Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 4/12/24: Would Boeing Murder A Whistleblower, Ticketmaster Criminal Conspiracy

Episode Date: April 12, 2024

First, James Li looks at the recent Boeing whistleblower death and speaks to an investigations editor at The American Prospect, then Matt Stoller does a Big breakdown on Livenation Ticketmaster's control of the live industry so corrupt it verges on criminal conspiracy. James Li: https://www.youtube.com/@5149jamesli Matt Stoller: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/ To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And this ranks right up there in the pantheon of Rhode Island fraudsters. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The voices and the perspectives that matter 24-7 because our stories deserve to be heard. Listen to the BIN News This Hour podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, guys. Ready or not, 2024 is here, and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support.

But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Would Boeing murder a whistleblower? My name is James Lee, and you're watching Beyond the Headlines on Breaking Points. This morning, police in Charleston, South Carolina, tell NBC News they are aware of the death of a former Boeing a notable whistleblower known for his substantial safety and quality reports to the Federal Aviation Administration concerning Boeing's production of the 787 Dreamliner dead in his car in the parking lot of his hotel on the final day of depositions in his whistleblower case against Boeing. The curious timing of his death have sparked some suspicions of foul play. And adding to that mystery, reports also indicate that he had previously cautioned a family friend not to accept any official narrative about his death as a suicide.

He wasn't concerned about safety because I asked him, I said, aren't you scared? And he said, and his voice and the way he would talk, I ain't scared. He said, but if anything happens to me, it's not suicide. Joining us today is Mo Tachik. She is the investigations editor at the American Prospect, who has done some fantastic reporting on Boeing. Thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. All right. We're not going to bury the lead today.

Did Boeing put out a hit on whistleblower John Barnett? Obviously, everything is still under investigation. But I know in your recent article, you mentioned talking to a few of his old colleagues, also a former Boeing executive. What are their thoughts? Also, at this point, what do we know for sure is that John Barnett was found dead in the in his Dodge Ram in the parking lot of a hotel where he was staying in Charleston, South Carolina, to give a deposition that had lasted was it was a three day deposition. He was on the third day. And he was found dead in his car from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was holding a silver pistol. My sense is that the pistol did belong to him, but that hasn't been confirmed one way or the other. And there was something that was in the driver's seat that looked like

something like a note. Again, the details on that have not really been released yet. You know, so my first impression was that, oh, this, you know, this guy must have killed himself, right? I mean, it kind of doesn't, you know, it really, like, I'm always open to the idea that, you know, foul play might be there. I started to change my mind when I think a lot of workers, former Boeing workers in both the factories and in the executive offices were completely open to the notion that Boeing might have done it. I spoke to one of his former co-workers in particular, who was very terrified. This person did not want to be identified didn't want you know anything that they told me to be you know to make them identifiable

but this person told me that and this person had you know blown the whistle at this same boeing factory and dealt with a lot of fallout as a result of that and this person told me straight up if i die you know please like i'm there's no way i would ever commit suicide like even if it is a car accident like please like get it investigated i mean that was just not what i expected i didn't i did not expect anybody who worked at boeing to think that Boeing would do this. There's incredibly bad morale within that company. Everybody who cared about the company for decades, sometimes a half century, you know, the people who have, you know, I've written about Boeing for about five years on and off. And most of my sources, you know, worked there for at least 30 years. It was

very close to their heart. And that's why, you know, when you hear, when you talk to the old Boeing heads, they always bring up the McDonnell Douglas merger. You know, this is 26 years ago, but it feels like yesterday to a lot of these folks, because that is when everything changed and learning more about John Barnett. He was at this point in his, in his case where the homestretch was in sight. He was really excited. He was thinking about writing a book. He was thinking about trying to do some sort of a podcast. He was thinking about finally enjoying his retirement for once.

