Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 1/20/23 Weekly Roundup: Santos Steals Money from Disabled Veteran, CNN Defends MLK Statue, Men Cutting Back Work Hours, CSPAN Full Time Control of House Cameras, Single Woke Democratic Female Voting Bloc, James Li On World Economic Forum

Episode Date: January 20, 2023

In this Weekly Roundup we discuss George Santos allegedly stealing 3,000 dollars from a disabled Veteran's GoFundMe surgery for his dog, CNN defends the new "Phallic" MLK monument, the story behind an Arizona Suburb who's water was shut off, a study showing that high earning Men are cutting back in work hours not quitting, a discussion on giving CSPAN full time control over the cameras in Congress, the rise of the Single, Woke, Democratic Female voter bloc, and our partner James Li covering The World Economic Forum's predictions of an incoming Recession and if there's more going on than meets the eye.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/AUSTIN LIVE SHOW FEB 3RDTickets: https://tickets.austintheatre.org/9053/9054To 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/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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indeed decide to seat George Santos on committees, we're also learning, courtesy of Patch.com, allegations that he took money that was intended to Sapphire, this puppy who was in need, this dog who was in need of a $3,000 surgery. A vet tech pulled him aside and said, hey, I know this guy who can help you. The guy turned out to be by the name of one of George Santos's aliases. Santos allegedly took the $3,000, closed the account and never gave that money to the disabled veteran in question. The dog, as I mentioned earlier, passed away. Ryan, anytime somebody gets caught in a cycle of bad press, some folks will try to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. I know CNN interviewed his former college roommate or whatever, and this has been sort of blown up

into a huge media story. I think it's newsworthy for sure. But all of these different questions lead us to wondering, this story seems very, very real. There don't seem to be holes pokeable in this story. We have online evidence of the charity. We have the accounts of two different veterans on this story. George Santos, you mentioned this before we started taping the segment. There seems to be an indication that maybe he's just wired differently, that there's a psychopathy at play in his case. Right. Most people would not be able to kind of physically stomach what is required to pull this off. If you go up to 99% of the global public and say that you'll give them, that they can have $3,000,

but in order to do that, they have to scam an unhoused veteran whose dog is dying. Very few people are going to take that. And the people who want to help him. Right, and everybody who's trying to help. Yeah. And set the criminal element of it aside, set everything else aside.

Most people would just say, absolutely not. There's just no way I could even live with myself if I did something like that. And so it takes a particular mindset to be able to just have no feeling at all or to even kind of thrive on the feelings of having ripped people off. You mentioned earlier that there will always be con artists in the world, but to con your way into Congress in the way that George Santos did, not just by telling the usual lies, but by actually being like a very real con artist, reminded me of the Netflix series that got super popular last year about Anna Sorokin, also known as Anna Delvey, who conned her way into the upper echelons of New York social life. And that was sort of remarkable to people, how she was able in this age of social media and the internet to create an image of herself that actually convinced people, this is somebody who belongs in our sort of social-like club. George Santos does that. Basically, there's an emergent picture that looks kind of parallel

to Anna Delvey that he's cobbling money together from these various places by making up these various stories, even using aliases and all of that. The guy ended up in Congress. Right. And maybe that was never his intention, And this was like one foot in front of the other kind of thing where you realize that if you run for Congress, that you can raise money, and then you can live off of that money. You can't do it legally, but if you can fudge, you actually can pay yourself a small income legally, but you can't benefit personally otherwise. What he was doing is he was renting basically a place for himself to stay in, using the campaign money to pay for that. You can get away with a lot because of how dysfunctional the FEC is and the way that

nobody's really checking on this stuff, unless you win. if you win, then people are going to start to check. So he ran twice. And the way that he won, though, I think is the serious question that needs answering. You can defraud tens of thousands of dollars out of people endlessly running for Congress or setting up a scam pack. It's when you get over the half million dollar mark that you become like a credible candidate. And so where did Santos get this half million dollar loan that he was able to give his campaign? That's a key question. And are Republicans nervous that that's going to expose some type of corruption that makes this more than just kind of this kind of silly thing that you can cordon off to the side, although there's nothing silly

about what he did to this veteran. Or do they think that he's such a kind of unique figure that they're immune from any fallout from this? I would assume that it's mostly the latter. They should, though, be concerned because I think there's increasing evidence they understood that his record was checked and dubious at best because you always do vulnerability studies. You always do that to preempt the opposition research. And it's interesting the story came out in local media because I think one of the reasons that you get these blind spots is because local media doesn't have the resources that it used to to catch this stuff before people become members of Congress, for instance.

