Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 1/20/22: Biden Speaks, Trump 2024, Drone Strike, Marianne, NPR, Late Stage Neoliberalism, Wall St Takeover, Matt Stoller, & More!

Episode Date: January 20, 2022

Krystal and Saagar talk about Biden's press conference, charges brought against Trump, drone strike footage, Marianne Williamson's comments about the two party system, NPR's discredited SCOTUS reporting, late stage neoliberalism, wall street capturing the housing market, an anti-trust outlook with Matt Stoller, 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/Matt Stoller: https://mattstoller.substack.com/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Good morning, everybody. Happy Thursday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. Lots of big stories breaking this morning. We are going to start this morning with the Biden presser that happened yesterday. Lots of gems dropped there to discuss on Kamala Harris, on Ukraine, on Build Back Better. So we'll tell you about that. Also, Trump 2024 is looking increasingly like it will be a thing because investigations into him and his family and potential financial improprieties continue. So that gives him an incentive to run and avoid any of those investigations or penalties for actual wrongdoing. There's new video of that drone strike in Afghanistan. We have brought you the details of that before on Biden's way out in order to appear tough for the media that was flaying him for, you know, finally getting us out of that war. They executed a drone strike they claimed was on ISIS-K militants.

That story fell apart almost instantly. Come to find out it was 10 civilians, of course, zero accountability. We have some footage of that strike that came from The New York Times, their FOIA request. It is disturbing to watch, but I think it's important that we sit with it and take a look at it and talk about that. People need to watch it. Exactly, and talk about the bigger context here. Really interesting podcast between Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang, kind of debating third-party efforts a la Andrew Yang's, and a potential primary of Biden and what might be most effective in effectuating change. We also have to bring in the details. Incredible story.

NPR reporting with great certainty that Chief Justice John Roberts had asked Justice Gorsuch to wear a mask because Sonia Sotomayor has comorbidities that make her more vulnerable to COVID and that he refused. And this was the whole thing about what a jerk he is. They are totally shooting down that story. NPR is still bizarrely standing by their reporting. The people involved just said you're full of it. So very interesting details there. We've also got Stoller in the show to talk about antitrust as it applies to the video game industry.

But we did want to start Sagar with that big Biden presser. Yeah, this Biden press conference was, I don't even know, guys. It was truly bonkers. Although it was the longest press conference of a modern American president. Was it really? So I guess that he gets that. Oh, I didn't see that metric. Yes, longer than Trump, longer than Barack Obama, and apparently George W. Bush as well.

So quite interesting. An hour and 50 minutes, I feel, and apparently George W. Bush as well. So quite interesting. An hour and 50 minutes, I feel, for the people who were in the room. Let's just lay the ground for this at the top, which is that voters are pretty concerned about Joe Biden and his health. Let's put this up there on the screen. In focus groups, people are basically saying that Biden and his personal health do not look so good. This is from Josh Kraschauer, who is quoting from a CNN study. Focus groups are giving party operatives nightmares. Biden does come across as old and absent, they say.

You don't say. Real and perceived fumbles play into fears that he is not up to the job. And Democrats are incompetent. So that was likely the context as to why he decided to stay out there for an hour and 50 minutes. Can I just pause for one second before you throw to the clips? How many times did we say during the Democratic primary, guys, this is a real problem. You're attacked viciously. And something that you should, and it was, oh, you're ableist and he just has a stutter and you're being ridiculous and how can you attack him for this?

No, this is not about someone who overcame a stutter and you're being ridiculous and how can you attack him for this? No, this is not about someone who overcame a stutter as a young child. This is someone who has to appear competent and in command for the American people and it's not going to go well if he can't. And lo and behold, now even mainstream elite legacy media journalists are having to admit that, yeah, there are some problems here. Yeah, three years later, Crystal, and people really need to remember, we were viciously attacked on our show for pointing out some of his stumbles and just very clearly saying, look, we are not denigrating the man for his age. We are simply saying that there is a strong, look, anybody knows, you look at an old person, they're not the way that they

used to be. I personally, and you did as well, had seen Joe Biden speak in the flesh 10 years ago versus now. Not the same guy. I was at that debate where he destroyed Paul Ryan, who was the supposed wonder boy of the Republican Party. And I saw him at a rally literally the exact same year. It is not even close to the same person who you see standing in front of you today. And that was just very full on display, possibly igniting an international crisis. We'll start with Kamala Harris, where he decided to put two things to rest. He said he is going to run in 2024 and Kamala will be his vice presidential nominee. Let's take a listen. You put Vice President Harris in charge of voting rights. Are you satisfied with her work on this issue? And can you guarantee, do you commit that she will be your running mate in 2024, provided that you run again? Yes and yes.

Okay. Do you care to expand? Pardon me? Do you care to expand? No, there's no need to. I mean, I ask the question. She's going to be my running mate, number one. And number two, I did put her in charge. I think she's doing a good job.

Well, I don't know about the good job part, but he is standing by her. I can't say that. At least for now. The real thing, the news, and we have several clips here that we want to play you. The next one is single-handedly the biggest piece of news out of this. Biden was pressed specifically on Ukraine. And he asked, he's like, do you think that Putin is going to invade? What is the broader Russia, NATO alliance? And look, as we laid out yesterday, our views on this are not typical neocon mainstream. Like, I'm not buying some of the CIA propaganda about what exactly is happening. pretty bad answer. If anything, he was being too honest and telling the truth and possibly igniting some response from the Russians. Just take a listen when he was asked about Ukraine and what exactly he expects Putin to do. So I think what you're going to see is that Russia will be held

accountable if it invades. And it depends on what it does. It's one thing if it's a minor incursion and then we end up having to fight about what to do and not do, etc. Yeah, that's one thing if it's a minor incursion. Just the tip, it's okay. Yeah, just the tip, literally, but for international relations. Here's the issue, right, which is that he's basically going towards the endgame and saying, yes, I expect Putin will do it if it's one thing. If he does this, it's another thing. If it's a full blown thing. All of that is obviously true. People were also very upset for him for correctly telling the truth, which is that NATO is divided

over this. Specifically, Germany, which is addicted to Russian gas because they've nuked their nuclear program. And so they desperately need it. And they are not willing to do any sort of arming of Ukraine or many of the sanctions. Remember, also, they were the ones who drew back many of the sanctions, 2015, 2016, on the original Crimea invasion. But all of this, A, doesn't present a united front. And, B, this is what drives me crazy about this type of policy. Pick one. Either say Ukraine is Ukraine and at the end of the day you will get economic sanctions if you cross that border. But we're Either say Ukraine is Ukraine. And at the end of the day, you will get economic

sanctions if you cross that border. But we're not going to defend it. You decide what you want to do. But don't go out there and say Russia is going to pay a price, but maybe, you know, variable if it's just the tip and maybe it's OK. But I stand by Ukraine. NATO is united, but NATO is also divided. This is the chaos that we've talked about. Remember, I did that monologue on Taiwan and strategic ambiguity. He was like, no, we're going to defend Taiwan. And then his administration would come out with a statement saying, well, U.S. policy hasn't changed. Well, which one is it?

Because, you know, there's nuclear powers here at stake. And it's the same thing here, which is that the lack of clarity has caused a huge amount of confusion in Kiev, in Moscow, here in Washington, where the White House had to put out a statement cleaning it up just this morning saying Jen Psaki being like, to be clear, any invasion will result in massive economic sanctions or whatever on the Russians. I don't believe that this is 4D chess crystal. I think this guy is old and is confused about what he's talking about. It's a very Trumpian response. You can see what's going on here very clearly. He's got the talking points that they prepared for him in his briefing. Here's what you say. There will be consequences and NATO is united. But he can't help but actually just sort of meander into what the reality of the situation is, which is if they do a little incursion,

they can have a little incursion as a treat, I guess. And then we got to talk about, you know, how serious is this? How much do we want to commit ourselves? The need is divided. What are you going to do? So a couple things to tie the two first thoughts together. They sent Kamala out on the morning shows.

I think she's on three different morning shows. She's doing a trifecta of morning shows and trying to make clear, no, there will be consequences and they will be strong, et cetera, et cetera. I guess I don't hate this answer as much as a lot of the media does, because you know what?

They're just bloodthirsty for like the more aggressive hawkish ramping up of tensions with Russia that he went, the more he would be applauded. And the fact that he leaves the door open for, you know, if it's not anything too crazy, we might not actually massively escalate. And they just, you know, they just destroy him for it. This was by far the clip that they went after him the hardest for. I would prefer the sort of confused doublespeak with the little bit of the truth slipping in here and tensions going down

versus him beating his chest and giving the media ultimately what they want. So was it a great answer? No. Could it have been worse, in my opinion? Yes. And I was actually very fearful that it would have been much more

in the hawkish ratcheting up of tensions leading us further and closer to the brink of war direction than what we ultimately got. I agree. much more in the hawkish ratcheting up of tensions, leading us further and closer to the brink of war direction than what we ultimately got. I agree. And my problem and fear here is that the president may feel one thing, but it's also very clear that, you know, depending on who's really in charge, I mean, who's actually running the State Department and the policy, because we continue to put out these statements and then, you know, one thing or the other, the lack of clarity and, like, again, the ambiguity whenever it comes to this, that is where you have real conflict. So the president may feel one way, but then what if he gets dragged towards some

chess beating type thing if it actually does come down to it? I mean, is he in charge here or not, depending on how he feels? That's the part where I just don't know what to think and why I'm really afraid, because whenever you have somebody like this, clarity is the most important thing. Either say, look, NATO stands united. We've agreed on economic sanctions. Putin, it's up to you. Well, just the tip. You come in. Maybe NATO's divided. What kind of message are you sending? I mean, and I'm not standing for Ukraine. I'm not standing for Moscow either. I'm saying that chaos in the international system is bad.

