Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 11/8/21: Infrastructure Bill, Vax Mandate, Workers, CNN, Astroworld, Carlyle Group, Gas Prices, Elections, and More!

Episode Date: November 8, 2021

Krystal and Saagar discuss the passing of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, courts halting Biden's vaccine mandate, worker activity across America, CNN being out of touch, Astroworld tragedy, following the money, where is Joe Biden, going deep in the election results with Kyle Kondik, 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/Kyle Kondik’s Book: https://www.ohioswallow.com/book/The+Long+Red+Thread  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Good morning, everybody. Happy Monday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. Lots of great stories to get to this morning. Actually, a lot of really important stories. So first of all, we had a court issuing a ruling at least temporarily blocking that Biden vaccine or test mandate. So we'll give you the details there. Bunch of stuff happening with the strikes. Updates on John Deere. Also updates on 30,000 plus workers for Kaiser Permanente who have given them a 10-day notice that they are preparing to go out on strike on November 15th. So we've got all the details there. A rather interesting clip on CNN. Actually give them a little bit of credit for having an interesting guest on and having a conversation that normally doesn't happen there. We'll break all of that down for you. All the latest on that horrific tragedy in Houston at Astroworld. What are the authorities saying at

this point? What is the very latest there? Also, as you guys know, I was out on Thursday last week. I was pretty sad to not get to talk about Virginia. We were sad. We were sad here. Right then. By the way, thank you for all the well wishes. My dad was in the hospital. He's out. He's recovering. He's doing phenomenal. So thank you for that. Sorry to miss last week, but I have some thoughts on Virginia I'm going to talk about in my monologue. We also have Kyle Kondik on to talk about what it means both in the state of Virginia, but nationally and for the midterm. So we'll get to all of that. But we wanted to start with some very significant and, in my opinion, extremely disheartening developments with regard to the infrastructure package and the Build Back Better reconciliation package. So long story short, and then we'll get

into all of the details, the situation has unfolded to be exactly what progressives were allegedly trying to avoid all the way along, which is that the infrastructure, the bipartisan sort of corporatist infrastructure package, has passed the Senate. It has passed the House. It has gone to the president's desk for signature. That is over with. That is done. And the idea was always that that was going to be matched together with the Build Back Better agenda because progressives wanted the Build Back Better thing. Corporatists wanted the infrastructure thing. Keep them tied together. And then everybody has some piece of leverage over the other one. Well, progressives, if you can even call them that, completely folded with a few limited exceptions that I will get to in a moment. Let's throw this New York Times

tear sheet up on the screen. Let me just read you the intro here. The House passed a $1 trillion bill on Friday night to rebuild the country's aging public work system, fund new climate resilience initiatives, and expand access to high-speed internet service, giving final approval to a central plank of President Biden's economic agenda after a day-long drama that pitted moderate Democrats against progressives. But an even larger social safety net and climate change bill was back on hold, with a half-dozen moderate to conservative Democrats withholding their votes until a non-partisan analysis could tally its price tag. They go on, in the end, enough progressives accepted a written commitment

released after 10 p.m. from five, they say, centrist, I'd say corporatist colleagues, that they would back the social safety net and climate package in mid-November as long as the numbers add up. So here's how this went down. These blue dog type corporatist Democrats said, we're not voting on this thing until we get a CBO score. But enough of them signed this meaningless letter of commitment that, oh, we promise we'll vote for it as long as the CBO numbers add up. Progressives were pressured by Biden. He called into the Congressional Progressive Caucus meeting. He called Pramila Jayapal multiple times, put the squeeze on, and ultimately, they folded. Even Lloyd Blankfein, who apparently hadn't tweeted in months,

decided to weigh in and say, progressives blinked. And that's exactly what happened here. Any sort of potential leverage that they had over this thing to even make sure anything passes, let alone trying to improve it from the pathetic and sorry state that that Build Back Better bill is in at this point. That is all completely gone. Corporatists got everything they wanted with the infrastructure bill, and progressives are stuck in an untenable, unwinnable position. Yeah, and just for people who don't know, the CBO is the Congressional Budget Office. And there's actually no guarantee that they're going to score the way that the Biden administration wants. People might remember this, but during the Trump Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the CBO rightfully said it was going to expand the deficit. And

they're like, no, we're going to go with our own fake accounting as to why this is OK. This is going to be the reverse situation of that. So if the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, does score this as not deficit neutral or saying it won't necessarily, it might cost more than they're saying in terms of the price tag, Manchin, Sinema, and many of these other people have the out in order to vote against it. So there's no guarantee whatsoever. In terms of the actual number of votes, it was an interesting little shakeout. Let's put this up on the screen in terms of the actual votes for no and for yeah, both from the GOP and the Dems. So amongst the Democrats who voted against the infrastructure bill, it was AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, Ayanna Pressley, and Jamal Bowman,

several members of the squad there. We should note though, Crystal, which is that there seemed to be a little bit of coordination here. I mean, Presley herself apparently had voted, did not vote no on the bill until it hit 218. Until it had enough votes. Until it had enough votes. And the only reason it really seems to have gone across the finish line is that 13 Republicans there voted for it. A lot of them either people who had voted for impeachment, they're on their way out, or people in the state of New Jersey. So I didn't know this, but New Jersey Republicans are obsessed with this bill because of the Amtrak New Jersey to New York tunnel. It has a 70% approval rating amongst Republicans in the state of New Jersey, hence why many of their reps actually voted for it,

like Jeff Bandrew. Some politics are still local. Some politics are. Listen, as somebody who's, you know, we all hate the goddamn Amtrak, so, you know, I sympathize. For those on the West Coast, come try it sometime. It's awful. I dissent from that view. Oh, really? It's not their fault. There's complicated reasons why it is often late. Okay. So all of that being said, there are some very interesting politics here happening in terms of what's happening with the actual vote itself on Build Back Better because they're not going to be able to have the same number of Republicans obviously cross for Build Back Better. Maybe one vote, maybe two. Even then it would be extraordinarily unlikely. So what happened here is that the squad was able to vote against the bill because they knew they were going to have a decent number of crossover amongst the GOP.

Let me pause you there because the other part of that tweet is really important. If the squad had actually wanted to flex their muscle and kill this thing, they had the numbers to do it. Even with those 13 Republicans crossing over, if all of the squad members or some chunk of the progressive, the squad plus members. Right, the progressive caucus. If some sizable number of the progressive, the Squad Plus members. Progressive caucus, right. If some sizable number of the progressive caucus, they didn't even need 10 votes

from the Congressional Progressive Caucus in order to kill this thing. So if they actually wanted to use power and leverage, they could have. Instead, as you said, it appears more likely that at least some of the individuals who voted no did more so as a protest vote, knowing that it ultimately wasn't going to matter. So it was a complete and utter fold on their part. And by the way, at this point, I'm using

the term progressive extraordinarily loosely because I think only the people there who were the six no votes you could even argue are progressive at this point. Let's put up their statement here. This is from Pramila Jayapal, who is the chair of the Progressive Caucus. They say about this commitment that the corporatists gave them that our colleagues have committed to voting tonight for the transformative Build Back Better Act as currently written no later than the week of November 15th. They go on to say the president has affirmed these members gave him the same commitment. So they're relying on the word of these five corporatists. By the way, in their statement, they don't mention

that it's contingent on the Congressional Budget Office giving them the score that they want. No guarantees on that. No guarantees whatsoever. And so the corporatists have provided themselves with an out here of, oh, the numbers didn't add up. Sorry, guys. We would love to do it, but we just can't. Let's go back to the drawing board. Let's endlessly draw this out so that it never, ever, ever happens. And anyone who wanted something better than what is on offer here, and we've covered relentlessly how this bill has been stripped back and some of its most popular, most important provisions have been killed. Anyone who wanted anything better out of this, that leverage has been utterly lost.

Right. And as Jake Sherman put in that tweet, you know, I am struck by the vote by November 15th stuff, considering these deadlines have been an absolute joke this year. So they're clinging to false deadlines. People who said that they would vote for it already gave themselves an out in terms of the conditionality. The bill has already become law, so the thing that Josh Gottheimer and all those other people had banked on has basically passed. Now, from what I am hearing, Crystal, there is one thing that may still induce these people to vote for the bill.

