Why Do the Clintons Have a Podcast?

Why do they call their podcast Why Am I Telling You This?

Is it to help you form a mental picture of Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea striving mightily to suppress their exasperation at the ignorati even as they can't stop wagging their fingers at us? Or perhaps they think that since the title of their show is in the form of a question, they can avoid sounding like the scolding know-it-alls they are.  

For example, if they'd called their podcast something like "Don't Make Me Have to Tell You This Again!" or "If I've Told You Once, I've Told You a Thousand Times!" then people might get the idea that the Clintons are annoying and infantalizing, and we won't tune in.

In the first episode, about how a gourmet chef is helping the Clinton Foundation to "build back the Caribbean better!" there's an audio montage of Bill cogently explaining why, exactly, he has to tell you this:

Now why am I telling you this? Because it is your future on the line. Why am I telling you this? Why am I telling you this? We can do this. Why am I telling you this tonight? Not to take you down but to keep you looking up. Why am I telling you this?

O.K.,  now that it's all been made clear that unless we heed Clinton telling us that our lives are on the line unless we heed what Clinton is telling us, let's now listen to Chelsea telling us that "our" children are Too Small To Fail. 

To divert attention from the fact that five or six major banks have been deemed too big to fail (or jail) because Clinton-era deregulation gave them control of the entire financialized global economy, Chelsea wants to tell you her spin. Her solution to the banks foreclosing on subprime predator loans and evicting millions of families from their homes, while the .01% sucked up all the wealth, is for those families to spend more time talking to and reading to their children.

For some reason, the Clintons have for decades been laboring under the delusion that poor mothers are neglectful mothers who don't already talk to, sing to and read to their kids. As a result, they need experts like Chelsea to tell them how to be good parents. Chelsea tells you this in her podcast so as to avoid telling you about that time, back in the 90s, when her Dad "ended welfare as we know it" by ending direct cash aid to the poor and sending mainly black mothers out to low-wage jobs without the child-care subsidies that they'd originally been promised.

Since poor children don't do as well in school as better-off children because, among other hardships, their mothers often have to work two or more minimum wage jobs and aren't allowed to stay home and nurture them as much as they might like, Chelsea's solution is not to resume direct cash aid to mothers, nor for the government to build decent affordable guaranteed housing stock for them. Her solution is to stock neighborhood laundromats with books so that the mothers can be freed up to scrounge for quarters and fold clothes.

I mean, if there is no decent affordable housing in these "at-risk" neighborhoods Chelsea is so concerned about, you can't really expect the Clintons to call for a washer and dryer in every non-existent apartment, can you? That sounds too much like Herbert Hoover crazily promising a chicken in every pot during the Great Depression. Because hardly anybody had a pot.

Although study after study has established that a child's brain can be irreparably harmed if she misses even a few meals, and that a growing number of US households have been deemed chronically "food-insecure," Chelsea Clinton is also not calling for an increase in the average meager SNAP (food stamp) stipend. She is convinced that just a few donated books in a noisy laundromat will help these hungry children to thrive and maybe even grow up to cure cancer:

Hi, I’m Chelsea. Welcome to Why Am I Telling You This?

Right now we’re wasting a huge amount of potential in our country. Who knows what diseases we haven’t cured or discoveries we haven’t made because we’re not giving every child an equal chance at success in life, and so I’m so passionate about this issue because, particularly now, as a parent I know that every parent wants to do the best that we can for our kids every day of their lives. I want to do everything that I can to ensure that every parent, grandparent, caregiver, adult in the lives of young children have every possible opportunity to surround those kids both with love but also with words.
Why am I telling you this? Because we owe it to our children to solve this.

To display what a diversity champion she is, Chelsea Clinton tells you that parents don't necessarily even have to read to their kids in English. And if they happen to be illiterate themselves, they can still talk to or sing to their children, even pray with their children. She cogently tells you:

And it helps build your child’s brain, and it helps build your child’s … Ultimately, their executive function and everything that we know is critical to success just in life.

I think she might have been about to say "build a child's house with a roof on it"  before she caught herself just in time. She tells you that conversing with your offspring is not an end in itself or that it even fills a basic human emotional need in itself. You talk to your kids with their future careers and monetary earnings in mind, and you ignore the miserable here-and-now of your own life. I can just picture Chelsea envisioning "our" children as a long marching line of automatons in suits carrying identical briefcases, their foreheads literally bulging with all that brain function. Only a die-hard neoliberal can speak of a child's well-being in terms of a business-like "executive function."