One thing we learned from the 20th century is that the escalation ladder on these things is, escalation ladder goes very, very quickly. And once it's out of the bag, it's very hard in order to put it back in. The number one lesson of the First World War is be clear about what your actual international lines are. Don't have the president say one thing, the vice president say another, put another statement out. If this was actual administration policy, A, I would support it.

But B, I would be happy. I'd be like, great, Putin knows exactly what can be done, et cetera. But now nobody knows. And same in Kiev. Look, Kiev now has our Javelin missiles, okay? Are they going to use those against Moscow? I mean, that is a real question.

And that's not good for us to have to lay in. We need actual direction from the president. This is one of those instances where we're like, being clear, having a lucid president is extremely important. So even on the policy, like I agree, I probably agree way more with Biden. With a little bit of incursion. What are you going to do? The doddering element of this is where I am the most concerned. No, I mean, that's very fair. The other thing I will say about this, look, obviously the media is like very upset that he wasn't more hawkish and more aggressive and et cetera, et cetera. Oh, you're hanging the Ukrainians down to dry, all of that. But just imagine if Trump, if this was Trump. They would lose it. Oh, it would be, you know,

what does Putin have on him? And they'd be calling for his impeachment again over, in their words, green lighting a Russian incursion into invasion of Ukraine. I mean, you can just imagine the fire alarm level freakout that would have occurred if this was Trump. And we'd be going back to, you know, what if he was a Russian agent since 1987? And where's the P-tape and all that stuff? I mean, they impeached the guy because he didn't want to arm Ukraine. I mean, as a... Well, and he did.

Obama did not. But he actually did. Obama didn't arm Ukraine. Yes. And they were cool with it then. He does arm Ukraine in a much more aggressive stance towards Russia, but because he's verbally, like, you know, playing footsie with Putin, they don't pay, you know, they can ignore all of the actual

more hawkish militant actions versus Russia. It's ludicrous. By the way, I have to make a correction. Yesterday I said that the U.S. armed Ukrainian rebels, that was incorrect. I said that meant that the U.S. armed Ukrainian government, the rebels are the people in eastern Ukraine who are on the Russian side. So I apologize for that. And that's just me correcting my statement. The other major piece of news that came out of this from the so-called domestic agenda, Biden saying that they will have to break up the Build Back Better Act, not specifying actually, though, which parts are going to be forward. Take a listen. I think we can break the package up, get as much as we can now and come back and fight for the rest later. So interesting there, Crystal, saying I'm going to break it up. This came after news that Bill Clinton had apparently called Biden and told him to break up the package and see exactly what could get on there. But I'm quite doubtful.

Look, it's January 20th. You know, they technically have a couple of months before the midterms really start to ramp up. Senate floor time is a very precious thing. Nobody knows which pieces people actually agree upon. And also, the White House, it's not like they're deploying a full-fledged effort on, okay, let's get the child tax credit. You know why? Because Joe Manchin opposes the child tax credit.

They're not going full board and saying, okay, let's do prescription drug pricing. Why? Because Kyrsten Sinema opposes the prescription drug pricing. So what do they agree on? Expanding the Pell Grant program? Yeah. Okay. Great midterm agenda, guys.

Good luck with that. I don't want to denigrate it. Pell Grants are good for, you know, poor kids and all that. But that ain't no transformative piece of legislation. This is the part where the sad part that people need to understand is the things that they all do agree on, all 50, are the most mealy-mouthed, nothing-type programs, which would make him look like an idiot

for spending so much of the country's time and political capital on that I still expect very little to get done. Yeah, well, and if they're just using it as a messaging tool for the midterms, obviously that's pathetic. What you really need to do is to be willing to put Joe Manchin in a tough spot where he's on the wrong side of an issue that in his own state is an 80-20 issue. Or put Kyrsten Sinema on the wrong side of an issue that in her state is an 80-20 issue. Like prescription drug reform is a perfect example. example, but they're too afraid to stand up to these two individuals or anyone else in the caucus and actually do the muscling and the hard work to get these things passed. Let's be clear. I mean,

the strategy of breaking it up and making things uncomfortable and making people take really difficult votes, that would have been a much better strategy from the beginning. Either that or going all the way back to the beginning of the administration, they should have had some of these things in the must pass relief bill, some things that, you know, would have persisted and not expired after just one year, or they should have kept together the infrastructure piece and the build back better piece because that was the only leverage that they actually had over those people. And then maybe you would have had a better shot at it.

Barring that, the next best strategy would have been to, from the beginning, go with these super popular and some of them quite transformational agenda items. I mean, something the president has talked about repeatedly is how much he cares about free community college. Yes. That would be really significant. But that's opposed by cinema.

But it divides the Democratic caucus a little bit. It puts people on the spot. It puts them at odds with their donors. And you haven't seen any willingness from the White House or from congressional leadership to make these corporate-backed individuals uncomfortable. So while the strategy is a better one, and Bill Clinton is many things, but he's not a dummy when it comes to political strategy, the strategy is definitely a better one. But it depends on what pieces are you going to put up and are you actually willing to make people like Cinema Mansion and Warner and the others who are hiding behind them uncomfortable with regards to their social circles and their donor bases? That's the question. So it just matters a lot what the execution is. And at this point, in turn, if they think this is going to save them from the midterms, I don't even think they delude themselves in that regard. And the other thing, we'll probably talk about this on Monday,

that CNN article that we led with where the operatives are like, oh, God, he's old and absent. The bulk of that article is about how the Biden administration is so incompetent. They just they don't even have a political operation. All of these members of Congress, it's different from Obama. They actually do want Biden to campaign for him. He isn't that level of toxic that Obama was, but they're just completely absent, completely onto lunch. No strategy, no muscle. This is not surprising, by the way, for anyone who has actually followed Biden in his career after his very first election of the Senate. He hasn't really had a tough election since then. As vice president, that

was all Barack Obama's political operation. And as vice president, he had a very dysfunctional sort of dynamic within his office where he micromanages everything, but he can't make decisions. So things just get bottlenecked and you end up with the level of mismanagement and incompetence that is the polar opposite of what people thought they were voting for when they voted Joe Biden into office. Absolutely right. And finally, we had to do this with the GOP. You flagged this one, Crystal. Biden's surprised Republicans aren't working with him. Interesting. Take a listen. I did not anticipate that there'd be such a stalwart effort to make sure that the most important thing was that President Biden didn't get anything done. Think about this. What are Republicans for? What are they for? Name me one thing they're for. And so the problem here is that I think what happens,

what I have to do in the change in tactic, if you will, I have to make clear to the American people what we are for. We've passed a lot. We've passed a lot of things that people don't even understand what's all that's in it, understandably. So funny, Crystal. He's like, what are Republicans for? I didn't anticipate this level. I'm like, dude, did you live through your own vice presidency? Where were you? What's happening? I have to say, I actually was kind of surprised that Republicans even gave him the infrastructure package. That's a good point. Well, no, that's because the Chamber of Commerce and the business people.

Of course. Yeah, the business people all wanted it, and they pushed them to do it. But that's as far as you're going to get. Like, where have you been for the past two decades? This is obviously, they were not going to hand you your agenda. And let's throw this next tear sheet up on the screen. I went back and looked, because remember during the primary, he covered some of this. He kept insisting,

oh, after Trump goes, it was like the fever's gonna break. Remember how to Barack Obama said? He kept saying that. He said that Republicans, once Trump is gone, they're gonna have an epiphany. Things will fundamentally change with Donald Trump out of the White House. He said, not a joke. You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican

friends. It's already beginning in the House now. If we can't change, we're in trouble. This nation can't function without generating consensus. It can't do it. And so this man has been in Washington for how many years? 35, 40, something like that. It's like 50 years that this man has been here. I mean, he's almost 80 and he showed up when he was 30. So yeah, he's been in Washington for like 50 years and you couldn't see just the most basic political dynamic that any moron who just exists in this country. No, they're not going to work with you. Whatever bipartisan era that you came from 40 years ago is long dead and gone. So that just shows you how apparently this man learned nothing from his experience during the vice presidency for all his talk about how, you know, and his aides

would be, oh, we're going to do things different and it's going to be FDR and all this stuff. Like you have no idea what you are doing in this town and the American people are suffering for it. Like I don't even care about your political prospects or the political prospects of the Democratic Party, but this is a time of crisis and chaos and deep uncertainty. And you have nothing to say. You're unable to execute on even the basics of your vision. He got asked at the end, are you going to,

hey, you made a promise to cancel some student debt. Are you going to do that? No answer. So don't give me this. Oh, it's all the fault of man. Oh, the filibuster. Oh, the parliamentarian. Oh, the Republicans are so mean.