It's called the SALT tax, the multimillionaire tax cut that they have purposefully taken out of the bipartisan infrastructure package, put in the Build Back Better to try and induce these people to go for it. So there's a lot of jockeying behind the scenes here in Washington. Bernie Sanders said that he would oppose an outright removal of the SALT cap up to like $72,000. Something like that is what's being floated right now. And once again, it's a reminder that the overwhelming 90-something percent of SALT benefits go to people who make over $1 million a year. 90% of the benefits. Well, that does not mean that there aren't people out there and make, you know, two, 300, 400,000 or whatever in the state of New Jersey and all that who won't get

a tax cut. But I'm saying that the people who have the most invested within this are millionaires. And in many cases, they're actually billionaires who divot on the income and more, but given that that's how they actually make their money, they have been able to write that off in the past and now aren't able to. So that is the one thing, Crystal, that may keep these people in line. That actually brings up a good political point, which is that if they had tied, had actually had these things be one bill from the beginning, then everyone would have had a stake in the whole thing ultimately getting passed. And so the fact that they pulled these two pieces apart in the hopes of getting some level of Republican support so Biden could have the, you know, could go out and say and have the talking point that he did a bipartisan deal. That's the reason why these has made it so incredibly politically difficult to get anything across the finish line, let alone something that was actually good. If the corporate infrastructure piece had been included in the Build Back Better piece, then people who were really interested in that would have had more of a reason to hurry up and get this thing done. So that decision to split them apart from the beginning

has turned into total catastrophe if you actually care about people benefiting from these bills. There have been a couple developments. The House is going a little bit of its own way on the Build Back Better thing. They've implemented a few reforms to some of the more popular provisions.

So originally the paid leave was supposed to be 12 weeks. Then they said maybe it'll be four weeks. Then they pulled it out entirely. Well, that might be put back in at four weeks in the House. The prescription drug negotiations, originally the idea, very simple, that Democrats have been campaigning on since 2006, we're going to have Medicare negotiate prescription drug prices, something that is patently obvious and it's absurd. It's not already done. Well, that got pulled out altogether because of these Dems who take a lot of money from big pharma. Now there's a sort of industry-approved middle ground that's going to let them negotiate prices only on the drugs that basically pharma's okay with them negotiating that may be put back in. So there are some movements there in terms of the House versus the Senate. So I can provide some clarity on that. I asked around.

What happened is, is that the House, because this is not actually going to be the final bill, wanted to put that in there to show, you know, like, hey, no, no, no, pay leave. So here's what's actually going to happen, which is that because it still has to go through the Senate and the Voterama amendment process, all of these things can be stripped out easily. And so Joe Manchin, what they're essentially doing is they're daring Joe Manchin in order to put forward an amendment which would have GOP support in order to strip out paid family leave. And the same thing whenever it comes to prescription drug. That actually could have more than 51 votes there in the Senate. And then what they're betting on is that the Senate will then pass this House bill minus a certain parts and the House is just going to vote for it anyway.

So like that is, as far as I understand it, from what I've asked Senate insiders here, that's the strategy around why the House was willing to put that in because they know it's not actually going to get in there in the final thing. They want the headline and the credit without actually as a party having unified guarantees that these things would make it through the process. You know, I mean, the prescription drug thing may ultimately go through because it's so watered down and industry approved at this point that they may even like the talking point of like, look, see, we support this and this is great so that they can get a little bit of PR halo. But it's basically meaningless. The last piece we wanted to show you of this is just how pathetic the quote-unquote progressive position ultimately ended up being. Congressman Ro Khanna, who we've interviewed multiple times, I always appreciate the time that he gives us. I also interviewed him.

Yeah, very nice guy. I interviewed him at length on podcast Crystal Kyle and Friends. He was very, oh, we're going to be tough. We're going to hold the line. We're going to make sure that we get something good for the American people. And we're going to, we're going to make sure we keep these bills tied together. Well, he ends up being the one that goes along with this. Yeah, we promise we're going to vote for the bill just as long as the CBO score comes through. Cenk on TYT pressed him on exactly

what his position is. Let's take a look at a little bit of that. But you got it. Look, let's just do one thing at a time. You guys said that you would not vote in the House until the Senate passed Build Back Better. You're now saying, no, we withdraw our position. You have to say that's true, because it is true, right? Well, there was a disagreement. There were different opinions, but certainly our chair, Parola Jayapal, said initially, I don't know

how she framed it, that we want some ironclad- I can read a New York Times quote for you. Progressive Democrats warned the House leadership that a majority of their members, majority of their members will withhold their support for a one trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill until the Senate passes a second far larger package containing their spending priorities. That's a fact. Yeah, but the challenge is if we really were to hold to that, that we'd have nothing. I mean, you really would then, the president's agenda would not happen and we'd move on to the next issue. No, no, but hold on, Representative Conner, that's of course not true, right? So you wouldn't have it yet.

That's not true. Hold on So you wouldn't have it yet. Why is that not true? Hold on, you wouldn't have it yet. And then what would happen next is pressure would then go back to Manchin and Sinema. And they would say, well, the progressives are holding the line. And they're doing the same exact thing that Manchin and Sinema are doing. Manchin and Sinema are drawing red lines all over you guys. I think Jake's making some very salient points there. Congressman Khanna not really having any response whatsoever. And ultimately what Cenk is getting at there is

this is why y'all aren't taken seriously in Washington and you never will be. Because think of what the position was. Originally the position was $6 trillion. Then Bernie negotiates, all right, $3.5 trillion. And the line from them was always, this is the compromised position.

$3.5 trillion, that is the compromised position. We will settle for nothing less. Then they kind of came off that and said, well, you know, we're willing to work with them, but no climate, no deal. They a couple times drew a hard line and forced a delay that these two things have to be tied together. And then as it gets chipped away and chipped away and chipped away, and they draw no red lines whatsoever about what programs have to be included or what their top line number is. The thing dribbles all the way down to almost what Joe Manchin's position is. And then on the very last line that they were holding that they have to be tied together, ultimately they collapse there too. I think it comes down to this, which is you got to be willing to walk. You know, at the end of the day,

Joe Manchin famously looked Bernie in the eyes. He goes, I can live with zero. What can you live with Bernie? And the truth is, is that Bernie could not live with zero. And that's the same thing with these people, which is that they weren't willing to walk whenever it came to their priorities. So you're going to get rolled and you look like a joke as you point to, can you imagine what the headline would have been in 2011 if the Freedom Caucus had the numbers to kill a bill and they didn't kill it? I mean, they would have been like, this is a total joke. And they always showed up and always killed the bills that they actually said they would. And leadership caved to them because they were serious in their willingness to vote against something.

And what you're seeing here is fake posturing. There's a couple years left in the Biden administration, but they will not be taken seriously for the remainder of it. That's pretty much the case. No, nor should they be. Yeah. I mean, ultimately, nor should they be because already their position was pathetic that they hadn't fought to keep what they said were their, you know, priorities in this bill. They'd already moved off of that. And then the very last thing that they were holding on to that they would keep them tied together. Ultimately,

all it took, this is all it took, three calls from Joe Biden, maybe some nice tweets from Ron Klain or something like that. And I think what really freaked them out was the media saying, oh, it's their fault that Democrats lost in Virginia a little bit of negative media coverage, and they just instantly collapsed. It's pretty sad to see. Very sad. All right, let's go ahead and move on. We're going to talk about this vaccine mandate court decision, a very big ruling out of the state of New Orleans in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal. So let's put this up there on the screen, which is that the judges in the Fifth Circuit have frozen the Biden vaccine

or testing requirement after a federal lawsuit. So the Court of Appeals suspended the requirement for private companies. Now, this is important because it was issued by a panel of three judges. Now, all the judges were GOP appointed. However, within that, what they rule is not necessarily a total strike against the mandate itself, but they are giving the Biden administration a few days in order to come forward and respond to what they say could be a grave assault on liberty and grave statutory and constitutional issues with the mandate itself. So essentially what needs to happen now is that the Biden administration has until 5 p.m. Monday today to go ahead and respond to the request for a more permanent halt to the mandate itself. Now, in terms of the court watchers that I have asked around, they do think that it's

possible that this may get stayed until there is a Supreme Court decision itself on the matter. So what that would mean, and you guys can think back to the DACA decision, where we saw like a Hawaii or a California judge pause it all the way up until the hill, hit the Supreme Court. There were others under the Trump administration as well. The travel ban was another one where until the Supreme Court ruled on it, it didn't actually go into effect. This could kick it into the same territory. And of course, we know that the Supreme Court can take a very long time. Now, what's happening here

is the Department of Labor, who issued that ruling through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, is arguing that under the OSHA Act itself, that it already gives the government the authority, quote, to act quickly in an emergency where the agency finds that workers are subjected to a grave danger and a new standard is necessary to protect them. Now, under that standard, they're arguing that COVID go ahead and applies to this. The real question is around where SCOTUS would fall, Crystal, because people in SCOTUS have kind of been, when I say SCOTUS, sorry for those who aren't insiders, Supreme Court of the United States. Where the Supreme Court is going to stand on this is they have been all over the map. So we'll remember Justice Kavanaugh, the Trump-appointed judge, had already acquiesced

