One voice, one community.
Straight Talk with Chris Lee and Morgan McKenzie
on 102 Jams.
It might have been a wrong intro to play right there
because we're about to debate.
So I don't know if it's gonna be like
one voice and one community.
I'm not gonna fit here, not right now.
No, no, no, no.
You listen to Straight Talk right here at 102 Jams.
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If you wanna see how beautiful Morgan is,
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and check us out right there.
I wanna thank Sergeant Vance for coming in today
and answering a lot of great questions.
And our just didn't seem like it was enough.
And this 30 minutes is not gonna be enough.
I already know ahead of time.
We have Aljanine Cash back in the building
and also Kwame Apada.
Good morning to you guys.
Good morning, man.
What's going on, man?
You guys have been rocking it
with our presidential debates the last couple of months.
And we ended off the last presidential debate
two weeks ago and Mr. Cash,
you were talking about how great of a governor
you felt like Pat McCrory was.
Oh, Lord!
And we didn't even really have time
to really get into that.
So I was like, we've gotta do a gubernatorial debate
because that's gonna be very important.
Probably, maybe I would argue,
maybe a little bit more important
than the actual presidential debate
if you live in North Carolina right now.
And so you have Roy Cooper versus the incumbent Pat McCrory
and Mr. Cash, you're a fan of McCrory
and Mr. Apada, you're a fan of Mr. Cooper.
Can't call him Mr. Cash.
He's Pro Pat, man.
I am.
Pro Pat.
Pro Pat.
I am.
Pro Pat is anti-Cash.
So let's ring this bell and get it on.
So first, I wanna start with you, Aljanine.
You said that you felt like Pat McCrory
has been a great governor.
I just want to give you a couple of minutes
to back that up.
Yeah, I mean, I've been on the show now several times.
So I think you all know the issues
that I tend to find more important
are things like the jobs and economy, infrastructure, energy.
You've heard me talk a lot about over the years.
And I think people forget the conditions
that this state was in when Governor McCrory actually came
into office four years ago.
We were number five in terms of unemployment.
Now we've got the lowest unemployment that we've had
in eight years.
We had actually taken on around $2.7 billion
in funding from the federal government in terms of loans
to fund our unemployment insurance trust fund,
simply because we were going through a massive recession.
Because of the policies of Governor Pat McCrory,
we've actually repaid that money.
And that's pretty huge simply because in order
to get companies attracted to coming back to the state,
we had to show them that we could pay that debt off
because they didn't want to move to this state
and actually inherit that debt.
So that was a big, big move on McCrory's end.
The other thing is when you look at the state budget,
we hadn't had a surplus in, I don't know how long,
under Governor McCrory, we've got a $425 million budget surplus.
When you look at transportation and infrastructure,
something I think is critically important.
This state primarily used to use what they call
an equity formula for transportation funding,
which obviously shifted a lot of state dollars
out to rural areas.
It didn't allow a lot of transportation construction
to go on in urban areas.
If you go around places like Raleigh and Charlotte
and even including Greensboro now,
you see a lot of transportation or a lot of infrastructure
development happening.
That's because Governor McCrory's actually increased funding
by $700 million, did away with the equity formula,
even created a 25-year plan for transportation in the state.
He's given teachers a billion-dollar pay increase.
We now are funding education at the largest amount
that we have in history.
The list goes on.
I don't want to be calling me up too bad over here,
but this man has been a great governor.
I know we get caught up in controversies like voter ID
and HB2 and some of the other social issues,
but when it comes down to what the governor was responsible
for doing, he's done it and a lot more.
We'll get to those other issues, too.
Mr. Rapado, why are you against Pat McCrory?
Well, I'm going to go line by line.
I'm just going to stick to what Mr. Cash said,
kind of line by line.
It's funny because as Mr. Cash says,
we forget about the state of North Carolina.
A lot of people forget about the state of North Carolina.
I'm in the United States.
And so for me, North Carolina is simply a microcosm
of the country.
The country is improving.
For North Carolina, it's going to improve.
We talk about jobs.
The country was shedding 100,000 jobs per month,
basically, when Obama came into office.
It's changed now.
It's changed for the last, what, 70 years or so.
And North Carolina is just the benefit of that.
So let's go tick by tick for what Pat McCrory's actually done.
And you tell me whether it sounds like
they've brung jobs to the country.
I'm into the state.
One of the first things he did was pass the voter ID bill.
I don't think anybody right mind can say outside of the law firm
that's actually been hired to defend that law
has brought jobs to the state.
In fact, you can make an argument that companies have left
the state because of it.
