Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 1/3/22: Omicron News, Twitter Censorship, Corporate Profits, Minimum Wage, Maxwell Trial, Primary Biden, Covid Lies, Starbucks Workers, and More!

Episode Date: January 3, 2022

Krystal and Saagar talk about how states have responded to Omicron, Twitter's censorship on covid, corporations using the cover of inflation to jack up prices, minimum wage raises in states across the country, results from the Ghislaine Maxwell trial, public health officials' stunning admissions, the Left's need to primary Biden, unionization at Starbucks with Buffalo store workers, 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/Starbucks Workers United: https://sbworkersunited.org/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Missed you, Crystal. Indeed it is. And indeed we have a wonderful show for you today. Lots, of course, to catch up on. We have for you the very latest on Omicron, what we know about it, the seriousness of it, government response to it, all of that good stuff. Also, Twitter banning permanently Marjorie Taylor Greene. We will tell you why and what we think about it. You probably won't be surprised to learn what we think about that. That's right. New data from our friend Matt Stoller about exactly some of the causes of inflation that you're not hearing a lot about

in the mainstream media. Also, some good news going into the new year. There are record numbers of states and localities that are upping the minimum wage thanks to a referendum that their voters passed. So that is exciting news as well. Also, the less than satisfying conclusion to the Ghislaine Maxwell trial and some developments there, including some very, very interesting media choices. Yes. BBC. Guest choices. Looking at you with Alan Dershowitz.

We've got two Starbucks workers on to preview for us what could very well turn out to be the year of the worker. That is something hopeful. That's what we're hoping. We're going to push it. It's going to start here. Yeah, that's right. We're declaring it right here, right now. But we did want to start, Sagar, with the very latest with regards to Omicron.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, obviously, everybody you know, probably I know as well, you know, at least somebody who contacted Omicron. Everybody I know seems to be doing fine. My mom got it. She actually is OK. So glad to hear that as well. But there's been some troubling questions around treatment options and more. As we have seen, you know, the discussion around monoclonal antibodies is very, very effective against Delta. The data around it is actually a bit mixed, although still hopeful in the right direction. Obviously, booster as well as vaccination amongst people who are elderly, obese, and in general seems to dramatically reduce hospitalization and death. Those are all good things. The discussion, though, around some of the life-saving COVID treatments in the city of New York has taken a very dramatic and really, frankly, terrible turn.

And we wanted to make sure that we dug into it as much as possible because this is causing causing a lot of consternation and, you know, rightfully so when we get to the bottom of it. Let's put it up there on the screen. So New York City will be considering race when distributing life-saving COVID treatments. So what they mean by that is that they will take into account a patient's race when distributing potentially life-saving COVID treatments, according to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene website. The city, this is from their official guidance, quote, will consider race and ethnicity when assessing individual risk from December 20th, which adds that longstanding systemic health and social inequities can contribute to an increased risk of dying from COVID-19.

This specifically is targeted towards monoclonal antibody treatments. This was another policy that we saw down in the state of Texas, and it continues to bubble up as we have shortages. Whether those shortages are supply side, demand side, or whatever, also remains very much up for debate. But we have to highlight this, Crystal, and say that just as terrible as it is to discriminate healthcare based upon vaccination status. The same is to be said for race. And also, you can assess all of this without even having to take race into account, and it would probably still have the same effect. If you are obese or have diabetes, you may be more likely in order to belong to a specific racial category, just use obesity status,

diabetes status, and immunocompromised status. You don't have to add race on top of that. It's the worst fears of a lot of people in terms of the way that healthcare and identity politics would become meshed, you know, including this babble speak when medically it's not even necessary. I mean, this is woke racism. Yeah, it's nuts. That's what this boils down to. And listen, so there are certain conditions where your race could be actually correlated. Sickle cell anemia. I was about to say sickle cell is the classic example.

That is not the case with coronavirus. Okay. I mean, listen, it's possible, but there has not been any research or data to indicate that COVID impacts people differently depending on their race. So even if you're using race as a proxy for something like socioeconomic status, and by the way, Glenn Greenwald had a great post breaking all of this down, that in and of itself is kind of racist. If you're basically saying like, well, we're going to use, we're going to say if you're black, we're just going to assume that you're poor. Yeah, it's like, wait, what? That's not okay to do. Because yes, if you look at socioeconomic status, that is correlated with a lot of the risk factors, including the types of

work that you're likely to do, which is likely to put you in contact with the public where you're not able to sequester and work from home like white collar professionals have been able to. That's one thing. Another thing, socioeconomic status is correlated with obesity, with diabetes, with some of these conditions that put you at heightened risk. But to boil it down to just race, it's the opposite of being backed by the science. So again, there are some conditions where this would make sense. Coronavirus isn't one of them. So this is one of those things where on the one hand, you look at it and you're like, we don't actually know if any white people who have been denied treatment because of their race, maybe this is just a one-off, maybe it ultimately isn't a big deal.

But it's emblematic of a very troubling direction and mindset that seems like less of a one-off and more of a trend, which is why we chose to highlight it here. Absolutely. You guys will have to remember in the very beginning of vaccination, so about a year ago, there was a big debate that we saw amongst public health ethicists because some people, like me, normal folks, wanted to vaccinate elderly folks first. But many public health ethicists said that, well, old people in America are disproportionately more likely to be white, so that would be systemically racist. And it's like, well, hold on a second. Once again, it's not to do with race.

If you're old, you are dramatically more likely to die. From there, we'll go down to obesity and immunocompromise. And then you can go down to health. Health is variably and widely distributed across all races. And you know, you have a lot more in common as an obese black Hispanic person with an obese white person than vice versa. And same whenever you're healthy across all different racial categories, whenever it comes to your health. It's actually one of the stupidest ways from people I've spoken to in order to try and classify the way that we should be targeting COVID health. So it is a horrible, terrible, terrible direction that the US healthcare system can go towards. And that is

something which if we're going to see this get implemented, and once again, in terms of these shortages, there's a lot of questions about why exactly we even have a monoclonal antibody shortage, but this is kind of a discussion for another day. The real question here is if we're going to have scarcity of tests of treatments and more, the way then that that gets distributed should always be towards the people who are most vulnerable. Those who are old, those who are immunocompromised, and those who are obese. It's not complicated. I can't understand this. There's also a tension between the liberal view, which at times has been, you know what, if you're not vaccinated, you shouldn't even get treatment.

You should be put at the back of the line. It's like a libertarian dream. Okay, so that's one view. And then this view, which says if you are non-white, you should be prioritized because it ignores the fact that for most of the pandemic, the post-vaccination pandemic, Black people and Hispanic people were less likely to get vaccinated, largely because of justifiable, you know, terrible past experiences and present experiences with our healthcare system. That's very inconvenient. So one of the reasons why you might say that Black people have been disproportionately impacted by COVID is because they've also been less likely to get vaccinated. Again, that sits uneasily with this other view over here that if you're unvaccinated,

you basically, you know, deserve what you get. So again, it's, it doesn't make sense. It's the opposite of following the science. And it ultimately boils down to just like the flip side of the most abhorrent sort of white nationalist views. That's right. It's like the flip side of that, of let's discriminate based on your race, just in a different direction. And so that makes it ultimately OK. Yeah. Let's go into the deeper just exactly how it's going with Omicron. I know that's what a lot of people wonder.

So we have the charts of hospitalization and death side by side. Let's put that up there on the screen. There you can see the newly reported deaths by day. Now look, I mean, obviously there has been an increase because of Omicron. However, it is not even close to the highs that we saw in Delta, despite the fact that if you'll take a look there on the right side at hospitalizations, we see the same thing. The hospitalization and deaths were much higher during the Delta variant as opposed to Omicron, indicating some less severity. So that is actually a very good thing. There also comes down to the federal response. There was a lot of consternation, Crystal, over the weekend, or sorry, over the holiday when the president spoke with all of the state's governors and said that a solution to COVID will come from the states, not from the federal

government. Kind of happened to agree with him on that. But let's take a listen to what he said first. Look, there is no federal solution. This gets solved. It was interesting to me. A lot of right wingers were very upset, obviously, because Biden said the federal solution, COVID, all of that. But look, I mean, this is kind of what we wanted from the beginning. We kind of did want an admission that there is really no quote unquote end game here, except for learning how to live with what we have, beefing up testing capacity and the ability for all of us to live our normal lives. That being said, I mean, seemed hypocritical, but also it's also an abdication of responsibility on some of the stuff that you can do. Yeah, that's right.

