Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 12/23/21: Good Pandemic News, Biden Pressed, Student Loans, FBI, Amazon, Media Lies, Saagar's Retrospective, 2022, and More!

Episode Date: December 23, 2021

Krystal and Saagar look at the positive Omicron variant news, Biden getting pushed on covid tests, student loan payments being paused again, FBI infiltrating BLM protests, Amazon warehouse workers dying in Bessemer, biggest media lies of 2021, Saagar's year end retrospective, how Breaking Points fans are feeling about 2022, 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/Warrior Met Fund: https://umwa.org/umwa2021strikefund/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is

still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Looking for your next obsession? Listen to High Key, a new weekly podcast hosted by Ben O'Keefe, Ryan Mitchell, and Evie Oddly. We got a lot of things to get into. We're gonna gush about the random stuff we can't stop thinking about.

I am high key going to lose my mind over all things Cowboy Carter. I know. Girl, the way she about to yank my bank account. Correct. And one thing I really love about this is that she's celebrating her daughter. Oh, I know.

Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, thanks for listening to Breaking Points with Crystal and Sagar. We're going to be totally upfront with you. We took a big risk going independent. To make this work, we need your support to beat the corporate media. CNN, Fox, MSNBC, they are ripping this country apart. They are making millions of dollars doing it.

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So what are you waiting for? Go to breakingpoints.com. Become a premium member today, which is available in the show notes. Enjoy the show, guys. Good morning, everybody. Happy Thursday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do.

Lots of interesting stories that we are tracking this morning. First, a little bit of a programming note. Sagar and I are going to take next week off. That's right. However, we're not going to leave you guys hanging. We have been banking lots and lots of content. We actually have more than three shows worth of content in order for everybody.

That's how much we love you all. You will not miss out on Crystal and Saga. You're barely going to miss us. That is our Christmas present. But yeah, so it's all stuff that we've banked before,

so it won't be exactly on topic with that day, just so you know what's going on. We'll be in different outfits. Whatever. But anyway, we're going to be taking the week off. We love you guys,

so this will be kind of our year-end show as well. And we do have some year-end content for you. We asked you guys on YouTube whether you thought for you personally next year was going to be better than, worse than, or about the same as. And you gave us some reasons why you gave the answers that you did. So we're going to go through some of that. Both of our monologues have kind of a year-end. A rapper.

Year-end rapper theme to them. And then the other thing we wanted to remind you guys of here at the top of the show is Sagar and I decided that to give back for this holiday season, we're giving to the Warrior Met Coal Miner Strike Fund. We gave $25,000. If you guys are able to support the miners down there, they have been on strike since April. They are not just fighting for themselves.

They are taking the fight to New York against BlackRock because that is who owns Warrior Met at this point. All they are asking for. We had a phenomenal interview with Hayden Wright. Yeah, please go watch that. We've got links to all of those. One of our favorite, maybe our favorite guests that we've spoken with since the show started. Just incredibly courageous and articulated what's going on there so effectively and so well. But, you know, they're struggling. They've been at this for a long time. The company

is not budging. They're bringing in scabs. They're down in Alabama, which is a quote-unquote right-to-work state. So it's a very hostile environment for them. And they're hanging strong. So if you're able to support them, we're going to put the link in the description. Go and do what you can. But with that being said, we wanted to start this show with a little bit of good news. Yes, some holiday cheer. A little bit of good news on Omicron. I don't want to overstate it, but of course, you know, there's been a real sort of dark cloud hanging over the holiday festivities with Omicron truly spreading like wildfire. I know for both of us,

anecdotally, more people in our circles who've had close contact or who have gotten it, many of whom are vaccinated. Obviously, it's spreading wildly, even among people who are vaccinated. We've been wondering whether or not it is actually milder than Delta. That was kind of the hope is, well, it looks like maybe it's milder. That was the initial indication in South Africa, but their population very different from ours. Well, we now have more indications that Omicron is in fact a milder disease than Delta was. Let's go ahead and put Derek Thompson, who we just had on the show as well, and does a really great job breaking things down. He goes through all of the evidence. Let me first say, even after he published this, there was another study out of the UK that also indicated that the disease is milder.

So Derek's evidence he offers here is South Africa. The evidence was really good. The initial evidence out of the UK was kind of mixed. There was a headline from one study saying basically there's no indication that it's less severe than Delta, but there's new research based on actual cases that does seem to indicate the hospitalization rates are lower. They've tracked it in Denmark as well. Those indications are good. I thought this was really interesting.

There was a study out of Hong Kong that he writes about here that gives a possible mechanism for why the disease is milder. And let me just read this to you. It says, one analysis from Hong Kong researchers studying viral samples in a dish concluded that 24 hours after infection, Omicron multiplied 70 times faster than the Delta variant and the original virus in the bronchus. That's the airways that connect your windpipe to your lungs. But the study also found that Omicron is significantly less effective than previous strains at multiplying in the lower lung tissue. That might suggest a different disease profile for Omicron. Upper respiratory tract infections

typically cause colds, sore throats, while lower respiratory infections are more likely to cause more serious things like pneumonia. The finding might also suggest a mechanism for greater contagiousness. Virus particles in the upper lung region are less likely to cause severe disease, but more likely to be expelled when people talk, breathe, sing, et cetera, et cetera. So just one study, but that would explain why it's spreading like wildfire, but so far hospitalizations are not spiking at the same level as the case numbers are spiking. Now, look, he also goes through, and I think this is extremely important to note, if you are vaccinated and especially if you're boosted, you are very, very likely to be fine. If you're older, then your risk profile is a little bit higher,

but it's still sort of analogous to a bad flu in terms of your risk profile. If you're unvaccinated, it's totally different. If you're unvaccinated and you're elderly, you have a significant risk from Omicron. So those differentiations and thinking about who's going to be in your circle at the holiday, I think are really important to keep in mind. I think that's really well said. And the reason that we're doing this is because, look, I don't think the media is doing a good enough job of presenting an accurate portrait to the public. You know, George Washington University here in D.C. now closing for the first couple of weeks of January. I know universities all across the country that are doing the same thing, going online. People are freaking out.

Listen, it's OK. You know, as you're saying, we can see the severity going down. If 85 percent of American adults have at least one dose of the vaccine, which confers a pretty significant reduction in hospitalization and death, these are things to celebrate. Another one, let's put this up there on the screen. The FDA yesterday authorized Pfizer's anti-COVID pill as Omicron begins to surge. Now, tens of thousands of these pills are sitting in a company warehouse in Memphis. They're literally ready to be loaded onto trucks and planes in anticipation of the

green light and soon will be available to people with a prescription. Now, personally, Crystal, I think that this should be made over-the-counter available, like an A-Quill or an I-Quill. In the interim, just because there'll be a shortage, just show a positive test on a rapid antigen or whatever. Just show it to somebody. You should be able to go and get one. This is the mindset that needs to sweep this country. We need to make it so, what do you do when you have the flu? You go, eh, this really sucks. And then you go to CVS or whatever, you buy some DayQuil, and you sit it out for three days, and you suck it up because that, you're probably going to be fine unless you're a child or unless you're elderly. In this case, even children are actually much safer. And we've

made it so that if you're elderly, it will be flu-like. If you're boosted in particular, probably going to be fine. And moving towards that type of mindset is exactly what we need to see here in America. Yeah. You know, this is really significant because it just means that we've got another tool in our arsenal. And also because one of the things that people really worry about when you have these COVID waves is that the hospital system will get overwhelmed. Especially one of the issues right now is a lot of the nurses are getting Omicron because it is so contagious. And of course, they can't be at work working when they actually have the disease, even if it is relatively mild. So the more that we have at-home treatments that keep people out of the hospital, the better off that we're going to be. So that's why that's really promising. I will say, you know, they do have a pretty significant stock ready to go. They

do think that will go pretty quickly, just given the number of cases that are going out. But that is a positive thing. We have this tweet here from Ryan Strzok, who broke down the very latest CDC data, just so you can kind of see the different risk categories here among unvaccinated people. And this just isn't just Omicron, it's Omicron and Delta and whatever else is out there. But Omicron is, of course, the dominant straight at this point. So unvaccinated, you're 451 cases per 100K. Vaccinated, that drops to 134. Boosted, that drops to 48. And in terms of deaths, which is a more actually important number, unvaccinated, it's 6.1 deaths per 100K. Vaccinated is only 0.5 deaths per 100K.