He was slated to likely receive a fair bit of money because he'd been kind of pushed out of the company early. He had no real motive to kill himself, especially on day three of a three-day deposition. On the other hand, of course, again, they did a very good job. Anyone who's seen the octopus murders, you know, if somebody assassinated him, they weren't sloppy about it. You know, they really did a very good job at making it look like a potential suicide. Of course, you know, there's a lot that we don't know. We don't know what that note looks

like. That's extremely important evidence. We don't know what the, you know, what the wound looks like. All of that is, has yet to come out. Yeah. Do we have a, I'm wondering if we have a timeline for the investigation? So you said it was the Charleston Police Department that's involved. Is it just them or their federal agencies getting in on the investigation? So you said it was the Charleston Police Department that's involved. Is it just them or their federal agencies getting in on the action? No federal agencies as of yet. I, you know, again, the law enforcement has been, you know, repeatedly said,

hey, it's still under investigation. And everybody who knows anything, like his family and his lawyer, they've been pretty tight-lipped because they don't want to antagonize the thing that I you know that is a little bit troubling I spoke with I'm a medical examiner in in Jacksonville and he said you know like in suicide and in one thing about suspected suicides is that generally the in a lot of you you know, bigger, uh, areas these

days, they don't actually have medical examiners doing this autopsies. Those autopsies are oftentimes performed by coroner assistants. And I spoke, I spoke to some, um, a, a, a criminal profiler from, um, you know, who, who had been with the FBI for a long time, worked on the, um, Unabomber case. And this guy, Jim Fitzgerald, told me that it seemed like it was the type of thing that if you were going to look at it as a potential assassination, the whole aspect, the whole saga made him think that it was like a warning sign, that it wasn't necessarily that they were trying to prevent him from testifying since he had already given two days of depositions, but that they were trying to send out a warning to anybody else who might think about, you know, potentially blowing

the whistle themselves. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about, there's one interesting quote that I read in your article. I believe it was an anonymous quote from a former Boeing executive. And you wrote, or he said that it's a top secret military contractor. Remember, there are spies everywhere. And more importantly, there is a principle in American law that there's no such thing as an accidental death

during the commission of a felony. I was wondering if you could expand on that. What did he mean by this? So here's the thing, and this is the broader context here boeing has been extraordinary lucky up till now you know 350 346 people passenger and crew died on 737 max crashes in 2018 and 2019 uh four and a half months apart almost almost identical crashes. And after the first 189 died on a Lion Air accident, they knew that there was something wrong. Everybody in Boeing knew

that this was going to happen again. It was just a matter of when, not if. They did not, they should have obviously grounded the plane after the first 189 passengers and crew died. That is obvious. They did not do that. Instead of doing that, they authorized $20 billion in additional share buybacks and introduced a program to eliminate quality control, essentially. So when they talk about the commission of a felony, they're talking about the murder of those 157 additional passengers. And this is a felony that required a lot of, you know, a pretty vast conspiracy to actually get away with because Boeing was under criminal investigation after the first MCAS crash in 2018. The criminal investigation widened, understandably, after the second crash. It widened to include the 787 factory. It widened to include an investigation that involved extensive interviews of John Barnett.

And then it narrowed. Then sometime in 2020, the prosecutors that were handling the case against Boeing got changed and the case got transferred to Texas from the New York Fraud Department. 6th, 2021, understandably, this never made any headlines. But on January 6th, 2021, Boeing signed what is known as a deferred prosecution agreement. And the Justice Department essentially agreed to not prosecute Boeing, because as it said, you know, the problems that they found in the company were not systemic, and they involved very few people. So while Boeing got away with it, you know, with this, this real, I mean, you can't even call it a slap on the wrist. It's like a wrist massage. Yeah, I think you compared that. Yeah, I think you compared that to in one of your articles is like similar to the sweetheart deal that Jeffrey Epstein got in 2007. So I'm wondering how, how is Boeing able to secure such a deal from the DOJ? Well, it's, it's not simply similar. It involves a lot of the same people.