And that's the problem. So my view on COVID policy is that because we have different parts of the country that are very different culturally and have very different sort of risk assessments and tolerance, that it does make sense to have local responses. Absolutely. So in that way, I agree with him. But to the abdication of responsibility point, we damn well need a federal solution for the lack of tests or the lack of sufficient amounts of monoclonal antibodies

so that people can get the very best treatment if they do end up hospitalized. We damn well need a federal response in terms of lifting the patent protection so that people around the globe can also get vaccinated so we don't continue to have these new variants emerging that pose new and novel risks to our own population. We could certainly use, you know, now they're saying, now that we're allowed to admit that cloth masks, like that there's a difference between levels of masking. We could have been removed from the internet, you know, now they're saying now that we're allowed to admit that cloth masks, like that there's a difference between levels of masks.

Don't you love we could have been removed from the Internet, you know, three months ago for saying that. That's fine. If different masks. I mean, this is something, again, there's been science to back up for a while now. Distribute good masks to everybody. Like those are things that the federal government, you can use the Defense Production Act. You can make it a national like wartime type effort. The fact that we don't have sufficient tests is such a disgrace. I personally visited or called a dozen or more different Walmarts, CVS, everything in my little region in King George County in Fredericksburg, Virginia, impossible to get a rapid test. So, I mean, this is and this is unique to America. Plenty of other countries around the world, including places that are a lot less wealthy than we are, have managed

to have rapid tests available for their population. And yet we have completely failed. So, yes, on the one hand, local control and, you know, gauging risk tolerance for the population locally. Yes, leave that to states, counties, cities, et cetera. Butuging risk tolerance for the population locally. Yes, leave that to states, counties, cities, et cetera. But there is a lot that the federal government should have been doing and has utterly failed to do. And of course, this is very, very different from what Biden sold when he was running for president. We were all going to get back to normal. I would put it this way. You the feds have to make it so that they provide the backbone and the infrastructure for then everybody then to be able to make their choice. So if people, like you said, the masks, whatever, I mean, personally, I'm against it, but some people want it. That being

said, it's up to the locals. They get to decide on how they would then be able to now knowing that they're going to have enough tests, or sorry, enough masks. But on the testing front, because we don't have enough tests, a lot of schools are with much more recalcitrant populations and parents who are freaked out. They're just going virtual. They don't even have enough tests in order to test all the students. So what are you going to do? I mean testing was – and I don't think this should be the case, but it still could be the case – would be a way in order to assuage the most freaked out people and say, hey, look, you know, everybody's been tested. When you have a wide availability of tests, as they do in Europe and many other parts of the globe, then, you know, a lot of life is much easier in order to go back to normal.

And that's just a way in order to ease things out to an area where people can learn to be more comfortable and live with the virus. And that's just something where, while, yes, it is good, and my monologue will be on this, that CDC and Fauci and all of them are basically admitting, you know, that a lot of these guidelines have nothing to do with science and have more to do with what they think public opinion can gauge. That doesn't mean, though, that people aren't still really freaked out. And the media has a big role to play in this. You know, Nate Silver tweeted this. Let's put this up there on the screen, which is that the New York Times ran a story saying, headline, Puerto Rico faces staggering COVID case explosion.

And yet only in the 13th paragraph do you learn that only 300 people are hospitalized with COVID on an island of 3 million. Exceptionally good news and testament to the power of the vaccine whenever it comes to preventing hospitalization and death. It's just they don't know how to report something without fear mongering. I see it every day here in Washington. Oh, my God, we have the highest case rate ever. What are the hospitalizations and deaths? Oh, less than Delta. OK, so why should I care? It's across the whole country. And, you know, the more we look at it in terms of Omicron, South Africa, where we saw the first widespread Omicron burst, put this up there on the screen. Their government now says that the country has

passed its peak without a major spike in deaths, offering cautious hope to other countries that are grappling with the variant. So from the beginning, you know, we owe a lot to South Africa. I really do want to say it's terrible what happened to them in terms of the travel ban. Omicron didn't even originate from there. They have a very good identification program early. They warned the entire globe, and they've been giving us consistently good data and news, and our media is the one that has been distorting it for our audience. I mean, the truth is Omicron is much less severe, obviously, in terms of hospitalization and

death. You could see it in the data right in front of your eyes, even with kids and more that are infected. Dr. Fauci, as I'll be saying in my monologue, is now even saying, don't worry, it's not kids dying from COVID, it's kids dying with COVID. That's been the case for a long time, but Omicron has now made it so that we can all just admit it. And especially with the less hospitalizations, the severity and the death and all that, it's changed the game. I mean, it really is just kind of a very virulent type of flu with the vaccination. That's the very key. Yeah, with vaccination, that's very true. And so one of the stats that's been out there, which is true, is that there are more kids hospitalized now than because of

Delta. The reason for that is because fewer kids are vaccinated. And this has spread. It's incredibly contagious, as I'm sure you are experiencing in your own lives. There can't possibly be a single person in America who doesn't have someone in their close circle who's had an encounter at this point with Omicron. So the vaccination status is really, really important. Even Dr. Fauci is saying that they think that this is going to peak really quickly and begin to fall really quickly. That was what we have seen now in South Africa, which is really hopeful. The other thing that is also hopeful is, number one, for a long time, people were not saying with confidence that it's less severe. Now everyone is basically saying with confidence it's less severe.

We see from data in the UK, it reduces compared to Delta. Omicron is 50 percent less likely to send you to the hospital. Great news. And ultimately, because it is so infectious and because it's less severe, it may actually give us kind of a way out of the pandemic because everyone will have some form of immunity. Now, listen, this is not, you know, a great thing to cheer for. And again, I really recommend if you're not vaccinated that you get vaccinated because then your risk is so much even less with Omicron. But the other thing that research is starting to show is that Omicron immunity does provide you with pretty good resistance to Delta. There you go. It's actually not the other way around. So if you've had Delta,

it doesn't appear that you have great resistance to Omicron. You're still like very likely to get a breakthrough infection. But Omicron seems to provide pretty good protection against other variants that are out there, which, again, is really encouraging. So listen, guys, it's I know a really chaotic time. The fact that it is so infectious means you are going to have a spike in hospitalizations and you will have some increase in deaths. That's already happening. That's inevitable, but much less severe than Delta. And ultimately, hopefully we'll get through it quickly. And I just pray that it doesn't, you know, disrupt the thing that I worry the most about is schools, because you should, since it is does spread so rapidly, I can see how school districts just like literally don't have teachers, sufficient teachers to have in the schools. But I

would just really encourage, you know, you to push to keep the schools open if it is at all possible, because we know for sure how damaging school shutdowns were for kids. And we know that this is mild and a low risk for children. Ultimately, I saw a good take. I forget who exactly it was. But, you know, in other countries, the last thing they shut down is the school here. The first thing that gets shut down is the school. Here, the first thing that gets shut down is the school. All the universities here in Washington, D.C. are remote, even though they have booster mandates. It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. And look, you know, yeah, they're college kids, but they're suffering.

I mean, I've heard from a lot of them, they're paying, you know, top dollar in order to sit at home in their parents' house and do Zoom school. You could say, oh, those idiots, you know, student. Look, it's a sunk cost at a certain point, too. You know, you're already within the system. So you got to feel for not just them. I mean, every young person out there who's having their life hobbled by this. It's not a way to live. And we don't we shouldn't live this way. There's nothing to indicate that there's a lot of people who don't and they're doing just fine. OK, let's move on on Twitter. This kind of, I guess, pairs very well. Marjorie Taylor Greene, an interesting character in her own right.