And if you're boosted, 0.1 deaths per 100K. So again, guys, if you're vaccinated, if you're boosted, especially if you're under the age of 80, you're really in pretty good shape. And I just was going to share with you, look, I'm getting together with my family on Christmas. My parents, my mom's in her late 70s. My dad's in his mid 80s. And we have happened to have stockpiled some of the rapid tests, which are very hard to get right now in the stores. So we don't want to blow through our entire supply of rapid tests, but probably me and one other person in the household is going to take the rapid tests the day before we see my parents just to be extra safe. However, if we didn't have those tests, we'd still see my parents as long as we didn't have, you know, we didn't have symptoms and, you know, there wasn't anything sort of

questionable going on. We've been trying to limit our contact just because the stuff is spreading so wildly and we want to be able to enjoy the holidays with our family. So that's what our personal protocol is going to be. I think that's important. Yeah, I'm doing the same thing. You know, going to my girlfriend's house, probably going to see her grandparents, probably going to take a rapid test just before, just, you know, just to be safe. And I think that's fine. This is, again, though, points to a central failure of the Biden administration, which we will get to, which is the total lack of failure of the ability to actually get these COVID tests. Right now, oh, free tests and all this. Yeah,

it's weeks away. I mean, you need it now. You need the infrastructure right now. And just anecdotally, my dad is in India. And I was like, hey, dad, bring back some of those tests. Because over there in India, readily available everywhere, dad you know bring back some of those tests because over there in India readily available everywhere because I don't have a ridiculous FDA which is making it so there's only one company or whatever can it is outrageous what a ridiculous uh thing another one where we wanted to point to in terms of uh hope let's put this up there on the screen which is actually the U.S. Army created a single vaccine against what they say are all COVID and SARS variants. So pretty interesting. Walter Reed is going to announce

human trials show success both against Omicron and even future strains. So scientists at Walter Reed expect to announce they have developed a vaccine that is effective against COVID-19 and all variants, as well as previous SARS origin viruses that have killed millions of people worldwide. So look, it's the military. I personally want to see a whole lot of data to this thing. That being said, one of the breakthroughs that came with mRNA at the beginning, we did a segment on this, I think maybe over a year ago at this point, which is that it actually was a breakthrough in terms of the ability possibly to vaccinate in the future against several other diseases that we haven't been able to eradicate,

even possibly accelerating cures for specific types of cancer and more. And so reverse engineering and now finding a cure or hopefully a vaccine slash cure for all COVID and SARS variants would be a huge step forward for humanity. Remember, SARS killed a lot of people in Asia, didn't necessarily make its way over here to the United States. There's a couple of other SARS-like variants. Obviously, COVID is one of those, and they almost always come out of China and out of Asia. So having one that can prevent illness against something that we almost certainly know will come in the future, whether lab leak or not,

is a very good thing. If the government makes a vaccine that works against not just the variants we have, but all possible variants, basically, which effectively what they're saying here... That's what they claim. That's what they claim. I mean, Moderna and Pfizer are going to be so mad about that. Yeah, they're going to lobby. They'll be like, no, we can't

trust the Pentagon vaccine. And then I'm going to be like, no, we can't trust the Pentagon vaccine. Yeah, right. And then I'm going to be like, hey, we need to trust Pfizer, Moderna, the Pentagon. That's tough. That's a real toss-up. But it does still need to undergo phase two and phase three trials, so it's a while off still. Right. This is what they say about why it works against all the variants instead of the vaccines that we have,

which aren't tailored, don't work against all of the different variants in equal capacity. They say, unlike existing vaccines, Walter Reed's SPFN uses a soccer ball shaped protein with 24 faces for its vaccine, which allows scientists to attach the spikes of multiple coronavirus strains on different faces of the protein. So whatever that means, that's what's going on there and why they think that, why they think that this vaccine is going to work against more than just, you know, the particular strain that it's, you know, one strain that it's designed for. The other thing that we should say, I don't know if this is controversial or not about Omicron, but if it truly is really infectious, spreading like crazy, and milder than Delta or the original strain, I mean, that also means that we're getting closer to the end of the pandemic.

Because people are going to have widespread immunity. And again, listen, I really want to implore you, not that anyone's going to listen to me, but maybe listen to President Trump, who also is very pro-vaccine and very aggressively making the case for the vaccine. Get the vaccine and you don't have to worry about Omicron. I mean, that's really the bottom line takeaway here. And if we do that, then we're going to save a lot of people's lives. We're going to put a lot less stress and strain on our hospital system and be able to get to the other side of this thing. I know it's felt like a long time, but I do think maybe we're turning a corner here. I kind of agree.

You know, Crystal, India has something like 70% level of herd immunity with both vaccine and just because COVID raged throughout the whole country. In a lot of ways, maybe it's a good thing. You have a less severe variant of the disease and it's highly more transmissible, which means it shatters the social stigma around getting COVID for a lot of these libs because they can see they're like, oh, even with the 19 different masks, I'm still going to be locking myself in my house, keeping a mask on indoors, which is something that public people, public health people apparently advise. You can still get COVID. And okay, you know, it shatters the social stigma, makes it so that we're all going to have a lot more immunity.

And perhaps this is the way that we move forward. Maybe I'm just speaking, you know, I'm a little bit too hopeful, but I think that is possibly the direction we could be heading in. Yeah, we will see. All right. Let's move on to Joe Biden though though. And because we it's very difficult in order to assess this administration right now, because in some ways they're doing a lot of the things that we recommended. They're just doing them far too late. And one of the problems that we see is Joe Biden's complete inability right now, at least, to take responsibility for a massive institutional failure at the U.S. government level around leaving people in the lurch at the time of Omicron and clearly, you know,

having to react in panic. And he was confronted, actually, at the press conference that he gave yesterday. He's like, hey, why did it take so long around these rapid tests and giving them to every single American? He didn't take it very well. Let's take a listen. Mr. President, what's your message to Americans who are trying to get tested now and who are not able to get tested and who are wondering what took so long to ramp up testing? Come on, what took so long? I'm hearing that from people who are trying to get tested now before the holidays. Well, what took so long didn't take long at all. What happened was the Omicron virus spread even more rapidly than anybody thought.

If I had told you four weeks ago that this would spread by a day-to-day basis, it would spread by 50, 100 percent, 200 percent, 500 percent, I think you would have looked at me and said, Biden, what are you drinking? But that's what it did. Now, we don't know what's going to happen from here. It looks there. There's some evidence that in South Africa where a lot of this started, that it's dropping off quickly, too.

We don't know. But I do know that we're not going to be in a position, like I said, when we remember we were having a problem with masks and gowns and the like. I said, I promise you, remember the criticism? I got questions from some of you. Why are you still paying for all these masks and gowns? Why are you stockpiling this? You know, Crystal, I don't remember him getting that question, but anyway. Number one, I also don't remember that question. What I do know is that the White House press secretary was asked two weeks ago whether they want to just mail test every American

and she ridiculed the idea. Why can't he own it? What took so long? Honestly, you could even throw the bureaucracy under the br- like, listen, you know, as president, I found a lot of these inefficient bureaucracies. I've been battling them since day one, and because of this pandemic, I came out and I said, enough. We are just going to do this. Would have been fake news. It would have been a lie, but, you know, would have sounded better than what he's saying. Just the inability there in order to take responsibility, it just is maddening. Because once again, after I did that whole monologue about people waiting in line, a lot of people have been contacting me with their own personal stories. Let's put this video of Harlem, the testing line from a couple of days ago, up on the screen again,

please. And you can once again see, just look at the line in Harlem that stretches for hours and hours of people waiting in the rain and more. It's completely disgraceful. I mean, you have people with their children, you have people spaced out, you have, you know, they're terrified. They don't know, you know, they're trying to get a test for free. There's a shortage of tests within the government. It is just a horrible situation. I'm sure they're sitting there in line thinking, well, if I didn't have COVID before, I definitely do. I'm standing in this line with all these people. Or maybe I'm going to get a cold. I'm in the damn rain. Especially with their children. People have contacted me as far as Georgia saying that

they spent four hours in a line in a car and there were people behind them that were turned away because they ran out of tests. I mean, anecdotally, just all across this country, it's not just the industrial Northeast, it's everywhere of people saying, I cannot get a test. I had to wait in line for hours. This is a total massive government failure, which is on the Biden administration. And they're just not accepting any responsibility. I mentioned this in the last block, but for those who are watching this on clips on YouTube, the 500 million free tests, which are great, by the way, which are going to get mailed to every American, well, it's going to take weeks. The contracts have not even been signed for those tests, Crystal. They could be signed as soon as next week. But in terms of actually getting your hands on these damn things, yeah. I mean, there's no timeline. Yeah, they're going to mail it to you. It could be over at that point in terms of Omicron. It just, whenever they

needed it at the time, they never took it to the FDA and accelerated the testing. You sent me this, that ProPublica story over the weekend. We don't even have this cut. I'm kicking myself right now. But it was a woman, a scientist, who created a rapid test in what, hours?