Then he put in the Duke Power Ash Bill,
where citizens of North Carolina have to pay for basically
pollution for one of the biggest energy providers in the state.
And it only has that not brought jobs because, you know,
we say lack of regulation or rolling back regulation would bring
jobs that great fallacy.
But it's actually, I think back in March, Duke Power shared
about 10,000 jobs to save money.
So that's what lack of or rolling back regulation would get you.
Then he put the HP2 law.
And again, outside of the law firm that was hired to defend that law,
no one in a right mind can argue that that's brought jobs.
And so for me, when you look at the actual reality of what
specifically Pat McCory has done to bring jobs to North Carolina,
it's actually done absolutely nothing.
And I would make an argument that North Carolina is improving
in spite of Pat, not because of Pat.
And if you remember, if you think about this,
as far as infrastructure, the transportation secretary
of the United States of America is from Charlotte.
He's from North Carolina.
And of course he's going, we're going to get more infrastructure
money because we are his home.
But the money that we're getting to me,
we were getting it because of Obama's failed.
I think we argued last time was a failed transportation bill
that he put in.
The money that North Carolina received was received to build
highways and do infrastructure.
But like I told you before, the Republican Party
put in that provision that allowed states to take that money
and use it for other things.
And we did that.
If you remember before Pat McCory was even in office,
North Carolina had construction going on everywhere.
And you saw that big old sign that says this,
well, for example, 485 is going to be ready in five years
thanks to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
That's before Pat.
So Pat benefited just like everybody else has
from the policies of Barack Obama,
certainly not from Pat McCory.
Let me ask you this.
There was so much misguided.
His commentary was so misguided.
I cannot let that stand.
So I'm serious for real.
The $700 million that Pat McCory reallocated to transportation
had nothing to do with federal spending.
This money actually came from the state budget.
We were just spending it on other items that were not
necessarily a priority.
So he actually reallocated that money in the right direction.
Pat McCory also was the first governor to come along
and I don't know how long that actually passed
an infrastructure spending bill.
He put a $2 billion public spending bill on the ballot
for citizens to vote on and to consider
and actually got that passed.
That hadn't happened in a very long time.
The reason why that's critically important is because
a lot of the money that got passed in that bill
will be allocated to our port system here in this state.
Our port system is not adequate when you compare it
to a South Carolina Virginia.
That's why they attract a lot of the large manufacturing
facilities they do in those states.
So Pat McCory not only has been increasing jobs,
he's increased jobs by 300,000 net private jobs
in this state over the last four years,
but then he's also making investments for a long-term vision.
I mean, again, a lot of what he said is misguided.
The money that I'm talking about that was reallocated
to transportation spending did not come
from the federal government.
Well, you didn't say anything about $700 billion
when you first go around.
I just didn't.
I just been ignoring it because you're talking about Pat
and all the silly stuff you're saying.
But here's the thing.
When you're talking about Pat,
he put money, I mean, he put a bill on the ballot
and the people decided to vote.
But no one was a governor before him
and had the courage to even be able to do that.
Purdue didn't do it.
I'm not sure about the courage.
Pat didn't have the courage to even come up with a vision
for transportation, but McCrory came along and did it.
Pat didn't have the courage to not,
I mean, not to sign the voting rights bill to get that out of there.
He wouldn't have the transportation infrastructure
in Charlotte if it wasn't for Governor Pat McCrory.
Now that's not true. That's also misguided as well.
Pat McCrory was a seven-term mayor of Charlotte.
Charlotte's been working on that highway for 25 years.
Pat McCrory was a seven-term mayor of Charlotte.
Seven times four is what?
You wouldn't have the light rail system in Charlotte
if it wasn't for Pat McCrory going against his own party.
He went against the Republicans of Charlotte
to get funding for that.
Is the term in Charlotte four years or one year?
It's four.
It's four years?
For mayor?
Yes, it is.
The numbers.
He was the longest-serving mayor in Charlotte.
Seven terms.
He was the one that worked on the transportation.
He was the one that worked with Hugh McCall
in Charlotte to get Bank of America there,
to get Duke Energy there.
He was there for 28 years.
He was mayor of Charlotte for seven terms.
I'm saying is he that old to be mayor for 28 years?
He hasn't been mayor for 20 years though.
That's just a little fact check.
I thought mayors were like one year.
No, it's not one year.
Fact check.
If Morgan's there with the smartphone,
fact check me please.
He was the mayor of Charlotte for seven terms.
Let me switch the conversation just a little bit
because for the last 15 minutes we talked about McCrory.
We hadn't said nothing about Roy Cooper.
He didn't say anything to talk about it.