In Suspended, that's the easiest way of putting it there. Very diplomatic. It's funny, Crystal. You know, we've had a consistent theme on this show of having to defend people who we cannot stand. And yet, this is where I once again find myself. Let's put this up there on the screen. Twitter permanently suspended Marjorie Taylor Greene's account. The social media service said that the Republican congresswoman had violated its policy on coronavirus misinformation.

So specifically, Ms. Greene had been suspended after five separate strikes for posting what they say is, quote, misleading COVID-19 misinformation policy. Now, I actually think it's very important in order to highlight that term. Misleading. Not false information. Misleading information. Now, I don't know if you've spent any time on Twitter. Pretty much everything is misleading. There's only 200 and something characters that you're even allowed to tweet. Selective screenshots and more go viral all the time with fake news and fake information. I think we're probably better off, even though it's really annoying, in order to have that out there. Now, specifically to what Ms. Green tweeted, the specific tweet, the fifth tweet that violated their policy. She said, quote,

that there were extremely high amounts of COVID vaccine deaths, of high amounts of COVID vaccine deaths, including a quote chart that pulled from information on the government database of vaccine adverse event reporting system. Would I use the term extremely high amounts of COVID vaccine debts? No. However, she posted a chart from a government database. Now, for those who don't know, it's called the VAERS database. VAERS is all self-reported. It's very difficult to know whether it's real or not, you know, whether anybody can technically do it. Some people look at it as gospel. Some people look at it as only 1% or whatever of all the vaccine deaths. Regardless, it is a government database. And, you know, I don't agree with what she said. But at the end of the day, if you look at the

actual strike itself, she posted a chart from a government website, Crystal. and misinterpreting data is something that happens on Twitter all the time. Ask any of these idiots who still believe in supply-side economics. I see it every day on my Twitter feed. And what really pissed me off is that some of the things that she was given a strike for before that, this one in particular, was whenever she said that COVID is not dangerous unless you are obese or over the age of 65. That is an objectively true statement. Now, I'm not saying that you can't still die or get hospitalized whenever you're under the age of 65 and not obese, but it's extremely unlikely to the point where there are a lot of other common illnesses where you're a lot more, uh, a lot more at risk for. And so when you say quote, not dangerous

for people, unless they're obese or over age 65 from both a directional and objectively true way of talking, especially in terms of Twitter, that is correct that, you know, the overall policy here is just leading a lot up to interpretation where if you want to set this standard, fine, but we all know then it's not going to be applied equally. I think that's the big problem. Another one of her strikes, her fourth strike in August, was she posted that the vaccines were, quote, failing. So, and I don't know what the first two were.

Yeah, they don't tell us what the first one. But listen, I mean, I think everything she's posting is misleading. I don't think there's any doubt about that. More of the point is, number one, I don't want a bunch of tech oligarchs interpreting public health information, which we already know they've done incorrectly and been wrong about. We've seen throughout this pandemic, even scientists who are really well intentioned have gotten things wrong and had to adjust on the fly. So even when the people who are total experts and have dedicated their life to, you know, understanding what's going on here are getting things wrong, you think that Twitter is going to be 100% on where things stand. Another issue here is, like it or not,

public elected Marjorie Taylor Greene. That's the real problem is that the public is electing people like Marjorie Taylor Greene. And there's a whole reason that we talk about a lot on this show why the country has gotten to this place where morons like this who are wildly irresponsible are put in positions of power. You are not going to solve that issue by just kicking them off of this platform. Furthermore, to your point, there has been a lot of misleading misinformation spread by people on the liberal side as well. Things that are, you know, anti-size. I mean, we talked about one just a minute ago, New York having this policy of like race-based discrimination. And there was a lot of discourse that seemed to indicate that people were more at risk from COVID just because of their race. That's not true.

That is misleading. What it really is is the underlying health conditions and factors, things like obesity, diabetes, your social, what your job is, what your lifestyle is, all of those things. ultimately see it applied in the same way because certain misinformation is comfortable for elites and certain misinformation is not. And so that's the other issue is, listen, I still wouldn't support it if it was applied evenly, but at least then you'd say, okay, well, I see that you're doing this across the board and at least there's some transparency about how this is going, but this is just extremely selective. Again, I don't like Marjorie Taylor Greene, and I think she's very irresponsible. And I don't think you should be listening to what she has to say about COVID. But that is the reality of a democracy. It's a free country. People who suck and people

who have bad takes and who put crappy information out there are still allowed to speak. And if we had a healthy society, we would be able to evaluate these claims and have a discussion about it. And trying to push them out of the public square has not worked to move our country in a better direction. And these people should not be put in a position of power to determine who gets to speak and who doesn't. And let me give you the perfect example of why. Put this up there on the screen. The current COVID misinformation policy from Twitter says that criticism of official regulations and restrictions, even on the grounds of efficacy, are justifications for strikes and bans. Now, when the CDC itself and Dr. Fauci admit that the official regulations and restrictions are not based in science, but are based upon what they think that the public can tolerate, and then you are not even, you're even banning the ability in order to criticize that on efficacy, congratulations, you just created the grounds for a police state. I mean, I don't know what else you can describe it

in order to have it so that the people in charge who have outright admitted they are putting policy into effect, which is not grounded in the science, but actually grounded in terms of social and public engineering, and then make it so that you can't even question the underlying efficacy of whether these are in charge. Think Australia's COVID camps, for example. Then how can you possibly say that you stand for anything but in serving as like an enforcement arm of the state? And, you know, unfortunately, all of this seems to be the case under the new CEO of Twitter. We'll remind you, put this up there with the new CEO, Parag Agarwal, had previously said that their job is, quote, not to be bound by the First Amendment. And every day we seem to see that, you know, coming forward, we saw that

idiotic policy about, oh, we're going to remove stuff of people, you know, who have not consented to be allowed in the photo. I mean, which effectively destroys a lot of journalism and the ability for viral moments in order to go and we all know exactly which viral moments we're going to get take down. The selective way in which all of this is being applied is just really a dramatic, terrible way to have a public, a free country and to have any public discourse whatsoever. And, you know, Crystal, you had this idea to get this mashup of all these blue checks celebrating this stuff. These are the people who run stuff. Put this up there on the screen. Lawrence Tribe, Marjorie Taylor Greene suspended. Goodbye, good riddance. Do her official account next. To be clear, he's calling for her government-issued Twitter account. Marjorie Taylor Greene personal account

has been suspended. A great move by Twitter and a win for public health and truth. Okay. I'm glad Marjorie Taylor Greene was banned from Twitter, but she needs to be censored and expelled from the Congress for the same reasons. Who agrees? These are the people who are in charge. They're celebrating this stuff. They're, you know, the elite tastemakers. And these are who Twitter are responding to. You want to live in a country run by these people? Absolutely not. We can't have this. Look, and I know there's a lot of hypocrisy. Whenever left people get banned and right people don't speak up, I agree with you. We speak out about it all the time here on the show, on every side, from BDS people who have been silenced to

also, yes, Marjorie Taylor Greene. That's how it has to be. There's no other way. Yeah, that's right. And I was thinking this through, too. I mean, you can easily see, because sometimes people like myself are very critical of big pharma and very critical of the fact that there is, you know, profit at the center of all of their decision making can get branded as anti-vax. I'm encouraging everybody to get your vaccinations in this show. I myself am vaccinated. I'm boosted. My kids are vaccinated, whatever. But the questioning even of the motive of big pharma is enough. Or Bill Gates or any of these people. Exactly. In some liberal circles to get you branded as anti-vax, you could easily see that type of just accurate discourse of what their motives are becoming problematic in a space like Twitter and then having the power to ban you just from questioning the wonderful motives of the big

pharma giants or tech giants for that matter. So this stuff doesn't stay just in the lane where you might want it or feel comfortable. I mean, listen, we both said a million times it's been nice having Donald Trump off of Twitter. That doesn't mean that it was ultimately the right decision. And the same thing here. Yeah, maybe it feels a little nicer on Twitter to have Marjorie Taylor Greene banned. That does not ultimately mean that it was the right decision and in the grand scheme of things, the right direction for our democracy to go in. Yeah, 100 percent correct. All right.

