Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 1/13/22: Deep State, Insider Trading, Inflation, Trump Comments, Media Delusions, Tesla & China, Federal Reserve, Marianne Willamson, & More!

Episode Date: January 13, 2022

Krystal and Saagar talk about the FBI's involvement in Jan 6th, stock trading by members of Congress, inflation numbers over the past year, Trump's comments on getting the booster shot, outrageous mainstream media proposals for 2024, Elon Musk caving to China, federal reserve policy, healing American politics with Marianne Willamson, and more!To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/Marianne Williamson: https://mariannewilliamson.substack.com/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Go to breakingpoints.com, become a premium member today, which is available in the show notes. Enjoy the show, everybody. Happy Thursday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. A lot of interesting stories this week. So a lot of movement from both the right and the left on potentially banning members of Congress from trading stocks. Of course, as long as Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are in charge, unlikely to go that far. But still, really interesting to track this progress. This all comes amid a new report from Unusual Wales detailing exactly how many millions of dollars in stocks were traded by

members of Congress when they invested, all of that. So we'll give you all of those details, extraordinarily important. Also, some really pretty troubling numbers on inflation. We'll tell you what prices spiked, where things are headed, as well as show you some vintage Elizabeth Warren. Yes. Back from before she was, you know, just cringe identity politics all the time. This was the type of stuff that you might have heard from her. So we'll bring you that as well. President Trump making some new comments, calling out politicians who are ashamed that they got the booster, saying that they are effectively gutless cowards. So we'll play those remarks for you there. We also have Marianne Williamson on the show. She's been floated recently as a potential Biden primary challenger. We'll talk to her about that. We'll talk to her about her assessment of the Biden party,

the Biden administration thus far. This also comes amid some horrendous takes from the press about what they would like to see in 2024. Spoiler alert. Hard stuff.

Hillary Clinton. And you would think that you couldn't top that, but this suggestion may actually top it. Biden Cheney, as in Liz Cheney, 2024. That's what one prominent columnist wants. But we wanted to start with a pretty stunning moment.

Of course, we've been tracking these questions around January 6th of we know the New York Times reported there was at least one Fed informant in the Capitol on that day. Not crazy to think that there were others involved. And you don't have to go down a whole false flag rabbit hole of conspiracy to want to know, hey, what insight did the feds have before January 6th because their response was total shit? And what active involvement, in addition to this one informant, might they have had? Of course, we know the way that the FBI has infiltrated some of these groups. Proud Boys have some past affiliations with the feds, let's just say. We know the way that the feds infiltrated these individuals who were involved with the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping. So Senator Ted Cruz, who we trashed on Monday, now we're going to give him a little bit of props,

he had the opportunity to question Jill Sanborn. She's a top FBI official about, hey, how many how many feds were there? What was going on? Take a listen to that exchange. I want to turn to the FBI. How many FBI agents or confidential informants actively participated in the events of January 6th? Sir, I'm sure you can appreciate that I can't go into the specifics of sources and methods. MR. Did any FBI agents or confidential informants actively participate in the events of January 6th, yes or no?

MS. Yes or no? MS. Sir, I can't answer that. MR. Did any FBI agents or confidential informants commit crimes of violence on January 6th? MS. I can't answer that, sir. MR. Did any FBI agents or confidential informants commit crimes of violence on January 6th?

I can't answer that, sir. Did any FBI agents or FBI informants actively encourage and incite crimes of violence on January 6th? Sir, I can't answer that. Ms. Sadburn, who is Ray Epps? I'm aware of the individual, sir. I don't have the specific background to him. Well, there are a lot of people who are understandably very concerned about Mr. Epps. So she's just totally unwilling to answer any of the questions.

Can't answer that. Why? Exactly. Yeah, why that. Why? Exactly. Yeah, why not? Why is he the only guy asking, too, by the way? If there's nothing to see here, then say, listen, no one was there. There was nothing to see here.

And so the fact that they're completely stonewalling here, unwilling to answer basic questions, pretty telling. You guys remember, just as a refresher, who Ray Epps is. We've played some of the videos for you here. He seemed to be a primary instigator of telling the night before saying we got to go into the Capitol being so aggressive that the, you know, Trump fans who were around him at the time started chanting fed, fed, fed, because what he was suggesting seemed so outlandish. Then on the day of, he again seems like an instigator. He's sort of at the front in terms of people going inside. He was originally on the FBI's list of people, of suspects, people they were looking for, and then is dropped off with no explanation. January 6th committee has received enough pressure around Ray Epps

that they felt the need to respond in a series of tweets. Again, this is really woefully inadequate. They say the Select Committee is aware of, quote, unsupported claims that Ray Epps was an FBI informant based on the fact that he was on the FBI wanted list and then was removed from that list without being charged. They go on to say the committee has interviewed Epps. Epps informed us that he was

not employed by working with or acting in the direction of any law enforcement agency on January 5th or 6th or at any other time, and that he has never been an informant for the FBI or any other law enforcement agency. Okay, then why is he being charged? Well, there's also a lot of questions. Was that interview under oath? Is the FBI the only? Also, law enforcement agency is a very specific term. That implies to the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security. Intelligence agency, there are a lot of other intelligence agencies all across the United States. I think the latest count is like 22. Was he employed or an informant or a contractor or affiliated or whatever? In any of those instances. No answer to any of that. Also, where's the actual transcript of the interview? You're just describing the interview. Was it under oath? Like I said, have it happen in an open jurisdiction in front of the camera in the Senate Judiciary.

Or at least put the transcript down. Put the transcript. Release the transcript. Hashtag release the transcript. I mean, that would at least give you some transparency. Not that it would still answer every question, because again, if you really care about January 6th accountability, and there are a lot of Democrats who claim this is like their top priority, well, you're just going to let one of the main instigators go free and not charge him and not explain why he's not ultimately being charged. So this is the

part of this conversation that really frustrates me is, of course, it's gotten subsumed into the culture war. And of course, Ted Cruz wants to make political hay out of this and all of this. And Tucker Carlson puts on his documentary suggesting it's all entirely a false flag. There's no evidence to support that. However, it would be surprising, frankly, just knowing the history of the FBI, knowing their infiltration of some of the groups that were present on that day to think that there weren't there wasn't forward visibility. They didn't know what was coming. So then why was the response so bad? That's one question. And then, you know, how many people are actively. I thought Cruz's question there about did anyone affiliated with the feds commit violent crimes? Yes, that's the most important. Because that's the other thing is we know that there are tens of thousands of crimes that are routinely sort of accepted and sanctioned by the feds, supposedly in service of keeping us all safe. That's a big question mark, how effectively they're ultimately doing this.

But, you know, if you really care about what happened on this day, these are significant questions. I also think focusing on Epps is a mistake. As we detailed in the latest Revolver News report, he's not just the only one. He just was so starkly caught on camera. There are multiple other ringleaders and individuals who are not wanted, have not yet been charged, who are actually known, and their identities were because they were pulled over by police officers.

These are people who were up on scaffolding with the bullhorn kind of directing the attack on the Capitol, encouraging that that person hasn't been charged. The people who helped breach the gates and who seemed to have like a fire retardant suit on at the time. Very specific, you know, type of uniform exactly. That person has not been charged, despite the fact that we know that that person had contact with the police the day before on suspicion of having a ton of weapons in his car. I mean, these, and also the pipe bomb. I mean, that's a whole other one.

Where's the guy who planted the pipe bomb? Probably the most egregious example. Also, why did Kamala Harris's security detail clear her being able to go in the building if there was a pipe bomb? Really interesting, right? In terms of the plant, when it exactly happened, the timeline, it's been a year. We still don't have the answer to all of these questions. And the corporate media is just picking up these statements by the January 6th committee as if it's gospel. They have no questions around this. You know, it's like, remember the way they covered the Benghazi hearing?

Rightfully. Being like, hey, this is, you know, doctor, or this is selective testimony, all of this skepticism. They have none of that here. Adam Kisinger puts out a BS thread about, oh, this shows that Ray Epps didn't actually commit any crimes. How do you know? You don't know anything. I mean, he said he never entered the Capitol. Once again, why was he on the FBI's most wanted list then?

I mean, it's not like he wouldn't be placed there without some pretty explicit reasons, and he was even interviewed and talked to in the days afterwards. This is all, and we now know, the ultimate end, which is what we've been warning from the very, very beginning. Put this up there on the screen, which is that it's not a coincidence that the Justice Department, one year after January 6th, is now forming a new domestic terror unit. And that new domestic terror unit is going to be within the Department of Justice to go after what they say is a threat that has doubled in the past two years. I always love whenever they say this. The National Security Division of the DOJ says that, you know, statistically, the threat has doubled. Based on what? Your BS statistics?