It involves, you know, very senior partners at the mega law firm, Kirkland and Ellis. Crucially, Boeing's chief criminal defense attorney in this case was the deputy attorney general under, I believe it was McKaysey during the Bush administration, who is the highest known official to sign off on Jeffrey Epstein's 2007 non-prosecution agreement. Both of those agreements were very similar in that they required lies, right? You know, the government actually lies and And it's the firm prosecution agreement on Boeing saying that, you know, there were no systemic problems, everything that we found, you know, this is a solidly ethical company. Nothing happened. This is just provably false.

And similarly with Epstein, you know, I forget what the exact phrasing was, but that agreement actually indemnified all of his conspirators, even those who were not even named. Both agreements drafted by senior partners at Kirkland and Ellis and put together by a lot of, there's a lot of cross-pollination in those two agreements. In fact, Merrick Garland's DOJ made the case that they aren't actually victims. The poor people who died on Ethiopia 301, they were not actually the victims of the crime. The only victim of Boeing's crime is the FAA. Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot of disturbing details coming out right now. But before we wrap, I just, I wanted to ask, or I wanted to talk about Boeing's future for a minute,

because I think it's important that maybe it's in America's best interest to have a competent commercial airline manufacturer. And we did see some leadership reshuffle after the MAX crashes you were talking about in 2018, 2019. And now we're also seeing another leadership reshuffle with Dave Calhoun. He's stepping down along with some other executives at the end of the year with some pretty robust exit packages. And then it all depends on, it's like tied to the company's stock price in the coming years. So my question is, can Boeing actually course correct here if stock performance is still the number one incentive that's driving executive compensation? I don't really understand the stock. I would say no. I would say that

Boeing, that the stock price, there needs to be some sort of extreme management overhaul. When they did appoint, I mean, it was very obvious. Calhoun was like, it was like when Tim Geithner was nominated for treasury secretary. pretty much everyone who knew who Tim Geithner was, was like, oh God, this is nothing's going to happen. No one's going to get in trouble. City, everybody is just going to get away with it. And that's what happened. And David Calhoun is a similar figure. He was the lead director of the board. He was the biggest, I mean, he's a guy who worked at GE and Blackstone. He doesn't actually show up to the office ever. He changed where the office was. He uses the perch to fly his plane around. I mean, it's a completely worthless piece of shit. I say that without knowing it.

But the latest trendy thing to say about Boeing is that what they really need is Larry Culp, the current CEO of GE, a sort of an irony because Boeing's three out of their last four CEOs have come from GE, have been proteges of Jack Welch, and they've absolutely fucked Boeing just the same way that Jack Welch ultimately fucked GE by completely financializing it and refusing to grapple with the fact that building something that involves 4 million parts is not the same thing as, you know, like manufacturing light bulbs or post-it notes, which is what, you know, McNerney used to do. So I think that there is a real effort within the sort of, you know, Davos set to say, hey, no, you know, actually the market can take care of this. And if they just hire the right guy, the right MBA, this guy, Larry Culp, who maybe isn't as much of a sociopath, who believe in building companies and putting them on the road to growth and who believe in quality, it has been such a you know total it's

very clear to like everyone in aviation now that boeing actually can't build a plane that they have lost the ability to competently build an airplane and that is like an existential problem and it's not reflected in the stock price i think a lot of that stuff is, you know, the product of algorithms and, you know, this sort of conspiracy of algorithms and fraud. Yeah, as an MBA myself, I can confirm a lot of sociopathic behavior that I see. And they don't know, they don't think it's that way but um it is from outside looking in it definitely is um anyways um this is obviously developing story so hope to have you back on really quick anywhere you want to point the audience to if you if they want to find or if you want them to find more of your work if you look at prospect.org and and search for boeing

i think you'll find a lot of my stories. I also write a lot about healthcare and all kinds of things. So anything that involves the intersection of organized crime and finance, I like to sniff around those cases. Awesome. Well, everybody go follow Mo. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. That is it for me this week. If you're looking for more documentary style, deep dives on various topics related to business, politics, and society, you can follow me on my YouTube channel, 5149 with James Lee.

The link will be in the description below. As always, keep on tuning into Breaking Points and thank you for your time today. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. I've never found her. And it haunts me to this day.

The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister.