There are things in your power that you could do right now. And by the way, that if you executed your administration with a competent strategy and tactics from the beginning, you could have accomplished way, way more. So don't give me this. Your hands are tied and all your excuses. This first year, you have to say, looking at it, and yesterday that's why I did this presser, it's a one-year anniversary of his term in office, it's a failure. Yep, complete disaster. And speaking of his predecessor, his possible successor.

Once and future king. Well, yeah, the once and future king. Very interesting piece of evidence here pointing towards why he might be running again. Let's put this up there on the screen. The New York Attorney General, Letitia James, says that Trump's company misled banks and tax officials. The Attorney General says that her investigation has uncovered evidence that Trump's company used, quote, fraudulent or misleading valuations on its golf clubs, skyscrapers, and other property to get loans and tax benefits. So the lawyers told a judge that they have not decided yet to whether we're doing a lawsuit in connection with the allegations,

but that investigators should be allowed to continue to question Trump and his two eldest children under oath as part of a civil probe. Trump organization called the investigation baseless, all of that. So the most accounting of it really is that this has been a longstanding New York attorney general thing into both Trump's wealth, into the organization, into how exactly they conducted themselves during business dealings. So, look, I mean, I don't think a single person who voted for Trump is going to defend the man and say, yeah, he's definitely a guy who paid his taxes. Totally on the up and up with regards to. Yeah, 100 percent. You know, did the best businessman the world has ever seen. If you really believe that, I don't really know what to tell you. Obviously, it's massively politically charged on both sides.

Just some more of the details, put this up there. The New York Attorney General says that they found $150,000 initiation fees into golf clubs that were never collected, into mansions that had not even been built, and 20,000 square feet in his Trump Tower triplex that did not exist. So these are all things that we're going to be seeing in open court. But why it matters, Crystal, is that you will remember that whenever you are the president, you are immune from criminal prosecution. And so, let's put this up there. Maggie Haberman of the New York Times observes, quote,

Any question of whether Trump runs seems to have been answered this morning. His aides have always signaled if the investigations progressed, he would run for president again. And I think that this is the thing that matters the most. Somebody responded, have they indicated will he run if he's personally indicted? She responded, same answer. Because, even though you're

under indictment, doesn't actually stop you from being president. And Maggie is very well sourced in this. She is very well sourced. I mean, look, I don't think it takes

a genius to see that from a personal level, one of the best things that you can have about the presidency is that you're immune from criminal prosecution. And then you have the,

what did we just talk about? One of the most unpopular presidents in modern American history who already in head-to-head matchups is not doing so well against Trump. Trump is off social media. A lot of people have forgotten exactly what it was like under them. Things under Biden are awful. And so you could easily see a world where he could get reelected very easily. And then you have a massive personal incentive from him as to why he would want to run again in order to forestall these investigations. So, look, maybe the best thing the New York attorney general could do is drop the case if she didn't want him to run again. I mean, listen, I don't really buy into the logic of like, well, let's try to placate him by not going after him and maybe that'll persuade him to not run for president because frankly, I think he's going to run either way

because you see the way, I mean, even in the way he's trying to clip Ron DeSantis' wings right now. Yeah. If he was looking at- Well, that's a lot about ego. It's a lot about ego, but it's also about, you know, if he was thinking about DeSantis may be my successor, he'd have a different orientation towards him.

However, on the merits of the charges, I mean, first of all, let's say, I think Attorney General Letitia James has been a very serious person. She's the one who really took Cuomo out, which gives her some sort of like nonpartisan cred, even though obviously as a Democrat, there's a lot of political incentive to go after Trump. There's just no doubt about that. She's also gone after Amazon. She's gone. She's joined some of these big tech suits. So I do think she's been a very serious person in terms of how she's executed the duties of her office. I, you know, don't think that anyone would be shocked that Donald Trump was inflating his assets and, you know and projecting him to be much wealthier than he actually was and a much greater businessman than he actually was, not just to the public,

but what she is alleging that they found is that there were some just blatant lies that were told to lenders, banks when he's trying to get loans and those sorts of things, and also potentially to tax authorities, which gave him significant tax breaks. So that's what's being alleged here. Again, I don't think anybody in the public would find those allegations, if they turn out to be correct, to be shocking. I do also want to say that, you know, from the right, there's been a lot of fixation on like the shady business dealings of Hunter Biden and Joe Biden and his brother and all those sorts of things, which I totally, you know, we've talked about as well.

And I think those things are important. They won't care at all about this, though. If this was Joe Biden, if the shoe was on the other foot, they would be up at arms about how shady and what a liar and a tax cheat and all that stuff. So let's just be clear that if the shoe was on the other foot, the reaction from the right here would be very, very differently. In terms of the political landscape, I don't see why he wouldn't run. He's got a pretty clear shot at it right now. And the Democrats, for all their talk about the existential threats facing the country and the end of democracy, David Sirota wrote a great piece that was like, are they trying to lose? Like, are you trying to pave the path right back to Donald Trump? Because that sure is how what it feels like right now.

It's pathetic that, you know, here a year into this administration where a lot of things have gone your way. You know, you could be in a place where people were feeling optimistic. You could be in a place where people were focused on the fact that you do have a tight labor market. You do have wage gains being made. Instead, people feel deeply pessimistic about the direction of the country, deeply pessimistic about your failed leadership, deeply pessimistic that you have any plan or ability to deliver for them something other than just like, you know, a kind of mushy chaos. So yeah, if you wanted to help reelect Trump, this is a pretty good state of affairs. And as you point out,

I'm not sure they really did themselves any favor by pushing Twitter to get him off the platform because it has, memories are short and people have forgotten what a just like daily obnoxious asshole and terrible presence in their lives he was over the course of four years. I think it's the best thing that ever happened to him. I know it's controversial, but I think his deplatforming is absolutely the best thing that ever happened to him.

Initially, it reduced his public opinion or his public consciousness. But that was, conversely, is a very good thing. It's people, you know, memory is short. People remember. People say, hey, in 2019, life was good. Trump was president. You know, look, that's just how people are in terms of the associational thinking that they make. Most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about politics. They just simply think about the conditions of their lives.

And Biden's single failure is that most people's lives are chaotic and they're miserable. And if you can't make that go away, you're going to suffer. And or at the very least, you can't seem to be, appear to trying to make those things go away, you're especially going to do badly. So I do think Maggie's right. There probably is no question. That being said, I had heard, you know, some of his advisors will say things like, his health permitting.

But look, honestly, he looks pretty good. You know, he looks a lot better. He's lost some weight. Looks more vigorous than Biden. More vigorous. Joe Rogan observed something about Trump which I found fascinating. Every president in history has aged dramatically in the job except for him. He was exactly the same.

Yeah, because it doesn't weigh on him. It didn't weigh on him. He doesn't care. Yeah, I mean, that's probably right. Look at Obama's face. Look at George W. Bush's face. I've seen this. If anybody's ever here in D.C., go to the portrait gallery, and you can see the death mask of Abraham Lincoln as opposed to a mask that he made in 1860.

The Civil War lines in his face are unbelievable. It's in the National Portrait Gallery in the presidential section. But with Trump, he looks better post-presidency than he did actually while he was in it. So look, I would say if I was a betting man, I think he's going to run again. Yeah. And Biden said Kamala would be on the ticket with him. And he has said he's going to run again, you know, assuming he's able. But I don't think that anyone in this town is going to stop sort of jockeying and wondering whether he really will be the nominee next time around because of exactly, you know, what these focus groups are saying. Like, he already looks like he's not really up to the job.

So the problem for them, though, the problem for them, though, is like, all right, who else are you going to put in? You know, I mean, Kamala Harris, good luck. They dream that Pete would be their savior. Billionaires love Pete, obsessed with this guy. But it's, you know, he's not going to be any stronger of a performer, significantly stronger of a performer than Kamala Harris is. So hard to see who they could even replace Biden with that would be a better bet for them at this point. All right, guys, we wanted to bring you this footage that The New York Times was able to obtain from the government through a FOIA request. And I have to say, guys, we wanted to bring you this footage that The New York Times was able to obtain from the government through a FOIA request.

And I have to say, like, the fact that the government tries to hide the initial fact that this happened is, of course, the most shameful. Then the fact that they try to hide the footage of it so we can't see in real time the horrific civilian toll is an added shame on top of that. Let's go ahead and talk about this drone strike. So this was, you'll recall, at the end of our occupation of Afghanistan, Biden wanted to project strength. They said that they had drone striked a ISIS-K militant. Of course, that story fell apart very quickly. And so what you're looking here at is drone footage. And there you see the explosion in this residential neighborhood in Kabul, which we pretty quickly found out, thanks, I have to give credit to the dogged reporting of the New York Times here, killed 10 civilians, basically took out an entire Afghan family, including little babies. The man that they thought was an ISIS-K militant, it turns out he was an aid worker for a charity based in California. Okay, and to make matters worse, the Pentagon did a whole investigation. No mistakes were made.