We wanted to highlight this because obviously inflation is on the minds of everybody. This is literally the number one concern of majority of Americans. Huge issue has spiked significantly. And there have been a lot of really bad takes and analysis or very selective takes and analysis of what exactly is driving that inflation? Larry Summers, who has been honestly one of the worst actors in economics for decades, had a particularly aggressive take about what he said was not driving inflation. And he, I'll get to those tweets in a minute, but he sort of aggressively said it is 100% not monopoly pricing power. It is not corporations just

jacking up their prices because they can and using the cover of inflation. Of course, our great friend Matt Stoller had to break that completely down and dispel the rumors that Larry Summers spreading there. Let's go ahead and put Matt Stoller's tweet up on the screen. So he shows here the corporate profit increase from 2019 to 2021 from $1 trillion to $1.7 trillion. That's $2,100 per American. Yes, you pay more than $2,000 a year for everything that you did before the pandemic purely because corporate profits have gone up that much. So this is really, really important to note. At the same time that we're being told that these corporations are under such price pressure from inputs, from labor, that they're

just forced to increase prices, their profits are going through the roof, especially large corporations. Well, those two things don't square. If you have these massive profit margins, then the price increase can't all be attributed to just your costs have increased because then you wouldn't see any profit increase at all. You may even see a profit decrease ultimately in that scenario. Matt wrote an entire post breaking down these numbers. And it's quite revealing because the other pieces, corporations and Wall Street, they're not even denying that this is the case. Yeah, they admit this is true.

There have been a number of these quarterly earnings calls where they talk to their investors and reporters and whatever, where they are admitting that they have been able to lift prices even beyond what would have been demanded by inflation using inflation as a cover story. And Wall Street has also that, you know, bankers who are analyzing stock, they have been looking for the same thing. Companies that have pricing power so that they can go even beyond what inflation is demanding that they do. Matt did some sort of back of the envelope type calculations and found that, in fact, somewhere around 60% of the increase in inflation over what it normally is, is attributable to corporate profits. Corporations using the excuse of inflation to jack up prices and to hurt you. By the way, there was also, and I hadn't seen this, he writes that there was a set of data that came from digital.com. It's a survey research firm.

They asked retail businesses about inflation. A majority, 56% of retailers, told digital.com inflation has given them the ability to raise prices beyond what's required to offset higher costs. And also, unsurprisingly, those price hikes are concentrated among large retailers. 63% of large firms have used inflation as an excuse to jack up prices. That's as opposed to 52% of small and medium-sized businesses. And the price increases from those large enterprises are much, much more. They have jacked up prices 50% or more compared to 6% for small and medium-sized enterprises. All that means is that if you have monopoly market power in a particular segment of the economy, you look around, you see all this inflation discourse,

and you say, you know what? I can get away with it. Consumers are expecting prices to increase. I can get away with it. And that is undeniable looking at the numbers here. Just to again show you what Larry Summers was saying all about this that Matt thoroughly debunked. Let's go ahead and put Larry's first tweet on the screen here. He says the emerging claim that antitrust can combat inflation reflects quite, quote, science denial, which is a very interesting use of terms there. There are many areas like transitory inflation where serious economists differ. Antitrust as an anti-inflation strategy is not one of them. That's very untrue. Next tweet from Larry Summers. He says, monopoly may lead to high prices, but there is no reason to expect it to lead to rising prices

unless it is increasing. There is no basis whatsoever thinking that monopoly power has increased during the past year in which inflation has greatly accelerated. So his argument is, look, monopoly power hasn't gotten worse, so why would price gouging get worse? Stoller exposes here that since they have the excuse of inflation, they can get away with it because the only check on them ultimately is consumer outrage and potentially, you know, government calling them out and government outrage. And since they have this excuse of inflation to run with, they're able to get away with it. That's the problem that we have right now is we have an inept government with no trust from the public. The public doesn't feel like Biden's doing anything about inflation. Also, because he's not addressing both sides of the equation.

He wants to try and blame it all on corporations. Look, it's about 60 percent. By the way, I wish I would. I have heard. I mean, he's not addressing both sides of the equation. He wants to try and blame it all on corporations. Look, it's about 60%. By the way, that's a lot. Look, I wish he would. I have heard. I mean, he's barely said anything about it. They did that one thing from the podium about meat packing. He put out like some one statement about it.

That's right. That's the one thing that he did. But he's not also even addressing the other part. And that's all we're trying to present to you is this is a very complicated story, which is that it's incredibly multifaceted. It's a huge confluence of events. And if you believe, as I think we do and most people should, that big corporations will use anything as an excuse in order to screw you over to their shareholders in order to make more money for

themselves, that is absolutely part of the story. You can even believe, I believe incorrectly, that government spending might have caused that. But you can't look at that chart and deny this. This is government data, not just government data. This is self-reported aggregated data from the corporations themselves about their actual profits. They're telling you how much money they make. They're like, here it is. This is exactly how much. Profit and loss. Profit after taxes, even. This is what it looks like. And it's up by billions and billions of dollars. And so when you look at that, you can understand very clearly too from that data from the self-reported study that small businesses are not the ones who are doing this by and large.

In fact, they're probably the ones being screwed most by the supply chain crisis. It's the people who have the economies of scale who probably could survive some sort of a supply crunch and, yes, pass on some of that to the consumer who are then tackling onto that an increase in price. And here's the worst part. Nobody's getting paid more. It's not like they're increasing wages. You know, they're not increasing wages. Or even if they are, they're being dragged. They're kicking and screaming, as we're going to be talking with our guests from Starbucks.

They're making record profits. They're certainly not increasing wages enough to offset the impact of inflation. The $2,000 price for everybody. Right, exactly. And that's where really this becomes such a big problem because we have seen some wage increases, but they're being eaten and more by inflation. So ultimately people, majority of people, end up worse off because of the increase of costs here. The reason this is important is because even if you accept that part, and I think that this is true, that part of why you have inflation is because people, because of the

pandemic relief programs, had a little bit more money in their pockets. What you choose to focus on and what you choose to ignore determines what your response will be. So if you pin it all on, well, people got more money in their bank account, so we got to deal with that. Well, what's the response to that then? It's, well, we got to have austerity. We got to cut these programs. We got to make sure people are worse off so that they can spend less money. That's the solution that he's advocated for. People like Larry Summers, and there are many others like him, are advocating for, well, if we just focus on the spending, the government spending side, then we need to pull back that money, make sure people are worse off so that they cannot spend. What I'm saying is we need to focus on, you know, corporations are doing just fine. Focus on that side.

Focus on the part that Matt Stoller focuses on, that they have way too much power and allows them to manipulate and take it. This is not a free market. This is not anything like, you know, what people who do believe in capitalism, what they would want to see in terms of a free market. They have all of this pricing power. Go after that. And yeah, try to deal with some of the supply shocks and the supply chain issues as well,

which Biden has done sort of like a fumbling and inept try to deal with. But the problem is not that people have actual money and are doing a little bit better thanks to the like, you know, $600 checks that they got. It's actually fizzling out. We see that consistently. Yeah, that they're spending down and depleting their bank accounts. People feel like the largest percentage, remember we tracked this, says that they expect things to get worse for them economically. So we're actually at this place where people are getting backed up against the wall again. And people like Larry Summers, they want to further pull the rug out from under them rather than turning around to these corporations and saying, hey, you guys are making record-breaking profits. What's going on here?