And has been unable in order to get this thing out by the FDA. I mean, these people are criminals at this point. What could possibly have been a higher priority? I mean, literally.

Literally. And that's the thing is like, part of good governance is anticipating obvious potential threats. Right. Another variant. Scientists have long been saying that the way that viruses normally evolve and different things can happen, but oftentimes the way that they evolve and mutate is to be more infectious, but it's better for them, evolutionarily speaking, if they don't kill the host. So more infectious, but less severe. So we even knew the likely direction that the next variant would take, and yet they totally failed to anticipate. Kamala Harris, I mentioned this before, but in an interview with the LA Times, she said, oh, we had no idea this was going to happen. And then after the fact, had to clean it up and say, oh, of course we anticipated some variant, just not specifically Omicron, et cetera, et cetera.

No, the lack of availability of tests, which you rightly point out, is not a problem in a lot of other countries, is a complete failure. I mean, it really is a complete failure of the FDA, but first and foremost, it's a complete failure of the Biden administration. Again, I just think about like, you know, my family multiplied on a massive scale. If we knew we could readily get tests, we would test everybody in the household.

I happen to have a couple tests that I bought before. So we're going to test probably two people in the household. But you think about that, the number of people who, hey, if they were widely available and especially if they were free, they would take that extra precaution. And that would help to check the spread and help to make sure that, you know, our elders are not exposed when they continue to be the ones who are most at risk. So it truly, truly is a significant failure. And the fact that he is so sneering in that response, it's, you know, we've seen this with Biden before. Anytime he gets challenged at all, he goes into like crabby old man mode.

And that's what you see there. I think you're right. And look, I've heard some criticism of asymptomatic testing. It's like, oh, you shouldn't even need one. All of that. I completely disagree. And the reason why is two things.

It's actually a social thing is that you're playing yourself because having rapid tests available for everybody gives people zero excuse in order to justify mask mandates, even vaccine mandates, all kinds of, it makes it so that there's no excuse for a lot of the people who are most panicked in our society. But number two, like you said, look, I'm telling you, everybody will get COVID, but I'm not telling you, like, I'm not cheering that. It's still not good for old people, okay? Or for obese people. Like, it's a risk. It definitely is. And, you know, if you're out there and you're struggling with your weight, you should really think about it because it's, and I'm not

shaming you, but I'm just telling you that you are significantly more at risk, not just of COVID, but of literally everything out there. And the problem that we have is that, what, 40-something percent of the country's obese, and then the rest are overweight. And when you live in that situation, you're having it so that we are way higher risk than almost everybody else in the rest of the world. Whenever you do actually get COVID, any respiratory disease, any disease, frankly, it accelerates everything on a population-wide basis. So I just think that we should have the tests and the ability in order to give people, especially the people who are most worried, the confidence that all of us have the ability

in order to walk around and definitively, or not relatively definitively, know whether you have COVID or not. It will just change the situation. It will accelerate a return to the workplace, if that's something that you want. It will accelerate a return to school and all of that. Yes, I think it is annoying, but it is something we would live with for maybe a year before we can transition to the much more normal. Like if I, like you, would also like to flip my fingers and make it go back to normal tomorrow, I don't think that's possible and without a rapid test environment. Yeah. And that's why Europe has used it to great effect. Yeah. The pandemic has really exposed all of the manifest failures of our health care system, whether it's the profit motive within, you know, pharma, whether it's the fact that hospitals aren't really, I a primary care doctor or any connection with the medical system at all. And that leaves them, you know, searching for alternative remedies and

getting caught up with those snake oil salesmen, which as bad as the for-profit pharmaceutical industry is, the alternative medicine world is even less regulated and even more full of snake oil salesmen. So just at every level, it's exposed just how broken our health care system is and what a stress and strain and how that has made all of us less healthy and more prone to not only coronavirus, but lots of other things as well. 100%. So that was the bad of the Biden administration. We have some good of the Biden administration, again, belatedly, but whatever.

They had originally announced that they were going to start making people pay their student loan payments again on February 1. There was a lot of consternation about this, especially because now with Omicron surging and new mass mandates and people being very wary and all of those things. And Americans increasingly saying they're worse off this year than they were last year and very pessimistic about their economic future. It was like, this is really not a great time to go ahead and restart those student loan payments. So apparently the Biden administration, listen, I'm sure they're watching Breaking Point. That's probably why they changed their mind. They're persuaded by our eloquent cases that we were making. Anyway, I put this up on the screen. They are now pushing off the restarting of student loan payments until May.

I thought the Biden administration's statement on this was kind of interesting for a couple reasons. They say, now while our jobs recovery is one of the strongest ever with nearly 6 million jobs out of this year, the fewest Americans filing for unemployment in more than 50 years, and overall unemployment 4.2%, we know that millions of student loan borrowers

are still coping with the impacts of the pandemic and need some more time before resuming payments. So that was Biden's statement. The reason it's interesting is it shows you the bind that they're kind of in because they want to sell like, actually, the economy is great. Look at these unemployment numbers and filing for unemployment's low and six million jobs, et cetera. On the other hand, it's not so great that we're going to make you start repaying your student loan payments. So you can see how they're trying to balance and juggle those things.

And again, Americans are very pessimistic about their finances right now. The other reason that it was interesting is because he makes a point of emphasizing that it was Vice President Harris who really was into this and really pushing for this. So, yeah. So it also was very funny, like an attempt to make amends because apparently they felt like they'd been done wrong by the Biden people and the Biden team. So he's trying to prop her up a little bit in this as well, which is funny. You know, the stats on this are still just terrifying me. 7.2 million borrowers who are in default are getting a reprieve from collections until May 1st. What about May 1st?

I mean, 7.2 million people in default. That doesn't even mention the people who aren't or even close to default or the people who can pay but are getting wiped out and getting the American dream robbed from them. I mean, look, I don't know how many segments we can do here on this show about how big of a criminal so many of the people in higher ed are, how much they charge for people, about how 50% or so of Gen Z college graduates do not yet have a job. 50%, six months after graduation. You can't make these people start paying student loans right now. I mean, that's completely criminal. And the way the entire system is architected is exploitation of the user and of the young person

while all of these people continue to get rich. So I don't know. I mean, you look at the system right now, Trump created it, extended it all the way until he took office. Biden then pushed it back to September 30th. Then in August, he said he was going to delay it one final time to January 31st, now postponing it to May 1st. All of this is just kicking the can down the road. It's very difficult because in a way, Crystal, I almost think May 1st could be worse because people's financial situation has been degrading as this year has gone on. The checks hit at the very beginning of the year. That boosted people. People actually had a lot of savings, but people are spending it down. We're a consumer country. We're consuming again. Now we're back to kind of normal levels.

Six months from now, what's that going to look like? And I think you and I, at this point, have learned the economy is not going to recover in six months. There's just no way. I don't know what that's going to look like for students. Yeah. And then you kick the can down the road further. And then, of course, you know, what progressives have been pushing him to do is to live up to his campaign promise to at least cancel $10,000 of debt, which is something he does not need Joe Manchin or the Senate parliamentarian or getting rid of the filibuster or any, he can do that himself.

He has on a very limited basis, canceled some debt for some specific groups of students, just as Trump did, just as Obama did. So everyone agrees on this one, that there is a power, an executive power to be able to cancel debt. He just refuses to do it. And then as you always point out, I mean, all of these things are ultimately Band-Aids. And the reason why it's important that we think about student debt is because, listen, this is the bill of goods that people have been sold.

Go to college. You're doing the right thing. If you go to college, then you're going to be on the track to the good life. And for far too many people, even when they get that college degree, they just end up saddled with a massive amount of debt. And the good life is maybe a little bit closer in sight, but it is not all that was ultimately promised. As you can see with, you know, Gen Z still 50% not finding jobs after four-year degree. So the promised land, telling students that if they just go to college, they're going to be good. I mean, this is like a version of the whole sort of individual personal responsibility bootstraps argument, rather than dealing with any of the other structural issues in the economy,

and just put it on the person, take on a ton of debt, go to college, and that's really a solution to our problem. Well, the number of people going to college continues to go up and up and up. And guess what? Inequality also continues to go up and up and up. So college attainment was clearly not the real issue that was going on here. No, absolutely. You know, it's interesting, too. I was talking about this over the weekend. And when you look at the stats on student debt, there's about $1.6 trillion in student debt right now. 1.73, actually. You could wipe that out. You would actually be back to that level in about five years. The reason why is because if you just cancel the current debt, the current system, the machine continues to move on. And so that amount of debt would just rack up once again.