Is there going to be any accountability? None. Yeah, they said no one will be fired over this. None whatsoever. No one will be fired. Zero accountability. It's absolutely insane. And then let's go ahead and put this next tear sheet up on the screen that accompanied the drone strike footage.

And by the way, they had two different videos as part of this article. The one that we showed you, which is sort of further overhead, there's one that's a little bit closer up. They both give you different angles. It's very difficult to watch, but I think it's important that we actually grapple with the toll of the actions of our governments. governments—and this isn't just Biden, of course. This is Trump and this is Obama as well—who've engaged in these drone strikes. The family wants to be relocated to the U.S. They haven't been. Our government has said they're going to give them money as compensation. Nothing can possibly compensate for the loss of your entire family, including your children and the breadwinner of the family. That money has yet to come through. So we did this, committed this absolute war crime, no compensation, no relocation, no accountability. And that's where things stand today. I do want to say, you know, just to give the sort of fuller picture, the number of drone strikes under Biden is way fewer than his predecessors. Obama, of course, famously had pretty aggressive and, you know, he had a very large drone program.

Trump expanded that even further and took even some of the limited checks off of the process so that there was, you know, even less concern for civilian life when we were engaged in these sorts of things. Biden, Jeremy Scahill, I read his piece in The Intercept about this. So Biden has almost totally halted the program while he says he's going to undergo a review of what those rules of engagement and how they get authorized and all of that is. But there's some fear that he's not planning on really significantly reforming the program and that he may not even go back to as stringent, quote unquote, a process as Obama had in place. So that remains to be seen. But I do just want to say that under Biden, the number of U.S. drone strikes has plummeted, but they have exacted a horrific civilian toll in instances like this that just shock the conscience. And the military is brazen about how, you know, no one's going to be punished for what is ultimately, you know, the killing and murder of a civilian family.

Yeah, they don't care. And this is a bigger symbol for the entire war because you don't even know how many of these things happened in the past. We have no idea. And the people in charge, can you think of something better for the way that the military handled this? They were like, we're going to go out and get the guys who killed our soldiers. Screwed up the drone strike. Screwed up the intel. Didn't fire anybody as opposed to this.

And they didn't even acknowledge it for weeks. In this residential neighborhood, I mean, you can see how close these are family homes. They don't care. Closing together. Even if this was an ISIS-K militant, they had to know they were running tremendous risk of loss of civilian life because they're right there in this residential neighborhood of closely packed in houses. And look, once again, how much of this is par for the course? Is this standard operating procedure in the U.S. military? How come nobody was fired on this? Was somebody ever reprimanded for this?

There has not been any answer to these questions. All of the generals in charge who lied to the face of the American people about the capacity of the Afghan forces, about the drone war, about all that, they still remain either in power or they're sitting on Lockheed Martin and Raytheon's board today. I mean, everybody off of this either got rich, got promoted, got careers made. These people, these kids in this case, also died. Our soldiers, you know, think about it.

We wanted to avenge their deaths. Where's that killer? I haven't heard anything. Where is he? You said you were going to go get him. Or where are they? I haven't heard anything. Where is he? You said you were going to go get him or where are they? I haven't heard nothing yet. So we have what, 13 soldiers who were killed in that horrific suicide bomb who also haven't been properly avenged. If anything, it's a shame that, you know,

on their memory that we would try to do, that we would do this horrific act in response to them. It's a crapshoot all the way around. Nobody won out of this thing. And I just think the lack of accountability is a symbol for the war itself and for the worst people who are in charge here in New York. Well, and there's a few other things to say about this. I mean, first of all, if the stories immediately that were coming from the government were sketchy. Oh, yeah.

B.S. They wouldn't identify. You know, anytime they actually get a terrorist, somebody who they consider to be, you know, a militant ISIS or al-Qaeda or whatever, they got names, they tell you what they did, where they were, all this stuff. They were very vague here, right?

Exactly. The only reason we even learned the truth about this, and it wasn't just some, like, you know, online rumor that gets dismissed as, oh, you know, these Afghans, they just complain and they just make stories up or whatever. It's because New York Times was able to dig in and get surveillance video of the individual going about his day, going to his workplace, getting a jug of water, filling it up, bringing it home. They were able to be on the ground and piece all of this together. That's the only reason we found out the truth of this situation, which obviously raises the question of how many more fit this exact same pattern. The New York Times has also done very good reporting into atrocities in Syria that were equally covered up, a drone strike there that killed scores of civilians,

that there was, in fact, an inspector general report into it that was so sanitized, and they bulldozed the area so you couldn't gather any evidence, so sanitized, it didn't even mention, like, the place or that there was a drone strike by the time it went all the way through the process. And there were these sort of unaccountable elite teams that could go over the head of even the ordinary military chain of command and execute these strikes on the flimsiest and in certain instances, according to the Times reporting, just completely invented circumstances. So this is not a one-off. This is a pattern of behavior. It just happens in this one instance. They were able to get caught. And then the last thing I'll say about this is, you know, right now, after we got out of Afghanistan, which you and I were both very supportive of.

And I give a lot of credit to Biden for having the stones to actually get it done. But now, because they froze the assets of the central bank, people are starving to death. You have some Democrats who are pushing the administration to unfreeze at least some of those assets so people don't die en masse and children of famine during this winter. And so far, they've thrown a few, you know, oh, we'll throw $300 million at the problem or whatever. It's woefully, woefully insufficient. And, you know, we're complicit in effectively a mass famine right now. It's completely morally inexcusable. Yeah. I mean, I read a story yesterday that Afghans are turning to Bitcoin because they literally don't have any money. I mean, because of the central bank removal that they've had,

that been pulled out from underneath and are having to use crypto in order to try and buy international goods look it's not the afghan people's fault that we occupied them for 20 years screwed up their country destroyed it and then by the way spent what 100 billion dollars trying to rebuild their military and it collapsed within a matter of days this isn't about helping the taliban yeah or whatever and if by the way if we let them starve and they all you know die in a mass famine, that only helps and strengthens the Taliban case. How many radicals are going to come out of that? It actually, it only will help them.

They'll be like, go get the U.S. into our country. Totally, totally accurate. And let's also be clear, there is one reason that the Taliban is in control right now, and that's because of our own mistakes in Afghanistan. I mean, they tried to surrender and come up with a deal at the beginning of the war. So the fact that the Taliban is in charge

in Afghanistan is on us. But there they are. And now they're the rightful government. We're going to starve the people because, you know, Biden wants to appear tough and not have the talking point that he's funding terrorists. OK, it's a disgraceful situation. It really is. All right. On a somewhat lighter note, but I think appropriate to some of the conversations we're having this morning, there is growing interest in some sort of third-party effort to break up the two-party duopoly. Two people that we have had respect for, Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang. Marianne went on Yang's podcast, and they had a whole discussion about this and how

it could play out. And I thought it was very thoughtful. I thought it was a very interesting, engaged conversation. Andrew, of course, has started the Forward Party, focused a lot on democracy reform, things like ranked choice voting. They're going to have an open primary process for the presidential election.

Marianne has been more interested in the direction of, hey, what if somebody challenged Biden in the primary in 2024, if it even is Biden who's running on the ticket or challenged Kamala Harris or whoever their Pete Buttigieg or whoever their anointed successor is. And so they had an exchange on what they think the right direction is. Here's a little piece of how that conversation went. Political parties are not even mentioned in the Constitution. George Washington warned us against them in his farewell address. John Adams said that they represented the greatest threat to democracy.

This idea that they get to be the gatekeepers they are, when in court the Democratic Party argued that they don't owe it to people to let the person who got the most votes win. We have to call the duopolistic system on what it is. And let's remember the duopoly is actually a monopoly. You know, we talk like how divided we are. They are not all that divided because the bottom line is the military industrial complex will get what they want. On that, we are not divided. Oil companies, more than not, more than not, will continue to do what they want to do. On that, we are not divided. Big pharmaceutical companies will continue to obstruct any chance of universal health care. On that, we are not divided. They divide us so that we don't recognize how undivided they are in some very essential ways. So one of the things Marianne

said in that conversation, which I thought was a good way to frame it on the question of third party effort versus a primary challenge to Biden. And, you know, neither one of these is an easy feat. Obviously, the deck is almost completely stacked against any sort of a third party effort. Even the most successful third party efforts in modern history have fallen dramatically short. But you also have the way that the DNC plays their cards and the rigging we saw against Bernie Sanders and the way they treated Mike Revell and Tulsi Gabbard and Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang very unfairly through that process.

But Marianne put it this way. She said, you know, third party, that's really what you're after is to influence the conversation. I'm kind of paraphrasing here. It's like, okay, I can push them. I can influence the conversation when what you really need to do is replace these people.