This is not all you're just, oh, we have to pass on the cost to consumers. It's a bunch of bullshit. Yeah, 100%. All right, we do have a little bit of good news that we wanted to make sure we got into the show, which is that there are a lot of places around the country that are going to have minimum wage increase, even though they weren't able to get it done at the federal level. Let's put this Axios information up on the screen here. It's a tear sheet. Record number of minimum wage increases set for 2022. They cite a report from the National Employment Law Project that found that 25 states

and 56 municipalities are going to raise their minimum wages by the end of 2022. In a lot of areas, that wage floor is going to meet or exceed $15 per hour. They have more information here. 47 cities and counties by the end of this year are going to have wages that meet or exceed $15 per hour. That includes D.C., includes 11 different California localities where a $15 minimum wage has already been met, and further wage increases to account for inflation are expected. There are 10 new states with laws in place looking to reach minimum wage of $15 or more by a specific amount of time. So a lot of progress here. On the flip side, there are still 20 states that have not raised

the minimum wage below the federal floor, which is $7.25 an hour, which is pathetic, which has been stuck at that level since 2009, which is the longest time in the history of the program of minimum wage that has gone without an increase, which is pathetic. But at least some states and localities are trying to make up for it on their own terms. Yeah, we want to try and highlight this. I mean, it's always good news whenever we see that. And yes, I'm not going to lie, with the price of goods increasing, some of it's going to be negated, but at least take-home pay will keep pace at least somewhat. Let's also put this up there from the Washington Post, a really interesting piece about the most unusual job market in modern American history. And some of the key takeaways there are that demand for workers right now has recovered, but the number of willing workers has not.

And we've consistently pointed this out. There's a lot of reasons for this. Some people have left the workforce, some who are older, on the older side of the spectrum. Some people decided that they like spending time more with their kids, so they just simply don't want to go back to work. And some people also cannot find a job in their desired category and don't necessarily want to go back to the type of employment that they were doing before. So that's pretty interesting. But the other thing is that it is still one of the fastest and slowest recoveries at the same time.

It's the fastest return for the unemployment rate, but the slowest return in modern history for labor force participation. And I think that we have to try and keep coming back to this, which is that there's a lot of reasons, Crystal, that people just aren't going back to work. And some of them are good if you value those, like we're saying, spending time more with the children. Also, you know, with all the school disruptions that you tell me about, I think it's pretty crazy that you even get to come here and do the show all the time. I don't know how that worked. Right? So this is repeating itself on a level all across the entire country. There's a lot of people who have to deal with the same thing.

A lot of people said, hey, driving for Uber really sucks. Hey, working, you know, you always point to this in nursing homes. You know, those workers got hammered and they're like, you know what, screw this. I'm not doing this anymore. There's a lot of jobs like that across the whole country. The burnout is very real, and it is making it so that we have both the fastest recovery in terms of the actual unemployment rate. And this is what the Biden people never seem to understand. They're like, we have one of the best economies in history.

People are still dislodged. They feel upset. Nothing is normal. Nothing is real. School, close, on is real. School, clothes, on, off. CDC, they change the recommendation every other day and then they admit some fake reason as to why they're doing so. Nothing is yet back to the way where people want it to be. They don't feel like they personally are going in the right direction.

There's a lot of different reasons for that, and exactly whether you can even solve that is a very, very difficult thing. But the one piece of good news within this has been the blue-collar great resignation with the ability of blue-collar workers across this country to quit basically as they see fit and immediately seek employment for a higher wage, usually in the same town. Now, the wage is still not high enough. It should be a lot higher, but that is one good thing I think that's come from this. Yeah. I mean, there's a mix here of one of the most interesting charts in this is they look at why people are saying that they left their jobs. And there seems to be a mix of some things that are affirmative choices where people reevaluate it. And this is the part that I think is so encouraging. People basically reevaluating what really counts in their lives and having a little bit of market power to be able to stand up for themselves and say, I'm not working this shitty low paid job where I'm

disrespected and treated as less than human anymore. I'm just not going to do that. And in some cases, they were sort of forced into that reassessment because so many people were laid off at the beginning of the pandemic. And so you didn't have a choice of staying at that shitty low-paid job and you had to reevaluate. So some of it is choice and affirmative, and that's really positive. Some of it seems to not be choice. So for some people, some people are really still worried about getting sick and worried about caring for people in their life who have gotten sick from COVID. Some people are struggling to find child care. This is another issue of child care has become way more expensive.

It's also one of the industries that's been hard hit by those workers in that industry are very low paid. So this is one of the areas where there's been huge turnover and child care facilities having trouble finding workers at the wage that they're paying, which would indicate that the government should get involved and help to subsidize those wages so that there are wildly more available and affordable child care so that people who want to work and are struggling to find affordable child care would be able to do it. There are some people who just say, I don't want to work. You know, that could be a sort of life assessment thing. So there's a real interesting mixed bag here. The number one reason, though, 38 percent of those who aren't working cited retirement. There were so many early retirements of people who just during the pandemic, they said, you know what? We're done here. I'm not going back. I'm at a point where I can make it work. I'm going to make it work. I'm just leaving. And that's kind of the largest percent of ultimately what we see going on here. And of course, we see the way that people are reorienting their relationship to the workplace in many, many different ways. We're going to talk to these two Starbucks workers who are

part of the successful union drive up in Buffalo. We see more Starbucks filing for union elections across the country. It seems to have been that sort of domino effect that the Starbucks executives most feared and that the Amazon executives also really feared with regards to Bessemer. We've, of course, tracked the strike waves. We've tracked the great resignation. We've tracked the workers at fast food places that, you know, they just have a mass. They're just done. They like lock up the door and put a little note on the door and say, we're done here. We're going somewhere else. So there's clearly a major reorientation that is happening here that, you know, it's possible possible that it really shakes out for the better. Right now, those wage gains are being eaten by inflation, but the hope is that the wage gains persist and that the prices return back to normal.

So we'll see. It's something we certainly will be tracking very, very closely all this year long. There's a high level of discontent. I don't think that's going away anytime soon. I don't think any election's going to solve that. But from discontent often is born new choices, re-evaluations, and more. So I hope that we can come out on the other side of this thing.

Indeed. All right, let's move on to Epstein. Okay, you know, really, I was wiping away a tear there for Ghislaine Maxwell. Just kidding. Really felt for her. Really felt for her. She was convicted on all but one count in her trial. But this isn't really about her actual conviction.

It's more about we didn't learn all that much from this trial. She never took the stand. In terms of the government evidence, these were crimes committed in the early 2000s and even in the 1990s. They very narrowly focused on sex trafficking allegations against Ms. Maxwell. But we didn't really learn a whole lot about Jeffrey Epstein, about the power elite, about the people they associated with lot about Jeffrey Epstein, about the power elite, about the people they associated with, about potential blackmail, about videotapes,

about all of the information that the FBI possesses. And in some ways, Crystal, this is the perfect little bowtie ending that the feds could ever ask for. Ghislaine Maxwell is going to jail. Yes. However, nothing was revealed in open court against the most powerful people on earth. Some might say that was by design because now all of those files in the FBI, they're not coming out. They're part of an investigation. They can remain secret for all time. Open court was the last and only opportunity for us to learn about so much of what these two were up to for several decades. And shockingly, even the New York Times did a decent

job of this. Let's put this up there on the screen. Maxwell prosecutors won their case, but shed little light on Epstein. And as they point to, we had a rare window into Jeffrey Epstein. And yet we got a very narrow blockbuster, a very narrow trial where high profile friends like Donald Trump and Bill Clinton came up only in passing. Just a few of the financial tractions and of transactions and a fraction of the thousands of FBI photos were even offered into evidence. Talk of Epstein's private planes, while much fascination, came off as staid. And what they say there is we learned very, very little about his actual lifestyle,

about the financial connections between him, people like Bill Gates and others. Yes, we learned a tad bit about the way that they were able to schmooze amongst the power elite, but we didn't learn about any potential blackmail or more. And the way that this entire thing, both from the media level, in terms of the lack of coverage around this, lack of understanding generally outside of these reporters about these larger connections of the Epstein network, have largely been ignored. And actually, on the BBC network, our British friends, who, just a reminder, one of their princes was literally ensnared in all this, to react to this trial and the verdict. Who do you think

they brought on? Put this up there. The BBC had to apologize after they had Alan Dershowitz, one of Epstein's own lawyers on their program, to react. They said, oh, well, his appearance did not meet our editorial standards. We did not make the relevant background clear to our audience. We will look into how this happened. Dershowitz not only served as a lawyer to Epstein, he has been accused by Virginia Gouffre, one of the most credible Epstein survivors,

as himself being a recipient of, I don't know how to say this, like, participating in sexual assault, basically. She claims, he denies this. Yeah, he denies it, to be clear. She claims that he raped her when she was 16. Right. That's who they chose to have on to evaluate the Maxwell trial.

