plus fossil fuel executives face congress over climate fuel change. >> some of us have to actually live the future that you all are setting on fire for us. >> author michael lewis on the missed opportunities of the missed covid response when "all in" starts right now. good evening from new york. i'm chris hayes. there's a cliche you hear a lot from people who cover politics like myself. it's got a bunch of different formulations. if you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made. the reason it's a cliche is millions of people enjoy sausage, i am one of them. it's delicious but you 100% do not want to know what is in it or watch how it is made. same can be said for legislation. might be very happy with the end result, might not like it that much but you don't want anything to do with the process of actually watching it get made so we're seeing that on display right now with the democrats big climate social spending bill and just to level with you, our view on this editorially is generally not to cover the daily ins and outs of the negotiations because even as someone who covers this for a living, i find it maddening. i find it extremely confusing and intolerable. the billionaire's tax. it's gone. so, okay, fine. that said, there is some real tangible news worth covering and taking a moment to think about. the democrats have the white house seal of approval. who knows, this might become law. as of now it has $1.75 trillion price tag, again, over ten years. bunch of provisions on the climate, child care but it leaves out some of the most popular proposals democrats have had for years. we'll get to more of that in a moment. before we do all of that, it is probably important to just take a step back, exempt ourselves from the relentless presentism of the news cycle and assess how we got to this point where the democrats have slashed this proposed $3.5 trillion agenda in half but also where they're considering spending $1.75 trillion on social welfare programs and climate at all. think back to 11 months ago. you'll remember joe biden was elected president, took about two weeks to count the votes, we didn't know what was going to happen. we department know on election night democrats were about to lose house seats. it looked touch and go. it looked like mitch mcconnell of kentucky was going to remain the senate majority leader. wasn't even clear, remember, in the beginning, those georgia races were going to go to a runoff. in other words, president biden was going to be presiding over a divided congress and he would be a kind of lame duck from the start unable to pass any major legislation but thanks in large part to a trillion press of get out the vote effort and very well run campaigns by two candidates combined with donald trump very publicly imploding over his false and increasingly desperate claims of voter fraud, democrats won both run off senate races in georgia. january 5th that happened. it secured them unified control of the government, both whoses of congress and the white house. with that control there was a new vision of what the future could be. there was hope president biden could bring about lasting change. here is chuck schumer of new york back in january. >> we have turned the page to a new chapter in the history of our democracy and i am full of hope this will be an exceptionally busy and consequential period for the united states senate. there is much to do and we are ready to get to work. >> and then hope was made good. it was paid down as it were, cashed out by the very swift passage of a $1.9 trillion covid relief bill which seemed they were willing to erase progressive policies. thousands of dollars for families in checks in covid relief. extension of covid unemployment insurance, whole bunch of stuff, money for schools and for transportation in big cities that were bleeding out from covid, right? even as biden, who ran as the moderate pragmatic candidate was overseeing the agenda, the progressive wing of the democratic party was ascending. it was ascending intellectually. senator bernie sanders of vermont, right, self-identified democratic socialist, the left most member of the caucus was in charge of the budget. progressives were bullish, reducing income inequality by taxing the wealthy and expanding the social safety net to look more like our peer wealthy democracies. and there was also a palpable feeling, that democrats learn from some of the mistakes of the obama years. they were not going to get poged down in the deficit talks crucially or those that demand consensus with the republican party. a real sense amongst the least cynical observers that joe biden could do the same as franklin roosevelt and lyndon johnson. the cynics or skeptics have been proven right in certain ways. it is pretty clear whatever the democrats do accomplish, could be a lot, it won't be the scale of the new deal of the great society of two massively consequential political agendas. but there's also a pretty clear reason for those scaled back notifications which never made sense to begin with. here is a snapshot of some of the senate majorities under presidents fdr and lbj when these men accomplish some of the most impressive social welfare packages. they had overwhelming democratic majorities. enormous. 