But this is already, I think, exposing problems in the Republican Party. And there's even the new right folks like Pedro Gonzalez coming in and saying he skated. You know, they knew this stuff. And maybe this half million dollar benefactor knew some of this stuff and is why Republicans stuck with Santos. We don't know, but that's an open question. Maybe there is a benefactor who pushed through it. He's saying, listen, Republicans do this stuff. And you have members, establishment folks like Elise Stefanik who are trying to remake the Republican Party who said, listen, this guy checks all of our kind of identity politics boxes off of. He's an instrument for us. He's a weapon for us to neutralize criticism from the Democrats. He can be a face of the Republican Party because he claims to be all of these different things. And that's a good thing. And, you know, in the new right, people are like, what utter rot in the Republican Party that they would excuse a clear history of perhaps sociopathic behavior because of that. And so

Republicans should be nervous. I mean, I do think the corporate press has blown this wildly out of proportion to its actual newsworthiness, which exists, but it does, I think, reflect seriously on the Republican Party and problems in our politics. And I think you're right that if, because Republicans don't have a strong bench of those candidates that they want to check the box, they don't have, you know, they're not drawing, you know, from millions and millions of supporters and then the best of those coming forward and running, that's why you're going to get some total cranks. Desperation, yeah. Who are able to check the right boxes and move through the Republican primaries.

And some will end up being complete con artists. Now, the best clue we have yet of where this money came from is this guy, Andrew Intrater, and his wife maxed out to Santos, gave tens of thousands of money to other committees that were linked to him since 2020, according to the Washington Post. And the Post notes that his cousin is Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg, who's been sanctioned by the U.S. government for his role in the Russian energy industry. This would be the kind of Russian interference that actually does happen, like Russian oligarchs funneling money into the system to try to get unsanctioned. Like, that's a, I'm not saying that that's what happened here, but that would not be

crazy. Right, right. If that's what, if that's, if it turns out that this Vexelberg character had something to do with this. Well, I assume we're going to find out more, and I would assume federal investigators will want to know where the money came from kind of as part of a plea bargain that they might offer to him.

Yeah, and I think that half a million dollars is the big open question here. So we'll continue to follow the story of Congressman Anna Delvey as it develops. You might have seen the new MLK statue in Boston. Some people have noticed a phallic interpretation. You couldn't help but notice a phallic interpretation. Others have just called it hideously ugly. I remain part of that category. I don't think there's any possible redeeming explanation for it. And yet somehow CNN's Don Lemon and the sculptor himself twisted themselves to actually blame the

people who are noticing how terrible the sculpture is and what it shows around on them. Here's their defense. Let's take a listen. Look at the hands in the picture and then look at that. The art piece designed by conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas only features a couple's arms during the embrace and not their heads, which has sparked a mixed reaction. It's not the missing heads that's the atrocity, although people glam on to that. It's a stump that looks like a penis.

That's a joke. Look at this. YouTubers, I'm sorry, but that looks like a giant penis right there. I'm sorry. It does. I think the artist did a great job. I'm satisfied. But it represents something that brings people together.

All right. Not sure why we played some of that because it's just obviously trolls. But listen, joining us now is conceptual artist behind the statue, Hank Willis Thomas. Good morning. Good morning.

How are you? Welcome to CNN This Morning. I gotta tell you, I saw the small version and the concept beforehand at a dinner and I thought it was fantastic. There are lots of people who think it's fantastic. Okay, so a couple of rapid fire questions. So you're happy with it?

Oh, over the joke. No, there are no plans to modify or change it no would you do that if they asked if asked i i mean by who right i mean i i could because this is a piece that was selected by the people of boston and this is not uh hank just came and put something thousands of people worked on this thousands of people actually put it together and no one saw this i would say perverse perspective and i mean to bring that to the King's legacy and to dictate the making of art and the celebration of them was really strange for me. I think it's, I mean, obviously you see what you want, as Poppy said, in the art. And

I think sometimes the most compelling art is the controversial art. Wow. Yeah. So apparently it's a Rorschach test. Hundreds of people worked on it and never saw it. So then they're idiots and they should all be fired at their job. Can you believe they spent $10 million on this thing? I mean, listen, for the sculptor, I understand defending your work. For CNN, why are you doing this? Right.

And it's like, yeah yeah if you saw this as a looking like a giant dick because literally everyone from a certain angle was like that looks like a giant dick that's really on you that's about what's in your head no there's a lot to say about this that i don't really get and look i don't want to be like controversial or whatever but you know the whole thing is supposed to like honor the king's marriage and like you know the whole like love for each other thing and i'm not going to go into all the details but it's not like that exactly was the best thing also why does that really have anything to do with mlk's legacy you know the whole point was that his personal life shouldn't be uh should be separate i guess from his actual achievements during the civil rights

era and then finally is like a modern art perspective i know i'm not using the term modern it's technically what is it? Post-modern or whatever. It's like, just put up a statue of the two of them. Like, why is everything so, like, interpretive these days? How?

What's wrong with a statue of them hugging each other, clearly, with their faces? Yes. How did this get through? Yeah. Like, he said, many people were involved.

No one was like guys this is going a little sideways I think they were afraid of being accused of being racist honestly I really think that's what it is

they think you're they're gonna call you a racist if you think that the statue looks like shit and literal shit anti-confrontational too so they're like

if everyone else is like yeah it's great it's amazing they're like yeah totally I love it there are a couple other moments though that I liked in this clip first of all If everyone else is like, yeah, it's great, it's amazing, they're like, yeah, totally, I love it. There are a couple of other moments, though, that I liked in this clip.