Right. And he took the opportunity to spin it in his favor. That's right. Because of the prosecutors, what they call this thin-to-win strategy of only presenting the very narrowest evidence and not bringing a lot of the other accusers in, Virginia Goufray did not take the stand. She was not called as a witness. of his time on the BBC to smear her and say the reason she wasn't called is because she's not credible and to make the case that, you know, this really exonerates him and Prince Andrew. So that's what he used his airtime to do without them even disclosing. I mean,

you shouldn't have this guy on anyway, unless you're going to grill him about the sweetheart deal that he helped to get for Epstein. But at the very least, unless you're going to grill him about the sweetheart deal that he helped to get for Epstein. But at the very least, if you're going to have him on, you need to disclose his very personal entanglements with this case. They didn't do that. Fox News also had him on, which again, why? But at the very least, they did say, you know, that he was involved and disclosed that his arrangements here. But why you would turn to Alan Dershowitz for any of this is so beyond comprehension. It is one of the most egregious things. And this says a high bar that I have ever seen on cable news.

And then you add on top of this in terms of tying up loose ends, so to speak. Well, right after the Maxwell verdict, the Department of Justice, let's put this up there, had decided to end the criminal case against the two Manhattan jail guards who admitted to falsifying records on the night that Epstein, quote unquote,

killed himself on their watch. So these two gentlemen were both having the charges dismissed against them because, according to the government, they both complied with the six-month deferred prosecution agreements that they had agreed to in May. And just remember, these two gents, the prison guards, have admitted to falsifying records, and according to them, were falling

asleep and surfing the internet that night rather than checking on Epstein every 30 minutes. They're caught on video, at least according to the Department of Justice, of doing all this. The records of the night that they were there and all that have been falsified. They've admitted to falsifying them, and they are somehow now getting the charges dropped against them. Remember at the time, Bill Barr was like, oh, this is an outrage. We're going to go after everybody in charge. He ordered a review of the Bureau of Prisons, the people, the guards. Everybody was like, no, it was the guards' fault. They were asleep. They were shirking their duty. They were surfing the web. They weren't doing anything. We're going to go after them. And then the day after the trial, it comes out and the feds are like, no, we're not going to prosecute them at all. So these guys aren't going to jail. They're off. You know, they can do whatever they want now. And the actual trial itself did not reveal a lot about Epstein. This is it. I mean, this was the last chance, Crystal. We had two chances in court. It was the Maxwell trial, and it was these guards in order to at least learn about the quote-unquote suicide and the circumstances around that, and now it's just disappeared. So, you know, two years later, they've done a very good job of covering up all their tracks. I don't know another way in order to describe it. It really is remarkable that, I mean, look, journalists are probably not really going to pursue this.

Oh, no. Very uncomfortable. Yeah, I'd love to interview these gentlemen. By the way journalists are probably not really going to pursue this. Oh, no. Very uncomfortable. I'd love to interview these gentlemen. By the way, they have an open invitation to the show. The court discovery process was one of the only mechanisms that we really had to learn more. And listen, I'm very glad to see Colleen Maxwell go away, probably, possibly for the rest of her life. Yeah, I see in terms of sentencing how many people were complicit how many people were directly guilty this is i mean we'll never know that's

basically what this looks like now we will never know a lot of sides of relief out there around the world among the global elite who had any sort of involvement with Epstein. And to take it back to the first thin-to-win strategy of the prosecutors against Maxwell, which they're hailing as a success because they did secure a guilty verdict, this is not the way that the strategy always works. So with Harvey Weinstein, they point out in this New York Times article, for example, they brought a lot of accusers in and even ones who weren't directly implicated in the charges that were levied against him to paint a portrait and a context of this is a repeated predator. behavior here because they had this very, very narrow strategy and focus. We really learned very little, and we are likely to learn very little, period. End of story.

That's right. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, everyone, it is hard to believe, but 2022 is upon us, and you know what that means. Time to look straight past the midterms towards that 2024 presidential race. I'm actually serious here. Jockeying and plotting, they have already started and all of the maneuvering will be supercharged by what a manifestly weak president Joe Biden has certainly turned out to be. Now, on the Republican side, there's only one real question. Will Trump run again? If he does, he's going to be the nominee. And who knows what that dude is

going to do? But it seems more likely than not that he will try to reclaim the White House. After all, he's around throwing his weight around in the party, making endorsements, ramping up his media appearances, setting up his cringy social media company, etc. On the Democratic side, with an incumbent president, there should be little to nothing interesting happening. But instead, there's actually a lot more intrigue on the Democratic side than with the GOP. Biden is a terrible president, and he is also extremely old. And while he does insist that he plans on running again, literally no one in D.C. is confident that that is actually going to happen. Now, if Biden steps aside, his vice president

would be the obvious successor. But Kamala Harris is even less popular than Joe Biden somehow. That has caused the donor class to start plotting in secret meetings how they could push Mayor Pete ahead of Kamala in line. It's an amusing soap opera that I will certainly track with popcorn in hand, but from my perspective, it couldn't possibly matter less which careerist corporate tool destined to lose they decide to prop up. But there is a new possibility taking shape that's a bit more intriguing. The left, disgusted with the lies, broken promises, and sheer incompetence of the Biden presidency, are considering putting up a primary challenger of their own against him in the Democratic primary.

Not the progressives here in elected office in D.C. They've sadly been largely neutered. But someone outside of elected office, Nina Turner, Marianne Williamson, have both been named. They have the potential to step up. Politico has that report. Quote, the left is already looking to 2024. Some want to see a Biden primary challenge. Quote, will there be a progressive challenger? Yes, said one prominent Democrat. And the quote in the article subhead there comes courtesy of former Bernie campaign manager Jeff Weaver. Other strategists from the Bernie left voiced similar sentiments. AOC's former comms director Corbyn Trent had this to say of Biden. He is deeply unpopular. He's old as shit. He's largely been ineffective, unless we're counting judges or whatever the hell inside baseball scorecard we're using. And I think he'll probably get demolished in the midterms.

People will smell opportunity and D.C. is filled with people who want to be president. So what are the odds that such a challenge could succeed? Pretty much zero. Close to zero. Bernie Sanders is the best politician the left has had in decades, and he wasn't able to get the job done against Biden when it was a wide open field. The odds of taking out an incumbent of your own party are very, very small. But very small, close to zero, is still better than absolute zero. And if you don't try, defeat is certain. Look, you never know what craziness might unfold. First of all, Biden may well not run or may not live to see the next election.

And second of all, if anything was going to turn our politics upside down and inside out, it is the last couple of years that we have just lived through. We've dealt with a once-in-a-century pandemic in which trillions of dollars of wealth were funneled to the top of society while the working class was given a little pat on the head, told they were special essential workers, and sent back out there to generate more profits for Mr. Bezos. And what's more, we face a dire reality right now. The country desperately needs to be rescued. It needs to be rescued from the Trump Republicans, but it needs almost as urgently to be rescued from the Biden-Pelosi Democrats. I am 100% behind any effort with even a tiny minuscule chance of accomplishing that goal.

Obviously, a rising labor movement is one really critical part of that. But electoral politics, that's another critical piece. Because it sure seems like we're at a tipping point of catastrophe on basically every front. You might say we're at a breaking point. Destabilizing inequality has accelerated dramatically as wealth by the trillions poured into the bank accounts of the wealthiest among us while Congress handed out comparative pennies to the broader public. Whatever you think about the fairness of the situation, history is littered with examples of societies which collapse and revolutions that are sparked when the public rejects the basic distribution of wealth and sees through whatever bullshit rationalizations the

ruling class dreams up to justify their grotesque largesse. Government capture by moneyed interests has reached extreme levels as well, as evidenced by the fact that the one really transformative bill that has passed under Trump or Biden was a giant corporate tax cut. In the Biden era, corporate America has been able to absolutely run the table. They cherry-picked only the business-friendly infrastructure deal and killed off the broader social and climate agenda altogether. Meanwhile, many of our legislators are brazenly on the take. Pelosi recently scoffed at the idea that they should not be gambling in the stock market while also legislating with access to inside information. She then proceeded to make some big trades over the holiday break by millions in call options and companies like Google, Roblox, and Disney,

thanks to our friend Unusual Whales for tracking that one. Of course, the climate crisis continues unabated. This holiday season brought with it more horrifying records and shocking weather extremes. Tornadoes ripped across the Midwest in a way that has literally never happened before in December. The previous record high number of tornadoes for the month was shattered by the 163 tracked in December this year. Suburban Colorado faced down an urban firestorm that forced shoppers to flee a Costco under apocalyptic skies of gusting winds and swirling embers. Let's look at that. It's insane. Here in D.C., we were setting records that were actually kind of nice if they were a bit unsettling. We had a bunch of 70 degree days as we bathed in the second warmest December ever recorded.