And once again, this is— Based on plots that you helped to create. Based on plots you created? Yes, the number of plots which FBI agents have been creating has doubled. I can—that's another way— In this particular realm, yeah. They're shifting resources from framing Muslim men to framing another group of people. Shouldn't be okay with it no matter who it is.

What's especially terrible is that within the announcement, they actually specifically talk about how they are redirecting resources away from al-Qaeda and ISIS towards this new domestic terror group. Also, here's how they describe it. Extremist, anti-government, and anti-authority ideology. Guess I'm a domestic. Anti-authority. I am very anti-authority.

Anybody who's had any experience with the COVID regime of the last two years should probably be anti-authority. And this also, I mean, that shows you it's not exclusively for right-wingers. Exactly. Right. You shouldn't feel comfortable if you're, you know, an anti-capitalist, if you have any sort of critique that's uncomfortable of government, no matter where you fall on the political spectrum, you could be targeted by this new unit. And this, again, is why it's important to understand what happened on this day, because they have used January 6th as a weapon to sort of further their own powers. Well, if there's indications that you had knowledge beforehand, that you had people there on the ground, at least who were informants,

then that raises a lot of questions about why we should be entrusting you with more power when you so dramatically failed on that particular day. And I will say, you know, some of the sort of online liberal faithful who are deeply invested in the January 6th committee and following every like person who's being subpoenaed and all of that stuff are starting to get a little agitated with Merrick Garland and others about the fact that there haven't been high-level arrests of people who were ringleaders and were instigators. And you know what? They're not wrong to feel that way when they've been led to believe that this was Pearl Harbor and 9-11 wrapped in one, that this is, I mean, this is Kamala Harris' rhetoric. I'm not making this up. This is the worst thing that's ever happened on American soil. And yet, you know, the charges you're getting are like the QAnon shaman for interrupting a government proceeding or for

trespassing. OK, if this is really sedition, if this is really treason, like where are those high level charges and why are you letting people like Ray Epps off the hook with no explanation, who was clearly, you know, invested in making this day as bad as possible, so they're not wrong to feel like they've been really sold a bill of goods here in terms of the sort of prosecutorial stance. But this is the other part is, you know, I made a point of saying this sort of like online liberal faithful, because the broader Democratic base is not super obsessed with 1-6 whatsoever. In fact, this is kind of funny. Put this tweet up on the screen.

This is a reporter who says he watched two focus groups with moderate voters last night. But these were all people who were sort of like lean Biden, voted for Biden. They were kind of like towards the Democratic camp or swingable towards the Democratic camp. Moderator asked the first group, five women about January 6th. Long pause followed before one of the women asked, what do you mean? Invoking January 6th didn't immediately mean anything at all to these folks, even days after the anniversary. Not because they're bad people who don't care about maintaining democracy, but because guess what? They got a lot of stuff going on in their lives. And, you know, as there's further tweets that follow that's basically like they all agreed this was a bad day.

They didn't like it. You know, there was a lot of blame on Trump, et cetera. But there was also a sense that, like like this is not the focus of my concerns. There are a lot of other things that are that are going on that are more relevant, more pertinent to me in my day to day life. And so you can just think about the fact that this is what Democrats have leaned into, especially over the past couple of months. And even their own voters are like, you're off base in your exclusive focus on this, on your obsession over this. This is not landing with us whatsoever. And that's why, in part, I just saw this morning, Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball, Kyle Condon, we have him on,

great analysts there, say that Republicans are poised to potentially win their largest majority in a century, In a century. That's how badly off-base Democrats have been with all this stuff. Look, so you put it all together. This has been from the beginning. Look, nobody, once again, I guess we always have to cover our bases. It's not like Trump was not primarily responsible for what happened on January 6th. That does not mean that there were not agent provocateurs who are within the audience or within the rioters that pushed things to a direction and inflamed them up such that the actual storming of the Capitol happened. How many of those people were FBI informants? It's a simple

question. Or not even FBI informants. How many of them were affiliated with law enforcement, intelligence, a higher U.S. government authority, such that it justified the largest domestic crackdown in modern American history? for months and occupied by national troops for months. Not a word from a lot of people. They were here for the QAnon rally, which nobody actually ended up coming to. It cost almost a billion dollars in that deployment. Now we have a new domestic terror law. Then we saw the systematic private deplatforming of a lot of people who were in the quote-unquote dissident anti-authority regime. Remember, this has been the greatest thing that ever happened to the powers that be. And so you should ask a lot of questions as to why that is. The new domestic terror unit is a threat, I think, to everybody who has a dissident belief. Yeah, 100%. Look, guys, this is like a fundamental

question. Are we going to be a security state or Are we going to be a democracy? Those are the choices. And so if you really actually care about democracy, the way this has been weaponized should be more troubling, way more troubling, because these are powerful institutions versus most of the people there who were totally powerless. You should be way more troubled by the direction that they have taken this in, by the way that they have weaponized it, than even of the events of that day, which, listen, there are two things I want to respond to that I saw online sentiments that were expressed when I was tweeting about this. One was, why are you scapegoating the FBI for the events that happened in the day? And I just want to be clear, we're not letting anyone off the hook for the personal action. They have agency,

and if they did bad stuff that day, they should be held accountable and they're responsible for that. And we are certainly not letting Trump off the hook either. And we say that every single time that we do segments on this. The other one that I really liked is people were like, this was Trump's DOJ. So there's no way that they would have been like, you totally don't understand the concept of the deep state. That's the whole idea. The whole point is that it's permanent bureaucracy. Permanent bureaucracy, not loyal to any particular president with their own agenda.

Yeah, right. And that's, by the way, I know the term has gained a lot of popularity during the Trump years and started to be used by the right during the Trump year. But this is a long-held concept that actually originates on the left of the political spectrum. So just wanted to put those two pieces out there. But again, bottom line is moving us more towards a security state, demonizing and criminalizing more of the country, surveilling, cooking up these plots, all of these things are a way greater risk to our democracy than the admittedly bad events of that day. Yeah, 100%. Let's move on. Speaking of threats to our democracy, which is corruption here in Washington, has been some really interesting and good moves around cracking down on members

of Congress who are trading stock. But I think a lot of the credit has to go to Unusual Whales, who has an account on Twitter, put this up there on the screen, who for the last couple of years really brought to the public consciousness by compiling publicly available data just how much members of Congress are beating the S&P 500 in 2021. And just look at that graphic here of all of these members of Congress, red and blue. Dan Crenshaw, Nancy Pelosi, Debbie Dingell, and Don Beyer. Victoria Sparks, Alan Lowenthal. I mean, every one of these people I named are members of both parties who are beating the S&P 500. And here's the best thing.

Somebody in finance pointed this out to me. There were only 53 hedge funds who beat the S&P 500 in 2021. So that means there are almost as many members of Congress who are beating the billionaires on Wall Street in terms of their private stock picks. Now, that's really, really interesting to me personally. I've got a lot of questions. And the best thing about Unusual Whales Report is by going and looking at the specific timing of trades where we have massive flurries of activities of stock sales right before major legislative events. It's exactly what happened previously whenever we would see members of Congress start to sell right around the time they knew the coronavirus was coming.

Then they ended up buying the dip. We saw huge options trades being leveraged by Nancy Pelosi's husband based upon possibly non-public information and her role as the Speaker of the House. We see members of committees who are trading defense stocks. The defense committee is trading defense stocks. Tech committees trading tech stocks. I mean, you almost can't get away from all of it. And you just tend to see here that massive amounts of capital are in the companies themselves of which Congress has the most direct impact on. The major technology companies which have contracts with the Pentagon and the defense contractors themselves. You cannot step away from it. And when technology has become the most valuable sector of our economy, and they are

then charged with trying to regulate technology, is it such a coincidence that they perhaps do nothing? And here's the question too. We will never know the answer to how much of it is corruption and not. I genuinely have no idea. So let's find out. And that's the key from this publicly available data, which just shows you that something's happening. They're not geniuses. I've met some of the people on this list. A lot of them are dumb. A lot of them are much dumber than you. And the question is, is what access to non-public information or shady deals did they get access to that allowed them to do better than the billionaires on Wall Street? Yeah. Ask yourself that question.