First of all, Don Lemon at the top, they play a couple of people, including Megyn Kelly, being like, looks like a giant dick. And it's like, those are trolls. I don't even know why we played it. The only people who would... And it also almost turns it into this kind of partisan thing. Like, only right-wing trolls would say the statue was terrible and it's like no literally anybody with eyeballs looking at this thing would say that it's terrible and it's an embarrassment

that's number one number two i like the humble brag the subtle humble brag from don lemon at the top there do you notice that he's like i got an advanced view of it. I thought it was phenomenal. Yeah. Come on. And the bigger point, which is that CNN made a big show of rearranging their, like, morning show. And this is supposed to be Chris Lick's big imprint on the network because he comes from morning TV. This show is way worse than what they used to have. Way worse. That's true. I mean, it was not great with the other two hosts.

I'm not saying it was amazing. It wasn't doing that well in the ratings, but it was way better than whatever this is. I got a soft spot for John Berman. He always treated you well. Always very nice to me. He seemed like a nice guy. Yes. Nice guy. You know, had me on a bunch of times during the Sanders campaign and whatever this, and apparently Caitlin and Don

Lemon apparently like hate each other. Yeah, you can tell. It's like very clear on her, So it's going well over there. Sorry. An absolutely crazy situation happening right now in Arizona. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. The city of Scottsdale has decided to stop selling water to an unincorporated enclave of houses that were built nearby. So this is roughly 500 to 700 homes with about a thousand people who are living there who have been totally shut off from the water supply because the city says it now has to focus on conserving water for its own residents and can't sell to this unincorporated area. So this area previously had been able to rely on Scottsdale and had a link up to their city reservoir.

And the overall problem is that this area of the Sonoran Desert has had a drought for nearly 20 years. And even though there is major rainfall happening right now in California, it's just not enough. It's a fill up some of the storage units and others. Many of the houses themselves were also built and actually sold to them by developers who didn't warn them about this issue. They don't have necessarily storage tanks and some of the other, like if you're living truly off the grid, you know, these people, they know what they're doing. You got water tanks, rain collectors, all that other stuff. But these people thought, they're like, yeah, it's not incorporated, but you know,

whatever. The water doesn't just shut off. They're skipping showers. Their toilets don't work. I mean, you're talking about a total breakdown in their quality of life in a matter of like two days. And there is no, there's no like, when is the water coming back? There's no guarantee happening. So this is all amid a major drought. I was just telling you before, I love Scottsdale. I think it's one of the most beautiful parts of the country. It's such a great city. And, uh, yeah, look, I mean, I knew when I was it's one of the most beautiful parts of the country. It's such a great city. And yeah, look, I mean, I knew when I was there and it was like 115 degrees. I'm like, I don't really know how people live here. And now kind of getting a little taste of why.

There's a quote in here where someone's like, like, are we just camping now? Yeah. I mean, you know, they bought homes. They knew they were in a more rural area. That was what they signed up for. They did not sign up for not having running water. And the way this went down is what they were doing before is they have these big storage reservoirs that get filled up basically once a month. They get enough water trucked in and filled

in these reservoirs to last them and their families roughly a month's time. And then the truck comes back and fills it up. And the truck was coming from Scottsdale. Yes. And so Scottsdale said, no, we're not doing this anymore. And part of what happened here, I mean, this is sort of does come down to these like sort of skeevy developers, it seems to me, because Arizona has a law on the books where you're not allowed to build a development if you don't have an identified water supply that will last at least 100 years. But there's a loophole for developments less than six houses. So what these developers would do

is they would take attractive land divided into five houses and then do a whole bunch of these to sort of get away with this loophole. And so, you know,

you can see these residents, understandably, they're also looking at their home prices. Like, even if they wanted to leave. Yeah, you just got nuked. Who is going to buy

your house that doesn't have a dedicated water supply? So they're totally screwed. And they're looking at places like Scottsdale that have beautiful golf courses, which take mass amounts of waters, and swimming pools, and other nearby communities. Apparently, there's a nearby community

that has one of the largest fountains in the entire world. And they're like, what the hell? Like, we can't even have water to flush our toilets. And I think that is a fair point. So anyway, it's a bit of a window into just the type of decisions and water wars that could really be coming because a lot of the reservoirs that provide water for this entire Western part of the country have been diminishing and diminishing and diminishing. And you're starting to have battles over like the Colorado River. Water is a big one. There are people who are trying to fight to basically privatize it so that it goes to the

highest bidder. You have investors coming in from Saudi Arabia and buying up water rights and using it for farming that gets shipped back to there. So there this is one little example of how crucial and how devastating these battles ultimately could be as we move into the future. Yeah, absolutely. So everybody just look, pay attention to these types of things. It could happen. I think the fairest point they have having again been they're not wrong. Like it's a lush green area, green area not naturally you know you've got all these golf courses and all these resorts and all these things going on it's like you can spare a tank of water for the city i think these people should sue those developers because clearly they were scheming or whatever and i you know probably arizona state

government or whoever needs to step in here because this is yes i do have to there was one line that i thought was interesting and funny and how people get like very um ideologically driven one idea was all right well let's form our own little group here as a community and we will pay to have trucks go to a further away not scottsdale but another further away location that will still sell us water and we'll have our own like self-funded water provided provider. And the quote here says other residents revolted saying the idea would foist an expensive freedom stealing new arm of government on them. So the idea collapsed. So those are probably the people who've got the reservoirs and they're like, yeah, screw you. I'm not paying for it.

