Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 4/1/23: Saagar Reacts To Trump Indictment, Covid Billionaires, Tech Leaders Open Letter Moratorium On A.I., Woke Millenials Hijacked Media, 40 Dead In Migrant Detention Fire, International Workers Strikes

Episode Date: April 1, 2023

This weekend we bring you Saagar reacting at home when the Trump Indictment first was announced, the new billionaires that emerged from the results of the Pandemic, an open letter from Tech Leaders calling for a Moratorium on A.I., Saagar interviews Amber Athey on her new book "The Snowflakes' Revolt" on how woke millennials took over Media, a Migrant Detention Center fire near the Mexico border resulted in the deaths of at least 40 people, and Max Alvarez interviews protestors in France and the UK on their respective worker's strikes.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/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. 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. Hello, everybody. Breaking and extraordinary news right now. President Donald J. Trump, former president of the United States, his attorney, Susan Nichols, has now confirmed that President Trump was indicted today in New York by a Manhattan D.A. They have not yet told us exactly what the charge is, although we can likely surmise that it involves the hush

money payment made to Stormy Daniels of $130,000. So we'll first put the breaking news up there on the screen. It was first reported by the New York Times, quickly confirmed by all media outlets, as well as President Trump's legal team. Now, let's go to the second one here. What exactly is all of this and what's going on for those who are just joining us as to why such an indictment might have even happened? All of it comes back to the $130,000 hush money payment made from Donald Trump and his lawyer, Michael Cohen, to Stormy Daniels to cover up an alleged tryst between the two of them in 2006 that happened in Lake Tahoe. So you can go and read the details of that if you're interested. Elsewhere, I'm not going to get into it. But effectively, all of this came to light in 2018 in a felony case against Michael Cohen

in which federal prosecutors alleged that that $130,000 payment was illegally recorded as a personal payment from the Trump Organization to Michael Cohen for legal services when it might have had instead to do with a campaign finance violation. Basically, the allegation was that the only reason that they were paying this $130,000 was not for the personal embarrassment that Trump would have suffered, but because it would have damaged his 2016 campaign. Thus, they should have recorded it properly. Cohen pled guilty to that charge.

But ultimately, no charge was actually brought against Trump. Now, how does that relate to New York state law? Well, let's take a step back and realize that the actual charge here is not only do we know that Trump was indicted in the Manhattan by the Manhattan grand jury, but also he was indicted with a felony. So what does that mean? Now, the only real charge here that makes sense, we don't have a confirmation of this, but pure speculation out is a falsifying business records or felony bookkeeping fraud under article 175 of the New York penal law. Now, a conviction for felony bookkeeping fraud in the state of New York carries a sentence of up to four years. But to prove that, it's actually going to be pretty difficult. So what do they have to prove? To be a felony rather than a misdemeanor, prosecutors have to show

Trump falsified the business records with the intention of committing, aiding, or concealing a second crime. So then we have to ask, what was the second crime? Well, they are thinking of invoking that alleged campaign finance violation that I already described. The how is he going to prove felony now again it was enough to convince a grand jury so maybe uh it's possible it's you know maybe he has non-publican evidence of some other intended offense uh that is around this like if there was any uh intention to deduct the payments as a business expense on the state tax return that also also could be one that they were looking for. Bookkeeping fraud itself has a two-year statute of limitations misdemeanor, and the statute of limitations also expires after five years, including taking into consideration the time that Trump've spoken to, the lawyer that we had on our show, Brad Moss, to discuss this novel theory of the case. It's never been tried before in New York before a judge. So very quickly we know that Trump himself will easily be able to contest some of this far before it gets to trial. Even if it does so, it's very possible that a judge could throw it out.

Now, in terms of also the optics, now, here's what we know. They're going to, by the time that they release the act, by the time they release the indictment before the public, they will have not only notified the lawyer, they will have negotiated some sort of either surrender or release or, you know, it also sets up politically here. Will there be a standoff? Will he refuse to be extradited? What will Ron DeSantis say? What will all of President Trump's, quote unquote, opponents in the race say about this indictment? And then politically, I mean, it's just extraordinary. He's a former president of the United States. He's now been indicted in the state of New York. What is the major Democratic Party going to say? What are the Fulton County grand jury? How will it impact all these federal investigations? So there's a myriad of different things. Also, you know, do have to say that clearly there seems to