And then the temperature abruptly dropped 30 degrees in one day. And this morning it snowed. And look, with the anniversary of January 6th looming, we got to admit the whole Democratic experiment we're engaged in here. It's kind of on life support, folks. Increasing numbers of people trust no one, believe nothing, and have fallen into complete nihilism. Or on the other hand, they fall prey to phony saviors and rigid ideologies that see the world in dangerous binaries of good versus evil. That is the logical end state of a nation with no organizing values outside of money and outside of profit. So, of course, faced with the primary challenge, establishment Democrats

will try to argue that any threat to their control of the Democratic Party amounts to an existential threat to the nation. Sure, they've done nothing but allow conditions to ripen for the return of Trump or something worse, but they'll still claim that they are the only one standing between America and the abyss. They'll insist that any dissent within the party will inevitably lead to fascism, that any honest critics must actually be doing the work of Putin or Trump or white nationalists. But we can't be afraid of more democracy. In fact, it is the only thing, both in the workplace and in the nation at large, with even a sliver of a chance of saving us. I hope that someone courageous and uncompromising

steps up, not for some phony notion of pressuring Biden or pushing Biden on this or that issue, but to take their best shot to actually win. Because a long shot at this point is the only shot that we've got. And Sagar, at the very least, these people deserve to be challenged in a way that is not stupid. 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, Happy New Year, everybody. I missed you all very dearly. I hope that you spent it with some family and some friends. Luckily, the people I was hanging out with, for the most part,

were able to avoid Omicron. But I'm sure that many of you know, as I do, dozens, if not hundreds, of people who tested positive over the holidays. A near universal theme that I heard from many who tested positive or who were left in the lurch by the public health elite was twofold. Number one, they failed us. This story, you already know, hours-long lines for tests, no tests available in pharmacies, Biden's so-called testing distribution not arriving for weeks. The fact that they never gave any therapeutic guidance when it was clear, even the booster shot, doesn't give you all that testing distribution not arriving for weeks. The fact that they never gave any therapeutic guidance when it was clear, even the booster shot, doesn't give you all that much protection from catching COVID. But the second thing I heard was, okay, now that I've got it, I'm done. I'm

done with the restrictions. I'm done with their BS. I'm done with their idiotic recommendations. I'm done with my kids wearing masks. I'm finished. I'm kaput. I could not have coincided better with the new year of 2022. And while a central part of this show is that the elite are fundamentally corrupt and out of touch with the majority of the American people, something I've tried to emphasize is that if just enough of you get together and you make your voice heard, then they are forced to respond in a little tiny way. In their response, we saw remarkably how full of it the COVID regime has now been for the last two years, and how we need to keep pressuring them to destroy them forever. Now, we've known for some time that

Dr. Fauci, many of the CDC's recommendations around social distancing or masks in schools are not based whatsoever in science, but instead in social engineering, trying to manipulate public opinion toward a restriction-minded goal. And as many millions of people got Omicron and realized whatsoever in science, but instead in social engineering, trying to manipulate public opinion toward a restriction-minded goal. And as many millions of people got Omicron and realized, hey, wasn't that bad after all, and others saw that even if they lived under a rock, they were still going to be exposed, a lot of people started questioning the guidance. And just like that, the CDC changed its recommendation for quarantine after testing positive for COVID,

not based on any science whatsoever, based upon what they thought that the public could handle. Take a listen. The purpose of it was, is that given the wave, the extraordinary unprecedented wave of infections that we are experiencing now and will certainly experience more of in the next few weeks, that there is the danger that there will be so many people who are being isolated, who are asymptomatic for the full 10 days, that you could have a major negative impact on our ability to keep society running. So the decision was made, although it's not completely risk-free, of saying, let's get that cut in half so that we could have 50%, namely half of the 10 days, and 50% of that time, people can actually be out with a mask in society. Did you hear that, everybody? Science

himself just had to acknowledge you have to balance COVID risk with the ability to have a society functioning. This singular point of criticism has been used by people like myself for over a year to argue for the end of COVID restrictions. And it was brushed off by the mentally ill people in charge of public health who screamed at us about science and COVID zero the entire time. But now the dam is breaking. Once they said it out loud, they're not going back. Once they've admitted it, you can't put it back in the bottle. Omicron has been a real come to Jesus moment for the public health elite. They can scream double masking and boosters at you all you want. And most of them still end up getting COVID themselves or exposed to it in the last three months. All you can do is assess your risk

level, get the vaccine if you're worried about hospitalization and death, and then live your freaking life. Once the release of the vaccine, they have done everything that they can to shut that message down, usually by pointing to dishonest statistics of case counts while ignoring dropping hospitalization and death. And in the case of children, pointing to them, who were already terribly ill otherwise, and then seeing that the reason that they died was COVID. This again is something that Omicron ripped the Band-Aid off for millions of parents,

who saw their kids essentially get a cold and then brush it off. Once again, it forced a stunning admission from Mr. Science, who has refused to acknowledge these basic facts around children and was forced to do so on TV. Let's take a listen. But the other important thing is that if you look at the children who are hospitalized, many of them are hospitalized with COVID as opposed to because of COVID. And what we mean by that, if a child goes in the hospital, they automatically get tested for COVID and they get counted as a COVID hospitalized individual. When in fact, they may go in for a broken leg or appendicitis or something like that. So it's over counting the number of children who are quote hospitalized with COVID as opposed to because of COVID.

I think I'm going to lose my mind. What's next? They're going to acknowledge natural immunity? Yes. It's maddening to see Fauci, the CDC, and others admit the basic truths that we've all been shouting for the last year. But here's the thing. It only shows that we're winning. People are waking up day after day to the terrible restrictions that they have been forced upon with no grounding whatsoever in science. And the more they are forced to admit that they don't act with only science in mind, the closer we get to normalcy. The tragedy, of course, is that it's all nearly a year too late. How many children lost a year of their lives with remote school or masks and the attendant social development? How many college students were bilked out of tens of thousands of dollars to sit at home with their parents and miss out on some of the best years of their lives? How many working class kids right out of high school couldn't get an entry level job because of whatever dumb law localities are forcing upon their people?

When you start to answer those questions, your heart actually breaks. But once again, I'll show you the hopeful way out of this. When even the most stringent liars like Dr. Fauci are forced to admit the truth, then there is hope. It's because the masses of this country are fed up. They're done. They won't live their lives with such significant description for something they can plainly see with their two eyes is not a threat to their life or the vast majority of other people's. But there is a darker truth here I want everyone to be aware of too. We only matter when we band together in very, very, very large groups. We can only break elite consensus on a case-by-case basis when they directly are destroying our lives, and even then, it takes a really long time.

We are governed not by the masses, but by elite public opinion. It's a much bigger problem that describes nearly every area of American public life. And we cannot fix it tomorrow. The first step of fixing a problem is acknowledging it. So spread the word, red pill the masses, so to speak. This is our only way out. I mean, how incredible was that, Crystal? When he's like talking about, oh, he's like, well, we did it because society. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sager's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at breakingpoints.com. All right, guys.