I have some sympathy. Some property taxes are bullshit, let's be honest. Yeah, but it's just like you're so anti-government that you're willing to literally go without water rather than it's like this small community of a few, you know, probably like a few hundred people. It's like it's not a big expanse of guards, literally just you and your neighbors. But, yeah, their ideology is too strong. They don't want their freedom stolen from their neighbors who are also just trying to get by. Maybe they're preppers and they've been living for this for their entire lives. You and I, we all know the type. A lot of discussions across America about the labor shortage. Was it unemployment benefits?

Was it pandemic? Was it just a difference in the way that people think? Well, we're getting some actually very interesting new data. Let's put it up there on the screen. A new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that a majority of the post-pandemic shortfall in the labor supply is people who are working fewer hours, not people becoming non-workers. Cutting back is especially most common amongst high-earning men who worked very long hours before the pandemic. So let's actually read exactly what they say.

Quote, although the pre-existing trend of lower labor force participation by young men without a college degree accounts for some of the decline, the intensive margin accounts for more than half of the decline between 2019 and 2022. The decline in hours amongst workers was larger for men than women, and amongst men, the decline was larger for those with a bachelor's degree than those with less education, for prime-age workers than older workers, and also for those who already worked long hours and had high earnings. Workers' hours reduction can explain why the labor market is even tighter than it was expected at the current levels of unemployment and labor force participation. I like this because it dispels a lot of memes. One of the big memes in

our society, especially more of a conservative meme, is unemployment made it so that people refused to work. And you could have credibly claimed that until we cut unemployment off more than a year ago, and we still have a huge labor shortage. So it's like, well, okay. In fact, remember, the states that did it first, they actually saw their labor- Yeah, go up. Yeah, it got even worse for them. So they had worse unemployment, so it was unemployment, or at least unemployment, maybe it had something to do with it, but it wasn't the whole story. And predominantly,

the whole story just is, I don't want to work a crappy job. I don't want to work as much. I want to spend more time with my kids. I mean, if there's any one solid benefit to pandemic, it might actually be this one. My only hope would be that, of course, people who are actually working class and not bachelor degree holders, which is more than half of the population, would get the same benefits to work less hours

than their white-collar counterparts. A hundred percent. But I do think that this reset in the way people view their lives and reprioritize their lives, I think it's nothing but positive. I agree. I mean, people, these are the type of workers, so you're talking about relative high earners, college degree holders who were forced to work remotely during the pandemic. And then many of them were like, you know what? Work is not everything. I actually like my kids. Turns out I kind of like my wife. It's kind of nice having like other priorities in my life than having other things than just define me other than just who I am in the workplace ultimately. And then you couple that with the data we talked

about last week, Sagar, of which jobs make people the most like miserable doing them. And it's like lawyer and banker. Those were the two most miserable professions. And in general, it was like white collar workers. Now, again, I want to take all of that with a grain of salt because some of the occupations they said that were the happiest were ones that were, you know, difficult and dangerous. And you have a lot of blue collar workers whose work is, you know, very difficult and can be degrading the way that they're treated in the workplace and low paid and all of those sorts of things. But it still was kind of revealing that the things that were making people the happiest, not only in terms of their occupations, but where they want to spend their time had nothing to do with this,

like miserable office existence. So some rebalancing of those scales, I do think it's a tremendously, tremendously positive thing and better values for us to have as a society as a whole. Oh, yeah. I mean, look, I have multiple friends who went to work in high finance and it sucked the soul out of every single one of them. I don't have a single one that survived more than, let's say, like three to four years. It just burns you. You get basically burnt to the core and then they all end up going do something else. But again, this is a white collar discussion predominantly so we don't just need like you know for all of the talk of white collar people cutting

back like we just had a whole episode where guys who work on a railroad literally can't get one paid sick day i mean for me the big hope would be that because this group of people has so much cultural power that the fact that they have a shift in mindset helps, to use a terrible term, trickle down to everybody else. That would be like the big, grand, optimistic vision. But, I mean, to be really serious, I do think that a resetting of priorities and a resetting of values is just a genuinely, genuinely good thing. All of the panic about the labor force participation rate dropping, I think, is silly. I think this is from like boss class and a lot of people who, you know, really liked it when they had this labor oversupply. And then you had like too many workers for the jobs and you could just treat them as disposable.

So any rebalancing of the scales in that direction, in my opinion, is a positive. Yeah, I agree with you. All right. We here at CounterPoints are going on a crusade. That's right. And we're going to win this campaign. We're driving this all the way home. We want the cameras in the House chamber, and you know what, the Senate too. How's the Senate escaping this? To continue to give us the kind of drama that they gave us that week where there were no rules. So actually over at The Intercept, we kicked off a petition that says, basically, if we put this one up here,

basically says, free the cameras. This is directed to Kevin McCarthy. Allow the cameras to not just pan as Newt Gingrich wanted it to one speaker behind the podium, but let us see what's going on in the whole chamber. And actually one thing that people will learn is that there's nobody in the House chamber.

And maybe that will start frustrating people. And then we might actually get people all together in the room. Like that's fun. That's democracy. It feels right. We'll put that petition down in the notes underneath here. Who was the Tea Party Patriots? Is that who?