on that eviction moratorium back several months ago, whenever he said that because coronavirus is this extraordinary crisis, we are allowing the eviction mandate to go forward, even though, in my judgment, it's probably not legal. Now, that actually could give an opening as to why they may justify then, and seeing coronavirus as an extraordinary crisis, grave danger, all of that, possible avenues through. Justices Gorsuch and Barrett, a little bit more libertarian in their leanings, very difficult to see them going ahead. So you could see a 5-4 split right there, even though it is a 6-3 court. Justice Roberts, again, whenever it came to the Trump administration, he would always

object based on process arguments. So it's like, oh, well, you didn't file the right paperwork, so that's not the right thing. Biden administration has at least gone through all of the administrative loopholes. Big question as to how they decide there. And then the main one is this. Remember, the Supreme Court did not find that the main vaccine mandate, which recently came to them, violated constitutional rights, but that was based on religious exemptions themselves. So this would be as a mandate for all workers and critically in private companies. So the vaccine requirements plus the testing requirement, whether it infringes upon the constitutional rights of both businesses and the individuals

who work there who don't work for federal contractors. That's really why the case law here is very different. But there's a lot of questions right now as to how the Supreme Court is going to find this, Crystal. So there are. Overall, courts have been, both Republican and Democratic appointed judges, have been ruling in favor of a variety of mandates. Both those implemented by universities, for example, also those like the one in Maine, have been upheld. Wall Street Journal said at least 17 different lawsuits. Judges have refused to block those vaccine mandates. They upheld Maine. They upheld universities. They've upheld some that have come from corporations. considerations, that all mostly dates back to this 1905 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Jacobson v. Massachusetts. There was a Lutheran pastor who had an objection to the smallpox vaccination requirement. And that was actually even more stringent because there wasn't,

at that point, there wasn't an option of a vaccine or test, number one. Number two, they actually would fine you if you didn't go forward and get the smallpox vaccine. This particular gentleman had had a rare but very, you know, damaging reaction to a vaccination he had received previously. So he had a major health consequence. It was a more onerous burden in terms of, it was a stricter vaccine mandate and the court upheld it. Let me just read you a little bit of the decision because I think it's interesting

the way that they worded it. It was written by Justice John Marshall Harlan. The court held that, quote, in every well-ordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members, the rights of the individual and respective as liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint to be enforced by reasonable regulations as the safety of the general public may demand. So that is the case law that this goes back to, that 1905 ruling that gives the state a lot of power in terms of these types of vaccine mandates. So that's why a lot of people have felt that when this does ultimately go up to the Supreme Court, it is very likely to stand. Yeah. And, you know, the other question, because I raised that as well, was that they're going to be a lot of arguments over whether coronavirus now faces a grave danger standard. So that's going to be you're going to hear a lot of stuff like what we heard in the public square actually presented within the courts around survival rates, around, you know, when you have vaccination, herd immunity, death, all of that as compared to smallpox, it's going to be pretty fascinating because it's basically going to be a distillation of the public argument, but in a legal framework,

which then can apply to everybody. So, you know, it's interesting too, in order to think about it in the public context, we have to remember the Supreme Court is a political machine, just like any other. I mean, the Justice Roberts is desperate to avoid court packing, and he doesn't want to fall on the wrong side of public opinion. And public opinion is shifting around on this. The vaccine mandate was actually quite popular whenever it was implemented or announced at the time a couple of months ago. It was in the 80-20 level of support. But as I pointed out in a recent monologue, let's put this tweet up there on the screen. This is from NBC News' own polling. They find 47% favor the mandate while 50% actually oppose.

And the strong agreement or disagreement there is a 34 strongly favor with a 41% strongly disapprove. This question, though, does ask, do you support everyone getting a COVID-19 vaccine. It doesn't give the vaccine or test alternative, and it doesn't have the language in there about just businesses with 100 people or more. That's right. And I believe also that the 100 or more requirement, this is another thing that OSHA is looking at in order to try and push it even further down the chain

in terms of the number of people who are employed or not, but they haven't yet found the same legal ground. The hundred or more seems to be the standard that they feel the most comfortable on. And you actually found this one where the vaccine mandate collides with business interests. So let's put this on the screen from Politico, which is that the mandate from Biden is very specifically tailored in order to hit on January 4. Now, you may think that's because of the new year, but actually it's because the people who are involved in the holiday shopping season are like, okay, hold on a second. You cannot make us enforce this thing whenever we have to send out all of these Christmas gifts and more, even though we're already in the middle of a supply

chain crisis. And so I do find this a little, you know, ridiculous in that, look, if it's a total oppressing danger crisis that the Biden administration says it is, then the holiday season shopping market probably shouldn't be the consideration. So instead, they're actually shifting it to January 4 in order to make sure Amazon and Walmart and all these other people can send out their gifts on time. It just goes to show that even in this one, the business lobby was very, very effective at saying, well, hold on a second. You know, we got to wait until that part where we end up firing like 500,000 people who are seasonal workers before we actually kick this thing into effect. Governments have competing priorities. One of those priorities is making sure Santa is going to arrive on time.

That's right. God forbid Amazon takes a little bit longer. That's fine to weigh that against health and safety of the American people. There is one other piece here, which is just kind of funny. For those of you, look, I think personally, as I've said before, that the alternative of you can either get vaccinated or you can get tested, to me, strikes the right balance between individual liberty and caring for the community and making sure that people are ultimately safe when they're at work. However, for those of you who do not hold

that position and you are completely opposed to it, let me offer one potential reason to maybe get behind it. Let's throw this last tear sheet up on the screen. Apparently, thousands of CIA ghouls might get fired because they're not getting vaccinated. And I think that personally, I view that as a win all the way around. You know, this is the one thing that could make me flip on the issue, Crystal,

which is that there's a lot of people apparently in the intel community who don't want to. And, you know, I got to strike the balance between everybody has rights and, you know, I probably shouldn't judge people, you know, and make sure everybody's taken advantage of. But then also, sorry, taken care of. And then there's the Intel people. I'm like, well, God, I just don't know who decides. So we thought that's a funny little addendum for those who hate the deep state. It could be that the vax mandate is the most effective thing in order to clean the deep state out in a very long time. Although maybe these are the people who were sympathetic to the deep state argument in the first place, and they would be getting out, and it would turn you into more of a neoliberal shill place.

So who knows? Maybe it's even worse of a situation. Complicated. I'm just wondering when they're going to come up with a vaccine for Havana Central. Well, you know that if these people had their way, that they certainly would be plowing hundreds of billions of dollars toward that goal. Well, they already passed the money through Congress. Well, that's for relief. Now they need research. They need even more.

They need benefits, you know. Yeah, yeah. We'll get right on top of that. Okay, another important story we wanted to bring to you this morning. So, lots of developments. The John Deere strike continues. As you guys likely know, John Deere offered a contract that was an improvement over the previous position. It gave, it offered raises, but it maintained, and this is a critical piece, maintained that two-tier structure where workers who have been there for a long time get one level of pay, one set of benefits, one level of pension. And workers who came in more recently, they're sort of kicked down to that lower tier, and their benefits, their pay, everything is less than those workers who

had been there for a longer time. So in a narrow vote, that contract offer was voted down. And so the strike continues. Here's the very latest. Let's throw this up on the screen. John Deere customers are now facing weeks-long delays for parts orders due to the ongoing worker strike. This is the first evidence of an impact taking hold during the farm harvest season. Of course, these problems being compounded by the fact that John Deere is dealing with their own issues with the supply chain crisis. But here's why this is really important. This is why these workers have leverage. So if John Deere wasn't suffering, if they weren't having trouble getting their parts in their tractors out the door and

delivered on time, then they wouldn't have a lot of incentive to come back with a better deal. They'd be doing okay. You know, they have this ridiculous plan in place where they've got a bunch of their like office workers,ar workers, trying to fill in, mostly, I think, dealing with inventory and trying to get parts out the door. That plan is clearly not adequate and not working to deliver on time for their customers. And for these farmers, this is really a make-or-break time of year. In this story, they say parts and components that U.S. farmers need to keep combines running in the busiest farming season of the year are taking as many as three weeks to reach customer hands. That is an eternity when fields need to be quickly harvested to stay

ahead of wintry weather, according to dealers and customers in the industry. So the fact that the workers are causing John Deere to feel pain here is highly significant in terms of ultimately their negotiating position. Right. And so John Deere themselves saying, look, we're done. We're not negotiating anymore. We'll see. Right. They've said this is our final offer after it was rejected there by the UAW. It was an immediate 10 percent raise. I mean, they are pointing out that John Deere just had its best year ever. And looking into it a bit more, what John Deere is trying to do, and they're going to increasingly face difficulty, is they're going to try and use overseas manufacturers and U.S. strikebreakers in order to continue this. They're going to basically try to import. Well, let me guess something. Import ain't going to work in a supply chain crisis. You might have heard of a backup over at the Port of L.A.