And I thought that was a pretty compelling argument that she made there. Look, ultimately, and we've talked about this on this show before, and I think you and I are both more or less in the same of the same mind about this. I don't I don't like denigrate third party efforts. I think they have been important throughout history to push the major parties to adopt the morally correct and more populist position. But in terms of actually overturning the apple cart and having a shot at taking over a party and doing something different, the only examples we have of that in modern times is by running through one of the two major parties. And Donald Trump, even though he ended up being, you know, effectively just like all the other Republicans, just with more bombast and obnoxiousness,

they didn't want him to win the Republican nomination. At least we're very uncertain about this guy and where he was ultimately going to take things. And they tried in their own way on the Republican side to stop him from ultimately winning. And he was able to do it, fully took over the Republican Party. Of course, now he's just made it all about himself and the same old like Paul Ryan, Chamber of Commerce friendly policies that Republican Party has been about for decades. But if you had a different person there, it didn't have to go that way. No, of course. It was more of a matter of personalities. One of the posters I have right there, right behind me, you can see down at the bottom, is of William Jennings Bryan. And the reason why is because William Jennings Bryan is

exactly the person who did what you're discussing. The Cross of Gold speech put him on the map in such a big way. He was the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, 1896, 1900, and 1908. And this is the thing about Bryan. He was a nobody, nothing congressman who then comes out and in a single speech takes over the entire Democratic Party apparatus, which is just BS, Gilded Age, nothingness, transforms it into a force that eventually takes the presidency under Woodrow Wilson. That would never happen under him. The whole great commoner and the populism of that was a takeover of that party. And originally, some of that energy had been concentrated in something called the People's Party, which was like an agrarian populist force of the 1890s. But eventually, what happened is that by getting subsumed in the Democratic Party, it changed the party apparatus and it changed the coalition more than anything. This is the thing about brittle parties.

And this is why, look, things are bleak right now. Don't get me wrong. But in times of bleakness and when everything is crumbling, you have the opportunity to really break everything apart and rise from the ashes. So that's why I think a third party right now, fine. I think it's okay. And it pushes things in the right direction. But taking over the existing party apparatus as we saw that Trump destroyed these people all within, what, it took a matter of six months. I remember Republican elites saying there's no way this guy can win.

Next thing you know, he is the party's nominee at the convention in 2016. The same thing could be done in the Democratic Party today. Kamala Harris is the least unpopular successor in modern history. Biden is incredibly unpopular. Who's left? Hillary? I mean, who's on the bench? Seriously. If I were a betting man, honestly, I would look at the total type of outside candidates, people like Eric Adams, Jared Polis, who you talked about. Those types of people are definite contenders, but also from the more left side, like a Marianne Williamson. The real thing is,

is that the currency in the Republican Party is you have to be hated by the elites and hated by the media. That is the only thing that the base cares about. It's a little less clear what exactly that the Democratic base wants. Under Trump, they just wanted one thing. We want Trump gone. That's why they of them have seen with Biden, oh, that's actually not enough. We need somebody who can win. And from that point of view, I think that when you scramble somebody's brain like that, though. And if he is not running, then that field is wide open. What I will say is, though, even in the instance where he is the incumbent running for reelection, there is so much dissatisfaction with him that I think, you know, somebody who played their cards right and ran a savvy campaign, I think there'd be a lot of energy behind that person and would be able to garner a significant chunk of the vote and really forcefully challenge them. As far as the forward party effort, which, you know, when I interviewed Andrew, I kind of pushed him a little bit on what his plan was and how this was all going to work out. He's focused on these sort of democracy reform agenda items, which I am 100 percent in favor of and totally support. But I think without a sort of domestic agenda and a foreign policy agenda that really challenges corporate power and established entrenched interests, I think you could end up with a lot of these sort of like enlightened centrist, like no labels-y types. Oh, totally, yeah.

That kind of gravitate towards it. So that's my fear with the direction that that party could ultimately go in. But we'll see. I mean, again, like I'm for more democracy, not less. And so if there are people who are running in that primary who are interesting, I mean, we'll certainly cover it here with great interest and see where it ends up going. And if it ends up. The great thing Andrew did in the Democratic primary was putting universal basic income on the tables, dramatically unpopular.

It was unknown and unpopular when he started. Now it's in the mainstream of American conversation. It's, you know, broadly supported. It ended up being acted on in the form of direct checks to the American people under both Trump and then also under Biden. So if he's able to have a similar impact with things like ranked choice voting, that would be a tremendous service and improvement ultimately for the American people. Yeah, there we go. Okay, let's move on. One of my favorite fake news scandals that we've seen in quite some time. So a little inside baseball, but actually ended up blowing up on Twitter. NPR reported, let's put this up there on the screen, that Justice Gorsuch did not wear a mask despite Sotomayor's COVID worries, leading her to telework. So it goes something like this. Basically,

that Chief Justice Roberts had told everybody on the bench that they had to wear a mask. Justice Gorsuch then refused to wear a mask. Justice Sotomayor, because she has diabetes and is worried about getting COVID, said that she would then choose to participate in a microphone setup in her chambers via telework because she didn't want to come into contact with other justices. People got pretty upset about this and, oh my God, Justice Gorsuch, how do you not respect somebody like this? He's such an, you know, he's a POS, like all this stuff, right? So they're getting very upset with Justice Gorsuch. It becomes a huge thing on Twitter. It blows up, you know, some tens of thousands of retweets in terms of that reporting. Well, the next day, let's put this up there on the screen.

The joint statement was put out by Justices Gorsuch and Sotomayor saying, quote, reporting that Justice Sotomayor asked Justice Gorsuch to wear a mask surprised us. It is false. While we may sometimes disagree about the law, we are warm colleagues and friends. Now, here's what's important. The copium after this, Crystal, the cope for those who are not as online as I am, was, well, the report said Justice Roberts asked them to wear a mask. So technically, the story is still true. And so in reaction to that, Justice Roberts puts out a statement. Let's put this one up there very shortly after to make things crystal clear. Quote, I did not request Justice Gorsuch or any other justice to wear a mask on the bench. So like the SCOTUS blog is making clear, Justices Gorsuch, Sotomayor and Roberts,

all three of the people who are involved in this story, say it is complete and total BS. So why does that matter? NPR today is standing by the story. Nina Totenberg, the longtime correspondent, says, quote, NPR stands by my reporting. How do they stand by it? All parties involved says this is BS. This did not happen. Yeah. Well, and so in this, there's further copium within this piece, expanding upon how they can still support this reporting. They say, quote,

On Tuesday, NPR reported that Justice Sotomayor, a longtime diabetic, had indicated to Chief Justice John Roberts that because of the Omicron surge, she did not feel safe being in a room with people who are unmasked and that the Chief Justice, quote, in some form asked the other justices to mask up. On Wednesday, Sotomayor and Gorsuch issued a statement saying that she did not ask him to wear a mask. NPR's report did not say that she did. Then the Chief Justice issued a statement saying he did not request Justice Gorsuch or any other justice to wear a mask on the bench. The NPR report said the chief justices asked the justices had come in some form. Oh, my God.

That is. That's what they're hanging it on is the fact that they said. Just put the coat straight in her veins. In some form. What? What? What? What, he did like smoke signals or something? I mean, it's just like they directly, as clearly as they could,

directly contradicted NPR's reporting. And they're still hanging on to this thin shred of like, no, what we said, it's still somehow magically in some form correct. So here is an interesting theory that I saw online from Pradeep Shankar, which is that the reason NPR is standing by, this is pure conjecture, so please forgive me, but the conjecture is the reason NPR is standing by it is because they think that the source was probably Sotomayor on background and that her or her staff thought that they could get away with leaking

something like this and it wouldn't be directly repudiated by the bench. But then whenever it became a huge national story and uproar on Twitter and people were asking the court for statements and all that, she had to backtrack and say, actually, you know, it didn't happen because it didn't happen. And then Justice Roberts came out and said that. I would only speculate as to why they would continue to stand by that reporting. And in general, when you report something of this magnitude, you should be very confident in your source. And one of the ways that people are very confident is a person with knowledge is sometimes the justice themselves.

Again, total, total conjecture on my part. I'm just speculating as to why this might have happened. There were other outlets that said they confirmed this story, too. Well, maybe they were talking to Sotomayor, too. I mean, that is very telling because you see this happen a lot where one outlet gets a story and then a bunch of other outlets are able to confirm it. And it usually is the same group of people peddling the same story in a lot of different people. So if that initial source is lying, then just because then NBC News confirms or whatever, well, they're still talking like the same liar, the same person with, you know,

some kind of dog in the fight in terms of the story. So the fact that you see a lot of outlets confirm something doesn't necessarily make it any more likely to ultimately be true. Remember that Atlantic story about Trump called the World War I dead or something like suckers and losers that conveniently came out right around the time he wanted to sign a peace deal with the Taliban? Shocking how it works. A year-long industry or a year-long incident just happens to pop up in the Atlantic right whenever we're going to have a major peace deal with the Taliban. Wild, right? Well, I remember it came out and immediately all these Pentagon correspondents start confirming it. Nobody will tell you who said it, who heard it, or whatever. And it became a massive story that the Atlantic, by their own admission, netted like 10,000 yearly subscriptions or whatever off of this thing. And then Biden goes out and be like,

you know, attacking Trump or whatever. It's total manufactured BS. But that was a true and clear window, I hope, for all of you. And to see how when you confirm a story, it only depends, you can confirm it by talking to the same liar. How do you know that they're not lying to you? Their standards are rock bottom. So this is the fakest of fake news that you could ever see. And the fact that NPR, a government-funded institution, is standing by this story is outrageous. But it's very convenient. Remember they put that statement out about the lab leak theory? They're like, we're not going to investigate it because it doesn't matter.