That's what's so damning is that when you look at the numbers overall, that they're beating the market and they're beating the people whose job it is to be good at this, right? So that's damning. The timing of the trades is extraordinarily damning. This was actually kind of funny to me. There was a flurry of trading activity among Senate Republicans when Joe Biden was sworn in. They were behind. They were like, oh, this is going to be good for the stock market.

So that's kind of funny. But also flurry of trading activity. Democrats, there was a significant flurry around the infrastructure bill. So when there were big things happening in Washington, especially things that they would have some insight into, being part of those negotiations and being part of the people who are directly voting on it, that's when they were making big moves. And so, again, look, it's very hard. Insider trading, prosecutions, very difficult. Yeah, you have to prove everything on both sides of the transaction. Yeah, very hard to know, okay, this trade was corruption.

This was just, you know, they bought it and they got lucky or they sold it and they got lucky. But when you look at the overall picture, there's no doubt that this is just shady as hell. And beyond that, what this does to public trust in our government, in our duly elected government, is devastating. And I also want to point out, it's not every member of Congress that's doing this. There are a lot of people who aren't on this list who have decided that, you know what, while I'm a member of Congress, I'm not going to involve myself in playing games on the stock market. So let's just, let's make that the standard. And in fact, there are movements now on the right and the left, I think you point out accurately,

thanks to the pressure that has been put online, thanks in part to the fact that Nancy Pelosi and her husband's trades- Yeah, have been so egregious. Have been so egregious, but have become such a flashpoint on the right. That's why you end up with politicians who feel like it's in their interest to make some hay over this and try to push things

forward. So that's where we are today, which is pretty interesting. There's some new moves this morning. But, you know, so the back story is Pelosi comes out and makes her comments basically like scoffing at the idea that we should have any checks on trading for members of Congress and for their spouses and family members. John Ossoff, it leaks out, is actually preparing a bill that's effectively a direct rebuke of Pelosi, given those comments. And so reporters run out and they start trying to press Democratic politicians on where they stand on this. And a lot of these folks were very cagey because now you're asking them, all right, am I

on the Jon Ossoff side or am I on the Nancy Pelosi side? Let's go ahead and throw our next element up on the screen there. So Insider took it upon themselves to go talk to Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer in particular. And this is funny. The other piece of this is Kevin McCarthy came out and said, oh, we may do something on this, you know, when we take control of the House. So Hakeem Jeffries is happy to go in on Kevin McCarthy. He has no credibility. I'm certainly not going to listen to ethics lectures on him. Fair enough. But then when they ask Hakeem Jeffries, who is seen as Nancy Pelosi's most likely successor, all right, well, what do you

think about this stuff? Nothing to say. He says, quote, I support continuing to make sure that everyone complies with the law as it is right now. I'm unfamiliar with the legislation. Bullshit. It has not been presented to me. Nobody has talked to me about it. And, of course, I'm open to having conversations with any members. Also, they asked Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer about a hypothetical stock trading ban on Tuesday.

He dodged the question saying, quote, I don't own any stocks. So, profiles encouraged. And, you saying, quote, I don't own any stocks. So profiles encourage that. And you know, yeah, here's the thing. Like you said, it is becoming bipartisan and that is the best news. So this morning broke, Senator Josh Hawley has introduced his own bill, which would go ahead and ban trading. Some of the specifics aren't entirely there. It's not the same as the John Ossoff bill, which also now has a co-sponsor. The big difference, as far as we know, between the Ossoff and Hawley bill, and apparently they were in negotiations because Ossoff originally wanted a Republican co-sponsor. Now instead he's got Mark Kelly's Democrat from Senator, who's also in a reddish state of Arizona. The big difference between them is Ossoff's applies not only to spouses but also to family, dependent family members.

Right. And Hawley's is just spouses. There's also some different enforcement mechanisms apparently. But those were sort of the, as far as Axios is reporting this morning, those were the distinguishing factors. Like I said, even a 10% increase and just making it so they can only trade mutual funds would be a dramatic increase in terms of public transparency and public trust. I've seen the way these things go through the mangle. It's very unlikely anything becomes law. But it gives me some hope. Josh Hawley, John Ossoff, Mark Kelly, Representative Chip Roy, who are in the House of Representatives, who is backing the House version of this bill. There are people. And now you have Kevin McCarthy,

who wants to do it to own Nancy Pelosi. Fine. I don't care. Yeah, take it. This is one of those ways where the culture war actually can work to all of our benefit. And I want to say this to a lot of the younger people in our audience. You guys are the reason that this is happening. And the reason why is because increasing public disillusionment, posting about it on Twitter, on TikTok, on Instagram, our segments, other people who talk about this, unusual whales, has brought it to a level of public consciousness where politicians can look at that energy and outrage and say, we got to do something about this. It actually is a rare instance of people on the internet using publicly available information, being outraged about it, talking about it. I mean, how long have we been talking about this now? For two years almost? I mean,

it's been years we've been talking and we were very lonely in the wilderness whenever we first started and is based once again upon unusual Wales information, started becoming a TikTok meme, started becoming something that teenagers and others looked at. And now people in Congress are talking about it. So look, that's how it starts. It's a good example of how internet activism, outrage, whatever, it can seem so faux and empty in 99% of cases. But in the 1%, if it does work, it's still a real victory. So I want you guys to understand. 100%. And it's important to understand why it worked because you can never count on these people to, like, do something because it's the right thing to do. Yeah, they don't care.

Right? But Ossoff, Hawley, Kevin McCarthy, they have perceived this to be in their political interest. Yes, and it is. And it is. That's the best thing. Right. And so the fact that you have people on both sides of the aisle perceiving this in their political interests and putting pressure on their own leadership, that's the other thing that's important to note is even Hawley's bill goes further than what McCarthy was floating. So he's also putting pressure on Republican leadership to do something that would actually be real here because, frankly, what McCarthy floated was kind of bullshit. But the fact that they perceive it in their individual political interest,

thanks to the pressure that you all put on them, that is a model for success for the future and something to remember and something to build on. So that is what is exciting. All right, guys, so we got new inflation numbers yesterday, but we also got a pretty interesting moment from Elizabeth Warren. So this particular segment on inflation has both the good and the bad here, ultimately. Let's start with Elizabeth Warren. So you guys know Senator Warren used to have really good economic politics. We're talking like 09. Yeah.

I mean, she came to into public prominence trashing Hillary Clinton and the banks, most importantly, the banks trashing Joe Biden for pretend posing posturing as an ally of women with his bills against domestic violence, which are important. But meanwhile, selling them out financially. I mean, she went toe-to-toe with him on this stuff. And then suddenly when she runs for president, she doesn't say a word about any of that, leans hard into the shallowest, most impotent form of identity politics. Things like, I mean, throwing Bernie under the bus, pretending he's a sexist, promising to wear a pink Planned Parenthood scarf on Inauguration Day. I know that was your personal favorite.

No, my personal favorite was promising an 11-year-old trans child that they get to pick the Department of Education secretary. I liked even more than that at the DNC when she had the BLM in the blocks behind her. So this was a major—I used to love Elizabeth Warren. I was such an Elizabeth Warren stan. So to watch her debase herself and just crumble into this totally impotent figure that is not really offering anything, challenging the powerful anymore was very sad for me to see. So this week we had Jerome Powell's confirmation hearings to be reconfirmed as Fed chair. And Warren is not a fan of Jerome

Powell to start with. And I think she's a no vote on that. But he's still going to get confirmed ultimately because Republicans are going to vote for him, too. But she really pressed him on the reasons, some of the reasons that we have such high inflation right now and forced him to admit that corporations jacking up their prices using inflation as an excuse to further jack up their prices was a part of what's going on. Let's take a listen to what she did here. Let me ask it the other way then, because we're still kind of doing econ 101 here. If you're a corporation that has eaten up most of the competition and cornered the market, is it easier for you to raise prices on

your customers and maximize your profits? Because you don't have to worry about losing your business. In other words, you've lost the discipline that the market imposes. In principle, if you don't have competition and you're a monopolist, yes, you can raise your prices. Okay. And over the past year, we know that prices have risen because of supply chain problems, unexpected shifts in the demand for goods, and even higher labor costs. But if corporations were simply passing along these costs in highly competitive markets, would the company's profit margins have changed much? You know, so many things affect that calculation.