So they're doubly screwed when it comes to that. And same with the strikebreakers. It's very clear these people have no ability because there are a lot of skilled employees that are out on strike. And they found that, you know, they tried to bring their office workers in more. So John Deere also posturing here. The real question is, look, who's going to hold out longer? And I think that the workers, having rejected two separate offers now, you know, and saying, no, absolutely not. We're sticking to our guns, puts the company in a real bad position. So two, three weeks from now, I think they're going to hold.

We'll see if they come back to the table. duplicitous the way that the company handled this latest contract offer because they put it out there and the vote for the ratification happened before they made that statement that this was their last best offer, which, you know, is a useful piece of information when people are ultimately voting on whether they're going to accept this deal or not. But it seems like, you know, one of the key things that workers have been complaining about and why they ultimately decided to go out on strike was because of this two-tier system. And that was left in place in the offer that was put on the table. As you referenced, always important to note, John Deere enjoying record-breaking profits, nearly $6 billion less projected for their full full year earnings. So they could make life better for these workers. They could get rid of the two-tier system if they so chose. Clearly, workers having an impact, putting the squeeze on them here. But as you guys know, John Deere workers,

not the only workers who are on strike or considering going on strike, authorizing strike. We've been tracking over 30,000 healthcare workers for Kaiser who had previously authorized a strike. Now they've taken another step that inches them right up to the door of walking out, giving that company 10-day notice that they intend to go out on strike on November 15th. This is from War Perfect Union. They say 32,000 Kaiser workers have given 10-day notice they'll go out on strike. Workers in California and Oregon are fighting against what? Two-tier pay structure that will slash new worker wages. They are also demanding at least 4% raises. And part of why the two-tier system for Kaiser

is so significant to these workers, even the ones who are benefiting from the higher level tier, is that these hospitals are dramatically understaffed. So the workers that are there are being horrifically burden, horrifically burdened. And of course, having, you know, still being in a pandemic and having come through the worst of a little bit of power right now. And also, a lot of workers are leaving the healthcare industry because of what they went, the hell they went through through COVID. So they also feel like this two-tier structure means that their staffing crisis and their agony around that is just going to continue. So again, Kaiser, huge profits, $10 billion that they made during the pandemic. If they wanted to get rid of the two-tier structure, if they wanted to give their workers that I'm sure they were happy to praise as essential.

Essential, thank you nurses. There are heroes, et cetera, et cetera. If they wanted to give them 4% raise, a little bit of a bump in pay, they have more than enough to be able to do that. Yeah. And look, I'm always stunned whenever we look at the actual demands. Here's what they're asking for, a 4% increase for nurses and healthcare workers annually for the next three years. Kaiser said it's offering 2%. How are you supposed to do with 2%? I mean, what are we already covering? Inflation, food, gas.

I mean, 2% is not even going to cut it in the best of times. And you're offering only 4%. How is that possible in one of the most major economic disruptions in modern history? And that's the thing. They're willing to go to bat just for 4%. They should get 10% if they're what they're really looking for, especially if they made $10 billion in terms of all of the healthcare subsidies that we've thrown at these companies during coronavirus. I mean, they're doing better than ever. And these people

have to go out and risk their livelihood just for a 4% annual raise at a time where the cost of goods in terms of what it actually costs is going up much more than that. You know, that is what pisses me off the most about this. They're asking for less of a decrease in their wages, effectively, when you factor in inflation. I mean, that's what they're really asking for here. To get closer to keeping up with the pace of inflation is what they're asking for, and an end to the two-tier structure, which has made their lives miserable and also, of course, breaks solidarity between the workforce, which is the whole intention of all of this.

You know, it's really interesting. I don't know if you guys covered it last week when I was out, but Joe Weisenthal tweeted a Bloomberg article about how you have two— Oh, no, I saved that one for you. Two major carriers, FedEx and UPS, okay? FedEx is non-union. UPS is organized by the Teamsters. They're union workers. They're much higher paid. These are good middle-class jobs, where if you're driving, you work your way up, you can be making $100,000 a year, good benefits, pension, all those sorts of that sort of middle-class stability. By the way,

very, very difficult jobs, but you're able to earn enough to achieve that middle-class lifestyle. Not the case for FedEx. And now in this crisis, FedEx is basically screwed because their workforce is quitting en masse. They have a massive labor shortage. They're having to reroute hundreds of thousands of packages to deal with the fact that they don't have enough drivers and other workers to be able to handle the package load that they've been inundated with. So even though they pay their workers much, much less, UPS is not only making more, but they have lower costs. Exactly. Because they actually have the workforce that they need. They have less turnover. They have less turnover. People are trained. Their system is able to work cost. Exactly. Because they actually have the workforce that they need. They have less turnover. They have less turnover. People are trained. Their system is able to work efficiently. And so they

are destroying FedEx in the competition right now, just showing how the whole point that I wanted to make with this is basically these companies can be penny wise and pound foolish, whereby trying to nickel and dime their workers and not paying them enough to actually make it worth it to take the job or to do the job, they're actually shooting themselves in the foot here ultimately. So even if you don't care about the fairness of the people who got us through this pandemic and have been doing the Lord's work, I had my own interactions with the healthcare system last week and God bless those nurses and the work that they have taken on every single day, even if you don't care about this, this can be incredibly idiotic just from a business perspective in order to continue to have an efficient operation and be able to profit, expand, and move forward. It's very true. You know, even anecdotally seeing stuff on Nextdoor or whatever.

By the way, if anybody is not on Nextdoor, I recommend it just to see what the Karens are up to. But everybody is saying stuff like, oh my gosh, can't send anything by FedEx. I had to send something to somebody and I read that article and I was like, here we go, UPS store. This is why. It's a little bit further, but I'm going to the UPS store to actually make sure my thing gets there on time. It's the difference between a high profit margin but fragile business. And a sustainable business supply chain, all of those things. And having workers who actually can live and are happy relatively in their job makes your business much less fragile. Ultimately makes your entire economy a lot less fragile. Unions in many ways are a tool for anti-fragility.

So there we go. Absolutely. All right. Let's move on to this one media segment. economy a lot less unions in many ways are a tool for anti-fragility so there we go absolutely alright let's move on to this one media segment you know we covered when you're out Crystal the meltdown

MSNBC meltdown I don't know what you're talking about Sagar it was some of the most beautiful television that we've seen in quite a long

time Joy Reid and Nicole Wallace there talking about critical race theory Brian Stelter I guess to his credit over there over over at CNN, he invited Bacha, who we've had here on the show, who talked about woke news, bad news, and why wokeness is bad for the media generally,

in order to discuss both her book in the context of the Virginia election. And she basically called him out right to his face, eliciting a pretty hilarious reaction. Let's take a listen. A lot of this conversation around wokeness is actually about class. We are hiding a class divide in America. We are hiding the just disgusting levels of income inequality in America. We are hiding the total dispossession of the working class of all races by focusing on a very highly specialized academic language around race. And I think what happened, you know, Glenn Youngkin's victory was a perfect example of this. The media's response to Youngkin's victory is literally the reason that he won, right?

How did they respond? There's a hundred medias, a hundred reactions. You're being pretty overly generalized, I think. Let me get more specific for you, okay? Because I have to say, I have to admit, having watched CNN all week, there's been a lot of very, very, very good genuflection on this front. But what happened right after the election was you saw host after host after host on MSNBC saying, oh, this is a victory for white supremacy, right? White supremacy wins again. Racism wins again.

When, you know, the lieutenant governor that Youngkin won with will be the first black woman to hold that job. When Glenn Youngkin managed to flip majority black districts, when he managed to get between 40 and 50 percent of Latino voters, are all of those people white supremacists? Of course they're not. They're people who are worried about, number one, the economy. Right. And number two, schooling. And it seems to me it is such a self-own to tell people who are worried about the economy that that is white supremacy, right? You are essentially criminalizing the views of working class Americans. Hmm. Oh, interesting point. And for Brian to say he doesn't know what she's talking about, Grabian actually put together a nice little supercut, including much of CNN's coverage. This is what their actual response to the election was. Batya is not lying whenever she says that this is pretty much the uniform take. Let's take a listen. Glenn Youngkin played the race card for a reason, because he knows it works on certain white voters. He did stoke white grievance politics to mobilize a Republican base. He's laundered Trump's really sort of disgusting, flagrant out racism. He's wrapped it in education.

