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(March 26, 2026)
American aviation is near collapse. She uncovered a terrifying lab hidden in California with alleged ties to China. Supreme Court says internet service provider isn’t liable for bootlegged music downloads. How can America be so miserable when it’s so rich?
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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You're listening to Bill Handel on demand from KFI AM640.
Bill Handel here on a Thursday morning March 26.
And if you have missed any part of our show,
then just podcast it.
Just go to iHeartRadio app and click on the KFI
and you can listen to all of it, part of it.
And we have some fun topics that you have missed
I guarantee you.
Also, ask Handel anything which we do on Friday at 8.30
where you record the questions and I answer all designed
to be humiliating for me.
And you go to the again, during the show,
you go to the iHeartRadio app, click on to KFI.
The show will be streaming and then go to the microphone
in the upper right hand corner, click on that,
record your question 10 or 15 seconds
and then Neil chooses the most delightful questions.
Now, I'm gonna make a statement, all right?
Real simple, the American commercial aviation system
as horrible it as it is, is actually a modern marvel.
Imagine this, you can get two and from nearly any two cities
of decent size, you can go to any of the five continents
that are out there, well, you can actually go anyone,
at a relatively affordable price and with exceptional safety.
Okay, that's the good news.
Now, let's go to the bad news
and unfortunately the reality that's happening today.
The system is near collapse.
Look at the long security lines.
Two to three hours at New York airports,
three in Atlanta, two in Houston, Chicago,
I think was four or five hours,
checkpoint staff by TSA, it's,
which is part of Homeland Security.
TSA, DHS has not been paying TSA workers since Valentine's Day.
And ironically enough, the issue,
it's all because of ICE,
as far as the Democrats are concerned,
but ICE agents are being paid.
TSA workers are not.
And then on the other side,
the administration is saying no,
not until the Save America Act is passed.
So those are the politics.
So at LaGuardia in New York,
all flights were paused this is the yesterday afternoon,
or a couple days ago in Air Canada,
jet collided with a fire truck on the runway,
a thousand flights that arrive at LaGuardia every day
and hundreds were canceled.
And that puts pressure on other airports
that may not be prepared to handle any redirects.
As crowded as those airports are
and how often have you been on a plane,
we are sitting on the tarmac
and the pilot says,
we're waiting for the gate to open up.
How often has that happened?
A lot in my life.
And so you have a redirect
because let's say a airport is closed
because of one of these disasters.
And all of a sudden,
you're waiting a whole long time
for a gate to open up.
And we're talking about ground stops that happen,
what the wing of the spirit airlines was clipped
by last spring.
And that was, I think, by an effect, a FedEx plane.
And look at the close encounters of the worst kind.
When you talk about, we're hearing,
I'm thinking, you know what,
there has to be more crashes.
There are too many close encounters.
There are too many near crashes,
not to have disasters and we're getting disasters.
So here is something I want to tell you.
When I say it's collapsing,
I am not kidding.
The federal government has been trying
to run air traffic control on the cheap,
I mean the cheap for decades,
staffing shortages and badly outdated equipment.
When I say badly outdated equipment,
they still use floppy disks at air traffic control.
I didn't know you could even buy a floppy disk anymore.
Transportation, Secretary Sean Duffy
panned the infrastructure and say,
oh, not only floppy disks, they still use copper wires.
It's not effective.
It doesn't work.
And there have been congressional sessions,
presidential administrations.
And that goes back dozens of years,
failed to fix the problem.
And here's one that I absolutely love.
Okay, the 737 MAX airplanes that crashed two of them
because of that MCAT system.
What ends up happening is the,
as you know, the FAA has regulatory power
and licenses aircraft.
Whenever there's a new plane up and running,
the plane has to be licensed.
Also maintenance has to be reported to the FAA.
Well, they have something very, very clever.
And it is called regulatory capture,
which means the FAA goes to Boeing
and says, there is an issue here.
There is a new issue and we have to analyze it.
We have to inspect.
And Boeing says, don't bother.
We've inspected it.
And we know it's safe.
Therefore, you should certify.
I mean, how crazy is that?
That's like a defendant getting convicted
and the judge says, you decide on,
this is to the attorney, you decide as to the guilt even
of your client.
I mean, it's that bad.
That's regulatory capture.
Because they don't have enough,
they don't have enough employees in the FAA,
the pilot, and today it's,
what was it at the tower where the airplane just crashed
at LaGuardia.
There were two air traffic controllers
where there should have been four,
and it was overnight, it was late.
And the FAA came back, where the TSA came back
and said, that's normal for us.
Normal for us to have half the people.
Disaster.
So we've gone from the marvel of the world
when all of this started,
when air traffic control came into being
and control towers and safety to one of the worst.
And it is a shame.
It really is.
Okay, now a couple of cases with internet service providers
that have come down.
One of them is the Supreme Court.
So this one is done.
And it's a major loss for the nation's music industry
because the court ruled yesterday
that a major internet service provider
is not liable for copyright infringement
because it failed to kick out known copyright violators
off its networks.