The Clinton Foundation has partnered with New York University, which conducted an actual laundromat study in order to efficiently measure the Too Small To Fail initiative, because if stuff can't be measured and calibrated, then what good is it? As the project's director, Patti Miller, explains to the podcast audience:

Actually, at 30 times the amount of literacy activities took place in these laundromats compared to control laundromats that didn’t have these playful learning spaces there. Then we actually thought, “Okay. What happens if you bring a librarian into these spaces?” And found, again, a tremendous increase in child-directed literacy activities. That kids were engaging with librarians for an average of 47 minutes a time, which is a huge amount of time, particularly for a very young child.

She doesn't explain why the librarians aren't working in actual libraries. Maybe it's because there are fewer and fewer public libraries in poor neighborhoods, and that the hours of the surviving libraries and the jobs of librarians have been drastically cut because of the budget austerity measures brought about by Clinton-style policies.

And speaking of neoliberal efficiencies:

Patti Miller:
Now we’re going to be able to observe a story time with our special guest reader, Chelsea.
Chelsea Clinton:
Oh, what a busy day we’ve had my busy family, reading, talking, singing too. We love to do all three. The end.

We must read to "our" children, yes, but we must never, ever waste our words or use too many words at any one time. Stories are not just stories for fun, they are jobs to be ticked off on every responsible parent's to-do list. Could Chelsea have made it any clearer with her rushed rendering of relentless busy-ness?

And since nothing happens in America without capitalism stretching its  tentacles into every human living space and into every human brain, the possibilities for profiting from the poor are endless. An offshoot of Too Small To Fail, explains reading specialist Ralph Smith, is a program called "Respite Time." Since Homo economicus is expected to multi-task even during precious leisure time, participating parents' verbal interactions with children are creepily monitored as they listen to the radio or watch TV.... or who knows, even while they listen to the Clintons telling them why they have to tell them this.

Smith says:

Too Small To Fail, in this amazing partnership with Univision, has figured out how to take the respite time and make it productive time in terms of parenting. That, it feels to me, is something quite special and I think that the communities across the country are going to resonate with the opportunities of Too Small To Fail their self. I’m excited. I’m intrigued and excited by that.

Um... not to sound picky or anything, but why do I tell you that the poor grammar used by a literacy expert, of all people, suggests that he could use some remedial time in the laundry room hisself?

The Clinton podcasts are produced by At Will Media, which in its own turn tells you:

Founded in 2015 by CEO Will Malnati, At Will Media is a full-service media company based in Manhattan and Los Angeles. With over 50 years of combined experience, At Will Media sets the pace for the podcast industry as a partner for branded content and a hub for successful and critically acclaimed originals. From podcasts to custom Amazon Alexa Skills, At Will Media powers and produces shows for high-profile clients such as GQ, Morgan Stanley, Town & Country, WeWork, Viacom, 1 Hotels, and more.  The firm notably went on to produce the first daily audio product by L’Oréal and Hearst Beauty for Amazon’s Alexa. 2019 saw AWM receive a nomination in the category of “Best Branded Podcast” at the iHeartRadio Podcast Awards for The Atlantic Magazine’s podcast The Future According to Now, Season 2.  At Will Media' executive team is headed by entrepreneur Will Malnati, Glee actress and Emmy/Tony-award winner Jenna Ushkowitz, former Twitter exec Julie Martin and Audible alum Mitch Bluestein.

With Jeff Bezos's ubiquitous spy robot Alexa at least tangentially involved in the Too Small To Fail initiative, the possibilities for profiting off the already-plundered and oppressed poor are not only endless, they're stratospherically eternal. How many words do parents speak to their children while glued to their two-way screens? How much is their data worth to these voracious companies? Why do I even have to tell you this? 

Will Malnati, the heir of a restaurant dynasty, has probably never set foot in a coin-operated laundromat. He doesn't look like the sort of chap who'd even do his own laundry in a private home.

Chelsea Clinton, to her own credit, did visit a Chicago laundromat earlier this year to read to a group of children who'd been especially bused in from a nursery for the photo-op occasion. They learned, among other things, that "H" stands for Hillary, and as such, it is one of Chelsea's favorite letters in the alphabet. The end.