We won't be talking about Roy Cooper for the next 15 minutes.
We got to get through a few things in this 30 minutes.
Just really quick.
He's who you're going to vote for, right?
Absolutely.
Why do you think our Lieutenant Governor, Roy Cooper,
will be a better choice for Governor than Pat McCrory?
He's been the Attorney General for quite a while.
Quite frankly, under his leadership,
as far as crime and criminality,
because unfortunately that's really all you can talk about.
So you look at what he's done at Attorney General.
And he's so innovative and to me smart and forward looking.
I remember back what, eight, nine years ago,
when I was in law school, he came and he was already talking about
internet safety and security, et cetera.
And so now we fast forward to these times and you can see that
that kind of thing is everything.
You just had a scam where basically people were calling around,
pretending like they were the IRS.
And those are things that Pat, I'm sorry,
Attorney General Roy Cooper was looking into 10 years ago.
And so we talked about vision.
He cleaned up a lot of the problems that were going on with our system,
the criminal system, as far as blood testing analysis, et cetera.
And I'm going to go ahead and let him go ahead.
But again, with Attorney General Roy Cooper,
I believe his vision for the state,
as far as actually bringing money into education,
because we've fallen under Pat McQuarrie's leadership to dog on near the bottom.
When I say that, because of his budget,
and I know he's increased, I guess, quote, unquote, the teacher,
the money that teachers get.
But if you fire all of the teacher assistants,
of course you're going to have more money to give to actual teachers.
I have actually have friends who were teacher assistants, et cetera,
who actually had to basically work for free
if they wanted to continue to work and educate kids.
So we've gone from basically top 10 in education to bottom half.
And we say, hey, teachers get paid $50,000 now.
So yeah, everything's cool.
But you look at that, you look through the nonsense and look at the reality.
The reality is because of Pat and his budget,
we basically have where we were maybe two teachers to every 20 students,
we're dog on down to one for every 18.
And so that's not an improvement to me at all.
And I believe Attorney General Roy Cooper would be better to handle that.
Let me jump in really quick right here.
Just, and this is Wikipedia, so it could be wrong.
No, I think you're right.
But they're saying that Pat McQuarrie was,
they're saying longest serving,
but this is from 95 to 2009, so 14 years,
and at the term length for Charlotte marriage, two years.
Okay, so you're right.
So seven terms at two years, I had the term duration.
I was thinking like 28 years, like a dude would be in Charlotte.
Even think about the longest serving mayor of Charlotte since the 90s.
He is the one that has led the transformation to Charlotte and made them what they are,
has, you know, led a lot of the transportation development that you see in Charlotte.
And I'm absolutely telling you, I mean, you guys are so misguided here
when you talk about education and McQuarrie.
And not only did he give the teachers the largest pay raise in history,
but he also increased education funding.
Outside of just teachers, he increased education funding by 13%.
Let me ask you this.
Let me ask you this.
If that's the case, so many teachers wouldn't be leaving the state of North Carolina.
Okay, that's actually, I have some friends.
I went to UNCG, so I have a lot of friends who went to study as teachers at UNCG.
And I know a lot of them personally who within the last four years
actually have left the state of North Carolina to go to either Virginia, Texas.
Those are some, some popular places to go.
When do these, I know that the $50,000 thing was kind of passed this year.
When does that take effect?
Because there's also a friend of the show that comes on who says that they haven't seen the $50,000 yet
and they don't know when it's supposed to come in.
Well, I think it's based on teacher tenure.
So I think some of the older-
He's been teaching for a while.
He taught Morgan.
Okay.
Well, some of the older teachers are supposed to see that happen first
before some of the younger teachers.
But when you compare a state like North Carolina to a state like Texas,
you're not really doing an apples-to-apples comparison.
I mean, a state like Texas.
Yes, you are.
You're really not.
You're really not.
And I'll tell you why.
Okay.
A state like Texas is one of the largest state in the, in the union.
You have a community like Houston.
Houston is exact, Houston itself as a community is 80 miles wide.
That means if we left Greensboro and drove all the way to Raleigh right now,
you'd still be in Houston.
So I mean, a Texas is a completely different state or a state like New York
or even a state like California.
I think when you make those kind of comparisons between North Carolina
and these large urbanized states, it's hard to make those comparisons.
And yes, if a teacher leaves North Carolina and goes to Texas
or maybe go to Florida or New York or California,
you are going to make more money as a teacher
in one of those states compared to here.
No, because North Carolina was one of the fastest growing states.
And in fact, yes.
We still are.