We've got to burn the system to the ground. I'm not, look, I'm generally anti-university in terms of the way that they behave themselves right now. I still recognize higher education has a huge purpose in American life and education so much more. I think it's very important, which means that we need to reform the system. I don't know what exactly that looks like. We've covered a couple of different ways here on the show in the past, pre-COVID. There's the having a stake in students' earnings. I don't know if that's necessarily right because that actually would penalize a lot of humanities,

even though I do think the current humanities, we have way more of an overproduction. There's a way in order to actually reform the way that the feds themselves will guarantee different types of loans. You could make it so that student loan debt is dischargeable in a different way, which also would change the incentives for the colleges. All I know is something is very, very broken right now. Yeah. I mean, I think one answer that was offered by Bernie Sanders in a more limited forum by Joe Biden is to have a free public college system. We don't want to subsidize a lot of these idiots, Columbia University or whatever. Yeah, but you aren't subsidizing Columbia University.

Columbia University is not public. So then you're having to compete with free. And Joe Biden was leaning into two years free community college, which reportedly he was, you know, that was a big priority for him. Didn't stop him from stripping it out of the Build Back Better plan even before that thing totally collapsed. But that would be one direction to go in so that you're not just canceling debt, you're making it so future generations can get this education. Because education is really important, not just for your job prospects, but to have, you know, a thoughtful and educated

nation, which is something that we all should value. And to also have not just free public college, but also free apprenticeship programs and lean into that as well. So anyway, bottom line is they are delaying the payments, moving them off to May 1. We'll see if they restart then. And there were a lot of lawmakers who I think put pressure on them as well. So a very minor victory here has been achieved from the Biden administration. Yeah, no, I think that's right. All right. Another interesting story for you here. It has now just been revealed the extent of FBI infiltration of largely sort of Black Lives Matter protests in the city of Portland,

Oregon. So there's New York Times tear sheet up on the screen. The headline is the FBI deployed surveillance teams inside Portland protests. Federal agents infiltrated Portland's unruly racial justice protests, dressing to blend in, capturing clandestine video. The tactics raised internal concern. That line is actually really significant because at least according to this reporting, the surveillance and infiltration was so aggressive that even people within the FBI were like, whoa, we may have gone too far on this. That really tells you something. I'm just going to read the opening piece here. They say the FBI set up extensive surveillance operations inside Portland's

protests, movement, according to documents obtained by the New York Times and current and former federal officials, with agents standing shoulder to shoulder with activists, telling vandalism suspects to guide the local police toward arrests and furtively videotaping inside one of the country's most active domestic protest movements. The breadth of FBI involvement in Portland and other cities where federal teams were deployed at street protests became a point of concern for some within the Bureau and within the Justice Department who worried it could undermine their First Amendment right to wage protest against the government. Some within those departments worried that the teams could be compared to FBI surveillance transgressions of decades past, such as the COINTELPRO projects that sought to spy on and disrupt various activist

groups in the 50s and 60s. So they went so far. I mean, we already sort of suspecting Ken Klippenstein has done some reporting in this regard, but this is another layer of information about the surveillance and the infiltration was so aggressive, even the FBI was like, we may have gone too far. Yeah. And this is why whenever we cover January 6th and potential Capitol Police informants and more, we always try to stress that these are things which go both ways. And now you have evidence that they were actually happening around the exact same time. This happened right after Biden was inaugurated, Crystal, right in the month of January. Same time as like the Gretchen Whitmer plot, same general time frame. Right, I'm all in there. Okay, like you point to this and you

actually see that there was a broad mandate within the FBI where they get to define whatever group they seem is extreme and they're able to infiltrate them and use all sorts of sketchy behavior. We're talking about furtively recording people, cameras, directing crowds towards different things. Hmm, that doesn't sound like influence at all. And look, you know, whenever you're talking about this with January 6th, you get labeled some conspiracy theorist or far right wing nut. Anybody can look at this. It's right here. It's a FOIA records. It's a public record for what exactly they were doing and that there were concerns even within the, you know, the, uh, the, the FBI themselves exactly they were doing and that there were concerns even within the FBI themselves that they were moving and acting in a way which was going to come under public scrutiny.

And that's exactly what has happened. But at the end of the day, I continue to see a justification for this over and over again. I saw some article over the weekend. It was like FBI agents infiltrated the KKK and they found this, this, and this infiltrated the KKK and they found, you know, this, this, and this, and the KKK is much stronger than you would ever believe. And this thing was spread like wildfire all over. I'm like, that's what they want you to believe. Look, maybe, maybe. I personally, I doubt it. In the year 2021, I mean, they want to spread a narrative. And like I said, which, which one of these stories gets more pickup? The FBI being involved in BLM and also on January 6th Capitol riots?

Or some quote-unquote warning from an FBI agent that the KKK has secret plants and cop organizations all across the American South? That one, the latter one got picked up, which justifies what? Exactly more of this type of behavior. The important thing here is that you don't have to feel like these Antifa protesters were good people. You don't have to feel like the, you know, Proud Boys or whoever are good people, even though I think a lot of them are feds, too, anyway. But everybody has rights and those rights should be valued and protected because it does not matter what side of the political spectrum you are on, especially if you are in any way a threat to the established status quo. And we have seen this throughout history. They will come after you and they will trample on those rights. Glenn, of course, all over this story.

And he tweeted, you know, their own definition. He says when the U.S. security state says domestic extremism poses the greatest threat to the homeland, they'll say the single greatest threat is white supremacy. But their list of domestic extremists includes all forms of anti-establishment dissent on the left, right, and otherwise. What he tweets there is their definition of what domestic violent extremists are and can look like. It mentions things like animal rights, environmentalists, pro-life or pro-choice, opposing capitalism, opposing corporate globalism. They even have a cat for anti-racist. So this does not discriminate against you left or right. Just because you don't like the people who are being surveilled today doesn't mean that you might not like the people who are being surveilled tomorrow. And you might not like any of them. You still should care about people's basic rights under the Constitution being protected at the end of the day. Yeah, I mean, you look at that definition, anything about perceiving government overreach, negligence, or illegitimacy, that qualifies you as a domestic violent extremist under the FBI. That is like the whole country. It's like, I don't trust you. I don't trust you. After this,

two years of this, you want to trust them? Absolutely not. I guess that qualifies me. Please don't put me on a watch list. This is the problem, which is that it justifies all sorts of crazy overreach, which people are totally fine with in one context and not fine with in another. And that is why, if there is any sort of lesson that could be learned, is that the fact that the FBI was running infiltration operations into both domestic anarchy groups and, you know, quote unquote, right wing groups around January 6th and BLM protests at the exact same time, that shows you exactly clear as day, the power of government overreach and the problem that it faces. And right now, the biggest threat that we face is that not enough people are calling this out. Biden and them considered that new violent extremism law in the Congress. And we had Joy Reid in them comparing right-wingers in America to like baths in Iraq. They're like, we need bath party members.

De-bathification. We need deep. Yeah, that worked out real well. Actually created a domestic violent insurgency in Iraq. That's the model. Which they're still dealing with. That's the model you should follow. The things we did in the war on terror in Iraq. Follow the model which created ISIS.

That's a real smart strategy. Or, you know, we could move in a direction where we don't have as many violent groups because we try to recognize where the root of a lot of that comes from. Listen, I've said this before. You either believe in democracy and you put your trust in it. And sometimes that's scary because you have less control or you go in the direction of a police state. And you can see what path we're on right now. Those are the only two options. And so you should be fighting like hell to avoid the police state direction, you know, no matter

who you are, where you stand on the ideological spectrum and how you feel about the people who are currently being most pursued by the police state. Yeah. And I just think I can't underscore it enough, which is that, you know, you see anybody who ever talks about cat feds being involved on January 6th is like, you're playing right into Trump's talking points or whatever. Take Trump out. It's nothing to do with it. You know, it's not, and nobody's absolving the idiots who strolled through the Capitol on January 6th either. Some people are absolving them and they shouldn't do that. And we are not here absolving them. And we are not absolving Donald Trump. He is the primary reason that that day was so horrific, which we always try to say. However, yeah, the idea that it's like, oh, you guys are nuts and you're conspiracy theorists, that there might have been feds involved.