Bottom line is if it knows that there is a violation
of copyright, then if it keeps on that copyright infringer,
the platform isn't liable.
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the opinion,
it was a unanimous verdict.
How's that for unusual?
Now we start with the music companies,
holding the right to everybody and everything,
every recognizable singer and songwriter,
Dylan and Bruce Springsteed and Beyonce
and Eric Clapton, I mean, all of them.
And the court wrote under our precedence,
a company is not liable as a copyright infringer
for merely providing a service to the general public.
Even with knowledge, it'll be used by some
to infringe copyrights, that's what Thomas wrote.
Now in a jury trial, and this went up to the Supreme Court,
the jury initially awarded Sony Music
and other record companies a billion dollar verdict
against Cox communication for infringement
of more than 10,000 copyrighted works.
The appeals court nicks out awards.
They know thank you.
Now it did say that Cox could be held indirectly liable
to contributing to infringement on a massive scale,
not liable per se, but indirectly liable.
And here's the argument that Cox brought up
and a boy who's this resonated with the court.
Cox warned of cataclysmic consequences
for internet users if Sony got its way.
Just one example, institutional customers
like universities and hospitals could be entirely cut off
from the internet.
If it turns out that a student from that facility
was caught infringing and therefore the companies must
kick off that university.
Whoa, well the court said,
no, you could tell that oral arguments
that that position resonated with everybody on the court.
Sony, Universal Music, the other majors
representing 80% of the industry sued in 2018.
So this has been going on for eight years.
And a jury in Virginia found that Cox was liable
for both vicarious infringement,
meaning it benefited financially from it
and contributory infringement
that it contributed to the infringement.
So one is we're not doing anything, but we're benefiting.
The other one is yeah, we're actively engaged.
And here is what the appeals court said
when it upheld the contributory infringement decision.
The music industry had flooded Cox
with infringement notices like crazy from 2013 to 2014.
They took one year.
The company terminated exactly 32 customers
for a copyright infringement.
32, that's it, out of all 100 millions of downloads.
And at the same time for the same period
it terminated hundreds of thousands of subscribers
for non-payment.
So the bottom line is, well, you might get nailed
for a copyright infringement.
I get asked that question all the time
on handle on the law.
Can I sue the platform?
Can I sue YouTube?
No, you can't because they are not responsible.
Now last year a unanimous court rule
that the American gun manufacturers
could not be held responsible for the cartel violence
on the Southwest border,
even if their guns are often involved in those other crimes
because manufacturers are not liable for what you do.
Also X Twitter in 2023 could not be held liable
for aiding and abetting terror attacks
because it has hosted tweets on its platform
that were created by ISIS.
And so the bottom line is,
these platforms are not liable.
And if you can imagine they are liable
for everything that bad actors do on the internet,
it changes everything.
I mean, we're not gonna be able to use the internet
because some crazy ass out the ISIS follower
or something to radicalize uses YouTube,
therefore, Subwadu is killed by that follower
who can immediately sue the provider
and get billions of dollars.
Not gonna work.
Okay, now there is a New York Times article,
Animal Street Journal article that I looked at.
And it talks about how I can be rich in America
and still be miserable.
That's the concept.
We start with the American economy.
It is truly the envy of the world.
However, Americans themselves are not happy about the economy
and we've been unhappy for a very long time.
Now, is that true?
Were the envy the world were rich,
but at the same time weren't happy about being rich
because we don't perceive ourselves as rich.
How is it possible to be rational
when those things happen?
We have pessimism for a long time
and we've had extraordinary economic growth.
Now, let me give you a couple of interesting facts
that you may not know of, okay?
Over the last quarter century, GDP gross domestic product
which is the entire economy of the country.
That GDP growth in the US has far outpaced growth
in Europe and Japan and two of our primary competitors
outside of India and China.
To such an extent and here is one that is actually staggering
that many of Europe's most powerful nations
have economies only as prosperous as those of our poorest states,
British and French living standards
as measured by disposable income
are more comparable to that of Mississippi
which is our poorest state.
Boy, that's a discrepancy.
Now, we hear about a shrinking middle class
but it really isn't shrinking.
It's shrinking because the ranks of the rich
and the upper middle class are growing astronomically.
So there are a couple of economists
who did an analysis of the economy,
Scott Winship and Stephen Rose
and they found that the core middle class,
that's households with incomes,
well, let's just 250% under 500% of the poverty rate.
I wanna not get into that.
The core middle class shrank from 35% in 1979 to 30%.
Now, that may not look like a huge figure
but that's a 13% decline.
And it's not because Americans are getting poorer.
We're not, it's that the rich are getting richer.
Much richer.
The percentage of Americans who were poor
or near poor plunged from 30% to 18% at the same period.
So those people that were poor or near poor,
that number basically went down 50%.
The percentage of lower class or lower middle class families,
that shrank as well.
The percentage of lower middle class families
went from 24% to 15%.