In principle, you could be right, but... Well, it's very much not what we're seeing right now. Today, nearly two out of three of the biggest publicly traded corporations in the country are reporting fatter profit margins than they reported before the pandemic, which doesn't sound like they're just passing along costs. So let me ask you, does that increase in profit margins combined with greater market concentration in industry after industry suggest to you that some corporations may be passing along increased costs and at the same time charging more on top of that to fatten their profit margins? That could be right. It could also just be, though, that demand is incredibly strong and that they're raising

prices because they can. Well, that's the point. They're raising prices because they can. Well, that's the point. They're raising prices because they can. Yeah, which as we have shown you is absolutely the case. You know, we looked at that gap in corporate profits, which is up like by, I think at the high record number in 2021, which again, nobody's denying that there has not been a massive demand shock as the chairman indicates. That is absolutely the case due to both money, savings, weird wonky stuff within the economy,

supplies chain issues, and all of that. But also, as we've seen, the corporations are bragging to their shareholders that because people expected increase in price, they can increase it even more so than they actually have to. And this is the part, too, which also kind of drives me nuts, where people deny the ability for local monopolies. So not necessarily a monopoly nationwide, but in specific areas, obviously have massive ability in order to manipulate price, especially when people don't have all that much competition. And look, we got the final numbers on inflation. Let's look at the key price hikes where everything is concentrated specifically in these areas which are most subject to the supply shock.

Put it up there on the screen. Gas is up 49.6% is a constitution inflation. Fuel oil, 41%. That's something that really relates to people who heat their homes, especially in rural areas. And just a clarification, this is an annual number. Annual number.

Right, just so you know, because it's a little bit confusing from the tweet that says inflation hit 7% in December. That's an annualized number. That's right, yeah. So that's the annualized number. And this is also the annualized increase year over year. Used cars up 37, rental cars up 36, hotels

27, utility gas 24, steak 21, beef 18.6, bacon 18.6, furniture 13.8, tires 12.4, new cars 12. So you guys basically get it. It's gas and it's food and it's travel. Those are the three things where you've seen a massive increase in price of goods. All three are subject to massive supply shock for various reasons. A lot of it, almost all of it actually has to do with globalization. And I wish that somebody would talk about that. I mean, it drives me nuts that people look at this and you're like, yeah, we have an international gas market. Domestic supply here in the United States is actually subject to international demand rather than domestic demand. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

And yet we just allow Exxon and Chevron and all these people to ship out half the gas that we produce here naturally even though we don't have to. Same whenever it comes to food. I mean, you have a huge increase in the price of fertilizer, droughts in Brazil, droughts in Montana, increase in demand of people staying at home, plus the shipping crisis. Yeah, you have an increase in food. And then, I mean, the used car one, we've talked about endlessly, semiconductors. I heard stories about Detroit, who is, Detroit is designing new cars by promising buyers stuff that they'll slot in into their car in the future. So they're basically like selling them a three-fourths finished car. This is all plans in Detroit right now because they're freaking out. They don't have cars that they can sell people.

I have a friend who works at the truck assembly plant in Louisville. And he hasn't worked in like 20 days. Oh, my God. Because they just, you know, it's one thing. The chips, they had the, what do they call them, chassis, the frame of the car. They had a shortage of those. It's just been like one thing after another. And so, yeah, it's bad when you, it turns out that it's good to make some things here and not be totally dependent on, you know, China and the rest of the world for our basic goods to continue

living life here. It hasn't worked out that well. And then the other piece of this that Elizabeth Warren very effectively, in fact, you know, gets Jerome Powell to admit, even though he really didn't want to. I was surprised by that. I didn't really understand why he was being so reluctant. Because these are, I mean, you know, we have this illusion of the Fed being this, like, independent, these wise men and women who are largely academics. But they're deeply tied in with Wall Street. I mean, that's their milieu. The Federal Reserve is comprised of a series of regional banks. The whole system was created by bankers, effectively. So I think that's why is they're just so tied in with Wall Street that

they don't want to admit what the corporations themselves are acknowledging that they're doing. So she gets him to admit, yeah, they're raising prices because they can. Well, that's exactly the point here. They can. They have the excuse of inflation. They have monopoly power. And so they're raking in record profit margins because they're able to use the excuse of inflation. They have monopoly power. And so they're raking in record profit margins because they're able to use the excuse of inflation to lift prices way more than is actually justified. And so the reason they don't want to acknowledge the globalization issues, just-in-time issues, and the corporate greed issues is because that would require them changing business as usual. Yeah, that's true. The easiest thing in the world to issues is because that would require them changing business as usual.

Yeah, that's true. The easiest thing in the world to do is to say, you all got a little stimulus check, and now you're able to buy a few things. Let's make sure that you're more impoverished so you can't keep doing that. That's the easiest thing in the world for them to do. Then that doesn't require them to change business as usual. So that is part of the story is that people were able to say, well, there was a demand shock coming out of the pandemic. You know, people can't, still can't go out and, you know, engage in services and those sorts of things. So they're

buying more goods. That is part of the story. But why would you want to respond to this multifaceted crisis by making the American people poor, which is what the sort of mainstream conventional wisdom, that's what it would lead you ultimately to do. Yeah. Sadly, that's probably what's going to happen. I just wanted to warn you all, that's almost entirely the most likely thing that's going to happen. 100%. We're already heading in that direction. Yeah, that's right. Okay. Let's move on to Donald Trump. This has been very interesting to watch. So you might not recall this, but Governor DeSantis was recently interviewed and asked whether he got the booster shot. And he kind of demurred and did not confirm whether the answer was yes or no. Now, next, Donald Trump was then interviewed by OAN. And it's the same situation as during the Candace Owens interview, where the interviewer

clearly wants him to say, like, I regret the vaccine, like trash the vaccine, you know, all of that. And Trump comes out forcefully, not only in effect for the vaccine, but calls out DeSantis in all but name. Let's take a listen. Do you reconsider your push for it? Or what's your view now on the vaccine in general? i've taken it i've had the booster many politicians i watched a couple of politicians be interviewed and one of the questions was did you get the booster because they had the vaccine and they oh they're answering it like in other words the answer is yes but they don't want to say it because they're gutless you got to say it whether you had it or not say it but the fact is that I think the vaccine has saved tens of millions of people throughout the world.

I have had absolutely no side effects. I've had it like other people have had it, nothing special. I've had it. Wow. That would be interesting. Yeah, I just – I think it's once again an area where this is, I always try to ponder counterfactuals, which is that, yes, you know, it may seem more calm with Trump off Twitter. But what did we lose? And this is, again, shows you the, you know, many cascading and 20th order effects of censorship. Yeah, you lost, you know, he was banned or whatever on January 6th.

But there's a world where this entire right-wing response looks completely different if Trump was on Twitter. A huge amount of what we see in terms of vaccine activity and more on the right is in the absence of Trump as a singular figure. And I see this very clearly. I also think now that him getting booted off Twitter is probably the best thing that ever happened for him. He receded from public memory. Whenever he does pop up and enter the public consciousness, it is in moments like this one. You know, in general, people blame the country's problems on Joe Biden, rightfully. They don't even consider Trump. You know, they're like, it's kind of like a yesteryear phenomenon. The intensity of the way that you feel starts to fade. And I see clips like that. And I just think about

Trump by not being such a big force in the vaccine discourse on to fade. And I see clips like that. And I just think about Trump, by not being such a big force in the vaccine discourse on the right, and I'm talking over a year ago now, there's very likely a way in which he negates and nukes all of this and ridicules people on the right for not doing so like this. So very interesting in order to see that. But honestly, at this point, I think it might be too late. I mean, I think so much of it has a life of its own. You know, it really is like you look at Candace saying she would rather die of COVID than take the COVID vaccine. Or, you know, a lot of these other people in the absence of Trump, you know, kind of decided to go in this way. And now Trump coming

out and calling them out isn't necessarily going to do anything. Yeah, and I was thinking about this in terms of the sort of political calculus. I mean, this is something we've talked about on this show is that you've got like, what is it, 85% of the adult population that's had at least one shot. That means even within the Republican Party, Trump's position is the majority position. I know, especially amongst boomers. You know, 95% of boomers are vaccinated. 95% of them. Yes, exactly. So he actually is on firm political ground,

not with maybe the most ardent supporters, but with the majority of the Republican base, he's on solid footing here, which is also, I mean, that's just interesting to note and very different than the picture that I think is often painted because you do have more vaccine hesitancy, sort of ideological vaccine hesitancy on that side of the aisle. I did want to say what DeSantis said, because I found the quote when he was asked by Maria Bartiromo. This was back in December.