Come on. I mean, look at the history. It happened here, too. Every single significant, like, protest movement or whatever that we say, it comes out later that there were feds. That's what they do. So it's not, we don't know. But it's certainly not crazy to think that it's possible and to ask some questions about it because that would be relevant for all of us who want to understand the real reason why January 6th ended up being such a horrific, catastrophic day for the nation. I think that's right.

Okay. Very important story. Yeah. Go ahead, Sagar. This is a chilling one. This is one that broke last night. We made sure we wanted to put this in the show. You guys remember that Bessemer plant and a warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama warehouse for Amazon, where there was a union election, which is later found out that Amazon illegally tampered in that union.

Well, a friend of our show, Kim Kelly actually reports that there were actually two Amazon workers who died within hours of each other at the warehouse last month. And one was actually denied sick leave before suffering a fatal stroke. Workers are telling Kim six people have died at the facility this year, and that Amazon is trying to cover it up. We have a bit of a video from this. Let's take a listen. A man in my department, now he worked the night shift, so it was before the day shift, which I worked day shift. He had died on the job. Apparently he had a stroke and died inside the trailer. From my understanding, he was inside the trailer for probably 20 minutes before someone realized

they hadn't seen him and went in the trailer and found him on the floor dead. He had gone to HR and said, I'm not feeling so well, can I please go home? Because, you know, a lot of folks, even myself, we don't even have enough UPT, which is unpaid time off, right? And if you go negative, they'll get rid of you like that. And so a lot of people are terrified of that. And this dude, he didn't have enough to go home. And so what HR told him was, you're just going to have to speak to management and see what they can do. And was, you're just gonna have to speak to management

and see what they can do. And just, you know, go back to your station and figure things out. I guess he spoke to his manager and his manager told him the same message that you just don't have enough UPT. And so they're effectively telling him, it's either you go home and lose your job

or you just stay here and keep working through the pain. And that's what he did. He was not supposed to be in a trailer by himself. There's always supposed to be someone in the trailer or at the end of the trailer to keep an eye on you just in case something falls on you. And he was in there by himself. So that we all know was wrong. On the day that this man had passed, he shipped out, there was another person who had to be put in an ambulance. They brought a wheelchair,

wheeled him to the front where fire truck and ambulance was waiting for him, and they took him to the hospital, and he passed. So that was two people passed away in less than six hours. They actually come around and tell people not to talk about it and go back to work. Yeah, don't talk about your dead coworkers. Just go back to work. Totally crazy. Imagine the inhumanity of that.

So Amazon has not responded for a request to comment. A spokesperson said that they were looking into it when they were asked by Mashable. So that is the current thing. But they didn't deny it. So, I mean, you know, something's going on at this plant. Well, six people in one year is, I mean, that's a lot of people. This, of course, comes on the heels of real questions about their lack of ability to keep workers safe in the tornadoes. Right. And, you know, a number of abusive labor practices that we've tracked here and that Marco Rubio and Sherrod Brown just sent a letter to Labor Secretary Marty Walsh ultimately about.

There's a lot in this video. I encourage you to watch all of it. That's extraordinarily chilling. Number one is they discussed that he knew he wasn't feeling well. He asked to go home. Very likely, if he'd been allowed to go home and seek medical care, he would be here today. And as one of his co-workers there says,

he'd be there to spend the Christmas holiday with his family. And he's not. This is a father. This is a husband. This is a community member that now is gone because of Amazon's cruelty and quest for profits over absolutely everything else. The other part that really is chilling and definitely got to both of these two workers that Kim interviewed here is the fact that, yeah, you weren't even supposed to, you're

just supposed to keep going. They didn't want anybody to talk about it. Someone asked the manager, like, what the hell happened? The manager's like, I don't know what you're talking about. I mean, just keep moving. Keep doing your thing. It's not a war, dude. Or else, you know. It's a company. Exactly.

Jesus Christ. You can't, you know, have a slowdown, shut down. People go home who are bereaved. I mean, I'm sure some of the workers that were there were very close to these individuals. It's totally nuts. And then, and this raises potential, you know, criminality. They didn't tell, you're supposed to report to OSHA every single workplace injury, let alone death. Well, reportedly, according to Kim's reporting here, two people

died on the same day. One of them gets reported. The other one, they did not tell OSHA about. And so when the workers said to OSHA, well, what about the other one? They're like, what are you talking about? They did not tell OSHA. So it appears that not only are workers dying in this Amazon warehouse, but they're trying to cover it up. That's totally crazy. I mean, yeah, when you're watching the video and you see these guys who are very courageous, by the way, to speak out. Oh, absolutely. I can't imagine the pressure that comes on them. And Amazon has, like we said, not denied it.

This comes on the heels of the tornado. But also, I mean, I remember even before the pandemic, one of the most chilling stories I ever read was 911 call transcripts from Amazon warehouses that the Daily Beast had put together. And we're talking about like suicide calls. We're talking about people saying, oh, we got another one here at Amazon, you know, the jump, we jumped, or we got another one here at Amazon that did X, or, oh, you know, self-harm. I got a worker here with suicidal thoughts. You can say, yeah, you know, this is just a function of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who work at a company. But I just disagree. I mean, over and over again, we continue to see the evidence of how this company puts its workers and their productivity over everything else.

And it's like you said, that mindset, that's like something that you exhibit in wartime. You're not at war. You're sending cheap stuff to people as fast as you can. And you're a multi-trillion dollar or whatever corporation at this point. You can afford to actually build in a system so the dude doesn't die on the job. Do I sound crazy? You can still have stuff delivered to your house in two days and not have to do this. I just believe, I don't believe you. Yeah. That there's enough, there's not another way to do this. Yeah. It, it truly, it's shocking to the conscience that this is, and this is standard operating procedure. This is, this is the way

that they operate. This is what we do. We just happen to get a particular glimpse of it here in Bessemer. The other thing that one of these workers talks about is how Bessemer is low-income community. And so Amazon comes in, yep, was highly relevant during the union election. Amazon comes in, you know, they're paying more than basically any other job that you can get the community. And so you got no other choice. I mean, even when they treat you like you're less than human, even when they say, no, you can't have sick leave and you see your co-worker die. Even with all of that, what other issue here, not just in Bessemer, but when you have a country that is, you know, increasingly dominated by these gigantic monopolies, it means you have no other option. And especially when they prevent you from joining a union and the deck is so stacked against you, because then at least you have some solidarity, some power. We just saw how the Kellogg's workers, shout out to them, were able to win a new contract that was better than what they had going.

They stood up. A gigantic multinational corporation were able to achieve some victory there. It was huge. If you don't have that and you're in a place like Bessemer, I mean, you're just at their mercy. Good luck. And they know that. And they know that. Which is why you see this type of unconscionable actions happening. I said it before.

Look, Amazon, it's not a tiny little small business anymore. They're the second largest employer in the United States behind Walmart. And they're creeping up in their market cap, increases in an exponential rate almost every single year. They dominate this entire country. Anytime I walk down the street in the city, all you see, Amazon trucks and guys delivering for Amazon. They rule the world.

I mean, you know, in terms of our labor market and more, they have so much power over so many people. They've reassigned economic value to towns which are near big cities. Nothing intrinsic about them is valuable to Amazon. Only their proximity to where the real people live, a.k.a. their customers. And when that happens, people like us, the public, have to look out for those who are employed at this company. And I think that they've proven now that they don't have the trust, and I don't think they should. There's going to be a new union election in Bessemer. That's right. It's going to be interesting to see. It's going to be interesting to see if the results are different this time.

Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, it was the best of times, and it was the worst of times for Sagar and I. Personally, of course, 2021 meant breaking free from bosses and corporate media, creating the fully independent show of our dreams. I mean that literally. It's not watching that show be embraced and thrive beyond our wildest expectations, but the nation whose activities, challenges, and successes we document on Breaking Points every day has had a pretty rough go of it, to say the least. The year started with a frenzied mob incited and lied to by the president storming the Capitol. It would continue with new waves and variants of COVID that make the notion of back to normal feel like a delusional fantasy. We've covered a tight labor market giving hope and power to workers with one hand, while inflation robs all the wage gains and more on the

other hand. And of course, we are closing out the year watching the final collapse of the only serious effort Dems undertook to shore up family finances and stave off climate disaster. Speaking of which, we were also here to document floods, wildfires, hurricanes, and all of the terrible records we've come to expect as the climate crisis continues unabated. But what I've decided to focus my end of 2021 opus on here is how the media lied and spun its way through 2021. My final tiny attempt to set the record straight on some of the major stories of the year. Of course, a comprehensive accounting would take until we're ringing in the new year for 2023 at least. So I

will limit myself here to a few of the most egregious and most widespread lies, which were told repeatedly by liberal and by conservative media outlets in service of their primary objective, that would be serving the powerful. All right, here we go. Lie number one, Biden is FDR. Now, at the beginning of the Biden presidency, we were told that Biden had hung a portrait of FDR in his office, a man he sincerely wanted to emulate. Media took this cue and they ran with it, launching a thousand takes on how Biden was just like FDR. He was the most transformational president since FDR or my personal favorite. Maybe he's FDR and LBJ.