2/3 in the senate. here's the current makeup. it's a 50-50 split with vice president kamala harris breaking the tie. their names are familiar to us all, joe manchin west virginia, kyrsten sinema of arizona. they have total veto power. they have spent the last few months in a truly brain goringly madingly fashion chipping away demanding their party do increasingly less and less for no discernible reason other than an ideological version to spending money to make material conditions better for people and/or perhaps a desire to please their corporate donors who don't like some of this stuff. that brings us to our current moment. democrats have unveiled their newcomb pro mice bill thanks to manchin and sinema it doesn't contain some of the most broadly popular proposals democrats have floated, for instance, letting medicare negotiate drug prices. it estimates it would save less money for the government, fiscally responsible, save $450 billion over ten years and, i don't know, is it popular? favored by 83% of americans, 95% of democrats, 82% of independents or a paid family leave plan despite the fact the u.s. is only one of seven countries that does in the very least offer paid leave to new mothers who just had a baby. so manchin and sinema have kneecaped some very popular bills. it has house democrats worried. president biden's approval rating has taken a dive during the ugly public negotiations, you probably know that. it is worth reminding people before january 6th donald trump's lowest approval rating was not during the first impeachment, charlottesville, it was december 27th. what was going on then? republicans were publicly negotiating the wildly unpopular tax cuts because nobody likes watching the sausage get made. listen, i think it's fair to say many of the compromises along the way served to make the legislation materially worse and less popular but also it is the case that $1.75 trillion package is a lot. it's the largest climate investment i've ever covered in my life. here's the bullish case. one year from now as we approach the mid terms, get out of the day-to-day, moment to moment news cycle, where are things going to be next fall? will we have vaccinated ourselves somewhere close to normal? will we have put a stake through the heart of covid? will president biden be overseeing an economy appreciably better than the one he's inhearded, supply chain kinks worked out. will people feel in their lives the material effects of child care subsidies and thanks to the ambitious bills that we're ushering through with the narrowest possible majority in the senate t. might be a likely outcome. that's where i'm choosing to look at where things stand right now. senator chris murphy of connecticut is one of the sentences senators that will decide the fate of the spending package. he joins me now. how are you thinking about today's developments, senator? >> i think that what you're seeing come together is extraordinary and historic and you are right to look at this year as a whole. joe biden's first year will go down as possiby the most consequential. he has cut childhood poverty in half. he will have passed the biggest one-time investment in rebuilding. biggest investment ever in the country's history on infrastructure. and universal pre-k. a cap on child care costs. the biggest investment in clean air and increase in taxes on corporations and be millionaires and billionaires to pay for it all so that we are not borrowing on our children in order to pay for these investments today. yes, there are big important things that aren't in the bill but taken together with the infrastructure bill and infrastructure plan, man, i don't know that you could match up another president in the first year who has made a bigger impact in people's lives. >> i want to talk about the drug pricing impact. you're on board for this. you would vote for it tomorrow. this is what alyssa slotkin said. no normal person can understand why we can't negotiate for drug prices. when we can't pass that year after year, i have no problem saying i'm frustrated. in this case my own party that one is a simple thing to do. one of the dynamics to think about, which is a little averted from things i've covered before is you've got swing district members saying like please, this bodes well in my district being vetoed by two senators who are like, nah. >> that's the consequence of a 50-50 senate. this is the slimmest democratic majority in the history of the country. this will have passed the most consequential set of social policies in our lifetime. i think that you need to stay tuned on the question of prescription drug cost controls. we were negotiating throughout the day to add some of those provisions back, including some negotiation of prescription drugs. i would not be surprised if by monday or tuesday when the house brings up this bill prescription drug reform, including negotiation, maybe not all of the negotiation the progressives would want but significant negotiation of prices is in that bill. >> that's interesting and gets to another thing. now having done the sausage metaphor going to ask about how like a question about how you stuff the meat in the casing, okay? one of the things that's fascinating to me here, you know, people have taken civics or watched schoolhouse rock have the committee system. there are areas of expertise, chairs, staff that knows it, tax writers in ways and means are notoriously expert in how the tax code works. here you have a weird thing you have the committees and they're doing stuff. you have manchin and sinema, so the negotiations are happening in a weird way where it's like i have this tax idea. well, go ask joe. go ask kyrsten. go over to them. i've got the prescription drug plan but like they don't have the institutional knowledge to right to okay this stuff because they're not the people that are the chairs of the relative committees. it seems kind of weird in that way. >> well, yeah. yes and no. i