Tea Party Patriots. Put up that second element here for us? Yeah. So Tea Party Patriots sort of took the side, actually, of the Intercept and the Lever, I believe, and other sort of left-wing groups that signed the petition, but also asked to go a little further, what they consider a little bit further. So in addition to adding C-SPAN to continue to broadcast, they said they want to, also I'm trying to read. Maybe I need a new multi-cam view of the house. Yeah, the multi-cam. The viewers can select from multiple vantage points. So it's like citizen journalism. People can do their own production. Right. Empowering citizen journalists via C-SPAN. Now, I like it. So interestingly enough, I had a conversation with a leadership source yesterday that I think floated some very relevant information. This is to counterpoints, a leadership source said, there are eight cameras in the House chamber at all times as of right now.

That is up from six cameras in the 116th Congress, seven cameras in the 117th Congress. So it's now eight in the 118th. And they also pointed out there are six cameras with a, they had 42 transitions in the 116th. Going back and forth. Right. That went up to 73 transitions in the next Congress. So it's increased. I'm not sure. This is OK. So this is the first hour of rules debate. OK. And each of those Congress. So this is their their they took what should have been a representative sample basically from the first hour and said basically that in the 118th Congress, not only have the cameras increased, but the transitions and the multiple views have increased. Now, the interesting thing here, and this is actually, I think, a worthwhile argument, and I think Ryan has a good solution, but the worthwhile argument is that C-SPAN is not the house gallery. It's not the same thing. So C-SPAN is not nationalized. And so the argument that- It's a private conglomeration of cable, right? So

there's the slippery slope argument that says what differentiates C-SPAN from MSNBC or Fox News. So if C-SPAN gets control of the cameras, as Tea Party Patriots said there in the different viewpoints, then, or as the petition says, then what would happen when Fox News or MSNBC comes to the House gallery and says, hey, we want control of the cameras. Why does C-SPAN get this privilege and we don't? Because a lot of people think of C-SPAN almost like PBS, right? Like it's this or even more nationalized and federalized than PBS. But it's not. And that distinction is what makes that really, really hard. Because if you do it with C-SPAN, why don't you do it with others? Now,

is the solution then to nationalize C-SPAN? Yeah, I'd have to, I got to think this through. On the one hand, yes, nationalize C-SPAN, make it public, and maybe let PBS do it or something like that. Because I understand the resistance to allowing Fox, NBC, CNN. Because then where do you stop? Who else do you let in? And then you have the government in the position of kind of licensing certain media but not licensing other media. Which they already do. Which they already do, but you don't.

But it's dicey when you're getting into that area. Then part of me is like, you know what? Let MSNBC, CNN, Fox, but then who do you not let in? Exactly. Okay, so all right. I'd say I'm still signing the petition, and I'm saying, all right, take a shot.

If the House gallery is going to add more cameras and going to continue to allow. But they've got to. I mean, if they do a good job, fine. Let's see. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's a good point. I mean, yeah, I was all I'm completely in favor. I saw the Tea Party Patriots thing and I was like, oh, hell yeah, let's do this. Let's see. ones that as people are tuning into cable news less, they get used in tweets. We use them. They get used in Instagrams. They get clipped everywhere, Facebook, YouTube, wherever,

and become really important. And so you are making editorial decisions as the person who controls these cameras. And if you're just showing, you know, Republicans in bad light, or if you're just showing Democrats in bad light, whether it's chaos or sleeping, and you're not doing it proportionally to, you know, both people sleeping. Like, you can have a real effect on the discourse by those editorial judgments. So, I do understand that argument. And I think, you know, their solution isn't the end of the world saying, hey, we're increasing cameras, we're increasing different views. So, I'm willing to see that out. But I also think there's something important about figuring out how to, because they, listen, like they do make this decision about who's licensed to have credentials. They do make those decisions. So is there a way to do something similar here?

And one thing, so one counter that just occurred to me could be the argument that, well, if you let C-SPAN in, then you have to let in Fox, MSNBC, and CNN doesn't hold because Congress can do whatever it wants. Congress could write into the rules, we allow C-SPAN and not the others. There's actually nobody who's going to force you.

If you're the lawmakers, if you're the rule makers, then you can do whatever you want. You could just say C-SPAN. The history of this is fun. But then you have a hard time when someone comes to you and says, well, why? Why? Because we say so. Because the public likes C-SPAN and they don't like you.

That's why. Get out of here. But the history is kind of fun. In the 19th century, you probably know this, the biggest prize in Washington was the contract to do all the printing for Congress. And whoever won the speakership was able to give that prize out, give that contract out. And so the party that won would then have its partisan paper get a massive subsidy from Congress, from the taxpayer. And so it would be funny if you said, okay, if Republicans are in power, Fox gets to control the cameras. And if Democrats are in control, MSNBC gets the cameras. Sorry, CNN.

They're a little more partisan than you are. Well, you know, they're silver lining to all of this, which is even if the solution falls short, it's actually still better than where it was before. If the number of cameras are increasing, the number of views are increasing. And this issue has become more high profile. A lot of people have been talking about this this week to the point where the petition is going viral and Tea Party Patriots is weighing in, people on both sides. This is important. I think this does really matter a lot. We should be able to see what's happening.