And then during the same period,
the share of upper middle class and rich,
and that exploded.
In 1979, 10% of families were upper middle class.
By 2024, that percentage had tripled.
In other words, they had come from the bottom tier
or the lower tier.
And the percentage of the rich,
and I'll describe what the percentages are here.
Went from 0.3% to 3.7, a 10-fold increase.
So to give you an idea of those income levels
from poor, near poor, all the way to rich,
there are five classes for a family of $3, $40,000,
$67,000, $133,400,000.
And so the result of this is huge.
A immense number of Americans live lives
that look extraordinarily prosperous
compared with all previous generations,
yet we complain about, for example, housing affordability.
Okay, that's true.
However, look at the houses we live in.
Far larger and more luxurious than Americans in generations past.
Look at how we live.
Central air, big screen TVs, home computers, multiple cars.
That's no longer for the rich.
That's the middle class, upper middle class,
middle class, lower middle class.
Even poor people have televisions and can have a car.
So here's another interesting part of this report.
The economic optimism and pessimism flip,
depending on who's in office.
When a Republican is the president,
Republicans are more optimistic.
When Democrats are in the White House,
it's exactly the opposite.
And if you have a closely divided country,
which we have now, you'll never have broad-based optimism at all.
Hey, it's just the way we look.
And so here's some examples of why the rich are incredibly rich
and middle class perceive themselves as not doing as well.
There was an article in the Wall Street Journal
about the cost of youth sports.
For example, the average family's annual spending on baseball
went from $1,100, went to $1,100 from $660 from 2019 to 2024.
And why?
Well, look at the nature of youth sports.
When we were kids and played baseball, we owned a bat, a glove.
We had a few balls.
We signed up for Little League.
We joined teams, local teams.
And now travel sports have taken over.
Travel sports are expensive.
Coaches, professional coaches are out there.
Teenagers on travel teams are rolling into weekend tournaments,
wearing thousands of dollars of apparel, equipment, swag.
And it is just a different way of living.
How about going to an NFL game, right?
Now you can be middle class, legitimately,
and earn your $150,000 or $120,000 a year.
How about going to an NFL game or a major league baseball game?
It went up 300% from 1991 to 2003.
Inflation didn't go up 300%.
So the average NFL ticket now costs more than $300.
The cheapest is $169.
That's the problem.
So we look at people who are rich.
And rich people are spending a ton of money on stuff that,
you know, we didn't spend before.
And so here is the bottom line.
Oh, I want to end it with this.
Airplane flight.
There used to be business class and there used to be,
basically, if you'd traveled domestically,
there was coach and there was business class.
And whenever I could upgrade,
because I go through credit cards, all my business,
I use credit cards, so I have a zillion miles.
I can upgrade.
I would sit in business class and people going to the back
of the plane and I would take my thumb,
point backwards and say, hey, I'm in business class.
How about you just to make people feel better?
Now, you've got like 18 different classes.
You don't know.
There's business class.
They're seating together.
There's pre-boarding.
There is, I mean, you just don't know.
So the joys of telling people, hey, you're poor.
And I'm not because I'm sitting in business
for the first class.
They've taken that away from me, bastards.
Taken it away.
The horror.
Okay, we're done.
Tomorrow morning, we start all over again,
Foodie Friday and Ask Handle Anything.
Eight o'clock, Foodie Friday.
Ask Handle Anything, 830.
And we're going to have a great time, had by all.
Okay, it's Amy and Will, five to six o'clock.
And that's Wake Up Call, Neil and I.
Join the crew from six to nine and Kono and Ann are always there taking care of business.
There's a song there that we should be singing, taking care of business.
Okay, we're done, guys.
Gary and Shannon are up next.
This is KFI AM640.
You've been listening to the Bill Handle Show, catch my show Monday through Friday, 6 a.m.
to 9 a.m. and anytime on demand on the I Heart Radio app.
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Run a business and not thinking about radio?
Think again.
Because more people are listening to the radio on iHeart today than they were 20 years
ago.
The iHeart broadcast radio connects with more Americans than TV, digital, social,
any other media.
Even twice as many teens than TikTok.
And that reach means everything.
Just think about the universal marketing formula.
The number of consumers who hear your message times the response rate equals the results.
Now let's get those results growing for your business.
Radio's here now more than ever and iHeart's leading the way.
Think radio can help your business?
Think iHeart.
Streaming, podcasting, and radio where the reach is real.
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seriously.
On public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and now
generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI.
It all starts with your prompt.
From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing
revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work.
Once screens thousands of stocks builds a one-of-a-kind index and lets you backtest it against
the S&P 500, then you can invest in a few clicks.
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on your thesis, not someone else's.
Go to public.com slash podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio.
That's public.com slash podcast, paid for by public investing, brokerage services by
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LLC, SEC registered advisor.
Data assets is an interactive analysis tool, output is for informational purposes only and
is not an investment recommendation or advice, complete disclosures available at public.com slash
disclosures.
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The Bill Handel Show