mean, every single one of us is elected and empowered to make decisions for ourselves notwithstanding whether we're a committee chair or not. this is always the problem when you are making sausage that you are dealing with legislators that aren't subject matter area experts. but, you know, i have been involved in these negotiations with kyrsten cinema over the prey description drug negotiation provision. she is very smart. she does not share my views on this subject but i don't know that the deficit here is one of her knowledge of the topic right now. it's that her opinion is just fundamentally different than some of the rest of us. there are pieces that are still being negotiated, not many, but this is one of them. i still think we may be able to add something. >> when people look at the political area, one party has unified governance, a mobilization in the imposition. people are looking forward to virginia, this question of will democrats deliver or not. what do you think of as what matters six, nine months from now for the politics of all of this? >> well, listen, i think people are openly questioning whether democracy works for them any longer. they are openly considering why trump's neoauthoritarianism appeals to people. this is our chance to show people democracy can demonstrably change their lives. it's important that these make tangible changes. the child care investment is one of those. people will be paying less for child care next year than this year. they're going to notice. second, it's important to show we are taking something from the haves. people are not satisfied just to do better, they also want to know that we are sort of rebalancing the economy. i'm going to go out there and just as aggressively talk about the tax increases on billionaires and millionaires, the minimum corporate tax so amazon pays something. i think that's an important script for us to follow moving forward. tell people what they're getting but also tell people we're taking something from the folks that have frankly been pleasing the regular folks in this country for the last two decades. >> my favorite detail of the propublica reporting was him filing to get the child tax credit because he qualified because he had zero income. >> senator chris murphy, thank you very much. i appreciate it. today a group of white supremists appeared in court standing trial for their role in organizing the unite the right rally in charlottesville that turned deadly four years ago and while today was just the opening statements, the fact that a few of the defendants forego representing themselves including the neonazi who favorably cited mine cumph. cumh ♪girl, i don't know, i don't know,♪ ♪i don't know why i can't get♪ applebee's. now that's eatin' good in the neighborhood. for people living with h-i-v, keep being you. and ask your doctor about biktarvy. biktarvy is a complete, one-pill, once-a-day treatment used for h-i-v in certain adults. it's not a cure, but with one small pill, biktarvy fights h-i-v to help you get to and stay undetectable. that's when the amount of virus is so low it cannot be measured by a lab test. research shows people who take h-i-v treatment every day and get to and stay undetectable can no longer transmit h-i-v through sex. serious side effects can occur, including kidney problems and kidney failure. rare, life-threatening side effects include a buildup of lactic acid and liver problems. do not take biktarvy if you take dofetilide or rifampin. tell your doctor about all the medicines and supplements you take, if you are pregnant or breastfeeding, or if you have kidney or liver problems, including hepatitis. if you have hepatitis b, do not stop taking biktarvy without talking to your doctor. common side effects were diarrhea, nausea, and headache. if you're living with hiv, keep loving who you are. and ask your doctor if biktarvy is right for you. ♪ ♪ ♪ if you're living with hiv, keep loving who you are. aloha! isn't this a cozy little room? 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>> so it's 1871 ulysses s. grant asked for this sweeping legislation. he was swiftly granted. something that doesn't happen these days. it basically allowed civil suits against -- it was specifically designed to dismantle the kkk. it allowed a civil lawsuit against anyone who restricts your civil rights, your ability to travel, your ability to move freely. and that landmark legislation was able to basically dismantle the kkk after the civil war. it dismantled them for a long time until the 20th century when we've seen a resurgence of white supremacist violence. so this case is one of the most expansive uses of the kkk. it acts -- the 1871 law in modern day and they're trying to -- the lawyers, the plaintiff's lawyers in this case are trying to basically sue the white supremacists out of existence so that's what's going on. >> under this 1871 klan act which was created in response to the white supremacist terrorists who had risen in the wake of reconstruction in the south, that were using violent means and intimidation to stop black folks from voting, assembling, this creates civil liability for people that engage in white supremacist activities designed to restrict people's civil rights. the theory of the case is the people at the unite the right rally did this. they are civilly liable. they are facing trial today. what happened on day one? who was there and what did you observe? >> well, we've had a couple of days of jury selection and today was opening statements so we saw very -- right in the beginning we saw the plaintiffs saying, you know, they had been beaten and had