So we're very excited to be joined now by Jazz Brissac and Danny Rojas. So Jazz works at that Starbucks that unionized in Buffalo. Danny's Starbucks is voting on a unionization effort in Buffalo coming up. So we'll get both the past and the present and the future all in one segment. Jazz, let me start with you. Just talk to us a little bit about what this whole experience was like from start to finish and bring us up to speed. Well, a whole bunch of us created an organizing committee at the end of August of baristas in Buffalo who were trying to unionize. There were three stores that immediately got very strong majorities. My store was one of them and the Genesee store,

which has ballots that are currently impounded because the company tried to stack the debt against the unionizing baristas was another one. We are confident that that one's also going to end up being recognized. But what we really wanted was just to come together and have a real voice and a real democracy in our workplace. Starbucks is a place that, you know, many of us have been at for a long time that we love working at, but it is also a place where we have no real say in what our work life is like. And Starbucks response, you know, we were kind of naive. They say that they're a progressive, better kind of company. And we thought, you know, they might sign the fair election principles and agree to actually work with us as we were trying to organize.

Instead, they parachuted in what they called the Starbucks SWAT team from the president of Starbucks North America, Rossanne Williams, on down and flooded us with over 100 corporate managers. Wow. So in about the four months that it took us to win our union, we've seen a lot of different union busting tactics, but we've stayed as strong as we can and are looking forward to make this happen again. Talk to us about what that victory meant in Buffalo to you and then your efforts and the other barriers that you're facing at the Starbucks locations that you both work at and also are working with. As a partner at one of the stores

who is still waiting on their election date, it gave us a lot of hope and clarity that it can be done because we saw one store successfully do it. And we are going to have more. We've seen stores file throughout the country since that victory. And it's building a lot of excitement around my store for both partners and customers. I have partners who were already pro-union who felt even more like sure of their decision. I have partners who joined the effort after seeing Elmwood basically like attain their right to unionize and become like certified.

Right. Jazz, what were the, some of the tactics that, that shocked you most? Cause I think you made a really interesting and important point that a lot of these companies that built, build themselves as progressive, different, et cetera, and may undertake efforts, you know, to on, on certain fronts to, to live and embody progressive values. But then when it comes to unionization, it's like, no, absolutely no, absolutely not in that sphere. Starbucks is a primary example of that. So talk to us about some of the tactics that they used that were ultimately

pretty shocking to you and your co-workers. I mean, the biggest thing that they did was bring in, quote unquote, support managers. They're not really here to support us. They're here to spy on us and watch us and try to make sure we can't have conversations. We've had at this point five additional managers at various points working in the store covering the shifts that they want watchful eyes on. So that was pretty shocking and overwhelming because there's no non-work area to have a conversation in. All the conversations have been happening in the store. And they've been pulling us into anti-union presentations. They've been using their emergency text alert system to send us, you must vote no for the union. And they've been cracking down, I think, even harder, which Danny can weigh in on, at some of the stores that are going next in the pipeline. For example, coworkers at another store that's having an election have been put on final written warnings or minor incidents. And I think what they realized is, you know, they are not stopping their movement.

They couldn't beat us at Elmwood. So now they're trying even more intense psychological warfare on some of those commitments. Danny, talk to us a little bit about that. What's going on in terms of what Jazz is talking about? I have a partner at another store who is also part of that trio of filing stores. And they were put on a final written warning for a minor offense. And this is something that I'm no stranger to, even pre-unionizing efforts at Starbucks. Starbucks definitely, when you speak out against your store manager or when you're trying to seek out change by calling our partner resources number um they tend to use corrective actions as a means to silence you and make you feel alone um that has happened to me personally before unionizing um so with that

like prior knowledge i was able to go into this knowing like the game i had to play if i wanted to come out of this successful and i feel feel that I was put through what I went through initially to be able to be that additional support for my partners and kind of help them navigate this situation in a way where we can come out of it kind of untouched by corporate, even though I can't protect them from everything, I do feel very proud of how they have handled everything since we filed. You know, Jazz, in a sense, their sort of worst nightmare is coming true because obviously why they spent so much money and put in so much time and effort and use such aggressive tactics to try to stop this

effort is they were worried about domino effect. They're worried that next Danny store is going to unionize. And of course, we've seen stores not just in Buffalo, but now in other places across the country also file for union elections. On the other hand, the reason they do this is because, number one, they want control. Number two, they're worried, are this going to hurt our business? But what have you seen there at your store in terms of how has business been? Has this destroyed Starbucks business in Buffalo? How have customers ultimately responded to this effort? Customers have been overwhelmingly supportive. I mean, we even have customers coming in and hanging Buffalo is a Union Town ornaments on our lobby Christmas tree. Tips have

been higher. Business has been really good. I think we've had regulars who aren't the most talkative coming in and handing us bags of union pins to wear. It's been actually adorable. And I think going into contract negotiations, that's something that we want to harness because while obviously there's economic issues and issues of, you know, health and safety right now, half of our store is in COVID self-isolation and we're trying to, you know, make sure that everyone's taken care of. But we also want to put first and foremost that we need to win the right to organize for everyone so that no one has to go through this kind of fight again

and really set a standard in a, not a purely economic way, but in a power shifting way for what this industry looks like and what it means to be a Starbucks partner. And Jazz, what are some of the things that you all be pushing for in your contract? Because as important as this first victory is, we also know that companies have a whole range of tactics that they use to try to never negotiate that first contract. When we saw this happen with Dollar General in Missouri, there was a store that voted for a union. The company engaged in these sort of sham contract negotiations. And ultimately, when they were forced to recognize the union, they just shut

the store down. So what are some of the things that you will be pushing for in terms of contract negotiations? And what have your interactions with corporate been like to this point? Well, I mean, most of my interactions with corporate have been when, you know, they've had top executives in the stores telling us to vote no. I haven't had that many interactions with them. But I think going into contract negotiations, we've asked Starbucks to sign an agreement for equity and sustainability that basically says, you know, we're recognizing the union. We will stop fighting the union going forward and respect all partners' right to organize. And we're going to actually make this negotiations a place where we recognize all the diverse

voices of partners and try to make this company the best and most sustainable it can be. I think from, you know, everything from seniority pay and better benefits so that no one's going into medical debt for, you know, healthcare needs to actually making sure that our company is living up to what it should be doing on a sustainability front on making sure that everyone is respected and truly treated equally. Because certainly there's a lot of divides in our workplace and Starbucks could be doing more on equitable promotions and equitable treatment. Danny, finally, just tell us what the timeline is.

When is your election scheduled? When are people going to start voting? We currently don't have a scheduled election date. We're hoping to get some more clarity on that. Like at some point today, there's a lot of like delays and moving parts. And we were hoping to have an election date by now. If I can make my best prediction, I would say anytime starting by the end of the month, I'm hoping, but I don't have any specific information on the date. Got it. Well, how can people support you guys? Jazz, you can go first. Go ahead. We're asking that folks call on Starbucks to sign on to our agreement for equity and sustainability, actually recognize our right to organize and bargain a contract that partners and Starbucks corporate can be proud of. Got it. What about you, Danny? I think the same sentiment that our customers can definitely hold Starbucks accountable, reach out and express why you want to see your favorite baristas be able to get the right to organize and why you think it could impact their livelihood.

And just like community support in Buffalo, we started handing out lawn signs. And I think that the more you can get your community involved in your unionizing efforts, you'll be able to see a larger payoff. And I think that resonates with Starbucks values as well, which will be really impactful. Yeah. Well, consider it called for. Yeah, absolutely. Guys, we've been tracking this closely with a lot of excitement. Please keep us updated and a happy new year to stay in touch guys. Happy new year. Thank you. Absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you guys so much for watching.

Uh, we really appreciate it. It was amazing year for us last year. We succeeded far beyond our wildest dreams. We've got big stuff in store. I mean, that union segment and more, we talked about different ways that we can go out on the road. Things are percolating, hiring more people in order to cover both the labor organizing. And look, we got to gear up as Crystal's monologue was all about.

Election's coming. It's an election year. Not just the midterms, man. The presidential election. The presidential and the midterms are starting. We are going to have people all across this country. We're getting ready

for how that all looks like. So we need your support. Link is down there in the description. We really appreciate it. We miss you guys so much. I'm so happy to be back here. It's nice to be back, guys. We love you. Happy New Year, and we will see you back here tomorrow. 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.

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