And it's like, what? Wait, what? I mean, what is happening here? Watching this institution, which I grew up listening to. I mean, you know, go down the drain in terms of woke politics. They have some wonderful podcasts, though, I will say. Maybe. Invisibilia is very good. I don't even listen to any more.

It's pathetic. I mean, I remember, you know, This American Life, all this stuff. They invented the entire genre. Truly iconic. I don't even know if we would be doing this format without them. I mean, in a way, they were some of the godfathers of long-form podcasting and discussion.

It's worth saying, too, part of why is because they don't have such a direct profit incentive, so they were able to experiment with things like longer form

and deeper dives and, hey, let's talk about human beings and their stories and stuff, which never would have flown in just straight-up corporate media. So, yeah,

it's sad to see things like this. Very pathetic. So NPR, your fake news. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, let's cut straight to the chase here. There is something being obscured in the media right now that we need to get 100% crystal clear on. We were right. Those of us economic leftists who said that putting the neoliberals back in charge would be wildly inadequate for the moment and result in paving the way back to Trump or worse, we were totally 100% correct. Those of us who said, even if all you care about is winning

Democrats, getting behind Joe Biden, a man who has been wrong on nearly every substantive issue of his lifetime as a member of the Senate, would be a disastrous mistake. Yeah, he eked out a nail-biting victory over Donald Trump, a man who had just spent months making it abundantly clear just how wildly irresponsible, dangerous, and dishonest he really was. But now Democrats, having followed the Biden neoliberal D.C. establishment playbook to a T, are poised for historic and preventable losses. This is not because Biden went too far left or did too much, or as Paul Bogala suggested, because Democrats have bad followers. It's because neoliberalism is a hollow, rotten shell that has been rejected repeatedly by voters, but like a zombie, continues to rise

from the dead and ruin every institution of note in this country. I need you and everyone else to understand that whatever excuses the media and democratic elites want to make, the failures we are living through right now are the direct result of the pathologies and failures of neoliberalism. The news item in particular that led me to feel the need to make this clear is this one. Tiger Beat on the Potomac, also known as Politico, is tracking how some of Biden's most reliable media boosters have turned on him. And you'll never guess what many of our brilliant minds in legacy media have identified as the cause of Biden's problems. It's the left. Leftists in general, and Bernie in particular, are ruining what would have

otherwise been a glorious neoliberal era of milk and honey. Tom Friedman says that Biden can right the ship by running alongside Liz Cheney in 2024. Chris Matthews returned from exile to send out this oddly spaced old man tweet. I want hardball fans to know how I appreciate your faith in me. 2022 could be a great time to show what we've learned. I tried to warn we were headed too far left. No word on whether he still fears being rounded up and executed in Central Park for his capitalist beliefs. Chris, blink twice if you're okay. But taking the cake for bad analysis was this New York Times own David Brooks, who tweeted, today is the day for Biden to begin revamping his presidency in a more centrist direction. There is no path forward for a left-ish agenda. A left-ish agenda. What in God's name are you

talking about? The only left-ish things that Biden actually did, those were all at the beginning of his administration, back when he passed a relief bill with direct checks and signed a few moderately beneficial executive orders to do things like lift wages of federal government employees, re-enter the Paris Climate Accords, and make things here in the U.S. And back when Biden was doing those left-ish things, he had an approval rating of 55% versus the 40% that he has now on a good day. He went from positive, net 12, to being underwater by almost exactly the same amount. Seems to me there's no viable political path forward for a centrist or corporatist agenda. The idea that there's no way Biden could accomplish a leftish agenda is similarly ridiculous. Biden could sign an executive order today canceling debt. He could

expand Medicare. He could legalize weed tomorrow if he wanted to. He could also actually put some muscle behind one of the myriad of left-ish economic agenda items with massive popular support and shame folks into either voting yes or justifying to the American people their corrupt no votes. So I don't want to hear it with your preposterous version of events. You all got the guy that you wanted. You got the meaningless theatrical displays instead of governing you wanted. And he has executed on the strategy that you wanted. He promised you that nothing will fundamentally change. And guess what? He's fully delivered. While we're at it, let's dispel some rumors about Bernie's influence on Build Back Better because that is a key talking point among the Biden went too far left crowd. The problem

for Biden right now isn't that he did too much, it's that he failed to deliver on really much of anything. And that failure is a direct result of Joe Biden's strategy. Bernie didn't want to waste months of time trying to get a few Republicans on board with a corporate infrastructure package that was a wish list for Wall Street. That strategy killed momentum and killed the little bit of leverage you had with the corporatists in a mansion and the others who like to hide behind them. What's more, the original $6 trillion Build Back Better bill was nowhere close to the Green New Deal and Medicare for All that Bernie did campaign on. It was a massive compromise to start with. So it wasn't Bernie's bill, but it was the opposite. And it was the opposite of Bernie's strategy. But in fairness,

the provisions in it could fairly be called a leftist agenda. And guess what? Polling shows that every one of the elements of that compromised leftist agenda are in fact wildly popular. They're roughly a gajillion times more popular than Biden, Kamala, and the failing Dems. Elder care, hearing coverage, clean energy jobs, universal pre-K, paid leave, all have a significant margin of net support. And even after all this time, corporate fear-mongering and democratic bungling, Build Back Better overall still garners majority support from the American public. But leftish is not leftist. And Build Back Better was also undercut by another key neoliberal failing.

Their obsession with making every single thing they propose so damn complicated that no one can even understand who benefits and why. They couldn't just send a child tax credit to everyone. No, it's got to have an income cut off and it's got to have a phase out. They couldn't just have actual universal pre-K. They have to propose a block grant with only a short-term and woefully inadequate funding mechanism and no way to ensure consistent quality. This has made the agenda so muddled and confusing that there is no mass public pressure on Manchin or Sinema or anyone else to actually get it done. And that is a big reason that Build Back Better ultimately failed. It's also a big reason why the child tax credit just expired with barely a whimper. So for those of you keeping score at home, you got a president who has hobbled his own agenda

by obsessing over rules and norms, who further destroyed his agenda by chasing that longtime D.C. fetish of elite bipartisanship, a president who has thoroughly rejected the left ideal of universality in favor of the neoliberal obsession with markets and means testing, who has only made the barest nods to the labor struggles that are unfolding across the country, taking no positive actions to actually strengthen their hand or to shame the greedy plutocrats who were involved. In other words, this administration is a pure distillation of late-stage neoliberalism. Exactly what all of you legacy media pundits who are hand-wringing now said that you wanted. Breathe it in. Let it flow over you. Pump it through your veins. How does it

feel? How's it working out for you in terms of voters having any interest in handing you power again? How's it going for you all, assuming you actually have a sincere desire to not let Trump return to the White House? What are the mounting tolls of inequality and deaths of despair mean for preserving America as an entity that we can even pretend is a democracy? We try to warn you, you own this disaster. Your ideology is bankrupt. And yet you steadfastly bar the gates, blocking any new direction which might be good and might be hopeful. And what is most pathetic here is that in answer to all of these failures, you got nothing to say except vomit up the same analysis that has been failing us for 40 years. Biden-Cheney 2024? You should only get behind that idea if you're ready

for Don Jr. 2028. This has been driving me nuts. This administration is exactly... And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, it's hard to look at politics today and be heartened about something. Biden sucks, obviously. Washington is more useless than usual, it seems. The Republican Party is cringe, and the Democrats are cringe, too.