their civil rights restricted by the white supremacists at the rally. they say this was a conspiracy of violence, that violence department just accidentally break out. what they're alleging and hope to prove through this case is that violence was planned, violence was coordinated and that violence was the point and then we had the motley crue of defendants, two of them are defending themselves and there's an assortment of lawyers who are all kind of trying to say, well, we didn't really plan it. it was kind of an accident. also if there was planning it was everybody else's fault. so we saw a lot of defendants kind of throwing each other under the bus. there was cantwell who decided to use his opening statements to make a lot of inflammatory and racist remarks, which were -- which were just physically hard to hear. it was really uncomfortable, but what was even more uncomfortable was listening to other lawyers justify racism and justify chanting phrases like, you know, jews go home and even worse which i'm not going to repeat on air under the guise of respectability. it was a tough opening day. >> when you say cantwell -- i don't want you to repeat him, citing the "n" word and citing mein kampf, i want to make sure that's what he did. >> yeah. cantwell, before he was thrown into jail he was like a podcaster kind of shock jock and, you know, it was really cynical what he said within two sentences he's, you know, citing mein kampf, he's saying basically all people are not created equal and then worse from there and, you know what it was, it was kicking over a log and seeing the rot and the bugs underneath. this is the kind of virulent racism that we as white people try to avoid and we can because of the color of our skin and what this trial is doing is making us i think as a nation face the violence of the words and the violence of the rhetoric and see how it translates into the violence of action. >> all right. lyz lenz who's covering this trial in charlottesville. thank you very much. >> thank you. coming up, donald trump announces he'll hold a telerally for republican candidate glenn youngkin. they're staking out polling places. less than a week to go before the election night in virginia. we'll talk all about it next. 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is there some version of george w. bush's we're going to do this, this, this, high stakes testing or is it another way of saying the crt stuff? >> well, it's sort of another way of offering this broad rallying cry for a lot of things that motivate his conservative base. yeah, for sure, it's crt. we know that's an academic concept that's not taught until college or law school. this is not something like first graders in the commonwealth of virginia are learning. it's not taught in virginia schools. it's other things that republicans are opposed to and gets them riled up. mask mandates, transgender students, what pronouns they should be called. it's not an education plan per se in the way you are thinking about it as an observer, voter, parent. how much money is he going to put into schools? it's not like that. it's a broad rallying cry to rally up the supporters that will be overwhelmingly determined by which side gets more people out. base election and an off, off year. >> that's not to say it's not an issue. there are parents who care about this stuff. i wanted to be clear that i wasn't missing something. i've covered races that were about education, teacher class size, they were about whether there was high stakes testing and all of these policy issues. what we're talking about here is this anger that many parents feel that their children's education and the control of it has been taken from them and glenn youngkin will restore it and terry mcauliffe won't. that seems to be the message. >> you're really hitting at the central political question in this whole thing. we know these issues get conservatives going and we know they get republicans to turn out. if you're a republican, you want to get your republicans to the pole, they tie them together. it ties maga with more moderate republicans who have mixed feelings about vaccinating their children or something like that. you're uniting your party under this broad stroke banner. what we don't know, which is a really important question, is whether it is convincing the suburban parents, the very same people in northern virginia, outside of richmond who really won the races during the races for democrats. is this impacting their vote? we know crt isn't. we also know they're pretty unhappy with schools. you'd be hard-pressed to find any parent in america right now who is saying schooling is going awesome, right? it's not how anybody is feeling. this will be a test for that very issue. >> i think schooling is going awesome. >> we found the one. >> i'm happy they're back. i'm so happy they're back in school. >> yeah, of course. >> the thing over all of this is donald trump. he loses the state by 10 points. glenn youngkin is playing this he needs the mag a vote. there's a trump rally for him. they salute a flag that was present at the insurrection. he has to dance around it. trump threatening to do a telerally on monday. do you have any reporting on that? >> i can confirm that's happening. i confirmed that this evening. he's doing a teletown hall like for viewers who might not know who that is. he's not coming to the state. he's not going to set foot. he will be on the phone with thousands of his supporters getting people eager to go to the polls on tuesday for in-person voting. it's still that delicate dance. >> yes. >> the real question is whether