have been some sort of scheduling fake out because the schedule originally was not known to the press. Not only that, they had told everybody that they were disbanding for an entire month and going out of town, leaving a lot of including us, you know, this morning talking about how it seemed that they may be skipping town. But it seems that, you know, this was all done in secret. Possibly that the feint was to fake out everybody to think that they had gone home and they weren't going to be doing anything before they ultimately did. So, look, an absolutely, absolutely extraordinary act here done my best to synthesize both what happened why it happened the potential impact of politics and all that let's all just uh take a step back and see what extraordinary actions come in the coming days but history is being made right before our eyes and uh i guess things are just going to get interesting thank you all to our premium

subscribers uh who are signing up at breakingpointss.com, watching the full video on Spotify and all that. We love you all. Thank you for making it so that me and the staff can get these things turned around very quickly for breaking news videos. And we'll continue to keep you guys updated. Thanks. Lots of discussion around COVID and profiteering, some of it on the drug companies, and they certainly did make billions and billions of dollars, but they're not the only ones who profited. New Forbes magazine piece, let's go and put this up there on the screen. Meet the 40 billionaires who got rich fighting COVID-19. Fighting is one way to put it, certainly. A lot of these people are just Chinese, and many of them are consumer products manufacturers who, quote, made billions of

masks and millions, millions of protective overalls and gowns for health care workers. We should remember that one of the problems with personal protective equipment, the PPE, in the early days that we didn't know how to manufacture any of it. So it's great. Actually, Crystal, we created multiple Chinese billionaires who made them for us while we bought them instead of manufacturing themselves. Glad at least they got made somewhere. Yeah, cool. That really worked out well for us. Not a surprise that the CEOs and several executives at Moderna, at Pfizer, and at Biotech all became billionaires off of the COVID-19 vaccine. But really what stuns me is it's like, look, we've talked a lot about the pharmaceutical companies

that have made billions, but really what came away from this was every single person who became a billionaire fighting COVID from a supply perspective and from a health technology perspective, not one of them lived in the United States. Every single one was in China. COVID-19 test manufacturer, China. Medical equipment, China. Personal protective equipment, China. And first of all, there's no such thing as a real billionaire in China, okay? They're one of those where the CCP is like, yeah, you're allowed to become a billionaire in this category and you got to cough up and do whatever we tell you. But second, I'm like, why did we not do any of this ourselves?

You know, it's every, let me read you this one. The health IT, the founder of the healthcare tech firm, which uses AI and big data to help cities conduct contract tracing and coordinate. China, it's like in every case, even in the pharmaceutical, many of these people came from China from the inputs into the vaccines itself. Do we just make nothing anymore? Like not one person on this list from the US had anything to do with manufacturing. It was only with respect to

biotech from the Pfizer vaccine. That's all we apparently are good at, is using government-backed resources to make a vaccine that they didn't even use. Yeah. Or sorry, that they didn't even make. Right. They didn't even do any of the research. Right. I mean, I have to say, things like this make me more and more radicalized of the number of industries that should just be like straight up nationalized or at least a very heavy government involvement. But yeah, I mean, especially with you look at the vaccines, how much was the government involved and did a good job of spinning things up quickly. But then it's, you know, we do, we fund all the research and not just in that moment, but over years. And then all the profit goes to these like new billionaires. And then, yeah, because we have stripped our manufacturing base over decades when we have a crisis such as this.

And it's like, oh, we need masks for our frontline caregivers and we need other PPE and we need these ingredients to make these vaccines. And we need, you know, to have ingredients to make these vaccines and we need, you know, to have capability to speed it up. We just don't have it. It just isn't there. So there's no other choice. And so you become completely dependent on a country that, you know, like it or not, we increasingly have an adversarial relationship with not a great state of affairs. So it was really, really exposed just how incredibly vulnerable we have made ourselves on every front by not valuing the basic capacity to make things that are essential for daily survival at this point. Yeah, no, it's just totally ridiculous. Like reading this, I did that monologue recently about how to become a billionaire in America.

And the point that I made was in the third world countries that what they were not basically second world at this point, they become billionaires off of building things. We are billionaires off financialization and, you know, biotech, which is basically using government backed research to manufacture and then get a legal monopoly with immunity and all of that from the government to become a billionaire. Tell me which one you prefer. How do you want your people to actually get rich? Because they all got rich by producing stuff in labs, building things, in manufacturing facilities and shipping and doing business and hard assets. We don't have any of that. It's all conceptual.

It's all just like moving money around in a new exotic way. Right, yeah. And the Indians too, same thing, manufacturing, manufacturing, manufacturing, and all their generic drug makers and all that, which deliver an actually cheap product to their billion citizens. You know, that's how you really should be able to deliver value. None of what we, our people, every person on our list is just some biotech manufacturer or sorry, some biotech executive involved in the vaccine process itself. You tell me what you want.