There's so many questions that we've never got any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero. She was stoic, modest, tough, someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her, until they didn't. I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real? Is this real?

Is this real? Is this real? I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying. This is a story all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip-hop. It's Black Music Month, and We Need to Talk is tapping in.

I'm Nyla Simone, breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives. My favorite line on there was, My son and my daughter gonna be proud when they hear my old tapes. Now I'm curious, do they rap along now? Yeah, because I bring him on going to be proud when they hear my old tapes. Yeah. Now, I'm curious. Do they, like, rap along now? Yeah, because I bring him on tour with me. And he's getting older now, too.

So his friends are starting to understand what that type of music is. And they're starting to be like, yo, your dad's, like, really the GOAT. Like, he's a legend. So he gets it. What does it mean to leave behind a music legacy for your family? It means a lot to me. Just having a good catalog and just being able to make people feel good. Like that's what's really important. And that's what stands out is that our music changes people's lives for the better.

So the fact that my kids get to benefit off of that, I'm really happy. Or my family in general. Let's talk about the music that moves us. To hear this and more on how music and culture collide, listen to We Need to Talk from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Matt Stoller, author of Monopoly-focused newsletter, Big, and an antitrust policy analyst. In this big breakdown, I'm going to ask the question, is Live Nation Ticketmaster, the company that controls most of the live entertainment industry, in fact, a criminal conspiracy? You might think that's a bold question, and it is. But some explosive new documents just came to light

that suggest that, well, it's a question worth asking. Let's dive in. In 2010, the live entertainment industry was in shock when Live Nation, the nation's leading concert promoter, bought Ticketmaster, which basically had a monopoly over ticketing software and was a major player in artist management. It was a very controversial deal, and Ticketmaster had already bought out most of its other competitors in ticketing software and really upset Pearl Jam in the 1990s. It was a well-known market power problem. But the government's antitrust division under Obama allowed the deal to go forward anyway. In fact, it seems like they were sort of proud of doing that. Let's take a look at this public picture that was put on the DOJ's website. So that publicly released photo shows the head of the antitrust division, Christine Varney, her number two, William Cavanaugh, and their advisor,

Gene Kimmelman, announcing that they were allowing that merger and talking to reporters about it. Now, the Biden Antitrust Division is very different than the Obama Antitrust Division. And they have been investigating Live Nation Ticketmaster, the firm that the Obama administration allowed to form. They've been investigating it for years. And when firms are being investigated, they tend to lawyer up. And so that's what Live Nation did, hiring an old antitrust lawyer named Dan Wall to represent them against potential monopolization charges that could be coming from the antitrust division. Wall defended Live Nation publicly as part of a PR campaign earlier last month in a blog post. He wrote that, you know, you might think that Live Nation charges

a lot for tickets, but that's really just supply and demand for a popular artist. The corporation itself charges low prices, not high ones. He even put up a comparison of commissions charged by online marketplaces, from Twitch to Airbnb to Uber, to show how little Live Nation charges. Let's take a look. You see, Live Nation charges less than Twitch, StubHub, Uber, Airbnb, etc., etc. Concert promotion, Wall wrote, is not a highly profitable business, even for Live Nation, end quote. So look at that commission. It's a measly 7% for Live Nation Ticketmaster. Now, sure, Live Nation charges consumers a lot of money and doesn't pay much to artists. I mean, this was Wall's argument. But they don't,

he wrote, set the ticket price. And even worse for Live Nation shareholders, at least, it's just not a very good business. Wall concluded, quote, the narrative that Ticketmaster fees are responsible for high ticket prices makes no sense. According to Wall, the middleman giant affects at most 2% of the price of a ticket for its trouble. Still, all of that argument from Dan Wall from Live Nation Ticketmaster feels weird. It sounds like it's not true, considering that Live Nation CEO Michael Rapinoe made $139 million in 2022. That's a lot of money for someone in just such a terrible business. Well, the reason it sounds like it's not true is because, well, it's not true. Or at least it's not true according to new documents released by Congressman Bill Pascrell from litigation in 2019 based on Live Nation's own financial data. These documents are from a court case involving a concert at the New Jersey State Fair in 2011.