Education, which is code for white parents don't like the idea of teaching about race. That's the fundamental problem for these parents and this anti-CRT movement. They don't like the way whiteness is being portrayed in these new, more inclusive lessons. This wasn't about those pocketbook issues. This was about how white kids feel talking about what black kids go through. The subtext of all this was, we can't let these black and brown people run the country.

Glenn Youngkin running on critical race theory that he knew hit a chord around race. I think all the CRT stuff is trumped up dog whistling. Some of it was dog whistle racism. The dog whistle messaging that you saw Youngkin engage in during the course of the campaign. CRT is in the latest line of school busing, cross town busing, welfare queens. You have it. It's in that same line. And you saw it in the results in Virginia. This more palatable Republican who still uses the same racist

themes that Trump did, he just packaged them in a soccer dad sweater vest model. He's found a way to launder a pretty racist trope, this idea that we cannot talk about America's history because it hurts my feelings. He's turned that into a campaign. White voters do have anxiety about a changing America, right? That it is blacker, it is browner. You've got the Republicans yelling like, hey, look, the black and brown folks are coming for us. Some Republican candidates are perfectly willing to use race as a motivating factor for their base. That has gone on for decades and it happened this year. Race is just the most palpable tool in the toolkit. It used to be of the Democratic Party back in the day when they were Dixiecrats and now of the Republican

Party. This is about the fact that a good chunk of voters out there are okay with white supremacy. Let's call a thing a thing. Actually, scratch that. They are more than okay. There's a lot to say about this. So, first of all, I think both that analysis and people on the right who are like, CRT, we found our thing. Like, this is what we're going to run with. I think both are way overestimating how much of a factor this was in Virginia or these other races. I couldn't agree more.

Because we saw the same shift to Republicans among independent voters and suburbans, etc. So not just in Virginia, but in New Jersey, too. And Nassau County in Long Island. Right. So where, you know, here in Virginia, there were these couple little flare-ups around what was being taught in the schools, etc. But that was not the case in those states. Right. So where, you know, here in Virginia, there were these couple little flare-ups around what was being taught in the schools, etc. But that was not the case in those states. Exactly. So I think the analysis is a lot more simple. You have 70% of Americans who say the country is on the wrong track, and Democrats are in charge. So there's a huge swing. I don't want to say that it

had nothing to do with it. And yes, race racial politics are incredibly potent and continue to be incredibly potent in American politics. But also just on the school issue, you know, I actually saw a pretty good segment on CNN where they interviewed four white suburban moms who had flipped from voting for Biden to voting for YoungKid, and their concerns were schools. It had nothing to do with CRT. Every single one of them was totally clear, like, no, I was pissed off that the schools were shut down. You know, Crystal. I was pissed off that my kids are behind, and I don't feel like these schools are doing enough to get them ahead. Now, look, you can say governors don't have all that much to,

that's probably more of a local school board issue, et cetera, et cetera. But I think a lot of the energy around education that was represented as about CRT was actually about questions around school closures and learning loss and those sorts of things as well. I couldn't agree with you more. And actually what happened is that CRT – and once again, I'm not going to diminish it. I do think it was potent in some respects perhaps with some voters, but I did not know this. Virginia behind Maryland was the locality or the state which kept its schools closed for longer than second to anybody else in the entire country. That seems pretty potent. And look, it's exactly right. And that's what we pointed to here over and over again, which is, look, is critical race theory part of it?

Yes, but the number one issue in this election was the economy. Number one, 33% of all voters, as opposed to 20-something percent on education, said that it was the economy, inflation being one of the major concerns. Glenn Youngkin famously ran that ad, which we played here on the show, and I have not yet heard a single media personality point to it about lowering grocery prices. That's actually pretty goddamn effective in an election where whenever you go and you talk to working people, and I'm actually going to get to in my monologue around gas prices and conversations even I've overheard organically, that is the main thing that's affecting. And same whenever it comes to education. There's a Matt Glassman, he's a political analyst. He tweeted something like this. He's like, look, in my interaction with Fairfax voters who switched from from Biden to Glenn Youngkin, it had nothing to do with critical race theory. Fairfax County just had its schools close longer than almost any school district in the nation. I am a white Virginia soccer mom. I live in a rural county. I don't think you could even call it Exurban.

But I talk to the other moms. Okay. Not one of them. I have yet to ever hear anyone in King George County use the words critical race theory. What I have heard a lot of talk about is inflation, costs at the grocery store, costs to stay. Costco. An ability to get, you know, a new whatever it is that they wanted to get

into their house for Christmas. And I've heard a lot of talk about school policies with regarding, even now, to ongoing quarantine. So if your kid is exposed, they have to go out for two weeks

and you have to get them tested and the tests are expensive. The misery of virtual schooling, I heard a lot about how kids got behind, how everybody's trying to muddle through. Those are the conversations that at least I'm hearing among the other soccer moms in my town. Now, again, that's not to say that this had nothing to do with it, but I think a lot of the analysis really oversold it. And to go back to Bacha's point, part of why it's very convenient for the sort of media liberals to lean into this analysis of just like, well, everybody's racist.

What can you do is it lets the Democrats completely off the hook. Yes. If everyone is just irretrievable, you know, irrevocably racist and there's nothing you can do about it, then their failure is justified. Terry McAuliffe, you know, he run a brilliant campaign. It's just, oh, people are racist. What can you do? And of course, they never talk about the fact that there's some conflicting data about how Glenn Youngkin did with Latinos, but it looks like he did pretty well with Latinos. Either won a majority or a near majority. And also with Asian Americans. So those pieces of the conversation are totally left out, I think, on the analysis all the way around. And I also think Batch's point, though, is a good one, that part of why Democrats are seeing such an erosion with working class voters is because rather than focusing on what they could deliver for people, the Build Back Better bill and its total collapse being case in point, they lean into this very off-putting language where if your whole politics is around culture war signaling and what you've decided to signal to is just this like group of educated suburban white people, then that's who you're going to win.

And by the way, Terry McAuliffe actually did better than Biden did with white suburban women. White college graduate women. The people you were going after, they showed up for you. Maybe run a campaign that's going to appeal to a broader group of people. Very, very excellent point. All right, let's get to this next story, which is really harrowing. The worst concert disaster since 1979 in the United States. We're talking about Astroworld and Travis Scott's concert over this weekend in the city of Houston. So let's put this New York Times tear sheet up there on the screen, which actually does a decent enough job of summarizing exactly what happened here.

So the Astroworld concert, there's been a lot of discussion here online. Now, the number one thing is that there were a couple of different things that were happening. Number one is that the crowds themselves were just simply out of control. And what they point to within this Times article is that the signs of trouble were not immediately apparent, but that concert goers at the very beginning were beginning to see that there was a major crush of people that were entering the venue and that increasingly they felt claustrophobic very much in the hours to the lead up before Travis Scott even took the stage. So that was number one. Number two was that there is a lot of discussion

about both security, the fact that security was not able to secure the venue, and we will get to a video showing very much of that, but also healthcare workers themselves embedded within the crowd, whether they had enough of the ability, EMTs and more, in order to respond to the disaster once it occurred. Three is that the authorities and Travis Scott himself are under major question here as to why they did not shut the concert down whenever it was then apparent that things were totally out of control. Four, and Crystal, you've gone very down the loophole here, is that there was some possible incident in terms of there was a rumor going around that somebody was injecting somebody else with something within the crowd, which might have spawned some of the initial freak out disaster. Houston authorities confirmed that that was under investigation. Again, under investigation, not necessarily that it was true.

So there was a confluence of kind of just crazy stuff that was happening. And just to give people an idea of what the crush looked like, let's go ahead and put this video there. You can see here the VIP entrance where people were blasting through the barricade. I'm talking about hundreds and hundreds of people that are just streaming through, knocking over the metal detectors, overwhelming the security guards. You can see that security at the venue was just clearly not adequate. And, you know, I think it's important to note that Travis Scott himself has encouraged this type of behavior in terms of rushing into the venue, telling people to get in there, you know, kind of regardless of whatever the consequences might be. I'm not saying directly he's like responsible or whatever, but it is something that he has said in the past. And it's important in order to note with that security video from what we can see

about what was happening, that Scott himself appeared to be slightly aware of that there was some chaos within the crowd while their actual rescue attempts were being made. So this is another video. Put this up there on the screen, please, where you can see that Scott himself is playing and singing while somebody is unconscious directly below him. And so the camera pans there to somebody who is completely unconscious being grabbed there by EMT tech. So there's a lot happening, Crystal. Travis Scott apparently had not stopped the concert, but paused it a couple of times. We're like, is somebody okay? So he wasn't aware that something was going on while this disaster unfolded. Eight people are dead,

okay? And we're talking about little teenagers, 14, 16-year-old boys, some 21-year-old college students. These are very, very young victims. And there are hundreds of people who were injured as well. So it's a terrible situation. Really sad. Eight people killed, hundreds injured at this point. One of the worst concert tragedies in history. And to your point, and this is the big question, honestly, why didn't they stop it sooner? Yeah. I mean, there are other videos going around of people climbing up to where the camera operators are. Yeah, trying to get them to stop.