The speakership battle proved that. We got a lot of insight. It gave reporters questions to ask. There was a lot more that we understood about that battle because reporters knew what to latch on to. They knew to ask about Mike Rogers. They knew to ask about some of these schisms that were happening and fights that were happening in real time. Because of what we could see on C-SPAN, the public got to see it in a way that I think was

extremely enlightening and broadened the context that we all had for understanding what was transpiring with our government. So it is important. And the more views, the more transparency we get, the better. And anyone who wants to help in that way, I think that's great. And that's the silver lining is that it's at least advancing in some direction. There you go. And then people have to actually show up and be on the floor. That's right.

Hey, maybe this incentivizes them to do that. Maybe it will. To actually govern. All right, stick around. We'll have more for you soon. Real clear investigations is out with a new piece. We could put this one up here that they call the rise of the single woke female or the single woke and young democratic female.

Trying to be one of these, it's one of these pieces that is Democrats and Republicans were battling over this demographic that existed, but it was also kind of creation of political consultant minds. When Sarah Palin came in trying to carve into that demographic, she very consciously called herself a hockey mom. Wasn't it even also like 2004, right? Ohio in particular, remember the sort of soccer mom stereotype. The consultant class was really laser focused on what gets the Ohio soccer mom, the Pennsylvania soccer mom, onto either side. Right. And Republicans thought that they really had the sauce that was going to like really work with the soccer moms at the time. Right.

So now you have Real Clear Investigations flagging what they're calling the SWF, basically never married women. They don't get to be soccer moms. Right. And so women in their 20s, 30s, 40s who are overwhelmingly Democratic. So what drew you to this piece? You know, to your point, I think it's what they're trying to do is coin the SWF, which sounds like it gets you back to the single white female SWF imagery. But they say, well, married men and

women as well as unmarried men broke for the GOP. This is last cycle. CNN exit polls found that 68% of unmarried women voted Democrats. And so the logical progression of this argument is that if you have such a clear majority of unmarried women and an increasing majority of unmarried women supporting Democrats, and you also have an increasing majority of women becoming unmarried, then this is a huge, huge demographic boost for Democrats. They also say their power is growing thanks to the demographic wins. The number of never married women has grown from about 20 percent in 1950 to over 30 percent in 2022, while the percentage of married women has declined from almost 70 percent in 1950 to under 50 percent today. And so you have the overall percentage, they say, of married households with children declining from 37% in 1976 to 21% today. That I do find interesting, that you have these two

things happening at once, less women getting married and more unmarried women supporting Democrats. They get into all the reasons that it might be sort of the cultural reasons. They talk about education rates. They talk about when you're less likely to own a home, perhaps you're more likely to vote for Democrats. The fact that you're existing in densely populated urban areas, all of these different reasons that women previously may have aged into more conservative voting patterns. Typically, we just saw different rates of voting. So it's, I think, actually a pretty interesting question that sort of SWF coinage aside, there's something in there for Democrats for sure. Yeah. Homeownership linked to family formation is the force that has historically pulled

people to the right in the United States of America. Like as people look at it at age, as people age, they become more conservative. There's a, you know, several funny cliches about that. But it's what happens as you age that ends up shaping your politics. And the significant drivers of that are, one, kids and worrying about their financial futures and their safety, their security. And related to that is homeownership. And so then you become invested in policies that are going to preserve the status quo and are hopefully going to grow your kind of investment in the status quo. Right.

Whereas if you don't have a piece of that, then you're much more willing to take risks. I was looking at some polling recently of the 2020 presidential campaign, and if you were over the age of 65 voting in the Democratic primary, the number that there were only, I think, 16 people who said that they were they were going to vote for the person that most closely aligned with their politics Everyone else was just gonna vote for whoever could be Trump. Yeah Whereas when you got to young people under 25 a Majority of them said they're gonna just vote for whoever it is

That's got that that is going to make the world a better place that believes in the same values shares the same values that they do and when you're younger you're able to do that because you have less to lose you know you have less to lose and that's that's how political scientists have understood this this kind of shift that people go through it's not that your politics change when you're older it's that your your willingness to take risk goes down. And so not getting the house in the suburbs and going through the process of family formation changes that calculus. Yeah. And they invoke the life of Julia, of course, predictably, but I think

interestingly and to interesting effect, which was it has a very big place in the sort of the pantheon of conservative movement or the great book of things that people on the right latch on to from the Obama administration. It's a life of Julia thing that it's the life of Julia thing where the Obama administration trotted out as a good thing every step of this woman, this hypothetical woman Julia's life, where she would get help from the government. And on the right, I think there are very real arguments that it was a celebration of dependency in a way that sort of went beyond what the public consensus always was about the relationship between a person and their government. But also, I think probably resonates with a lot of people, especially post-recession, which is when The Life of Julia was released and the sort of hyper-individualism that has always been informed by, you know,

Paul Ryan giving his staff copies of Ayn Rand. And, you know, that sort of old school conservative movement mentality has been replaced by, you replaced by Tim Carney writing books like Alienated America about how the problem is alienation and not necessarily, is actually Obama's, the dependency agenda creating hyper individualization. There's a groundswell after Youngkin's election in the conservative movement of saying the Republican Party should become the party of parents. Well, if there are less parents, your strategy can't just be the party of parents. It has to be also the party that appeals to Julia. They have to find some way to do that. It's not just that Democrats are going to become increasingly reliant on that demographic. It's how do Republicans become a party that can also appeal to Julia, that can also tap into saying there's this really sad New Yorker cover from the middle of the pandemic?