She said, you got to say it. Well, that was, yeah, Trump said, you got to say it. Well, that was, yeah, Trump said, you got to say it whether you had it or not. Bartiromo back in December had asked DeSantis and he said, quote, I did, done whatever I did, the normal shot. So he would not say. And right, like that doesn't even,

yeah, that's not even like really English. It's fine, yeah. The other thing I wanted to note here is that Governor Jim Justice of West Virginia has COVID right now and is vaxxed, is boosted, and is apparently very ill. He described himself as extremely unwell, had to postpone his state of the state speech. So just wanted to say, you know, we're thinking of him and his family because he's an older guy. He's a heavier guy. Big dude, he's like, he's either six foot seven or six foot eight. And I've met him in person. He is a sort of larger than life figure. And he has, you know, a number of comorbidities that would put him at more risk with coronavirus. So you can see there are still people who, even when they're vaxxed and boosted, continue to be at risk because of their, you know,

sort of personal health status. I hear it all the time. People who just got the booster shot, now they have COVID or whatever. I just, you know, it's another thing. Yes, it protects you from a hospitalization and death, but look, it'd be very, be very, very, you know, clear that taking care of yourself is one of the best ways in order to avoid having a bad time, not just with COVID, but with all disease. Something I've really learned from this. I do want to highlight something which has been fascinating to me is that Trump's shot at DeSantis spawned a lot of conversation on the online right who were trashing Trump for going after DeSantis. Oh, really?

Yeah. So Ann Coulter actually said this, quote, exclusive, Trump is demanding to know Ron DeSantis' booster status and I can now reveal it. He was a loyal booster when Trump ran in 2016. Then he learned our president was a liar and a con man whose grift was permanent. I hope that clears things up. Of course, Coulter has hated Trump for a while. She has. But then I also saw a guy, Matt Walsh, he works over at the Daily Wire, kind of an interesting, more libertarian figure. And he, again, was doing the same thing. He's like, hey, he's a classic Trump trashing the one national figure who actually would have a chance in his absence. So there has now been kind of an internecine war online as to people turning against Trump for going after DeSantis because they see DeSantis as a much more competent, true figure, you know, on the national political stage. I just thought it was

a fascinating thing too. I think in a way that this could also be driven by Trump's insecurity as seeing DeSantis kind of rise up and take a lot of national media attention. I mean, at his core, that's all he cares about is attention on him, on himself, and very, very, very jealously guards his role as a number one person within the Republican Party and his hold on the base. So there's another element to it, too. I'm just saying, I found it all interesting. I mean, the Republican Party is very much Trump's party. If he runs, he'll be the nominee. But he is super petty. And so the fact that DeSantis even has a little bit of a toehold, even though he's not a real threat to Trump whatsoever, I'm sure that's definitely part of his calculus here.

I do think your counterfactual is interesting to contemplate, too. The fact that we don't have Trump in our face on Twitter every day reminding us how annoying and obnoxious and awful he is routinely, that probably has helped him. That probably has put him in a better position because memories have faded and people have forgotten how horrible and selfish and narcissistic he was on a routine basis. There's none of the Stormy Daniels is a horse face. There's none of all that other stuff, which was intrinsic to Trump. Now, whenever he comes out, it's in a more filtered format. Most of his statements don't get any play whatsoever. It's only in these kind of breakout moments in which the media covers him. And, you know, with all the national attention on Biden, then there's nothing to really compare it to. So it's a very fascinating thing to me that it could be the best thing that ever

happened to Trump politically, allowing him to not remind people constantly of the most odious and annoying parts of his personality and letting people only remember the good times of 2019 or whatever. People's consciousness and their memory changes very, very quickly. One year is an eternity in American politics. So you put that all together and you see this. I see a jockeying for being the top of the Republican Party, look, with a good message, undeniably, of it. And just it makes me really think. I'm like, what would the world look like with Donald Trump on Twitter today? Maybe it would be a better one in some ways and worse in others.

I don't know. Yeah. I have no idea. We'll never know. Okay. This is, you found this. I love this. Two of some of the greatest op-eds in history. We always save our, we always save the E block, the last block. Peak corporate media right here. This is peak corporate brain media rot. So many different ways to describe it. Let's put these joint op-eds. They dropped on the exact same day, which is kind of amazing to me. Thomas Friedman of The World is Flat fame says Biden-Cheney 2024, but even worse over at The Wall Street Journal,

Hillary Clinton's 2024 election comeback. Oh, my God. So let's start with this. By the way, I posted that on Instagram and I got a hilarious joke saying that Hillary is on her fifth horcrux. That's for all my Harry Potter fans out there. Look, let's go ahead and actually consider this, right? What exactly is the Hillary argument that they're saying here? So Doug Schoen and Andrew Stein. So they say Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have become unpopular. It is time for a change candidate. Nothing says change like Hillary. Hillary Clinton.

Fourth time's a charm, folks. And the amazing thing, though, is that the tortured logic of it makes sense. Kamala is super unpopular. Joe Biden's poll, Quinnipiac poll just came out. He's at 32%, one of the lowest on record for a sitting American president in his first year in office, nearing Trump territory without any of the actual fervor of his own base. And so they look at Kamala being as, if not more so, unpopular than Biden. And they go, okay, well, who's somebody who could do it? Hillary.

And those of us are saying, yeah, but how much more marginally popular is she? I mean, maybe a little bit more than Kamala, but this is still somebody who is probably the most odious and hated American figure in modern politics. Plus, you know she's a proven loser. Yeah, she literally already lost. She's a routine proven loser. She lost to the likely Republican candidate of 2024. It says also a lot about the fact that

how do we keep putting up the same people over and over and over again? That is a sign of a stagnating republic. But the other one is also important to understand from Thomas Friedman, because this is just pure New York Times, like neoliberal brain, because what he's like, well, Liz Cheney stood up for democracy. And so Joe Biden and Liz Cheney can team up in order to defend democracy, because this is the right-left. And, you know, the point we try to make here, right and left in the way that you understood it in 2004,

that does not make any goddamn sense in the year 2022. Biden and Cheney have a lot in common in terms of their political orientation, in terms of their policy priorities, in terms of their record on the war in Iraq. I mean, that's why this bloc is called Uniparty, because that's really what it is. If you look at the institutional interests of Washington that the two of them seem to represent, there is not a lot of difference between the two. And you look at the brain of the pundits. And this is how they grapple with the idea of Biden losing popularity amongst the American people. They cannot tell you why Biden is unpopular. And the story of why informs what you want to do in order to correct it. The idea that a Cheney would be the savior of democracy,

that that's also that that's the real left-right divide is also complete nonsense. And that, you know, it's actually a useful op-ed because this is the ideology of liberal elites at this point. That's how they're able to make common cause with someone like Liz Cheney and put aside all of the totally abhorrent, you know, militaristic tendencies of her and, you know, record of her father and all of that and say, oh, this is a hero. This is someone we should embrace. This is someone we should make common cause with. This is how you end up with Nicole Wallace as one of the top liberal stars on MSNBC.

This is how you end up with all of these FBI, CIA types being given cushy contracts. Because what are they going to stand for? Making more speeches about January 6th? That's what you really think like the Democratic Party needs right now? That's what they think. Is to, you know, to double down on January 6th and voting rights, which is just like a debate about process effect. I support it. It's fine.

But if you're just arguing about like the mechanics of the process, you're not even really playing the game. So it exposes the true way that they think about the country and the type of divide, the type of divisive politics that they want. And it's a type that maintains everything as bad as it is, but offers more Lin-Manuel Miranda show tunes, more kneeling in kente cloth, more one-sixth denunciation, which ultimately doesn't threaten the livelihoods or the lifestyles of the elite class and allows them to feel good and virtuous about themselves, feel like they're doing all right, feel like they're on the right side of history without actually being committed to effectuating a single change. On the Hillary thing. Yes. So I was actually debating with Kyle a little bit about this. Oh, yeah. What does he think?

Well, he was like, I'm starting to believe that this is a real possibility because the case he laid out to me is basically like, because I think she's going to want a rematch with Trump. Yeah. And the political circle around her has vested like personal financial interest in continuing, you know, continuing the dream and that the Democratic Party is stupid enough to think that this could be a sort of unifying candidate and the other candidates are totally total failures and obviously unpopular so he was like you know i think she really may be actually thinking about it i just i just can't you know the biggest to me i want to say i can't believe the democratic party is stupid enough to do this but no i can believe i can believe that actually yeah i think the biggest problem for her is that her fan base

would be the type that would say, how can you push aside the first woman of color vice president? I think for her, that would be a real stumbling block and very difficult to overcome, which would make her a divisive figure, even among her own like sort of most hardcore lib fans in the Democratic base. Yeah, I think you're right. You know, it's just the entire thing is, I don't see how it could happen. That being said, it's more of indicative of the mindset from which they are now going to try and find whoever it does come to ultimately replace Biden, be it 2024 or be it 2028. This is the brain which leads you to say Pete Buttigieg is the person to save the Democratic Party. I agree. I agree. And we're going to, for tomorrow, we're going to be talking to the Daily Poster about the millions of dollars of dark money. I

mean, there are donors who are really behind this guy. There are machinations behind the scene. I mean, the challenge for him, too, is how do you displace the first black woman vice president? I mean, listen, if you lean... I love that he's in this predicament. I think it's hilarious. You lean hard into this just totally hollow, shallow, content-free identity politics, and it can get weaponized right back at you.