If we elect Pat for another term, we won't be, but I'll tell you this,
the reason, the reason why it's important to do it this way now,
and it's because of that fact, right?
You don't want to compare the total amount of money we're spending
to other states or the larger states.
So we'll break it down into basically a per student basis, right?
And so the money that North Carolina is spending per student
is the lowest since what 1930s.
It's not true, we're 44th in the nation.
We're actually, like we said, we're 44th in the nation.
You guys, fat check it and you'll see again.
We're 44th in the nation.
That I'm right about that.
And so on a per student basis, we're spending less money.
And so if I say, hey, Morgan, you got $15.
Hey, let me give you an extra dollar.
Yeah, I've increased the amount of money she has,
but what is it worth, right?
A pack of gum.
And so for me, if we're growing and you are not matching
the funds of the growth, right?
Then it doesn't matter.
You can say, hey, I've increased spending.
I'm so cool.
But no, you haven't per student.
We're less than what we were when you got into office.
And you can tell that on a factual basis,
because students are leaving, teacher assistants getting fired
in the classroom filled with kids or having less, fewer supervision.
Because we're running low on time.
This was only 30 minutes.
Let me ask you this really quick and then we'll go to HB2.
With one of the things that's also happened is that there was
before there was a pretty booming film industry in North Carolina.
And tax codes have kind of changed a little bit.
And a lot of film is leaving, either going to Georgia,
going overseas, going somewhere else or whatever.
And that has happened under McCrory.
And I just want to ask you about that, Mr.
Cash, because you talk about the jobs and what kind of benefit
do you think that kind of serves North Carolina?
Yeah, I think McCrory.
And this is where McCrory and I actually differ.
And I'm the first to admit whenever I differ with any elected official.
The General Assembly was the ones that jumped out and did away with
not only the incentives that were going to the film industry,
but also they did away with the historic tax credit,
the state historic tax credit,
which really led to the large rehabilitation of a lot of old buildings.
So when you go into a downtown Greensboro and you see some of the
rehabilitation that's went on with some of those buildings,
the way they've went about doing that is using what they call historic
tax credit.
And there is a federal credit and a state credit.
And so the General Assembly actually did away with that.
They did away with the incentives for the film industry.
And McCrory was actually someone that went against the General Assembly
when it came to these incentives.
And what he was able to do is he was able to restore the historic tax credit
for the state historic tax credit, but was not able to win back the incentives
for the film industry.
So this is a case of where the General Assembly and the governor's office
really deferred McCrory lost that battle.
I hate that because I actually think that the fact that we were spending money
on the film industry, it became a billion-dollar industry here in North Carolina,
predominantly down at Easter in North Carolina.
But again, I do think that was something that was good for the state.
And that's just a battle that...
And also impacted here because I have some friends who have left North Carolina
and who've actually moved out of state because of...
I'm going to step in very quickly and talk about courage.
We're going to talk about quite a few bills where Pat McCrory,
quote, unquote, lost to the General Assembly.
I'm just going to say he's weak because he lost quite a few of these battles.
So that's just another reason why not to vote for him if he continues
to lose battles in which he's against.
That film industry we talk about is not just for bigger cities like Greensboro.
That was helping rural cities, small cities.
They'd vote for Pat.
And so he failed those cities.
And quite frankly, looking at their downtown area, nobody's going downtown.
For example, downtown Burlington.
You can film down there, but there's no...
Like a Bank of America, it's not going to move the headquarters there.
And so destroying the film industry basically makes those types of cities
and counties irrelevant.
And not only that, but you can tell when a Republican party moves in,
they fund and bring jobs for businesses they like,
i.e. businesses that will pollute and destroy the state.
And so other industries that they don't like, like film, smart industries,
maybe tech, they're out.
But you're all going to combat your bottom dollar companies like Duke Power
and other polluters that will get their tax breaks.
And one of the first things that...
And it just really quickly that I hate about the Republicans when they move in,
they immediately got rid of the tax-free holiday for citizens.
They immediately changed the tax code so that ordinary citizens
would pay more taxes for their homes.
They immediately did all these things that they claimed that they would not do,
but they did it.
And that's why I don't like that.
Under Republican General Assembly, what you've seen happen in the last four years
is approximately $4.4 billion in tax cuts for North Carolina citizens,
the largest in history.
Unless you call Duke Power a citizen, then that's not...
Those are the facts. And I challenge...
I will say this, my taxes, my state taxes have gone up every year.
Well, I challenge everyone out there to go fact-check everything that I've said today
in the last 30 minutes.
You're going to spend a lot of time doing that, man.
But the Republican state legislature have given this state a $4.4 billion tax cut
and at the same time created a budget surplus of $425 million.