Now, I just want to tell you where these documents came from because it's kind of funny. We often think about monopolists as sort of dominant and powerful and all-knowing. And that litigation has been going on for 13 years. At a certain point, the plaintiffs hired an expert. His name is Richard Barnett. He's one of the top scholars in the business. And he looked at Live Nation's confidential records, and he wrote about how the corporation actually works.

And the plaintiffs then submitted that report to the court. And the judge, unfortunately, ordered it sealed so that no one could read it. Saying, ah, this has got confidential information or whatnot. And that should have been that. Except, and here's where the stupidity of a monopolist comes in. Live Nation or someone's on Live Nation's legal team or Dan Wall's team or someone like that, they screwed up and they accidentally uploaded the report to a public court site, Pacer, where Pascrell got his hands on it. He just downloaded it. Then he sent it out in a press release and that's how we have

the documents. Okay, so what's the case all about that shows how Live Nation really works? Well, it starts with a concert when in 2011, the head of the New Jersey State Fair, his name is Al Dorso, hired a company called Juice Entertainment run by two experienced concert promoters, to put on a concert. Now, Live Nation, they told Live Nation, do you want to do this? Live Nation wasn't interested. But as soon as they got wind that Juice Entertainment was doing it and started to book acts, Live Nation demanded to co-produce the show. And Dorso, who was running the State Fair, was just like, okay, you guys work it out. And he later put it, you know, Live Nation, they were the 800-pound gorilla.

I said, go see if you can work out a deal. That's what he was saying to Juice. Now, Juice and Live Nation couldn't work out a deal. And then Live Nation managed to get Juice fired. How? Well, the smaller firm sued Live Nation, claiming the giant coerced performers into not signing with Juice to appear at the fair and threatened to withhold its ticketing services to the venue, the state-owned Meadowlands Sports Complex, if it were not allowed

to be a partner. That's for public reporting. In other words, Live Nation used dominance in other lines of business, artist promotion, and ticketing software to thwart a rival, which is exactly why the Obama staffers like Gene Kimmelman should have blocked the merger in the first place. But this situation leaves a question. Why didn't Juice consent to let Live Nation co-produce the event? I mean, half the profit is still better than no profit, right? Well, the reason is, according to Juice, that Live Nation offered a deal that would have saddled the firm and artists with the costs while Live Nation itself took the profits.

In this purported arrangement, Live Nation and Juice would have split the cost of putting on the event, like renting the venue, the soundstage, and so forth. They would have also shared profits from ticket sales with artists and with each other, and that sounds good so far. The problem is what came next. It's in the accounting. Here's the expert report. Live Nation negotiated third-party expenses like rental costs into the venues directly with vendors in exchange for exclusive financial gains not disclosed to their artists or their agents, managers, or independent co-promoters in the form of rebates. So in other words, Live Nation had secret side deals with vendors

to inflate costs by overpaying those vendors and venues, which meant that any profit from the event would evaporate. It would look like a loss. Co-promoters and artists who share in profits would lose out and would be told that the show just wasn't profitable. But the thing is, those vendors, those venues who had gotten extra money by being paid inflated costs would in turn remit that money back to Live Nation in the form of secret rebates. In other words, Juice would pay the inflated costs that would get furtively funneled back to Live Nation, along with all the profits from the show. Now, Live Nation didn't disclose any of this revenue diversion with the artist to whom it

had a legal obligation, with whom it had contracts, which is why Juice's lawyer said that the corporation, quote, essentially defrauds everyone involved. Now, these kinds of secret kickbacks ensured what Juice's lawyer called the, quote, financial ruin, end quote, of co-promoters. Now, of course, Live Nation claimed it was losing money or not making very much money on any particular event, and it wasn't. But that's because the profit was coming in through rebates, which, according to this expert, Barnett, went on to align in the accounting statement called, quote, contribution margin, end quote. So Juice's experts found, so interestingly, Barnett even found that Live Nation kept two sets of books. So in one case, they posted an entry of