Here is a typical example of the Biden is FDR genre from consummate insider Mark McKinnon. So I think Biden's speech was transformational rather than transitional. And, you know, I think that everybody six months ago, including Joe Biden, would have thought that given his sort of bipartisan nature, his 48 years in the Senate, that he was going to come in and be very incremental. Obama went in as trying to be this big transformational guy and actually got very little done. And we seem to have flipped the script now where Joe Biden, sort of like what happened during the campaign, just is a man who's meeting the moment. He's realizing that due to COVID, due to a lot of other sort of things that are happening politically and culturally, that he's got an opportunity to go bigger than maybe anybody since FDR. And that's what he did in his speech last night now.

And over on Fox News, they had their own version of this, routinely pretending that the Biden administration was really run by Bernie and AOC, and they were going to do all sorts of horrible things like give people living wages and affordable child care. Please, guys, don't threaten me with a good time. Now, at this point, this silly propaganda talking point hardly needs debunking. Imagine comparing a one-time check distribution and an industry-friendly infrastructure package to the sweeping vision and changes of the New Deal. FDR was intent on being radical for a generation, as he said. Biden was intent on being in bed by 8 p.m. and fulfilling his campaign promise to Wall Street that nothing would fundamentally change. But Joe Biden did do one good and courageous thing. Naturally,

that is the one thing the media absolutely crucified him for. Which brings me to lie number two, Afghanistan. We spent two decades in Afghanistan propping up warlords with child sex slaves, sending trillions of dollars from the U.S. taxpayer to a bunch of Beltway war profiteers. President after president, general after general, they lied routinely to the American people about just what an immoral sham catastrophe grift we were all funding. And when Biden had the guts to actually end that conflict, revealing the ugly truth about our war in Afghanistan, the media across the board portrayed the first correct decision in Afghanistan in decades as a humiliating defeat. When of course, the true outrage was the whole 20-year history of crimes and lies. Here is one

example is the New York Times, quote, President Biden will go down in history fairly or unfairly as the president who presided over a humiliating final act in the American experiment in Afghanistan. And naturally, to assess the situation, they turn to trusted and esteemed thinkers like Judith Miller, Condoleezza Rice, and John Bolton, shamelessly using the worst actors of the Bush era with a vested interest in hiding their own crimes as strategists and moral arbiters of the end of the catastrophe that they enabled.

Well, there are two mistakes at work here. The first is the strategic mistake of withdrawing, which Biden made, but which Trump fully supported. Had Trump been reelected, he'd be doing the same thing. On this question of withdrawal from Afghanistan, Trump and Biden are like Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Thank you, John Bolton. These people, they don't care about Afghan girls. They care about their own paychecks, their legacies, and their personal ideological commitments to forever war.

Every single outlet, liberal or conservative, they all sang the same song on Afghanistan. That is how thoroughly and entrenched every media outlet is to the Pentagon and the military industrial complex. And the topic of the deep state fealty brings me to my next lie. Lie number three, Russiagate. Now, past years have brought us new Russiagate lies and tangled webs of Eastern European conspiracy. But this year, the lie was in what legacy outlets decided not to tell you. Because this was a year when the tattered steel dossier on which much of Russiagate was based was fully exposed as nothing more than a partisan hit job based on rumors and innuendo, some of which

actually came directly from Democratic Party operatives. Of course, Fox News was happy to crow about all the new developments to their audience since it was convenient to their team. But if you were an MSNBC or CNN viewer, you likely had no idea that the whole thing had been discredited. Rachel Maddow, of course, led the new Red Scare for years under Trump, spending night after night speculating on when the walls would close course, led the new Red Scare for years under Trump, spending night after night speculating on when the walls would close in, when the Russia-Trump plot would be uncovered, when the speculation in the Steele dossier would be borne out as fact. Russia, Russian pro-Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russia, Russia, Putin despises the West in general, and the United States in particular, Soviet Empire. Russia, Russia, Russia, they're the adversary. They want to bring us down to Soviet Union. Russia, undermine the West, Soviet Communists, Communists on the left.

Russia, end of the West, we'll see you again tomorrow. Now, you would think that someone who invested so much time and effort in the dossier's claims might want to let her audience know that, you know, the whole thing was total bullshit. Yeah, not so much. Now, no one, of course, has tracked this better than Matt Taibbi. Instead of coming clean with her audience, Maddow just invented a new conspiracy. She framed the indictments from Trump's appointed special counsel Durham as payback for the Mueller investigation. Taibbi has also tracked how the outlets that have bothered to even acknowledge the collapse of Russiagate have picked on a few journalist scapegoats for sacrifice. Those designated to

serve as tribute are meant to bear the brunt of the blame for the wild conspiracy theories that ran rampant through every single liberal media outlet. For wasting years chasing Cold War ghosts instead of pursuing a fact-based investigation of Trump that may actually have damaged him rather than further strengthening him, literally no one has faced accountability. All right, let's turn to economics now. Lie number four, inflation. Conservatives were gleeful when inflation started to climb. They were delighted to dust off all their old Jimmy Carter references and ready with a quick explanation of why prices were climbing. It was all that dastardly spending. Completely left out of their analysis was the monopoly power and greed that has led corporations to use the

excuse of inflation in order to jack up their prices as much as possible. After all, companies are posting record profits and doing better than ever. They don't have to lift their prices, certainly not as high as they have. They are doing it because they can. Also left out of the analysis is the way that offshoring and just-in- time practices, both free market fundamentalist ideas left the entire supply chain extremely fragile. The moment there was a single hiccup in this precariously balanced global system, the entire thing seized up. There were plenty of bad inflation takes across the board in liberal and conservative outlets. But over at Fox News, they were particularly

determined to mask the truth and place the blame exclusively on spending. Imagining a nation full of lazy, entitled workers with bank accounts stuffed full. To make the case, they routinely roll down one of the wrongest men in all of economics, Art Laffer. Turkey prices, as many people run to the grocery stores today, are almost 10% higher than they were last year. Potatoes, eggs, onions, iceberg lettuce, Brussels sprouts, all of this is going to cost you more. And those are just a couple of the examples. On the whole, because obviously we report this every year,

your Thanksgiving dinner is now expected to cost 14% more than it did last year, an all-time high, so it could be the most expensive Thanksgiving ever. Art, your response? I was just going to tell you that I really like food and I love Thanksgiving dinner. And it makes me want to cry. I mean, you know, if you look at this, you know, the spending is doing it. You know, the spending is keeping people out of the labor force. The participation rate is falling in the labor force. So therefore, we have less goods supplied. You're giving all these people money. So they're buying a lot more stuff than they otherwise would have bought.

When you have much more demand and less supply, prices go up. And that's exactly what happens. And now these people want to double down on it. Here's a hot take. People having money to spend is actually a good thing. And what's more, this idea that Americans are just rolling in the dough right now is also a total lie. One third of Americans now say they are worse off than a year ago. That's the worst number since the total economic collapse of the early days of the pandemic. All right, though, let's get to lie number five, hiding the money. While all of this

lying and propaganda is shocking, there is one big foundational lie at the heart of all corporate media coverage, left, right, and center. That is the lie that the river of cash flowing through D.C. into the pockets of legislators and regulators has nothing to do with the terrible state of affairs in the nation today. Because there is a simple explanation for why BBB failed and the infrastructure package succeeded. For why Kyrsten Sinema ran on prescription drug reform and then blocked prescription drug reform. For why starting wars is always good and ending them is always bad.