Trying to get them, screaming. People are dying. Like, I'm trying to save a life here. Stop. And trying to get them to turn the cameras on to do something to stop the concert. The show went on for 40 minutes after authorities say this became a mass casualty event.

40 more minutes. Right. And so in some ways, the fact that the live stream shows Travis Scott sometimes pausing, stopping the songs, and then continuing, it's almost more damning because after the fact, he said, oh, we had no idea what was going on. No, you did, though. And look, I believe that he didn't know the extent of how bad things were, but clearly there were indications that he knew this was going poorly, and no one steps in to stop. So I did go really deep on this. I read a lot about it.

I watch a lot of the videos because you just ask yourself, like, how the hell did this happen? And I do think it was just this confluence of horrific factors. You had way too many people packed into this place. And when you look at some of the videos, I mean, you can't even distinguish the people one from another. It's just this mass of humanity, almost like a wave of people. And they're just being buffeted around totally out of control. These individuals had no control over where they were going or what was happening to them. Then you had the fact that people have been locked down. This is their first, in many instances, live concert experience in a long time. So, yeah, the atmosphere was very chaotic, as evidenced by the video that you just showed.

He apparently put a countdown clock up on the screen leading up to his appearance. So starting at 30 minutes and the on the ground reports from people who were there and survived say that every minute it was getting packed in more and more and more tightly leading up to his appearance. And then people started having trouble breathing. And then people start, of course, they're screaming. People are screaming as loud as they can for help. The crowd in unison is chanting, stop the show. And people are passing out, unconscious, getting stepped on, getting trampled.

We still don't know exactly the cause of death for the eight individuals who were dead. I read from – there are people who are experts on crowd control and on these kind of crowd surges and what happens. Apparently, the most common cause of death from a crowd surge like this isn't actually from getting trampled. It's from asphyxiation. So you literally can't, you're compressed so much that you literally can't breathe. There have been documented instances where the crowd, the energy from the crowd is so intense that it bends metal barricades that are meant to withstand a thousand pounds of pressure. So that's what people who were in the middle of this, that's what they were ultimately up against. Then you add on top of that, as you were saying, these reports that somebody or multiple somebodies were going around injecting people with what appears to be some kind of drug. And the reason

that this had some credibility to it is because the police chief of Houston in a press conference said that there was a security guard who reported, who was actually administering CPR on someone or attending to someone who had passed out, and who reported feeling a prick in their neck. Then they went unconscious,

had to be revived with naloxone. And there was a pinprick on the neck consistent with having been injected with something. And then there were other bystander reports. So that's where that piece comes in. And I also read reports that said even before Travis Scott took the stage, the paramedics who were there at the festival, because, look, festivals, you're always going to have people who are, you know, drink too much or passing out or it's too hot or whatever. So you're going to have some health issues. That's, you know, almost a given at these festival environments. But that they were already overwhelmed with hundreds of people who were having significant injuries to the point that they could no longer even keep track of all the people that they were having to treat even before Travis Scott took the stage. of questions about what the hell happened, why the show wasn't stopped, why there wasn't more security in place, why people were so incredibly tightly packed in to start with. Yeah, I think the real one to me is my own outrage that there are people who were there who are in full knowledge

that there was something very terrible that was happening. And this, just to give you an example, put this on the screen. I mean, Kylie Jenner, who, you know, I guess is somewhat engaged with Travis Scott. I don't know exactly what the situation is. Put this video on the screen, please. And you can see from her now-deleted Instagram story that, you know, you can see an ambulance trying to make its way through this crowd. An EMT card making its way to an unconscious victim. And so over and over again, we see a situation where people there seemed to know something was going on.

They weren't stopping the concert. As you said, people were climbing up to the camera and saying, please stop. The concert wasn't happening. And there are eight people who are dead, some of whom are 14, 16, teenage boys, college students who are not going home. And so all of this amounts to the worst concert disaster since 1979. A lot of people were pointing to an old clip from Linkin Park, I think it was in the mid-2000s, where they stopped their concert in the middle, being like, hey, hey, hey, stop, stop.

They're like, is this person safe? Are we good? Got to make sure everybody's safe. And then they continue the show. That's what it should be all about. And so there's still a lot of questions. There are a lot of people that are going to have to provide a lot of answers as to what went wrong here because, you know, people died and it's not a joke.

Yeah, indeed. This isn't a joke. It wasn't a game. And it's heartbreaking for these families who lost their loved ones in a horrific tragedy. Okay, Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, as Glenn Youngkin jumped into the political fray, his old colleagues at private equity giant Carlyle Group, they kind of prepared for the worst. They were waiting for the moment when the company's ghoulish maneuvers

and sociopathic ethos would ultimately break into the open. Here's a Bloomberg piece citing that. From August, they say former colleagues have been bracing for Youngkin's run to not only spotlight Carlisle's past controversies, akin to what Mitt Romney's presidential run did to Bain Capital, but for it to also dredge up missteps by Youngkin and managers he oversaw. And there was plenty to be concerned about. Carlisle Group first gained notoriety thanks to Michael Moore's documentary, Fahrenheit 9-11.

In that documentary, Fahrenheit 9-11. In that documentary, he tracked how they profited off the attack through their extensive ties to Saudi Arabia and their investments in the defense industry. Former President George Bush Sr. happened to be an advisor at the time, putting the Bush family in position to personally profit from our forever wars. And then there's just the generally ghoulish behavior that is the business model of private equity. You may recall John Oliver exposed one aspect of this. Carlisle Group has gotten into the trailer park business, buying up mobile home parks, jacking up rents, and evicting tenants en masse, splitting the most vulnerable among us for fun and profit. But for some reason, the Virginia governor's race did not include much discussion of the way rapacious vultures like Glenn Youngkin and Carlisle Group looked to profit

off of war and poverty. Why was that? Well, there was one eensy-weensy little problem. Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe had himself profited off of Carlisle Group. As friend of the show Matt Stoller put it, quote, I love that Terry McAuliffe couldn't attack Youngkin's Carlisle Group record because McAuliffe was an investor in a Carlisle fund. Ladies and gentlemen, the Democrats. Indeed. But the corruption and co-opting of the Democratic Party by Wall Street and business interests is not just a problem for the Virginia governor's race. In fact, their capture by business interests has destroyed their ability to deliver for regular people. And I would go so far as to say that it poses an existential threat to the country. Now, let me first say that the GOP is at least as captured as the Democratic Party.

They have long been the party of big business, and deciding to occasionally talk about the working class has changed absolutely nothing in that regard. But when the working class really went off a cliff is when the Democratic Party also became captured by big money. Terry McAuliffe was part of this shift with his bestie Bill Clinton. Clinton used populist language to win the presidency, and then he quickly shifted to reorient the party away from labor and towards business. Clinton and his DLC pals, they decided they didn't want to leave all the big money fundraising to the Republicans. And that's, of course, to say nothing of the post-public service corporate gigs. Supreme Court decisions that opened the floodgates of

corporate cash continually just made this situation worse. And so now Democrats, unsurprisingly, find themselves unable to deliver on even the most modest of campaign promises, thanks to their complete industry capture. Joe Biden? He promised to be the most pro-union president in history. He championed the PRO Act, which would help tilt the balance of power a little bit back towards workers. Oh, who would you look at that? Multi-level marketing companies. Also known as pyramid schemes, which should by all rights be illegal, they have been funneling money to Kyrsten Sinema to buy her opposition to the PRO Act and make sure it can't pass through reconciliation or through any other method.

But of course, the problems are way bigger than just Kyrsten Sinema or Joe Manchin. Joe Biden promised he would lift the minimum wage to $15 an hour. It was really the only thing that he promised Bernie in exchange for Bernie's endorsement. But unfortunately, New Hampshire's two Democratic senators, along with a number of other Democrats, have been bought off by the National Restaurant Association, causing them to oppose an extremely popular and badly needed lift to the minimum wage. This steadfast industry opposition has allowed the minimum wage to languish at $7.25, going the longest time in history without a race. Joe Biden also was reportedly extremely committed to the idea of free community college. He emphasized it

even after his election, guaranteeing that it would be included in his Build Back Better agenda. It was a linchpin of his plan to give working class Americans a shot at the American dream. But the four-year college industry couldn't have community college getting all the glory and, more importantly, having a competitive edge in the market for paying student customers. So they sent out their lobbyists and, lo and behold, Biden's top priority for Build Back Better was no match for their organized money. And finally, there's prescription drug prices. Now, Democrats have literally been promising to have Medicare negotiate prescription drug prices since 2006.