I don't know if you remember. It's a young woman, trash all over her apartment, take out containers, a cat, pill bottles. She's drinking a martini on a Zoom call. How do Republicans tap into that? I don't think they have good answers right now. Well, I mean, what they have to do is they have to turn Julia into a parent. And they are now suffering from the very results of the policies that they championed in the 1980s and 1990s. If you go in and you destroy people's economic security, then you shouldn't be surprised that as a result, they're delaying having children. Common sense and surveys all say that the reason that people are delaying or not having children is financial insecurity.

They can't afford it. It's too expensive. Same thing with marriage. Yeah, and so it's, right, the same thing with marriage. And so Reaganomics and that entire neoliberal order produced the very precarity that has led now to so many people saying, you know what, I don't have anything to lose anymore, so screw you. Well, it's interesting because Reaganomics was really a reaction to government policies that I don't think were administered responsibly that created some of these problems as well in low-income populations. So that's where I think it's difficult to have this conversation because on the one hand, you do need to be sure that these policies are not cynically administered to create dependence that creates electoral benefits. And then at the same time, you need to make sure that if you're going to the other side, you damn well better be taking a look at what people actually need.

I mean, one of the biggest drivers of unhappiness and stress in this country is freaking health care. I mean, it's just like Republicans have no answer to that question. Absolutely none. So they shouldn't be surprised when Julia turns to the government and says, I'm out of luck. I'm screwed if something happens to me. This is a policy I will vote on. They just don't have any answers. All right. So then if we can get the Republicans supporting kind of left-wing kind of pro-family ideas, like creating actual economic security, which then

will create more parents, create more children, and then maybe eventually they'll turn into reactionaries and vote for Republicans. I'm fine with that tradeoff. Fine. Let's do that. If it happens. Yeah. Make everybody's life better. And if they end up voting Republican as a result of it, then we'll have that fight then.

Bookmark this video so that when that happens, Ryan Grim gets credit for being the Karl Rove. That's right. The architect. I charted your course. Now you guys just take it. All right. Well, we'll have more right after this. Hey there, my name is James Lee. Welcome to another segment of 5149 on Breaking Points. And today, let's explore the hot button topic permeating the minds of CEOs and billionaires

at this year's World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. The Wall Street Journal. At Davos, mood is somber as many CEOs question economic outlook. Reuters. Davos 2023. CEOs most gloomy on growth in more than a decade. Bloomberg News, CEOs, economists worry global recession looms as WEF begins. Davos has gone mainstream and recession has gone mainstream. A PwC survey shows 73% of chief executives across the world are expecting a global economic growth to decline over the next 12 months. That is the most pessimistic view CEOs have had since the survey started over a decade ago. Mark, we've been expecting a slowdown, but an overwhelming number of CEOs say it's coming this year. Yeah. And Cheryl and I were just talking about this. I feel like if there is a recession this year, which I think is likely,

that this is going to go down as one of the most telegraphed, most consensus recessions ever, because everyone seems to be on board. Everyone believes that there's going to be a recession sometime this year. One of the most telegraphed, most consensus recessions ever, says Mr. CEO there. Does anyone else find it very odd the nature of today's discourse where CEOs and billionaires are all predicting a recession? Jeff Bezos, who has $90 billion of his personal net worth in Amazon stock, told people not to use it.

The probabilities say if we're not in a recession right now, we're likely to be in one very soon. If you're an individual and you're thinking about buying a large screen TV, maybe slow that down. Now, hear me out. soon. If you're an individual and you're thinking about buying a large screen TV, maybe slow that down. Now, hear me out. I understand why content creators and the media say things like we're going into a recession. The world is ending by canned foods, et cetera. It gets clicks and it gets views. I see it happen with my own videos as well. But what I don't understand is that if you're Jeff Bezos and you make money from consumer spending, why are you going out of your way to say that

there's going to be a recession and that you need to be careful about spending money? And I'm not just cherry picking here. Look at these other examples of some of the most rich and powerful people on earth sitting the exact same day. You know, mild recession for, I don't know, 18 months or something like that. I mean, Europe is already in recession. They're likely to put US in some kind of recession six, nine months from now. It's an increase in interest rates that eventually will result in an economic slowdown. So I'm afraid that the bears on this one have a pretty strong argument. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Jamie Dimon, Bill Gates.

I'm not saying their predictions are necessarily wrong, but these aren't exactly the types of people who would go against their own financial interests and offer up this kind of advice from the goodness of their hearts. I don't think so. Let me know what you think. But I think there's more going on here. And yes, we had to take some losses in our subprime department last year, but those losses will be contained at only 5 percent. I have a question, please. Sir, the Q&A is after my statements, but you know what? You seem anxious. Thank you. How can I help you?