For why the rich pay less in taxes oftentimes than their secretaries. For why the rich world is pumped full of vaccines and the poor world is left without. It is all about money. It's the simplest principle. Follow the money. Instead, corporate media, beholden to a lot of the same moneyed interests, they love to invent personality clashes and parlor games and horse race tactics and villains that they can blame for the sorry state of the nation. They normally don't allow anyone on their air who might give up the real game. So what I'm about to show you was quite a remarkable segment that we've played here for you in the past. It's remarkable because of the very diplomatic suggestion from Bernie's former campaign manager

that money might be impacting the analysis of paid lobbyist Heidi Heitkamp. And it is also remarkable for how the CNN host rushes in to defend the honor and integrity of this paid lobbyist and Democratic arson. And this is the problem, right? You are having a backroom closed deal conversation that isn't transparent, that isn't public. So I'm all for it. Hey, senators have different positions. Great. Let's have it out. But what I'm concerned about is the influence of corporate lobbyists i'm influenced i'm concerned about the influence of senator heitkamp and her group right if the problem here is that we're talking about popular policies that people want and they are good with taxation of the wealthy to make them pay their fair share and we are talking about issues that if you go to west

virginia you go to montana you go to north dakota you talk share. And we are talking about issues that if you go to West Virginia, you go to Montana, you go to North Dakota, you talk about these issues, people are on our side. So we're not fighting over, oh, hey, we're asking you to take a tough vote. We're asking you to deliver for the American public on the pledges that you made. And it is the influence of corporate lobbyists that are cutting this proposal down, that are cutting the president down.

Well, let's make clear, no one is questioning the Senator Heitkamp's transparency here. I mean, we are just being transparent going say it however the results of what she's trying to do is advocate for cutting down on corporate taxation we have a problem dynastic wealth in this country we've got to wrap this up but i will say that let's not forget that the senator and let's not let's let's not forget in corporate taxation? This isn't about corporate taxation. This is about individuals being taxed based on the transition or the transaction that their assets would go through. And I want to mention something. Billionaires, Senator.

I can have billionaires. That's what we're talking about. I don't want to get inside baseball, guys, here, because we are running out of time and we have to move on to the next topic. Obviously, things are coming down to the wire in Washington right now. I can just say that let's also remind our viewers that Senator Heitkamp lost her seat in the Senate for voting her conscience, too. So I don't want to forget history as well. Absolutely incredible. So revealing. It is no wonder that 2021 was the year of tanking cable news ratings, mass unsubscribes, and precipitous drops in readership

at virtually every legacy news outlet. It is also no wonder that 2021 saw new historic lows in media trust. And it's no wonder that so many of you opted to spend your time with us and other independent outlets instead of these clowns. So out of the trash, something new is being born. And your rejection of these lies makes me profoundly hopeful for 2022 and beyond. That clip is maybe the most revealing thing about Kate.

Like just, if you just watch and understand that clip, you will understand everything that's going on. 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, after the 2020 election, I did a monologue called everything I got wrong about the election. Now, in my defense, I actually called every single state in the electoral college. But obviously, that was based on understandings of polling that was wildly off. The TLDR of that segment was that I dramatically underestimated the culture war and Trump's chances nationally, and I overestimated economic populism as part of his appeal. I also way overbelieved polling, which is why now the

Kristol and Saga rule is you should add a minimum of about four points to any poll for Republican support. But Kristol and I were talking, and since this is my last monologue of 2021, I thought it would be fun to review this year and look at some of my worst predictions and why, and say what went wrong. And let's start with the obvious, somewhat famous amongst my critics for one particular prediction I made in January of 2020, that Joe Biden would have a 70% approval rating because all he had to do was distribute vaccines and give out $2,000 checks to people. Well, I whiffed that one, huh? Joe Biden somehow is one of the least popular presidents

of my lifetime. Arguably, he's actually much worse than Trump because he doesn't even have a base of supporters who love him. So what went wrong for Mr. Biden? Well, you all know most of the story, but I'll tell the shortest version. Biden actually was on track for a very high approval rating. In April of 2021, he had 55% and it was climbing, as you can see in the graph in front of you. What happened

though? Delta variant began to sweep and the Biden administration was caught flat-footed. They simply couldn't decide on what tactic to make. And they just said, screw it. If you're vaccinated, then you're good. They should have said that. Instead, they said, well, that's not on you. Instead, they went with Fauci and the rest of the bureaucrats, sealing their fate. July 29, they announced, quote, new actions to slow the Delta variant. That's when his approval rating went south and into freefall because Biden brought back the mask to millions of Americans with new CDC guidance, and from there, it was pretty much over. Biden went into red a mere 20 days later, as it happened, to coincide with Afghanistan. And from there, he has gone into territory that he's in right now.

Basically, Biden's embrace of new pandemic restrictions, despite the fact that he had vaccines, is about half the story of what killed his presidency. But of course, you know what the other half is, and it coincides with another thing that I got wrong. Let's put it up there. Inflation. My most strident comments haters are ecstatic to hear me admit, and they're right. In May of 2021, I famously said, quote, call me in six months if there's still inflation. Obviously, I look like an idiot. Let's parse my reasoning and look at why. In May of 2021, inflation was predominantly located within used cars, hotels, and other businesses which were reopening to an explosion in demand. That's why I said that. Obviously, this would drive prices up. My reasoning at the time was it was purely related to a temporary demand shock from locking people

down over a year. But then, of course, food prices began to shoot up, and the story is also just as complicated. I've detailed this in many monologues this year. The increase in the price of food is almost entirely related to increases in the inputs of fertilizer. Droughts here at home and abroad, crazy shortages in meat caused by problems with the meatpacking supply chain from 2020 disruption, and also an increase in consumer demand born from the fact that a lot more people are at home and they're cooking a lot more, leading to an overall price increase in groceries. I can already hear the finance bros in the comments, Zagre hasn't said anything about the M2 money supply. Yeah, I haven't. You know why? Because if inflation is purely a function

of increased government spending, then we would see commiserate increase in price across the board. Instead, we have massive variance in the price of key consumer goods born of terrible supply shocks like the backlogs at ports, trucker shortages, with a wonky economy where people were locked up for a long time, and in many cases have a lot of money to burn. But it's certainly not transitory anymore. And the reason why actually proves the key thesis of this show. The modern economy of the United States has been constructed over the last 30 years to simply consume Chinese crap.

And that economy gets really bad when it's hard to consume Chinese crap. We build nothing, we don't grow enough of what we need, and our markets here are global, meaning that key goods that we need, like food and gas, are priced to global demand, not American demand. Despite the fact that we have enough here at home and have plenty of mechanisms available to take care of our own people, we live in a financialized, globalized world, which is great for some people and some stuff, but it makes you very vulnerable in a crisis. My hope was that we would learn that lesson, but I'm not naive. The deficit hawks have won and gaslit people into thinking that this is all because of government spending. In fact, my current prediction,

which I do hope to be wrong about in a future monologue, is that a GOP president will win in 2024 based on inflation concerns. They will nominate someone to the Fed who will raise rates, which will then induce a massive recession, which will then lead to job loss. But hey, inflation is solved, right? So that about wraps it up. My estimation are that those two single things that I was wrong about were the only ones this year, obviously. I'm sure I've been a moron in many respects, and I love you all for keeping me honest. I think that we will make this an annual tradition. And since it's the holidays, I'll try to end on this very optimistic note. Something we got right. Something we decided actually right here. When we

decided to leave the Hill, I had no idea if this was going to work out. We both put ridiculously high charges on our credit cards for this set and for this beautiful desk, crossed our fingers and said, I hope it works. And we were more than right in our decision than I could have ever imagined. There are so many millions of you who have done with our corporate media overlords and who truly just want to watch the world burn. And we say, no, we're done with you. For that, I'm very thankful. I'm thinking of all of you this holiday season, everybody who showed up to the world and shows us that the world, that there's a better way. It's a Christmas gift I could never have asked for. And even if I have been wrong in a lot, you've stuck with us. It means more to us than you will ever really know. And I want you to know that we're just getting started. Happy holidays, everybody. I implore

you this. Turn off the news. Enjoy time with your kids and family. Don't talk about politics. Just enjoy your life. So there we go, Crystal. Inflation and that prediction. To be fair, I blame Biden for both of those things. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Fun segment. Crystal, you came up with this idea.