Every once in a while, I am surprised and reminded, though, of why we keep slogging away at this business. Because every once in a while, something breaks through to the masses. Because of the Internet, millions of people slowly get red-pilled as to how rigged the system is. The first sign of this I saw in the post-Trump era was GameStop, the war of retail versus the hedge funds. But to me, one of the most interesting backlashes that we saw in modern memory was the backlash against BlackRock and other Wall Street firms which seek to buy as much single-family housing

as possible to turn America into a nation of renters. In short, they want to take the last thing in your life that you own and sell it to you on a temporary basis. They have their enforcers in the media, the literal bug men, who think that it's fair to be penniless as long as your technical needs are met with a closet of an apartment and a job that pays you just enough. It's a war on the middle class, and it has continued since that outrage over about six

months ago. But I've got bad news for all of you. It's getting even worse than before. So let's take a listen. Wall Street is pouring massive money into the single-family real estate market. BlackRock is buying Home Partners of America for $6 billion. But what's worse is the government actually helped them do so throughout the first half of 2021. The Federal Housing Authority ordered government-sponsored Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to actually limit loans secured by investment properties. So since mom-and-pop landlords have loans from Fannie and Freddie to finance property purchases, they were obviously hurt. So meanwhile, as the Motley Fool describes, big boys like BlackRock and American Homes for Rent had big legs up on capital, and they were able to raise money to go big and buy as much as possible in real estate. This happened as

limiting the playing field at the height of the real estate boom six months ago, and it gave them a months-long head start. Just as we predicted here on Breaking Points, the more control that these ghouls have over your housing situation, the more miserable your life is going to be. The Financial Times just completed an investigation into how Blackstone, another large real estate firm, has moved into housing in a big way and how it treats its tenants. The innovation that they claim is called rent-to-buy, in which tenants rent a property with an option to purchase from the company. It's sold as a way for people to be able to get housing without the onerous process, and it lowers the friction and transaction costs of a real estate search. There's just one problem. The Financial Times identified 967 homes in

Orlando that were purchased by Blackstone-affiliated Home Partners. But only 155 of those houses were actually sold to homeowners. By comparison, Home Partners actually evicted 185 tenants during that time. So in other words, they ended up evicting more people from their houses than actually fulfilling the stated promise of selling more houses as per their project. To make homeownership more accessible to the middle class, that's what they claimed from the beginning. It's almost like anything that Wall Street touches when it comes to housing ruins it forever. 2008, they messed up. You lost your house. 2020, you probably lost money. They got richer. Then during the largest real estate boom in modern

memory in 2022, the average middle class worker has no chance of buying a normal house ever. So let's say that you're a striver. You're an American and you want to buy a house. Maybe you'll invest your time in actually fixing it up. That's the one advantage that you have, right? Well, I've got bad news for you. Websites like Zillow and other online buyers of houses are selling thousands of homes to landlords backed by Wall Street firms like KKR, Cerebus Capital Management, Blackstone, and other big boys. The real rub, though, is that the houses were never listed. They were simply bought in behind-the-door transactions between the tech real estate companies and the Wall Street firms, meaning most Americans never got the chance to bid for that property. This means that the big

boys can buy the houses at rock-bottom prices, they can fix them up, and then they can sell it to you for an enormous profit. In fact, a full 20% of houses sold by tech firms went to investors and other similar entities. But in areas like the Sunbelt, which is the largest growing area of the United States by population, that number is a full 40%, which means that in the new frontier of America, the limitless opportunity is held by Wall Street, not by you. I am not talking about a few homes. In the third quarter of 2021, investors accounted for one in five U.S. home sales. Everything in American life is becoming financialized. The more financialized it is, the less power you as a citizen have. To actualize and to live freely and to have a general say in how your life is going,

there's a lot of theorizing right now about why Joe Biden is unpopular. But the answer is simple. You actually need to have freedom. Living in America is hard for most people, and they realize it's getting worse. Look, things have not always been perfect, but most people can remember a time

when a responsible adult could purchase a house that is just not in the cards for the vast majority of people today. Upward mobility seems like a fantasy attainable only through either the technology industry or selling your life to the professional managerial elite. There does not seem to be a way out. The less that we take from the people, the angrier that they are going to get, and they should be. I mean, Crystal, this is a story I've been wanting to follow up on for a long time. What it incited me to write it was... And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com.

Joining us now, a great friend of the show, Matt Stoller. We're going to be talking about the FTC, antitrust, big tech, and gaming, all of that. Matt, it's great to see you, man. There's a lot going on in your world right now. It's all happening. Yeah, it's happening. So, Microsoft announced yesterday they're going to be buying Activision for like $70 billion. What do you think about this, Matt? I mean, we see a lot of consolidation here in the gaming industry.

A lot of our audience probably are gamers. YouTube is a big place for gaming people. This is something the mainstream media doesn't really look at. but this is a massive market and it has a huge impact for a lot of people's lives. Yeah, gaming is, I mean, it's huge. I'm not a gamer, but it's like, it's an industry where you've traditionally had a, you've had a lot of independent game publishers, but what is happening now is you're seeing a kind of attempt at, well, there's been consolidation, but this is an attempt to kind of turn gaming into a series of walled gardens, which is fairly similar to what happened with Hollywood and streaming over the last 10 to 15 years. So Microsoft is buying Activision.

And what they're trying to do, I mean, gamers all, you know, everyone knows Game Pass. Yes. And it's essentially, it's a subsidized, it's a subsidized kind of Netflix-like service. And I say subsidized because Microsoft doesn't make money on it. And then they just, you know, they use their other profit streams, which are massive, to, you know, effectively try to give lower prices than anyone else could afford to attract people into their system. And then they'll eventually like try to raise prices later on. This is a really big merger, the purchase of Activision. It's a $69 billion merger. But for Microsoft, it's almost nothing. I don't want to say it's a rounding error,

but it's like 2% to 3% of their entire market capitalization. So they're still making $20 billion, $10, $20 billion a year on Windows and Office. They're cloud services and all that. They're a $2 to $3 trillion corporation. So a $69 billion purchase isn't that significant. However, there is an open question as to whether this purchase will go through because of increased antitrust scrutiny. And the stock is trading or was trading yesterday at about $83. It went way up. But Microsoft's offer is $95.

And that spread means that investors don't actually think that the deal is certain to go through. There's a little bit of risk. And at the same time as you saw Activision stock go up, you saw Sony stock crash, went down by about 12%. And the reason is because when you're up against a competitor who has endless amounts of money to destroy your business, then it's really dangerous. So the theory here is Microsoft will buy Activision and then will pull popular games off of Sony's platforms and make them exclusive to Microsoft platforms.

Wow. So that's what that sort of fight is about. And the interesting thing about Microsoft is that it is one of, if not the biggest company in the world. But it has largely escaped antitrust scrutiny, unlike Apple, Google, Facebook, or Amazon. And it obviously was, there was a huge antitrust suit against Microsoft in the 1990s. But since then, Microsoft has kind of gotten a kind of, you know, the good guy reputation.

Yeah, they've got a little halo around them. Yeah, yeah. They're like... Your friendly neighborhood trillion dollar corporation. Right. Yeah, they've got a little halo around them. Yeah, yeah. They're like... Your friendly neighborhood trillion dollar corporation. Right. Well, it is interesting. I mean, you have a piece, by the way, on your sub stack, big, that people should both subscribe to

and then go read the piece because you're doing phenomenal work there. I am personally a subscriber. Oh, stop it. Stop it, you. It's well worth it. It's true. But you write about this.

I mean, first of all, there's a lot of interesting stuff in there about just Bill Gates. And in the 90s, he's this villain. He's this facious capitalist. He's getting caught. He's being dragged before all this stuff. And then he's, you know, makes his wealth play and he's reformed. And now he's the good billionaire. And that sort of tracks with how Microsoft has in an era when, you know, tech has faced a lot of scrutiny at this point from Democrats and Republicans, Microsoft has kind of skated by. And what you say with regard to this particular purchase, and this is reading directly from your piece now, is you say that Microsoft's purchase of Activision wouldn't normally raise a lot of fuss in antitrust circles

because there are still competitors in the game publishing market. As Microsoft Gaming head Phil Spencer noted, the firm will be number three in gaming, and gaming is not a place where Microsoft has a unique capability. But that is only under the old antitrust framework. As Jonathan Cantor noted, with digital markets and stacks of products creating ecosystems that have lock-in, such a narrow lens does not make sense. So explain that concept. Because,

yeah, you can see Microsoft saying, we're number three in game monopoly. What are you talking about? But you have to look at the whole ecosystem and all of the things that they're doing to see how they have ability for anti-competitive behavior here. Yeah. So this gets to the second big thing. Well, there's so much happening this week. It's all happening. But so a couple of days ago, Lena Kahn, who runs the Federal Trade Commission, and Jonathan Cantor, who runs the Department of Justice Antitrust Division, which are the two main enforcers of fair competition laws, they came out with an ask for information for merger guidelines. Now, this sounds really nerdy, but it's actually all the money and power in the world, okay? Because companies structure the economy by choosing how to merge and how not to merge. And since the 1980s or so, we've had a really lax way

of understanding merger policy. So in 1982, Reagan's antitrust chief, Bill Baxter, said, you know, there's a law against illegal mergers or against mergers that create monopolies. It's called the Clayton Act, but we're not really going to enforce it anymore. If a company is big, you know, they used to think, we used to think in America that if a company was big, it was probably because it was doing anti-competitive things. Not always, but often. And so the enforcers would be really scrutinized big companies. In the 1980s, Baxter, prompted by Reagan and Robert Bork and a whole bunch of others, said, no, no, if a company is big, it's because it's good at what it does. And why would you want to stop mergers?