How are you? Fine, thank you. Would you say that it is a possibility or a probability that subprime losses stop at 5%? Thank you. I would say it is a zero percent chance that your subprime losses will stop at five percent. Zero. Excuse me. I have to take this. He must be from Bank of America. That is how we expect people in positions of power to behave in the weeks and months leading up to an economic recession. The wealthy, the elite, the establishment mouthpieces will say, no, the market is strong and there's nothing to worry about.

And any opinions and evidence contrary to that are to be dismissed as fringe conspiracies. Today, however, mega investment firms like BlackRock are publicly shouting from the rooftops telling us to quote-unquote get ready for a recession unlike any other and what worked in the past won't work now. This is really bizarre to me because, and this is a little anecdote, the commencement speaker at my MBA graduation, her name was Sally Krawcheck. She was kind of a famous former research analyst and banking executive. She told us in her speech that there was an unwritten rule within Wall Street to never write or publish negative research.

Basically, if you predicted that the market would go up and it didn't, that would be okay. Just dust your stuff off and we'll get it right the next time. But if you predicted that the market would go down and it didn't, you'd be crucified and fired. That was just how it was apparently. But for some reason, they've now done a complete 180 and throughout all of 2022, CEOs and billionaires have been promulgating this recession narrative so much so that over 50% of Americans think that the economy is only going to get worse in 2023, according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll. So it's either that people in power are for some reason more honest, more altruistic now, and warning people about getting smart with their money, or there's something else going on.

I think there could be something else going on. First off, despite however outwardly quote-unquote somber the mood has been for CEOs, the fact is that U.S. corporations are still lining up to buy back their own shares. The article I'm citing is from January 9th, 2023 Bloomberg News. Quote, despite 98% or whatever survey you want to use of CEOs saying that they're worried about a recession, they are still comfortable enough to spend money on stock buybacks. So are they really that worried? That's a good question. Are they? Because evidence suggests that a recession isn't much of a worry if you have enough capital due to the fact that you can not only withstand a recession,

but you'll come out of it even better off than you were previously. The Great Depression, the dot-com bubble, the financial crisis, their survivors always got bigger. But here is the key difference. You remember that clip from earlier, the big short. The big banks were definitely aware of their over lever position and knew they were exposed if the bubble were to pop. Probably not to the degree or magnitude, but they knew it would be bad for them.

Which is why it was widely reported afterwards that many of them had tried to conceal their bad investments and financial woes with quote-unquote accounting sleight of hand. Accounting sleight of hand. Interesting how they put that. But my point is, this is not the case today. According to a report from JP Morgan, all the big banks appear to be well capitalized to weather a recession. The nomenclature on this graphic looks a little bit technical, but to put it simply, even under the worst case scenario, the banks would have more than enough cash in so good in the sense that they might also be willing to tolerate or even bring about a recession for their own self-serving interests, knowing full well the negative impact it would have on everyday working people. For example, think about housing.

If housing prices were to collapse, who would be best primed to take advantage, you think? A well-capitalized institutional investment firm or a full-time worker whose job may or may not have been impacted by a recession, trying to pay their monthly mortgage or saving up to buy their first house? This is from Fortune magazine, quote, What's an interesting dynamic with institutional investors is a lot of them have been sitting on the sidelines waiting for that moment to strike. They're thinking, hey, I want to buy these homes from you, the builder, but I want to have a discount to do so. These institutional investors don't just want markdowns in the 10% ballpark. They're hoping for 20% and 30%. Well, that's sort of convenient, isn't it? The hollowing out of America's housing market vis-a-vis a recession by corporate vultures.

Alex Karp, thank you for being here. I'm very happy. Nice to see you. How many times have we been doing this? Many, many times. Many times, yeah. And we've been through a bit of a roller coaster in terms of the economy, in terms of the world, geopolitics and everything. What is your sense now?

And what do you think the sensibility is here right now? Yeah, look, we built our company and I believe in addressing the world as it is. We've built our company around the way the world is now. I am pessimistic about the near future, very optimistic about what we can do to help that. Alex Karp of Palantir Technologies, a scarily powerful firm, look them up. But anyway, the point I wanted to make is that I think that clip perfectly encapsulates the mindset of Davos and the world economic form

and the game they play. The CEOs, the billionaires, and the business community, they love to pontificate about the state of the world, the opportunities, the challenges, and how they are the ones somehow best equipped to save the world, except of course ignoring the fact that they are responsible for causing most if not all of the problems in the first place, thus perpetuating the cycle where they create problems, then they get together to

talk about the problems, which then ultimately lead to these backroom deals where they hatch these profit generating schemes that masquerade around as solutions. That's a conspiracy if there ever was one, because with each of these cycles, they gain just a little bit more control over the masses and we gradually and inevitably lose our personal sovereignty. So is the recession coming? Is it already here? For now we can only conjecture, but the undeniable truth is that each and every invitee at Davos no doubt has the ability to profit handsomely from economic, social, and geopolitical disorder

all while prancing about the Swiss Alps, cosplaying as altruistic ambassadors of the world. That is all from me this time. I am very curious to know what you think. Also, if you found today's discussion about Davos to be helpful, please take a moment to check out my channel, 5149 with James Lee,

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