Okay, so we thought we would do a little end of the year segment here. As I said before, this is our last sort of like real-time show of the year. We banked a ton of content. We're not going to leave you guys hanging, but we are going to take the next week off. So you won't miss us too much, but this

is our last live show. So we wanted to do a little end of the year thing. So we decided to ask you guys, Breaking Points community, whether you thought next year for you personally was going to be better than this year, worse than this year, or about the same. And I actually haven't looked at the results in a little while. So let's see what the most recent that we have here in terms of our screenshot. Better than comes in at a bare majority, 50%. Worse than, only 18%. That's pretty good. And about the same as 32%. We also asked you guys, and I haven't read these yet. We also asked you guys to give us some of the reasons you thought that next year would be better than worse than or about the same as this year. Let's go ahead and throw the first screenshot we have up there on the screen. These

are a couple of people who said it would be better than. Eddie C says better because the main takeaway I got from 2021 is always focus on improving yourself before you can improve the world. You can't let the despair of a failing government, backstabbing political party, or all the seemingly insurmountable problems in the world stop you from fixing the small things in front of you that you can change. I've lost weight. I've improved my eating and drinking habits. I've gotten better sleep and have made small investments in myself and my home that make my daily life a bit more enjoyable, comfortable, and happy. I'm grateful for that and want to maintain that positivity into 2022, despite what else goes on. Hope you all have the best for the new year too. William, that's awesome. William Harnon says,

I hit the main goals I set for 2021 and I'm setting new goals for 2022 because of that. Keep working to be better. Keep building on what you've done. If you get knocked down, figure out what you did wrong and get up and keep moving forward. Those are awesome comments because, you know, I think sometimes it's hard. Obviously, in politics, we look at sort of big picture societal trends. And when everything feels like society-wide, it's going in the wrong direction. It can rob people of the agency to do the small things in their own lives that they are capable of and have the agency to do to make their own personal situation better. And that's not without getting into a bunch of like bootstrapping and it's all

on you. It's not all on you, but that doesn't mean that you can't change your habits, change your mentality and, you know, improve your personal situation in ways that should make you feel positive. I'm right there with Eddie. It was a huge year for me, completely revamped my entire health. I went from sitting on the couch doing nothing six months ago, worked out four days a week. Every single week, I think it took nine days off only in those six months. And it was amazing. It changed my whole life. I lost, I think I lost a 5% body fat and gained seven or eight pounds of muscle. I need to check the stats again. I mean, look, I'm not saying that it's great. I definitely could have done a lot more. But you implement a little bit of things in your daily life. You change your

mindset. It changed everything, your outlook on the world and so much. I cannot recommend it enough to people who are out there. There are so many different resources. Andrew Huberman's podcast, I'll go ahead and give him a shout out right now. I can't recommend it enough. Just little, little hacks in your daily life, which will just be outsized impact on that. Can't emphasize. But we also, like you said, I don't want to erase people out there who also had a terrible year. Let's put their comments on the screen. Let's look at why they have to say, quote, having to pay student loans is going to sting. And even though we haven't received, we haven't received, sorry, I can't see the. I got rid of the child tax credit we were owed for the past three months. We got used to having

that money in our pockets. Things are going to be very tight unless we magically win some money or find the time to pick up extra income revenues between school, careers, and parenting. Being a millennial, trying to do everything your parents did is suffering. KaysenF says, Kaysen,

anyway, it's never going to end so that I can just operate my business again the way I want to. And so those are the sort of society-wide political implications that come crashing down into personal lives. And, I mean, those aren't things that you can just, you know, go to the gym more and overcome. Yeah, you can't go to the gym more and keep your business open. Right. Get, you know, enough money in your bank account to be able to get by. And that's the thing. I mean, that's where I get so angry with these people who act like, oh, Americans are just, they don't even want to work. They got all this money in their bank account. That is not reality

for anywhere close to the majority of Americans. And especially because so much of our society, like the cultural value is put on your market value. That also takes a toll on your self-esteem. I'm not speaking for these two individuals in particular, but I've seen this and I know you guys have as well. I think especially for men, their cultural value is very wrapped up in what their market value, what they're able to earn is. And when that ability is taken away from you, I mean, that's not just economic struggles, which are brutal enough to start with, but that can trigger whole crises of identity as well. I did a couple of monologues this year. Some of my favorites around desirability in the dating market and all that about all of the rise in single males, especially to younger and even as

they continue to age up, has all sorts of downstream terrible effects. Bad health outcomes, actually not good for single women as well, decline in happiness, decline in trust, decline in overall earnings, college attainment, everything, almost everything. I encourage people to go watch and read that study also. It's the same thing. Yeah. And I'm glad we picked those because those are the structural ones. Look, making a lot more money here, it's a hard, it's a tough country, right? Especially with inflation. And yes, the great resignation has made it for blue collar workers, but a lot of people still feel trapped. And before the pandemic, people were one blown tire away from bankruptcy.

Even, you know, what always kills me during the holidays is this payday loan place near my house. And I walk, the line's out the door, you know, for holidays. People are trying to go out there and buy their Christmas gifts and stuff for their kids, being totally taken advantage of by these scumbags. You know, these, like, check cashing payday loan places with these mega high interest rates and fees and all this stuff. And, you know, that's the reality here too. And I do think taking away the child tax credit, that's going to hurt a lot of people. Yeah, no, I mean, there is no question that it will increase poverty in the country. Zero question. Especially among children. Yeah. All right. We do have some people too who said they expect next year to be basically the same as this year was, which probably, you know, I mean, a lot of times it's a safe assumption.

Let's go ahead and throw those up on the screen and see what they have to say. Jayton Lenning, I'll be doing about the same because the BS going on never slowed me down once anyways. Doesn't matter what happens. I'm living my life until I'm not. I like that attitude. Sawyer says, about the same because of all the setbacks. Losing my job during COVID was the best and worst thing to happen to me. I've allowed my physical and mental health to slip during the pandemic.

Now that I've secured a better paying role, things are turning around. It is an uphill battle to pay off all the debt and get back in shape. But there's finally light at the end of the tunnel. I don't know. Sawyer sounds like he's a little optimistic. I think so. Yeah, I hear more optimistic. Yeah, then you seem like you feel like maybe next year it's going to be a little bit better. But I mean, that just shows you the way people have gotten kicked in the teeth. And it's going to take a long time for the total fallout of the pandemic, what that did to people, the great resignation, all the roiling in the labor market, the roiling in the prices, all of those things,

it's going to take a long time for that to set allow and for people to get back to some sort of stasis wherever they were or wherever they're going. Yeah, I choose to believe it's going to be better then. I had big hopes for 2021. Didn't all work out. Started off with January 6th. And then we all got vaccinated and I was like,

man, this is going to be awesome. I was in Miami at some point in like April and people were going crazy. Then the Delta wave and all that started hitting, you know, the masks came back. So it's been a real wild ride. We'll see what the next year holds. I choose to believe it's going to be better. For me, I will be wildly happy if 2022 is as good as 2021. Yeah, there you go.

And, you know, I mean, we obviously. For us, obviously, yeah. We went through an incredible change with taking the show independent. That was, you know, incredible. There was a lot of change in my personal life as well, which has all been to the better as well. So if I can match 2022 to 2021, I would be the happiest person alive. Because I've never been happier than I am right now or felt more free.

So there you go. That is the best thing that we can have. I hope that for all of you, like I said in my monologue, take some time off, spend some time with your family. Just enjoy yourself. Watch some stupid ass TV, holiday movies, Love Actually. I'm definitely gonna be watching that later. I love Love Actually too.

I don't care. It gets me every time. I don't care if it's cringe. It's great. I agree. Every time I'm in an airport watching that later. I love Love Actually too. I don't care. It gets me every time. I don't care if it's cringe. It's great for me. I agree. Every time I'm in an airport, I see people hug. I've got tears in my eyes.

Jesus. Q Grant's voice is in my head. It gets you. It gets you. And I think sort of the common theme for both of us that we really want you guys to know is that for us, 2021 was good because of you guys.

Yes, there was a lot of terrible shit that happened and continues to happen. And, you know, we try to stand in solidarity with those who are really going through it right now. And also with those who are fighting back and also with do see the way new things are being born and not just with breaking points, but you see the way people are breaking out of a corporate media mindset, how they're seeking out new and different ways of thinking about the country, thinking about themselves, thinking about the world. And I do think that that is a tremendously hopeful thing. Couldn't agree more. We love you guys so, so much. We are so grateful for you. Merry Christmas, if that's your thing.

Merry whatever, whatever you're celebrating this season. I just hope you enjoy, are happy and healthy, take care of each other, and we'll see you in the new year. That's right. Merry Christmas, everybody. Happy new Year. I know a lot of cops. They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes.

But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend.

I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. High key.

Looking for your next obsession? Listen to High Key, a new weekly podcast hosted by Ben O'Keefe, Ryan Mitchell, and Evie Oddly. We got a lot of things to get into. We're going to gush about the random stuff we can't stop thinking about. I am high key going to lose my mind over all things Cowboy Carter. I know. Girl, the way she about to yank my bank account. Correct.

And one thing I really love about this is that she's celebrating her daughter. Oh, I know. Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.