Virtually every Democrat, including the worst ones like Kyrsten Sinema, they all campaigned on it. Why? Because it's obvious, it's non-controversial, and it's extremely popular. It's also a very high priority of the American people. But of course, Big Pharma opposed it, and they have won, as they always do. The original reform

is out. It's been replaced, possibly, with a stripped-down, industry-approved version, which will do little to actually save costs or reduce the ability of Big Pharma to steal from the nation's seniors. Now, these failures and obvious corruption, they are an electoral disaster for Democrats, as evidenced by the McAuliffe-Yunkin race. More broadly, when both parties serve a similar set of elite interests on economics, politics just collapses down to culture war. And Republicans have a way better hand to play on culture war issues than Democrats do. There are simply way more non-college-educated Americans than there are college-educated Americans, and Republicans have staked out

more favorable ground, signaling more effectively to these non-college-educated voters. But more importantly, these failures and obvious corruption pose a clear and present danger to the society writ large, most obviously by blocking even the most basic and needed reforms, let alone the more transformational policies that our rigged system desperately calls out for. But by destroying any and all faith in electoral politics as an effective means for change at all, this is an extraordinarily dangerous situation. Because when people lose faith in democratic processes, well, they turn to more desperate measures. What does that look like? Well, we know. Looks like reaching for pseudo-strongmen like Trump or worse.

Looks like susceptibility to the type of conspiracy theories that gave us January 6th and significant anti-vax sentiment. After all, when so many parts of the system are actually rigged, it becomes pretty easy to believe in nefarious forces doing nefarious things for power and for money. Looks like nationwide riots sparked by justifiable rage at the casual snuffing out of human life, all in order to attempt to maintain police state order on the American underclass. It looks like nihilism punctuated by rage, a nation bearing witness to our own dysfunction and decline, a country led by greedy plutocrats who will never

stop rigging the system to get a little bit richer, even if it destroys the very nation that made them rich in the first place. And Sagar, it has never been more clear the way that money, they don't have to buy everybody, but if you just buy a few key... All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, where is Joe Biden? Increasingly, I am having difficulty coming to terms with just how bad of a president that Biden actually is. This isn't some boomer monologue about empty shelves Joe or some bad faith critique.

Really what it is is a total disbelief on my part that Biden would be so inept at even pretending to care about some of the most basic determinants of why people vote and some of the outward factors that most govern the day-to-day lives of American citizens. My previous monologue on food prices delved deeply into the food supply chain and the various supply shocks around the world increasing the price of food. But as promised, today's monologue is about the other expenditure, which is gas. Now, I was driving around in my Jeep Wrangler this weekend, the most superior vehicle ever made on the face of this earth, when, of course, I had to stop and fill up my gas tank. Now, I knew I was going to write this, and I swear, right after I got out, I heard two people organically having a conversation about how the increase in the price of gas and food was killing them and why won't anyone do anything about it. Now, look, I have explained many times that the

president generally has pretty little to do with the price of gas. But the problem is most people don't know that. And when most people don't know that, it means that as a politician, all you should be doing every day is signaling to everyday Americans that you at least feel their pain, that you are at least doing everything humanly possible in order to fix it. Instead, this is how Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm reacted on Bloomberg News when she was confronted with what she and the Biden administration are doing about the price of gas. In Sturgis, Michigan, it is $2.89 a gallon. I guess that's better than in California. What is the Granholm plan to increase oil production in America? That is hilarious.

Would that I had the magic wand on this. As you know, of course, oil is a global market. It is controlled by a cartel. That cartel is called OPEC. And they made a decision yesterday that they were not going to increase beyond what they were already planning. You could not script a more let them eat cake moment. You're the energy secretary, Mrs. Granholm. At least pretend that you can do something. Many of you might have heard me reference one of the books behind me lately.

It's called Freedom from Fear. It's an Oxford history of the FDR presidency from the Depression through World War II. One of the most important parts of that book is this. The New Deal really didn't work for the first couple of years of the FDR presidency. And yet, FDR was overwhelmingly popular and reelected. The economy was actually worse and unemployment was going up. But he remained a living god in the United States. How? The answer is that people, though they were suffering, felt that at least Roosevelt, unlike the rest of corrupt Washington, understood what they were going through and every day they picked up the newspaper, they saw that he was at least trying his damnedest with a program for this or that, with this act or that act.

By throwing the federal government into a posture of action, he at the very least had their trust before things got better. That's the dirty secret of politics. You really don't even have to be good on paper. If you just appear in charge, you are in charge. And Biden is nowhere to be seen. His literally designated official is laughing her head off on national TV about the plight of millions of people. And I just want to scream, do something. Those who watch this show know that I'm not some MAGA warrior, but I at least have to say that Trump understood this pretty well when he was president. Back in the days when I was a White House correspondent, I remember well how Trump fixated on the price of gas. When there was an attack on a Saudi oil tanker, the administration immediately said

that they would tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve if necessary. Consistently, Trump used the bully pulpit of his Twitter account to pressure and warn OPEC that he would take drastic measures to keep the price of gas as low as humanly possible. Why is Joe Biden not doing any of that? You know, I think coronavirus qualifies as a national crisis. Can you think of another instance that might make the most sense in order to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, both as a sign to OPEC that we are willing to take drastic action if they won't step up, and as a signal to all Americans that the government understands what they're going through? Obama tapped the SPR in 2011 after we took down Gaddafi. Okay, this is way worse than that.

Or extrapolate this to the supply chain crisis that we have right now. The administration is fully within its authority to mobilize the National Guard and get back to work in clearing up backlogs at ports, adding to the supply of truckers, and expediting the most screwed up parts of the supply chain. Or how about this? Last time I checked, we have a trillion dollar blue water Navy. The entire purpose of a Navy is to guarantee the supremacy of American commerce on the high seas. And right now, it seems like a time to answer the call of duty department of the Navy. Throwing the National Guard, the Navy at the supply chain crisis, tapping the SPR, giving a speech daily or even weekly about the price of gas, would help Joe Biden and the American people probably more than what's in

this infrastructure bill. And yet, we barely hear from the president himself. When we do, it's less than inspiring, to say the least. Maybe that would even be okay if he had good deputies. If what we saw, though, was that main deputy in that interview. Nobody in the higher echelons of the government seems to care or even want to do anything at all to fix the most pressing problems of Americans' lives. They are going to pay big time for it. Americans right now have a lot of cash on hand. They have a lot of savings, but they hate the economy right now. The reason is simple. Things are not working the way they're supposed to. 69% of people in the latest

Gallup poll said the economy is getting worse and they are not crazy. Look at the price of gas or the price of food, and they want the government to do something about it. And while practically, there is certainly a limit to how much you can do. How about the Biden administration approach that limit first before they start plowing us with excuses. Until then, they are going to continue to lose bigger than they probably ever have before. And honestly, they completely deserve it. It really is just an alternative universe in my head, Crystal, but I can't get over it. I mean, you were talking about whenever you're talking to your... Joining us now, we have Kyle Kondik. He is managing editor at Sabato's Crystal Ball at UVA Center for Politics and also author of a highly relevant book titled The Long Red Thread, How Democratic Dominance Gave Way to Republican Advantage in U.S. House Elections. Great to see you again, Kyle.

Good to see you, Kyle. Thanks for having me. All right. So you were pretty prescient in terms of the Virginia election. You and your colleagues moved the race to lean Republican shortly before Republican Glenn Young can actually prove the polls right for once and won by a narrow margin. What is your view overall of what happened here in the state of Virginia and frankly, in the state of New Jersey and other places as well? I think if you take Virginia and New Jersey together, it's interesting that when it's all said and done, Phil Murphy's margin of victory is moving up about two and a half, three points. Looks like Len Young could have won by about two points. And if you go back to 2017,

you saw basically a roughly 11-point shift from 2017 in both Virginia and New Jersey toward the Republicans. And it's interesting that it was almost exactly the same when it was all said and done in both states, which I think was reflective of just what kind of environment we're in, which is that it's a Republican-leaning environment. And I think we saw really great Republican turnout in both states. Not necessarily bad Democratic turnout, at least in Virginia. I mean, overall turnout was very high in Virginia. But I think the combination of Republicans being aggrieved and showing up in big numbers, and also, you know, the Republican candidates likely making some gains amongst

swing voters, you know, that's how you see such a big change from, you know, from four years ago, and even from a year ago, obviously, both these states voted, you know, from four years ago and even from a year ago, obviously, um, both these states voted, you know, voted democratic for president very comfortably last year. And, you know, I think we were sort of waiting to see like what, you know, what the environment actually is, you know, is Biden's approval rating actually that bad for Democrats? Uh, are Republicans still enthusiastic about voting even after, you know, Donald Trump sort of, you know, made up all this stuff about the 2020 elections integrity and whatnot. And I mean, again, the answers we get to these questions, they're good ones for Republicans. Yeah. You know, it's fascinating. There's been a lot of takes kind of on both sides here, Kyle, blaming critical race theory, wokeness, and more. I think James Carville, we have something on that.