And so I think that's the conundrum that he's going to find himself in. That being said, Democratic Party has, you know, ways of moving people aside and strong arming, especially someone like Kamala, who ultimately is like her only relevance comes from her proximity and power within the Democratic Party. So she's going to be reluctant to go against them or like say anything negative about them in any sense. I think it still has to be Kamala. I don't see a way that it can't be. It has to be hers. It's hers for the taking.

The Democrats are just too cowardly in the elite in order to say anything. And they're just too susceptible to the attack that they're stopping a black woman from accusing, from achieving her dreams. So that is just gonna be, it's the most politically powerful force amongst elites is accusations of racism.

And that is going to be something that is weaponized to the extent that you have never even seen. Anybody who questions it is going to be accused of some of the most heinous things. And that is going to then lead to her losing in a proportion of which the likes of which we have not seen in almost a century. FDR-level blowout.

It's going to be bad. And they will blowout. It's going to be bad. And they will embrace her even knowing that. Yeah, they will. Because they're cowards. Because they're cowards. Because to them, signaling their personal virtue is way more important than achieving power or certainly achieving power and actually doing something with it. Oh, very true.

So I think you have a good point there. It's going to be Kamala, guys. It'll be fun to watch. That's very likely. It'll be fun to watch. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, as you all know, something I keep a close eye on here at Breaking Points

is how corporate America has become fully ensnared with the Chinese Communist Party. That ensnarement is almost complete in the areas of finance and manufacturing, where our industrial capitalists were happy to loot their own domestic enterprises in exchange for big payoffs from Beijing. Now, that transfer of wealth is by and large complete. The best we can do is put a final end to it. But the area where I remain most concerned is on technologies of the future. That's why I pay a lot of attention to Elon Musk. Now, it is because of

my respect and admiration for the companies that Musk has built to prominence that he deserves scrutiny that I'm about to give him. I have detailed in the past how intertwined Elon has become to the Chinese regime. But one of the latest moves by his company Tesla shows just how much he's decided to cast his lot with a foreign adversary. Tesla announced last week that it would open a showroom in Xinjiang province of China, the very site of the worst atrocities within China towards its ethnic Uyghur minority. Now, you make no mistake, this was not done out of the growing customer base for Tesla in Xinjiang, but as an explicit mark of faith by Tesla to the

Chinese regime at this critical turning point. Let me explain. In recent days, the House of Representatives and the Senate have passed a bill banning imports to the United States of any product made in Xinjiang province by Chinese slave labor. Primarily, it applies to cotton. Now, over the past two years, Western companies have come under major governmental pressure to ensure the integrity of their supply chain. Leading brands like Nike, H&M, Walmart, and Intel to expressly assure shareholders and regulators they have no connection to Xinjiang province. This has provoked massive backlash in Beijing, who use their massive hold over American companies to try and compel their speech in the other direction.

In effect, they have brought their regime of political censorship to our shores in addition to their own. Now, certain companies who are shameless have seen there's actually a lot of profit to be made in embracing slave labor. Like Hugo Boss out of Germany, who once made uniforms for the Nazi SS. They proudly proclaim they buy Xinjiang cotton. And Tesla, on New Year's Eve, opened its showroom there to send the same message, which is, we stand with you, Chinese Communist Party. It was the ultimate act of fealty to the Chinese government, who, as I have detailed here, have ruthlessly captured and exploited Tesla in their country to build up domestic manufacturing. Elon gets filthy rich. They get the supply chain. Everybody wins, except for America. But what's particularly gross

about this is how much it shows that Elon's bad boy image here at home is mostly an act, actually born of the freedom that he was given in his adopted country. Elon likes to tweet irreverently at senators. He likes to say the government here in the U.S. is useless and a terrible allocator of capital. And yet, at the exact same time, he kowtows to a foreign government who tolerates no dissent. Elon Musk's Tesla put electric vehicles on the map probably two decades before they would have emerged naturally. It was a stunning effort in moving humanity forward. And by letting his company get co-opted by that foreign government,

and worse, controlled by them, we as Americans have to ensure our integrity and access to what will be a major contest of the future. But electric vehicles aren't the only area in which Elon has moved the ball. He's revolutionized space technology, and he has given how much NASA has gone woke right now, and right now they care more about putting a woman in space than actually putting a human on Mars. He is likely our best shot at interplanetary travel in my lifetime. This, again, is a major problem. If the Chinese can

squeeze Elon through his Tesla ownership and a huge portion of his net worth, does that mean that they can now control one of our national champions in the space domain? The answer is actually yes, and already we see tensions bubbling to the surface. The Chinese government recently complained that two SpaceX satellites came too close to Chinese astronauts while in space. And critically, the Chinese messaged the story at home, saying that SpaceX and its Starlink efforts, which is to provide high-speed internet across the globe, is part of a U.S. rogue project that the U.S. was monopolizing the space race. In other words, the Chinese are upset with Starlink and with SpaceX, which is controlled by Elon. Now,

while they use their leverage over into the Tesla manufacturing supply chain of huge supply, that is vehicles, to compel change in another area, what happens in the space race between China and the United States for Mars when the U.S. relies right now on Elon's company just to get us into space? What happens if we want to become a nation of electric drivers? Can we even do such a thing if our flagship company works for another government over the interests of the citizens from where that company was born and is based? These are all great questions that Elon doesn't want to answer. I again say this as somebody who is a fan of him and respects him, but I respect the country that Musk built much more than Musk himself. And it has become clear that the Chinese impression that Elon is a rootless cosmopolitan who cares

more about making money than patriotism could be very well true. And the solution is simple. I've outlined it here. For every business, not just Elon, let's just make the choice for him. I believe in the Elon electric future. I also believe the control of that future lies with supply chains. So mandate Elon do what he did in China, that he make his business decisions at the political, he cannot make political decisions at the behest of a foreign

adversary, or he loses his security clearance and access to lucrative government contracts. In effect, he's got to choose. You can't have it both ways in the 21st century. We made this mistake once when it came to manufacturing and finance. Look where it got us. To win the future, we have to at least make sure that we have a say in it. And it is time to say that that is clear when it comes to Mr. Elon Musk. I mean, it's pretty clear, Crystal, what he's doing here. And I think what pisses me off the most is the whole... And if you want to hear my reaction to Saagr's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com.

Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, as we discussed, we just got some new inflation numbers, and they are pretty rough. In 2021, annually, inflation spiked 7%. That's the steepest rise since 1982. Energy, cars, food prices, those all led the way for price spikes in that year. All things with a whole lot of relevance to your average American. A whole lot of Americans surveying this chaotic landscape of wage increases, low unemployment on one hand, but price spikes and empty shelves on the other, they believe we could be headed into another recession. In fact, a new poll found that a

stunning 75% of Americans believe that we will enter into a recession in the next 12 months. That includes 33 percent. So a third of Americans who said that outcome is very likely. Now, the Biden administration wants to convince these Americans that they're crazy and actually everything's really great. After all, look at the stock market. It's soaring. But there's some pretty good reasons to believe that the American people kind of on to something when they see troubled economic waters ahead for 2022. And to really understand how the year is likely to unfold, don't listen to the White House. Instead, listen to the Fed. You see, Jerome Powell's Fed is in an extraordinarily tricky position right now, one that is explained in detail in Christopher Leonard's new book, The Lords of Easy Money. We just interviewed him on Crystal Kyle and Friends. I highly recommend

both that conversation and the book itself to you. But the extremely simplified version of the problem is this. The Fed, since the 2008 financial crash, has engaged in truly historic and unprecedented behavior, pumping trillions into the stock and into the bond markets at the same time that they kept interest rates at zero or very close to zero. Now, this easy money did not spread evenly across the economy, though. Not even close. Instead, it went where the Fed could put it, which is to the very top. Remember these headlines from a year or so ago? Market edges towards euphoria despite pandemic's toll.

