don't. It was powdered sugar. And there aren't too many people that just love cops.
I do when a cop shows up, I feel safe, But then I'm not a young black man in my twenties either.
Where there is. What's real is driving while black.
I totally believe that, even though cops and I have a huge disagreement on that. So you've got these raises that are automatic based on favored nation. When that goes up and other agencies, you average that and the CHP goes up. Also, the retention contracts, officers with more than twenty seven years of experience now get an incentive for
ten percent of their base wages. So if a rookie officer is making one hundred and seventeen or one hundred thousand dollars a year, you would think that a veteran would be making.
One hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. I think that's fair.
Well, they get fifteen thousand dollars to stay another year, more money for motorcycle cops, more money for officers who work with police dogs.
I think a couple of.
Reasons why there aren't enough officers out there, and HP is just a poster child for this, is that the love for police officers has for the most part disappeared. It has become more dangerous to be a police officer, although statistically I don't know if that's true or not. But we hear about the ambushes. Cops are considered the bad guy, especially in minority communities. Today, if a cop is called to a domestic violence call, the assumption is or they're fearful of.
Getting shot being ambushed. I don't know.
If you've been stopped by a cop lately, when they go up on the street, you will see that the cops are a lot less friendly and they're more apt to be just more cognizant of what you're doing, doing what your hands.
Are doing than they did before.
Also, I think the good news is I don't believe that they have lowered their standards. I do not believe that police forces have lowered their standards.
The LAPD says, well, no.
The CHP said that it received more applications to its academy in the first half of this year than in saint period in twenty twenty three. And I have talked to many police officers. It is not easy to become a cop. Standards are very high, the psychological testing. You know, for example, you want to be a cop because you like shooting people. You want to be That's what I why I can't be a cop because you know, frankly,
I would go out of my mind. At a point there was one very highly placed officer that for years invited me to do a ride along with the police. Occasionally you can do that people in the media and some people in the police. You can do a ride along, actually sit in a police car and drive and when they go, when they have a call, you're there. And if there is a call where someone with a weapon is involved, you're there. And they tell you get behind
the car. I mean, they are not going to stop simply because a civilian is there in the car.
And I would never ever go.
You know why I would never go because I would always ask can I kill someone? Will you let me shoot someone? And it was always no, you cannot. All you can do is ride along. So then why I'm not interested? You know, why would I go on a ride along if I can't actually kill someone. The point is you've got kids that don't know what the hell they want to do.
You know, how about the CHP's it's a pretty good career.
The money is very good, the best and if it's very good, and you have to go over the hump. And I think at some point the police are going to come back to being admired and loved by the general population.
I would think so. And I want to end with this.
When I see a cop, I feel safer unless I'm being pulled over.
I just like it. In the meantime. I once asked Moe A.
Kelly, who is African American, and I asked him, when you see a cop or you're pulled over, what you think he said? He says, I think there's going to be some kind of an altercation, or at least I'm going to be looked at very differently than you would, Bill. And I believe that. By the way, I totally believe that. Okay, A quick word about the state and the plan to fund our transportation system. And I'm talking about the roads.
I'm talking about public transportation. Thirty nine million people rely on it every day. And so what and who pays for all of that? Well, the main source of funding is gas tax revenues. And what is going on, Well, people like me are buying evs and that means we don't pay gas tax. I don't use gasoline. Now, there is a special registration fee of one hundred and eight dollars a year.
However, if you drive a car that is an eternal combustion engine.
Your normal car, you're paying about three hundred dollars per year in taxes, so you're paying three times as much as I do, and that means there is a shortfall. Also, California is among the worst rated states for road and highway conditions and transit and other modes of transportation. We've been edging close to a fiscal cliff. This is not sustainable, this is not equitable because I don't pay taxes.
You do.
And what's going to happen is you've got some serious consequences for communities across the state unless state.
Leaders can agree on a viable plan.
Now that gets kind of fun because you've got EV drivers and manufacturers. The VV cars are saying no, that's the whole point of EV is not to pay taxes or not to spend money on gasoline, which includes taxes. More and more, Politico had an event where you had public officials and industry leaders figuring out what we're going to do.
And it's so many things are thrown up in the air.
California's gas tax accounts for eighty percent of the budget for maintaining the state highway and road repairs, and Boy we have some great road repairs. You ever go to France, for example, do you know even the back roads, you know, the kind of roads that you can't drive on because your car is going to lose its suspension in the first ten feet. Even those back roads are perfectly maintained. The United States is way way behind. Well, you've got no,
that's not true. You got Yemen, South Sudan. Maybe it's a little worse in other countries where not it's not quite as bad. But I keep on using France as an example. But I don't know why.
But even with the.
DMVFS for the EVS, without the tax at the pump, we're looking at an annual funding gap between four point four and five billion dollars needed for maintaining public transit pedestrian bike lanes, local streets, roads, highways, bridges, overpasses.
And bus and railroad transit.
The gas tax generates about one point three billion dollars for bus and rail and so the Metro, which, by the way, a quick word about the Metro, A lot of there's got a lot of hassle about the Metro, how unsafe it is. It occurred to me a little while ago that if you want to commit suicide and you don't have the balls to do it, buy a ticket on the metro.
It's that simple. Why not if this has.
Become a critical issue, not the suicide part, but the declining revenues, and it's literally threatening, sorry about that, threatening the funding of essential transportation.
So what do you do?
What are the experts telling us? A multi pronged, equitable approach. This has to be multifaceted, which is always the case. Nothing moves without tran transportation infrastructure, so that has to be at the top. One is a fee base road user charge. Drivers paid by the mile instead of by the gallon. All right, that makes sense because that means all of us are paying the same amount. I still think EV drivers are going to pay less.
Maybe not so.
Now it just becomes a question of the environmental impact. Am I upset about the environmental impact with fossil fuels?
Actually?
Yes, For someone who doesn't give a rats about much of anything, you know, particularly how you are affected by anything, I actually do care about fossil fuels. I also you ready for this? I recycle? Would you ever have thought that I recycle? My daughter is getting getting married a coming up November and I'm trying to convince her to instead of doing a traditional wedding, just a bunch of people's encircling a tree, eating bushes and keeping fossil fuels,
don't have the lights, et cetera going on. She doesn't believe in that, But I'm actually concerned. I have a solar system, so I don't go on the grid.
I have an EV you know, I actually give a rats about that. Yeah, I'm surprised too that I do. I really do.
So we're gonna see what happens as we go and transfer to the EV's more and more. California is certainly the United States central location for EV's by a long shot. Yeah, we've got to We got to figure something else because it's not going to work. Kf I am six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
You've been listening to the Bill Handle Show.
Catch my show Monday through Friday six am to nine am, and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.