Let's take a listen. I want to get your reaction to this national discussion. Let's take a listen. Looking at these results, your party, what went wrong? What went wrong is just stupid wokeness. All right, don't just look at Virginia and New Jersey. Look at Long Island. Look at Buffalo. Look at Minneapolis. Even look at Seattle, Washington.

I mean, just defund the police lunacy to take Abraham Lincoln's name off of schools. I mean, people see that. It's interesting, Kyle. That's not just a takeaway from the center-left establishment and the media. That is also the Republican takeaway. So what do you make of that in the context of these elections? Well, look, I think Republicans like to wage their elections on sort of cultural grounds, and they particularly like it when Democrats are easy to tie to, I don't know, I guess the best way to put it is maybe the academic left. And I think that with some of these things that, you know, the attacks the Republicans have made against Democrats,

and, you know, again, it's kind of murky territory, but I think Republicans are very comfortable with this. And I think that you could argue that those attacks were effective. And in fact, you know, after the 2020 election, you know, the Democrats, obviously they won the presidency. They won control of both chambers eventually after the Georgia Senate runoffs. But even Joe Biden was, you know, reportedly complaining about, you know, his party getting pigeonholed on this defund the police rhetoric, which I think you could sort of put in the same bucket as some of these other, you know, kind of cultural attacks that Republicans make against Democrats. And

there are a lot of Democrats, I think, who feel like the Republicans have drawn blood on some of these things. And, you know, it's not for, you know, it's easy for Democrats sort of complain and say, oh, we're being mischaracterized and this and that. But, you know, as a party, you have to figure out ways to fight back against it and to disassociate yourself from positions and rhetoric that maybe you feel is politically damaging and the other side feels is politically damaging and is a good attack to make. And I don't think Democrats have quite figured it out on these particular topics. Yeah. So, Kyle, given that we now have some answers about just how bad the national environment is for Democrats, what does that mean looking forward to the midterm

elections? Because when we had you on before the Virginia election, you laid out the case that Virginia can be a pretty effective bellwether of where the nation is ultimately headed. So what is your assessment there? Well, look, I mean, I think that if the environment is, you know, looks in next year, the way it did last Tuesday, you know, I think Democrats are probably going to lose the House and the Senate. You know, one thing we did at our Crystal Ball newsletter was right after the Virginia election that sort of, again, to us sort of confirmed that indeed the environment's pretty bad for Democrats. We moved some of the U.S. Senate races toward the Republicans. We had them rate as least Democratic. Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, we moved all those races to toss up. You know, the House situation, I think, is murky just because we're in the midst of the redistricting process. And so

we don't know what the lines are going to look like in a lot of places. We're getting a sense of it. Some big states have finalized their lines, Illinois, Texas, North Carolina, although of course there very well could be litigation in some of these places. But, you know, redistricting is important. But if we're in an environment where, you know, Republicans are leading the House generic ballot polling by several points, that's the sort of environment where Republicans are going to pick up a lot of house seats, no matter necessarily how the districts are redrawn. And, you know, there are a lot of governorships on the ballot next year, too. The Democrats made big gains four years ago. But you could see a lot of the Democratic governorships being in jeopardy to places

like Michigan, Wisconsin, Kansas, et cetera. So, you know, this was a, this was kind of a, you know, the check engine light came on for the Democrats on their road to 2022. I guess there's time for things to change, but, you know, also the history generally suggests that the president's party struggles in the midterm, and that's exacerbated if the president is unpopular as this president is. And so, Kyle, what do we also think in terms of the Senate? So where are the particular Senate seats that might be most vulnerable specifically in this type of election? Are we looking at Arizona? Where else are we looking? Yeah, so there's kind of like a kind of a universally agreed upon kind of big seven of Senate races. The Republicans are defending

three. They have an open seat in Pennsylvania, an open seat in North Carolina, and Ron Johnson may or may not run in Wisconsin. And then the Democrats are defending Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and then also New Hampshire. You know, all of those states are really competitive for president, with the exception of New Hampshire, where it was really close in 2016, but Joe Biden won a bigger victory in 2020. But Republicans also may have basically their best Senate recruit in that state. Republican Governor Chris Sununu appears likely to launch his challenge to Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan. It really could be any day now, but we're waiting on that to sort of, you know, officially make that race a toss up in our own ratings.

So those are the ones to watch. But in a bad environment for for Democrats, you know, all four of those seats that they're defending are very much at risk. And, you know, let's let's say hypothetically, the Republicans were to net four Senate seats this time and go to fifty four forty six. Well, that could set them up for the Senate for a little while because next cycle, 2024, the Democrats, their most vulnerable members are on the ballot. Sherrod Brown in Ohio, John Tester in Montana, and Joe Manchin in West Virginia. And so it's a bad map for Democrats in 2024, too. So it's really important for Democrats to figure out a way to hold the line here in 2022.

And, you know, again, the environment is just not good. And we could talk all day about the problems that the Republicans are having with some of their candidate recruitment in some of these states, unproven candidates, candidates with domestic violence history or accusations, et cetera. But at the end of the day, if the environment's bad, a lot of those things don't mean as much as they otherwise might. I mean, when you add the results from Virginia and New Jersey together, there's a lot of discussion of certain local issues in Virginia with regards to schools and CRT. But this really looks like a national wave. And I think to your point, it was also incredibly predictable. You know, just even taking away the pandemic and how Americans feel about the

country and Biden's approval rating, just looking at the history, you know that you're very likely to have this backlash effect. You know what the map looks like for Democrats. And so they should have understood if they didn't what a tough landscape they were ultimately facing. Kyle, I'd love you to tell us a little bit about your book here, The Long Red Thread. What is the thesis of the book and why did you want to write it? Yeah, so the book came out of a master's thesis I wrote at Johns Hopkins a few years ago. I finished up my degree there and I wanted to explore. I've analyzed and I've written about house elections for more than a decade and I wanted to use getting my master's in order to, you know, explore this topic more. And so the book is essentially, it's a history of U.S. House elections since the early 60s. And I start

in the early 60s because that was the time of some landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions that enshrined the concept of one person, one vote into law. And so prior to those decisions, you know, House districts within states, some of them had four times more people than, some districts had four times more people than another district in the state. So that's, I thought that was sort of a good starting point for kind of modern redistricting. And it also starts in 1964 with the Democrats at the height of their power. They also have almost 300 U.S. House seats. Lyndon Johnson has been reelected. And so it sort of charts how the Democrats went from, you know, holding the, being essentially a permanent majority in the House for much of the back half of the 20th century to 1994 when Republicans took control. And then

Republicans have more often held the House since then. So it gets into all these kind of big concepts like redistricting and political realignment and the nationalization of elections that I think have all combined together to give Republicans more advantages in the race for U.S. House majorities than Democrats have. Well, very relevant, I think, to a lot of what we discuss here on the show. All topics we explore here quite a lot. And guys, I really recommend you go on and get Kyle's book. We've been talking to you for a long time now.

You are almost always right on with your analysis and your predictions. So certainly one of the voices we turn to the most when it comes to election analysis. We rely on you a lot, Kyle. Thank you, Kyle. Really appreciate it, man. Thanks for having me. Our pleasure. Thank you guys so much for watching. Crystal, we're so happy that you're back. Happy to be back. Really appreciate you guys.

Yeah, I know. It's not one of those good situations, but everything has worked out. We really appreciate your guys' support. As we mentioned, we've got big plans, as you guys can see here with the cameras and more. Other expansions and cool things that you're going to be hearing about soon. But to do that, we need your support. There's a premium subscription down there in the link. You get the show an hour early. All the benefits, but really what you do is you support our work here and the big plans that we have.

So we thank you all very, very much. We're cooking up some good stuff, guys, that I think you're going to be excited about that we're certainly excited about. So stay tuned for all of that. It's great to be back and I will be back tomorrow as well as we'll saga for a full show. We will see you then. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight-loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series

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