America got a huge lesson in just how fake the stock market really was when they were watching the destruction, desperation, and job loss in their own lives unfold against the split-screen reality of a stock market-breaking record after record after record. Well, the Fed's extraordinary and unprecedented moves were a big part of that very perplexing story. They shot a money cannon at Wall Street while Congress pissed down a small trickle for the rest of us. Take a look at this chart and you can get a bit of the sense of the scale of Fed action that we are talking about here. This is a graph of the Fed's balance sheet. That's just a way of tracking how much money the Fed pumped into the pockets of rich people through something called quantitative easing. In 2005, that balance sheet looks more

or less the way it has looked to the entire Fed history. Then there's a big jump, starts in 2009, continues to about 2015. Those numbers stabilize. They even slowly decline a little bit before shooting skyward like a rocket during the pandemic, bringing us to the present day and the landscape that is now facing Jerome Powell's Fed. To make things even easier to understand, really what that graph is, it's charting socialism for the rich. Now the Fed has to decide if it's going to continue. And with inflation spiking to extraordinary levels, Jerome Powell is stating pretty clearly that the free money party is about to stop. Now, in one sense, that's actually good because these policies have massively spiked inequality and they have ultimately done damage to working class people.

Here's the fear, though. Christopher Leonard and other analysts believe that all of that Fed money has created huge asset bubbles. Asset bubbles are what happens when investors buy up stocks, bonds, properties, things like that, bidding up prices based not on those assets' underlying value, but on the logic that since prices have been going up in the past, they are likely to continue going up in the future. Asset bubbles have a kind of logic of their own. They're a feedback loop, where past price increases fuel speculation on future price increases. Which is all well and good, I suppose, until the music stops. Then the exact reverse dynamic takes hold. Speculators believe that prices will fall, so they start selling. That

causes prices to fall even more, which leads to even more selling. And while regular people may not have benefited much from the Fed's asset bubbles while they were being inflated, they sure as hell get hurt badly when those same bubbles burst, throwing the economy into a recession. Look no further than the dot-com bubble burst or the housing bubble burst to understand the profound pain and damage inflicted on regular folks when asset bubbles burst. Okay, so that is the context for understanding what Fed Chair Jerome Powell is hinting at this week with his most recent comments. Inflation concerns have led Powell to signal pretty clearly that he plans to put the brakes on in a major way over the next year. Most of the coverage of Powell's comments focus on the Fed's long-expected intent to hike

interest rates three or four times over the coming year. But what you should really focus on is what the Fed is going to do about all of those assets they put on their balance sheet while they were funneling money to the top 1%. Take a listen. The economy no longer needs or wants the very highly accommodative policies that we've had in place to deal with the pandemic and the aftermath. So that's what that's really about. We're really just going to be moving over the course of this year to a policy that is closer to normal, but it's a long road to normal from where we are. When Mal talks about a long road to normal, he's talking about that massive balance sheet that needs unwinding. What's more, he went on to say that this process should happen, quote, sooner and faster.

That much is clear. In other words, the Fed is claiming that it might be time to pay the piper. And Americans are right to believe we are entering right now very dangerous territory. Because too much unwinding and too fast could easily trigger a recession, popping those asset bubbles rather than slowly letting the air out. And these new inflation numbers are putting increased pressure on Powell to do exactly that. Now, listen, if you didn't follow all of this, at least understand this.

Our economic destiny this year, and for many to follow, is really in the hands of the Fed. Pay less attention to pundits and the inept Biden people and much more to people like Jerome Powell. I also want to say one more thing about this, which is questions of monetary policy

used to be matters of fierce public debate. They sparked mass populist movements. Think of William Jennings Bryan's famous cross of gold speech as the quintessential example. It has not always been the case that you had to search the financial press to get in-depth discussions of this type of stuff. And it certainly hasn't always been the case that the masses are made to believe that the wise men and women of the Fed should just crunch their numbers and do their thing and that the rest of that the masses are made to believe that the wise men and women of the Fed should just crunch their numbers and do their thing, and that the rest of us peons are too stupid to really get it. This cloistering of the Fed, it was done intentionally over many years, including by the famous former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, who created his own inaccessible Fed-speak language

so he had to be a PhD candidate to understand what the hell he was talking about. In fact, none of this is that complicated to grasp. And the consequences of Fed action, especially in the modern era, are way too massive to just turn our brains off and outsource to a handful of Wall Street-connected elites. Resolve to learn more, engage more, and pressure more. In 2022, let's make debates over monetary policy populist again. And that was one thing as I dug in. I know you talked to Christopher Leonard, too, whose book I really highly recommend. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Joining us now, we have bestselling author, former presidential candidate, and many other

wonderful things. Marianne Williamson, it's always great to see you. Oh, great to see you. And thank you so much for having me. Of course, Marianne. You've been creating a little bit of a stir recently, so we'll get to that in a moment. But I wanted to start with, I thought you had a really excellent and thoughtful post about January 6th on your sub stack, which you guys should be subscribing to, by the way. Let's go ahead and throw that up on the screen. And you talk about how the real dichotomy in American politics, this is your quote, is not between the right and the left. It's between the powerful and the powerless. The political media industrial complex headquartered in both parties has created the left-right culture wars to distract Americans from the truth of who and what actually oppresses them.

Our fellow citizens are not our enemy. Greed is our enemy. Abusive power is our enemy. fellow citizens are not our enemy. Greed is our enemy. Abusive power is our enemy. Injustice is our enemy. Unfettered corporate influence is our enemy. You don't think the Democrats really got that point across on January 6th? No, I don't think they did. I don't think that the songs from Hamilton and Lin-Manuel Miranda, as much as I admire him and admire that show, if ever there was a performative response, literally, to what was actually going on, it was very sad. To me, that day, if we really wanted to make a stand for democracy that day, the president would have declared a national medical emergency and expanded Medicare to everybody.

It would have canceled the college loan debt. He would have given a speech talking about the importance of raising the minimum wage. It would have talked about the importance of the PRO Act. There were so many things that they could have talked about that would have truly been making a stand for the possibilities of democracy and how the system of our government can be used to make people's lives better. And until we do stand as a people in absolute insistence that our government return to that core value, we will be in trouble. Because we're not a government of the people, by the people, for the people right now.

And that rage, the rage about that is legitimate, I think. You know, I found it really interesting when you went on Jesse Waters' show, Marianne, and you said that the real political divide, as Crystal said, is not left and right, and that's a cartoonish version of our political reality. And we're talking about powerful and powerlessness. Why is it that this statement does not seem to emanate whatsoever from the Biden administration? I mean, I think it's so central as to why he is so unpopular with the American public right now. Because unfortunately, more than we even feared, the Democratic Party, at least the corporatist establishment, elite elements of it seem to be as held hostage by corporate donors, whether it has to do with big insurance companies, big pharmaceutical companies, big agricultural companies, big chemical companies, big oil companies and defense contractors as the Republicans. I mean, we can argue, you know, well, they're worse.

But at this point, the fact that the Republicans are worse isn't enough because that fact, the fact that this corporate aristocracy basically holds Washington hostage, means the way that has become the core value of the Republican Party, which represents a nosedive for our democracy. But the way the Democrats try to have it both ways represents a managed decline of our democracy. Either way, it is the opposite of, once again, a government of the people, by the people, for the people. Government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations. There's a new poll out, And look, this is a bit of an outlier, but these numbers were stunning from Quinnipiac. We can throw those up on the screen. First of all, they found political

instability, not U.S. adversaries are seen as the biggest threat, nearly six in 10 think the nation's democracy is in danger of collapse. But kind of the headline number here was Joe Biden's approval rating at 33 percent, 33 percent. And again, it's an outlier and we like to look at averages and all of those things. But there is zero doubt that from the beginning of his administration, when he actually had pretty good marks with the American public to now, he has really fallen far and fallen fast. The two questions I have for you is, is this the Biden administration you expected? And why do you think that the assessment of him has been so profoundly negative from the American public? Because people stood in line for seven, eight hours thinking that this was going to help them, thinking that this was going to at least

reduce their college loan debt, if not cancel it. People were hoping. You know, if you look at the polls, you were talking about polls, the American people want universal health care. The majority of Americans want at least a serious substantial reduction in the college loan debt. The majority of Americans want that $15 an hour minimum wage. The American people want, poll after poll shows they want free college.

The American people want a government that serves them so they can thrive, so they can be productive, so they can be creative. And that, by the way, is how our economy and everything else about our society would repair itself. So in a way, I have a friend who said the other day, we thought Trump was the wake-up call. It turns out Biden is the wake-up call. The wake-up call to the fact neither one of them are helping us. The working class in America is going, well, will the Republicans do it? Will the Democrats do it? And now people are like, neither one of them. The status, they both represent a status quo. The real issue is not where they're different, but where they're way too much the same. And the status quo will not disrupt itself.