$90,000 rent for settlement, but only $75,000 internally for the same item. They routinely put in profit and loss statements large losses while admitting that events actually made money. So that's just one event, all right? That's one, a state fair in New Jersey. How much was this contribution margin across all of Live Nation? I don't precisely know, and you can throw other things into that accounting line, but there are hints of amounts. So in the third quarter of 2021, which is the last time they used the term contribution margin that I could find, it was $747 million, probably in the billions today. And that's where CEO Michael Rapinoe's nine-figure

payday is probably coming from. Live Nation is generating a great deal of revenue, but somehow shows low margins, lots of events where they're not making money, but somehow the cash is coming in. Now, that's just a price hike, right? It's a way of extracting more revenue. But it's also hidden, and hiding the price hikes is important. Because monopolization, which is about controlling a market and then extracting by your pricing power, is harder to prove if you show low margins, if you show that you're not charging very much. Their antitrust lawyer, Dan Wall, can just write, poor little live nation, our business is terrible. Yeah, and we all know that you bill by the hour,

Dan, on your lovely silk sheets. Now, let's take a step back and recognize what we're really looking at. It's not just an extractive scheme. This is about power. Power over our culture. Power over an entire industry. Basically, Live Nation can present venues or other people in the business, anyone in the business pretty much, with a choice. If you cooperate quietly, you'll get extra hidden revenue. And that means cooperating with knowing dishonesty in the business. If not, well, Live Nation will maybe work with your rival or may just buy into the market to compete with you directly, may not let artists come to your shows. At any point, too, I mean, it's not just the blunt instrument. At any point, Live Nation can dial up more corporations in and around the live event space, with each one presenting additional options for fees and rebates and

what is essentially financial engineering. Okay, is this report true? I mean, why, like, you know, Live Nation would say, oh, they got it totally wrong. They didn't disprove it because I don't think they can. But the question is reasonable. Is the report true? We don't know. The expert is well-respected. He looked at Live Nation's financial data. And it is easy to believe the worst about Live Nation Ticketmaster. They have a really bad reputation in the industry and then among consumers. But the reason I think it's true, and I'm not sure, but the reason I buy it is because this particular story is consistent with the behavior of a lot of firms, many dominant

middlemen firms in our economy, from pharmacy benefit managers to Amazon and their relationship with third-party sellers, how they mediate between third-party sellers and consumers, to big banks who securitized mortgages in the financial crisis, to the advertising technology industry, and so on and so forth. Now, most of them don't use two sets of books. That's kind of like, you know, that's a little bit, you know, above the, I'm not saying everyone's a criminal conspiracy, two sets of books, kind of a red flag. But in general, it's a business model. Middlemen who have market power, they use fees and kickbacks, often hidden through a complex maze of subsidiaries or overlapping lines of business, to extract in ways that

are really hard to see. It's inefficient. It's immoral. And more importantly, it creates a climate of fear. The problem is, it's also just the way that we do business today. Fortunately, Live Nation is under investigation and there are a bunch of companies that are under investigation. But this lesson, if this is true, and I think it is, but if it's true, this is why Live Nation needs to be broken up, and more broadly, why

we need to get rid of this way of doing business, these secret kickbacks and rebates throughout the whole economy. Thanks for watching this big breakdown on the Breaking Points channel. If you'd like to know more about how big business and our economy really works, go to the link in the description below and sign up for my market power focused newsletter, BIC. Thanks and have a good one. 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. Stay informed, empowered, and ahead of the curve with the BIN News This Hour podcast. Updated hourly to bring you the latest stories shaping the Black community. From breaking headlines to cultural milestones, the Black Information Network delivers the facts, the voices, and the perspectives that matter 24-7. Because our stories deserve to be heard. Listen to the BIN News This Hour podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I've seen a lot of stuff over 30 years, you know. Some very despicable crime and things that are kind of tough to wrap your head around.

And this ranks right up there in the pantheon of Rhode Island fraudsters. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.