I'm going to see you guys next year at the mall for the tax-free holiday.
Attorney General Roy Cooper is governor.
Really quick.
HB2.
Yes.
It's been hurt in North Carolina. I'll let you go, Mr. Keshe.
Listen, obviously, from an economic perspective, it's been hurt in North Carolina.
I think from a social perspective, you've got a lot of citizens out there
that felt like this was legislation that needed to be...
or policy that needed to be implemented.
But here's the real bottom line.
What the Republican legislature and Pat McCrory was doing,
all they were doing was reacting to an overzealous Charlotte City Council.
Charlotte had no reason whatsoever to even create the ordinance that they went to create.
The ordinance that they created was going to hurt a lot of small businesses.
It was going to cause them to have to spend a lot of money on regulations
that they didn't necessarily need to spend.
And so the state responded and the Republican legislature responded
and McCrory responded.
And just recently, just two or three weeks ago,
the same Republican legislature reached out to the Charlotte City Council
and said, hey, let's sit down and work this out
and try to do away with this in an amicable way.
But the Charlotte City Council wouldn't respond and didn't want to work that out.
Because they know a new governor is on the way.
HBC2 has not only hurt us economically,
it's hurt us in every way possible.
We are now the laughing stock of United States of America.
We just lost the NCAA basketball tournament game to South Carolina.
And so there's no measurable way that anyone can say that it's helped.
And they did respond to an overzealous city council in Charlotte
by being overzealous themselves.
And so there's just another reason to get them out of there.
To me, there's nothing that you can say that will make up
for losing the NBA All-Star game, NCAA Tournament games,
ACC Championship games.
We just built the Aquatic Center down in Greensboro.
So even simpler things like a tournament,
an NCAA tournament for swimming, we've lost that.
And so we keep on, and the economic impact of these things are devastating.
And there's nothing to make up for it.
There's no amount of tax breaks you can give to Duke Power
that can make up for losing all of those games.
That's billions of dollars now leaving the pockets of North Carolina citizens
that can make up for the fourth billion-dollar tax break
that they gave to a million-dollar company.
Now, the Commerce Secretary, Secretary Scavalla,
the head of Department of Commerce would counter you right now
and say that that's just not true.
I would love to have him on so I can teach him a lesson.
We have seen an economic impact,
but it hasn't been at the degree that Kwame is so passionately declared.
So losing $500 million in Charlotte, North Carolina
for just one or two days for an NBA All-Star game is peanuts.
I would love to have the transportation status to come on down.
I think there was a huge impact.
I don't think it was a $500 million impact.
So the impact of us losing an ACC tournament game in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Again, I mean, Kwame, and everyone here,
I was the first one to say, I agree with you.
We've been hurt economically.
I own 10 different restaurants across the state of North Carolina.
So yes, I've been hurt personally by it.
But at the same time, I think the 300,000 net private jobs that he's created,
the fact that he's made this state one of the best states in the state to do business.
Last week we were debating out of Democrats.
He's reduced our regulatory structure here in the state.
I think the things that he's done is positive.
On a net, as far as that goes, let me tell you something right now.
Without Pat, we would have the same jobs.
We have the same infrastructure.
But you know what?
We would have the NBA all-star game too.
And I for one cannot wait for that man to get out of office so we can get back to being the state.
You'll have to watch it from TV.
You'll be fine.
You'll be fine.
I mean, you'll have to watch it from TV, Kwame.
You'll be okay.
People treating North Carolina like we're Alabama now, Pat McCoy.
It's time.
It's time.
We're not Alabama.
You gotta go.
I wish we could do this a lot more because this was great.
It was informative and entertaining at the same time.
Always entertaining.
What's funny about this is if I was just listening, I would think you guys hate each other.
Like for real.
If I was just listening.
But then Yunglin be talking for an hour in the parking lot.
I got dapped up right after this.
Thank y'all for coming in.
We're gonna do this again at the end of the month.
Absolutely.
About, you know, with Trump and Hillary.
I didn't even get to, you know, what Trump's doing.
The debates tonight.
Debates tonight.
Yeah.
I was y'all gonna say I didn't get to, you know, what came out a couple of days ago though with Trump.
But then also remember the gubernatorial debate is on Tuesday night at nine o'clock.
Was it seven o'clock?
I think it has to be nine.
I think it's nine.
Nine o'clock.
So make sure you tune into that as well so you can see Roy Cooper versus Pat McCrory.
Make sure you register to vote.
You have basically five days.
Oh, because of Pat, by the way, you have five days.
One of two jams.com is where you can go register.