And when you see this in the Democratic Party, Marianne, why do you think it is that only you and a few others are even willing to say it? I mean, we see anonymous quotes in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, people saying, oh, Kamala, she's terrible. Oh, Biden. I mean, it might be awful if they run again, but nobody's willing to just come out and be like, look, the president is very unpopular. There are a lot of different reasons. The stories we tell ourselves as to why, I mean, it's all up for debate. But it's just a matter of fact. And this is not going well.

Why is it so difficult for so many of these people? Because they're held hostage by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and this whole elite establishment leadership, which has been saying for far too long, look, we got this. We got this. I cannot, the audacity of the establishment in this town that still today with our democracy in peril, with our environment in peril, still has the outrageous attitude, look, we got this.

No, you don't got this. And so much of the conversation about force the vote, the squad, they played along from day one. And this is what many people told them was going to happen. And it's all brand protection. It's all job protection. One of the things that blows my mind about politicians is they act like they're the only people who have to make ethical decisions at work. And we all do.

We all make decisions and say, well, you know, if I do the right thing, I might lose my job. Lose your job. Lose your job. Right. How is that any different than what you were talking about? Elon Musk and the Chinese Communist Party. Lose some money. Yeah.

Lose some money. Lose your job. They also always play the game. AOC was kind of the worst offender of this during the force the vote conversation of like, you just don't understand. Yeah, we understand. We're doing grown up things here. Yeah. Behind the scenes.

Which really is just. You just don't get it. Well, here we are a year later and you can see the results of their strategy. The Biden strategy was a failure and the progressive strategy was a failure. I mean, it seems like Bernie's like kind of admitting this at this point, saying, you know, the Democratic Party saying they need to reassess, saying they've turned their back on the working class. But, you know, it was apparent to some of us from the beginning that this direction of trying to play ball, trying to go along to get along, you were never going to be in the power position that way.

All you're going to get is your Ron Klain, you know, tweets liked or whatever. Congratulations. Like you said, that's the post on Twitter. Well, also, to me, it was so transparent, the psychology. To me, we're adults, and we're playing it right here. It was code for, she gave me her cell number. It was so obvious, the seduction. We're going to take care of you, honey, and you're here with us at the big kids table.

We'll show you how it's done. The code for that is, and then maybe you'll be in leadership in 2030, 2036. Meanwhile, they're playing a long game while we don't have that time. I don't know how long people think that they have before the masses will reach the gates of the Bastille because that's what's going to happen. It's going to be something is going to fundamentally correct itself or become fundamentally horrible. It seems to me that what is considered sort of the neutral idling of today is unsustainable. It's going to break. It's going to go one direction or the other.

Yeah, and you see this in so many different metrics, which are, you know, violence against the government, which people say is, you know, one-sided. It's actually pretty bipartisan. I mean, you look at dissatisfaction with faith in institutions all across the board. You talked a lot during the campaign about restoring almost a spiritual sense of Americans. Why is it, do you think, that politicians are so disconnected from the, as you say, the general sense of just dissatisfaction?

I hear it from so many people. Anytime somebody comes up to me on the street or whatever, Crystal, I'm sure you see the same thing, is like, thank you for just making me feel not crazy. I don't feel like any, I feel like I'm crazy for feeling dissatisfied about this or that, you know, nobody is talking about it. Why is that, that we have? Because this town is, you know, righteous living is a balance between tough thought and an empathetic heart. And this town, there were some wonderful things that go on in this town as well, obviously. But the sort of officialdom posture

is tough thinking with this closed heart. It is so divorced from a recognition of human suffering. Even though you see these tents of the homeless everywhere, they literally pass all this on their way to the Capitol every day. So without empathy, without an open heart, you don't see suffering. If you don't recognize suffering,

then you're not going to recognize the rage that will inevitably emerge from all that suffering. Nothing is so dangerous as large groups of desperate people. We even knew that after World War II because after World War I, the crushing economic conditions in Germany created the petri dish out of which Hitler arose. Large groups of desperate people end up doing desperate things.

They are more vulnerable to ideological capture by genuinely psychotic forces because they see no hope. And anybody, you know, people really need to read history. People in this town need to read about Germany. People in this town need to read about Germany. People in this town need to read about the French Revolution. The arrogance of thinking, no, it's different now. It is so not different now. Yeah. Well, and we can see it very clearly when we look at other countries.

Yeah, and other countries are looking at us. Somehow we're very confused when we look at our own country with the same discontentment brewing. Obviously, there's a big Politico piece that floated you or Nina Turner as a potential primary opponent of Joe Biden. I know you're not going to like, you know, haven't made decisions and not going to divulge anything here, but I have to talk to you first. I did want to ask you about what you think of that direction, whether you think, you know, what a goal of such a primary effort should be and what you think is realistically possible there. Well, I'm not enrolled in the idea that we should just assume that Biden will be running again. Yeah, I agree.

And you know what? People in this town are not. Exactly. His own campaign manager barely says that. Exactly. And this is one of those other disconnects. They say in public, are you going to primary? In private, they're saying, well, obviously you're not running again. Right. So I think that there will be many, many voices. To me, the issue is not the who but the what.

And the what is someone who is standing within the electoral space for the kind of agenda that will really create the course correction, the terrible imbalance, social and economic imbalance of opportunity in this country between a very, very few people versus the vast majority of people. And what a danger that is, not only to individual lives, but to the state of our democracy and our future. How do we, you know, there are a lot of people who kind of had their hearts broken by various political idols, whether it was, you know, really investing a lot of hope in the squad and AOC thinking, OK, now we've got a voice in Congress. They're going to be, you know, the voice of the people that are going to stand up to the powerful institutions that are there and not not working out the way that we thought, whether it was Bernie Sanders, you know, immediately endorsing Joe Biden, not really extracting any concessions,

playing a part in what ultimately ended up being a failed strategy this year. And this isn't to say these are like bad people or corrupt people or they had bad intent, but just to say at the end of the day, they didn't fulfill the role that people were hoping that they would ultimately fulfill. How do you give people sort of hope that they're not going to have their heart broken again if they invest their emotional energy in another similar project? I think hope is born of participation in hopeful solutions. And none of this would have happened if the American people hadn't taken our eye off the ball the way we have in the last 40 years. So we, the American people, need to take some responsibility for

the part that our complacency played in a lot of this, our distractedness, our lack of civic responsibility. You can't heal anything in your life by making it all about how other people have disappointed you. And the issue is we were asleep for too long, but we are awake now. You know, Churchill is famous for having said that you can always count on Americans to do the right thing after they have exhausted every other option. And history shows that we as a nation are often slow to get there. But once we get there, we slam it like nobody's business.

And this is the year to do that. I think there is so much awakening going on right now. And the hope is not about what they're going to do. It's what we are going to do. Well, I hope you're right. To me, we're hoping. One last question for you. Okay.

Because this is a personal question. This is one of the things that I really admire about you is you were talking about how people in this town have really hardened their hearts it's like they don't even see the tents of the homeless they don't even see the the pain and suffering of them is right around them yes um you have remained and we're personal friends so I know you're on a professional also a personal basis, but you've remained this very vulnerable, like you allow yourself to be vulnerable. You engage with criticism, oftentimes unfair of yourself. You have maintained your deep compassion, empathy, and humanity, which I think are your strongest assets. How do you do that without just not like breaking down? Because I think I have such a thin skin. I don't know that I could maintain that sense of engagement and vulnerability and empathy that you seem to have been able to do.

It's a cliche, but they say you get bitter or you get better. Otherwise, they really win. You become someone. Almost you become who they say you are. That's the ultimate, you know, what are they, you know, it's like the ultimate not allowing all that to win is not allowing it to pervert your humanity. Yeah. No, I think you're right. And I think that if you have any kind of a, whether you see it in religious terms or spiritual terms

or even secular terms, you know, it doesn't matter. If your devotion is to love and forgiveness and righteousness and ethics, you know that that's just another way that you yourself are being tested, honed, and given the opportunity to become a stronger person. Very well said. Always lovely to have you. I'm Michael Kassin, founder and CEO of 3C Ventures and your guide on good company. The podcast where I sit down with the boldest innovators shaping what's next. In this episode, I'm joined by Anjali Sood, CEO of Tubi. We dive into the competitive world of streaming. What others dismiss as niche, we embrace as core.

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