youngkin shows up on that call. even if he does, it's not clear how usable that will be for the mcauliffe campaign because it will be before election day. >> that is fascinating. a great example of trying to have it both ways. dr. deborah birx testifies and the tens of thousands of lies she could have saved. the failed pandemic response just ahead from the trump administration. ♪girl, i don't know, i don't know,♪ ♪i don't know why i can't get♪ applebee's. now that's eatin' good in the neighborhood. [ sneeze ] applebee's. are you ok? oh, it's just a cold. if you have high blood pressure, a cold is not just a cold. unlike other cold medicines, coricidin provides powerful cold relief without raising your blood pressure be there for life's best moments with coricidin. now in sugar free liquid. what do we want for dinner? burger... i want a sugar cookie... wait... i want a bucket of chicken... i want... ♪♪ it's the easiest because it's the cheesiest. kraft. for the win win. -capsule! -capsule! -capsule! capsule saves me money on prescriptions. capsule took care of my insurance. capsule delivered my meds to my doorstep. capsule is super safe and secure. get your prescriptions hand delivered for free at capsule.com what the world needs now... is people. people who see flight a little bit differently. so it takes less fuel to bring people together... ...and make faraway places feel a little closer... ...with engines that power planes more efficiently. because seeing a better-connected world isn't far in the future. we're building it... now. ge. building a world that works. nicotine is not addictive? >> i don't believe nicotine or our products are addictive. >> i believe nicotine is not addictive. >> i believe nicotine is not addictive. >> i believe that nicotine is not addictive. >> and i, too, believe that nicotine is not addictive. >> 27 years after big tobacco was called to capitol hill to answer for decades about misinformation, executives in the top big oil companies were called to testify about their role in spreading decades of misinformation about the danger posed by their product. the ceos of exxon, shell, bp they testified remotely today. probably nice climate controlled rooms. they were grilled about their company's well-documented efforts to cover up the link between fossil fuels and climate change. not one of them would admit to any deliberate wrongdoing. >> today the ceos of the largest oil companies in the world have a choice. you can either come clean, admit your misrepresentations, ongoing inconsistencies and stop supporting climate disinformation or you can sit there in front of the american public and lie under oath. >> mr. woods, ceo of exxon, do you agree that climate change is real? >> yes. >> thank you. mr. lawlor, ceo of bp america, do you agree that climate change is caused by human activities? >> yes. >> would you commit to saying you're not going to fund any group that's going to engage in climate disinformation at least? >> chairman khan, what i'll admit to is being an active member of the api. >> the api, of course, is the oil industry's lobbying group, american petroleum institute has been working to kill a lot of climate legislation. it wrapped up after six hours today. they promised to subpoena the oil companies to get the truth about their climate change agenda. >> we are at code red for climate and i am committed to doing everything i can to help rescue this planet and save it for our children. we need to get to the bottom of the oil industry's disinformation campaign and with these subpoenas we will. 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what's been your perspective, dr. berks? -- birx? >> he's been so attentive to the science and the data, and i think the data that comes out of his history of business has been a real benefit during these discussions about medical issues. >> okay, all right. come on. i remember seeing that. that was dr. deborah birx, the then white house coronavirus coordinator in 2020. she could have said he really cares about this and he's good about judgments, but analyze the data? we had a burst of covid around the world, running out of life-saving ventilators, and now we have more perpetualized by that man and it comes from none other than dr. birx. in the subcommittee on the coronavirus virus, she said, quote, the 2020 election vote distracted people from the vote. they flowed from the top. we've seen in a testament to that means vaccine removal and the grandstanding of vaccine mandates. the author of the book i just mentioned called "the premonition pandemic story," michael lewis joins me now. it's great to have you in studio. >> good to see you, chris, face to face. >> here's my big question for you. the book analyzes the structural failings in american public health from the top to the bottom. it's not just trump, there's a bunch of other stuff. then we got to a point where a lot of the stuff on the vaccine proliferation like structurally got pretty fixed. logistically we're getting it out. then we hit it up against a social barrier, culture barrier. how do you understand that as part of the story you told in the book? >> well, the social barrier was a hit in the very beginning of the pandemic, right, where the whole idea of having a coherent strategy that everyone followed was dismissed. the idea that -- i mean, trump basically said, every state for itself and go find your own supplies and kind of poo-pooed social distancing and all that. so a strategy we created in the united states and peddled to the rest of the world that was used effectively to save many lives around the world, we did not