Businessmen know what is good for their companies. And if they want to merge, who are we to stop them? And so you saw roll-ups across the economy. And that's why you have firms like Microsoft and like Apple and Google and CVS and a whole bunch of private equities. So what Lena Khan and Jonathan Hintz did on Tuesday is they said, we're going to rewrite the merger guidelines. We are no longer going to take a very narrow lens where we said, OK, only if you can prove an inefficiency or if there's just some changes in prices. Basically, the evil nerds who control the world, we're not going to listen to them anymore.

That would be like the economists who say basically bigger is better. And we want to hear from people who have been through mergers. We want to hear from farmers. We want to hear from entrepreneurs. We want to hear from workers. Tell us what you think we should be doing with mergers. And they asked a whole set of detailed questions and they laid out basically a different philosophy of how to think about corporate power. And one of the things, I think the important thing that Jonathan Cantor said was, you know, we are now in, we have these digital markets and it's not

just about whether you make one video game and you're competing with someone else who makes a different video game. It's also about the platforms. It's also about the subscription services. It's about, you know, a whole series, a kind of an ecosystem. And we can't think about just sort of very narrow lenses of competition. We have to understand the broader platform question. And this applies to, you know, kind of everything that's going on in our digital economy.

And so that's why that matters. A merger like this would traditionally not be a big deal. They'd just kind of wave it through. But now when we're thinking, well, do we want the video gaming industry to be a series of walled gardens? That's a different question. Can you explain to people what that term means, walled gardens? a walled garden i guess it came from it's like a web one term yeah

it's like yahoo news yeah aol right you know aol dial up right like the idea is that you get to go and experience sort of the internet that is that is delivered to you by a corporation. So AOL, back when you had the dial-up internet. You had your email on AOL and you got your news there and all that stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They basically, you didn't have a browser to the rest of the web. Or at least there was the AOL service and they gave you, you know, your news and everything else that you wanted, that they gave you. And then if you wanted to go onto the web, the open web, you know, eventually they would give you a browser to do that. But a walled garden is the idea that,

that it's like, it's like kind of cable, cable, right? You can only choose a certain, you know, a certain number of channels and, and it's, it's a little bit one way. So what, what these, really the goal of a lot of firms when they look at an open system like that, like the internet is they're like, well, how can we create artificial scarcity? And how can we deliver to the consumer and not allow the consumer to sort of organize or talk back? That's what the strategy is. And to do that, you know, one of the best things that you can do if you're an attempted monopolist is you create a kind of walled garden where you control all the content. So like a Netflix would be an example where, you know, that's not really, that's not an open system

at all. It's just whatever Netflix wants to give you, whatever you, you know. So that's what they want to do is they want to turn kind of these open systems into kind of more capitalized versions of the world. This is another thing I want to ask on the gaming front, which is that I did not know this, but Microsoft already owns Bethesda Games, which is itself a large portion of the gaming market. So at what point would Microsoft then have one of the largest controlling stakes in gaming if this merger were to go through?

Yeah, so Microsoft has, I think, something like 30 studios that they've been buying up. And Activision itself is a merger of, I believe Blizzard was in 2008. But they were itself a roll-up in the 90s. So they have about 25 different studios. And so this is a merger of mergers. I think Microsoft will have one of the largest portfolios,

not necessarily the largest. But one of the things I think Microsoft will have one of the largest portfolios, not necessarily the largest. But one of the things I think is important here is to recognize that with these mergers and these corporations is that the people that are doing the work, that are making these games, are not the ones that are in control. So activism, you know, he, the guy, the CEO, I think, what is it, Bobby Kotek, I think is his name. You know, he's just a financier, like a roll-up artist. I say artist. I mean, and he's had really serious, like, sexual misconduct scandals at the company, like alleged rapes, all sorts of really terrible stuff. But he's also just fundamentally really bad at managing games.

I mean, they've been milking their existing portfolio to just drag profit out of... It's like Marvel. Yeah. Except they're not making good... People like the games. You've got Candy Crush and... I think Call of Duty.

I'm not a gamer, so I know I'm going to say something a little bit... We're sorry. We're fighting for you.'t don't get that mad yeah like yeah i i dedicate my nerd energy to one yeah different eight-year-old i do understand roblox a little bit and a little bit of minecraft that's about it i think don't they have minecraft too is that yeah they have minecraft yeah but the other actually there's another interesting angle here which is that uh a lot of the fight over gaming it is is over sort of which walled garden gets to dominate. And it's the mobile platforms are where Microsoft doesn't have access to mobile platforms.

They have to go through Apple or Google. against them by buying firms, buying games like Candy Crush, and then trying to negotiate more aggressively with Apple or Google to get into their app store. And, you know, without the 30% take or without certain provisions. And so the idea there is, well, Google and Apple are trying to, you know, they have effectively a lot of control over mobile gaming. And Microsoft is trying to bulk up so they can negotiate with them. I mean, ultimately, it's all ridiculous. Like, what we should have is rules that say, public rules, like, I don't know, the law, that say that you can't monopolize, right? I mean, we actually theoretically have rules that say that.

Yeah, they're just not enforced properly. Right. And that's, to get back to Cantor and Kahn, they are actually saying we are going to start enforcing these. I know one of the things that I think is really hard about antitrust, and it's weird,

but there's actually a lot of good things going on. It's an area where we're rebuilding the capacity for the law, and people just don't believe it. Yeah. They don't have any faith that it's actually going to matter. So I'm looking at the CNBC headline, my go-to news source. The Senate will get, they have all the best people there. It's the voice of capital. The Senate will get its best shot at regulating big tech and Apple,

Google and Amazon are already playing defense. So what do people need to know about what's going on in Congress this week? Yeah, so it's a good question. So there's a hearing, or yeah, it's today, actually, the Senate. Actually, it's right now. Oh, wow. The Senate is, the Judiciary Committee, which writes the antitrust rules, they are taking up two bills that would put some mild constraints on dominant tech firms. So just those, basically those four. Microsoft might get wrapped in, but probably not.

And the bill that they're taking up today, it's a bill that bans self-preferencing. So it says Amazon, they have their Amazon Basics platforms or Basics products, right? And they will, if you do a search on Amazon for, you know, for socks or whatever, if Amazon has its own brand of socks, they might stick that ahead of everybody else's. This bill would say, you can't do that unless, you know, you have to treat everybody equally if you own a platform. You can't treat your own stuff better. And, you know, this is a problem for firms like, uh, Yelp. It's a, it's a problem for firms like TripAdvisor or, you know, and it's a problem for consumers because if you go to Google and you look up, say a doctor, right, Google's going to

stick its reviews of, of doctors on, on Google maps ahead of, you know, other potential sites that maybe have better reviews of doctors. And like, it's bad if you go and you get worse reviews of doctors, right? Because doctors are important, I'm told. And so that's the kind of fight today. But this has been a fight for many years. And it all came out of an antitrust investigation in 2019 and 2020 in the House side where David Cicilline and Ken Buck, who I know you guys have had on you. They spearheaded a bipartisan investigation where they went through millions of documents and brought the big tech CEOs and grilled them and didn't look like fools, actually. They actually looked like they knew what they were doing and said, you know, tell us about your business. And then what they found were a

series of problems, conflicts of interest, monopolization. They just looked into these markets. And so out of that came a series of bills. And a bunch of them passed the House committee. And now the Senate is going to take up one of them, which is the self-preferencing one. Not that big a deal kind of in terms of restructuring the world, but politically it really matters because this is the moment where people are saying, well, is there actually the political will to write a bill?

And if it passes out of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the answer is yes. Then it's kind of open season. A lot of stuff becomes possible. And if it doesn't, then we'll probably get delayed for a few more years in terms of writing legislation. So it's kind of a put up or shut up moment in terms of, okay, are you all Democrats and Republicans just happy to go on chess beat for your like pet causes with to tech, or you actually serious about regulating this market. And so we'll get a clue to that, or a little bit of an answer to that this week.

That's right, that's right. Okay, good. Well, you'll keep us updated, Matt. It's been really fascinating. I hope some people got something out of this, and it will help you understand, if you are a gamer, some of the meta big forces. And also, if you're not,

this is a huge portion now of the economy. So there we go. Thank you so much for joining us, man. Thanks, Matt. Thanks for having me. Of course. Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it. You know, in terms of your support, it means the world. You know, Crystal, yesterday our A Block mysteriously was just not

able to be played on the YouTube app, which I have yet to receive a proper response as to Democrats saying that, what was it, cult following Paul Begala saying they have bad followers. Yeah, so mysteriously, everybody who's watching it on YouTube, on their phone, like 50% of the market, you know, whatever, unable to watch it. Look, as we said, that's why we rely on all of you. Premium link is there in description.

We deeply appreciate it. We're just one move away from them destroying us. And I'm reminded of that every day. They are monopolists, as Matt Stoller will definitely tell you. And they have a lot more power than we do. So your support enables us to not have to live in fear of the every move of the YouTube algorithm. So thank you guys.

We love you all. We've got some great content for you to post this weekend. And we'll see you back here next week. See you next week. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily, it's your Not the Father Week on the OK Storytime podcast,

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