avail ourselves to it consistently across the country. as a result hundreds of thousands of people are dead. so this is just this all over again, right? it's sort of like we're really good at creating knowledge, and then we're really good at not using the knowledge we created. the vaccine is a breathtaking scientific achievement. so how does fit into the story? the premonition -- it's funny, the characters in the premonition have gotten the wrath of having predicted the pandemic, and it's just because they lived their lives in preparation for it. what the premonition really is is the premonition that we might fail. because of the privileged around the country, there were problems you could see, and there were two big ones. one was the low status of the public health officer, the main character of the book, a public officer, ran into resistance from her community who stopped the measure she needed to take to stop tuberculosis. >> it's like who are you to tell me i can't do this? >> that is our system, such as it is. it isn't the cdc running everything, you've got all these local public officers, state and local. they have a lot of legal powers, but they don't have a social power. they're low status, poorly paid, nobody really feels the need for them, no one understood their role. you could see watching the friction she experienced with the community that she was going to have a war on her hands if she had to do something really big. you also saw she wasn't going to get any backup from the centers of disease control, that they had sort of removed themselves from the role of actual disease battlefield command because it was messy and controversial, and turned themselves into kind of an academic institution that want to wait until they had lots and lots of data before they made any decisions. all these characters would tell you is if you wait until you have certainty in the beginning of a pandemic -- >> too late. >> -- the game is over. by the time you get the data, the virus has spread. you've lost your chance to contain it. i don't know about you, but i find the situation we're in amazing. if someone had told you we would be looking at 750,000 dead americans and that wouldn't be enough to unify the country on a sensible strategy? i would think you were crazy. i think cherry dean would say no. >> i thought of cherry dean, because these meetings, i talked to a local public health official in nashville, tennessee, i talked to a local public health official in a county in missouri where they're getting up and saying, hey, the kids should wear masks in schools or xyz and they get screamed at. >> we know where you live, it's worse than that, right? in 30-something states there have been bills introduced to the legislature, some of them have passed, to reduce the authority of public health officers. we've positioned ourselves to be in a worse place if another one comes along. we're in a better place where we have this miracle vaccine where we can come from other viruses. we have reduced the commanders to actually run the battle. and we have an entrenched minority of a third of the population that is ready to not do anything to protect their fellow citizens. >> that's my question to you. there's technical failures that happen, right? i think some of the failures by the cdc, technical failures on mask guidance. the way this shook out idealogically, the political va -- valance of trump leadership. >> right out of the gate, the country needed to be on a war time thing. you needed to make sacrifices for your country. since it got framed as it's a livelihood, if you've got people dying in restaurants, it's not good. >> when the numbers go up, the economic activity goes down. >> there is something like -- the best natural experiment is the nordic countries, right? you have denmark and norway and sweden. denmark and norway did a full-on social distancing. sweden let the virus run. there's been a postmortem on this. five times the deaths in sweden, the rate of death, and greater economic cost. it isn't either/or. you aggressively contain the thing and you get more of your economy. there was that that was going on. that framing was a big problem. but the sort of bizarre notion of freedom that i should have the freedom to infect you with a deadly disease, we accept constraints on our daily life all the time. i'm not allowed to drive drunk, you know, but it's life-standing to say that i shouldn't be able to drive drunk. it's connected to this wild idea that i should be able to do regardless of its effect on you. that was another strain on it. would my characters ever predict that? no. the doctors in the cdc never would have anticipated the cdc failing the way it failed. so they didn't see it all, but they had a sense like, we're not as prepared for this as people think. they had a sense that there are these problems in rolling out the strategy that we haven't really faced up to. >> michael lewis, it's a great joy to have you here. it's great to see you in person. the book is called "the premonition" and it's out. he also has a podcast. if you liked the interview, you can go to my podcast. >> if you don't like it, you don't have to go. that's all for my show tonight. rachel maddow is next. hello, rachel. i'm hoping in the build back better bill there is some tax penalty. also, push the subscribe button, give me your likes, i want the four-star ratings, the whole thing. >> and if you don't, wait to see what happens to you. thank you, big chris. big government. thanks to you at home for joining us. happy to have you here. all right, it used to be called value jet. it was founded in