Absolutely fascinating development with Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and a number of other tech leaders coming out and saying, we need a moratorium right now on AI developments. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. The open letter, which was distributed with about 1,100 signatories, to be clear, some people dispute that they didn't understand what they were signing. But Elon and Steve Wozniak's signatures are not in dispute here at all, say that technology companies need to cease AI training systems that would be more powerful than the latest large language processing system known as GPT-4. So AI power, they say, tends to correlate with the model size and the number of specialized computer chips that are needed to train it. They're outspoken in their concerns about AI as a threat to humanity. And really, what it comes back to is that we shouldn't forget that Elon was actually an original founder of

OpenAI and decided to leave the organization because he didn't think that they were developing in the right direction. Since then, he has actually warned about censorship within the OpenAI chat GPT platform and what he's been pointing to. The reason I found this really interesting is there's a big split in technology right now. A lot of people are, I wouldn't say AI purists, they're excited about the developments of AI, they're excited about the computational, and you can't help but be.

But then there are others, more visionary founders, people like him and others who have been warning about what some of the dangers are. And they say, hey, we need to develop rules around this. We need to develop some sort of protocol about how we would approach these very tricky political questions. I'm not sure where I fall. I'm curious what you think. If you think about the original development of social media, because nobody knew what

it was going to do, we didn't have preset rules around the First Amendment or other principles that set us up for disasters in the future. So maybe it would make sense. Like, hey, we're in the burgeoning stages. Let's set the agreed upon thing and let's not deviate from it for when the inevitability comes. They're like, look, this is the standard. This is what we've all agreed upon. I tend to be sympathetic to the idea of, hey, let's have a pause and figure out what the hell all this means, because this is unfolding incredibly quickly and the ramifications of it are far reaching in terms of the labor market, in terms of like information distribution, in terms of things that we aren't in terms of news, like everything. This is a small example, but there's just recently this picture of the

Pope that went viral and had like a puffy jacket on. It was funny. Everyone thought this thing was real. Oh, really? Yes. Oh, I didn't know that. To me, it was obviously fake. Initially, you know, this thing was widespread and it looked super real. And obviously, it's minor and of no consequence. But it shows you we're already at that level where there can be, you know, pictures, images, videos, information that goes out that is wildly inaccurate that gets taken up and consumed really quickly.

Again, this is a small example. I thought one piece of Elon's concern about the direction of open AI, I actually did a monologue on this and I thought was really well founded, which is like he says, when I signed up to be co-founder of openAI, the idea was open, like open to the public, transparent, open source and now and nonprofit. Now they've sold this off to Microsoft. Exactly. To use it to, you know, profit them probably at the expense of everybody else, because that's the way that these developments mostly work. We saw from the TikTok hearings, we may love to live in a world where our legislators are like really super on it and with it about what this is and what it means and how to regulate and wrap their arms around it. But we all know that that is not the case. So the idea of not saying, all right, we got to shut this down, but let's have a pause.

Let's think about what this means. Let's think about where this is going and let's be intentional about it from the beginning, given how fast this is all developing. To me, I'm very sympathetic to that position. I am as well. I also just don't know if it's going to be private.

Look, the name of technology that people were like, hey, let's hit pause on this. It never happens. Unless the government comes in and is like, listen, this is the way it's going to be. Voluntarily, somebody will just depart from the consensus and then they'll get all of the benefits.

So it's kind of a prisoner's dilemma. Honestly, I just think it's going to happen regardless. I'm not sure if there's anything that we can do about it. By the way, I don't even believe some of the hype around it. They're like, oh, it's going to replace all white-collar work. I'm like, maybe some. Maybe some. But my point is, we'll see. Like, we should have also some hubris about how much technology or this type of technology actually can fully replace some things.

It can automate a lot, and I think that's great. You know, I saw one example of somebody putting their blood work in OpenAI. Chat GPT was better than their doctor. Yeah. I'm like, okay, that's great. But, like, that's not the reason that people go to the doctor. You know what I mean? Yeah.

They're not going to be able to, like, sit there and it's so open. Maybe, maybe we can get to that, but there's still a lot of finesse and things that still, that you're going to require at least some human input, like the raw input output, like a, for example, like a diagnosis is very different from like emotional therapy or, you know, many of the other things that people even go to the doctor, use medicine in the first place. So that's my take. That's part of what Kevin Roos talked about, the tech reporter for the New York Times, who wrote a book about where some of this is going. And he said, you know, it's easy to discount how much we sort of have a bias towards humanity, where how are you going to feel about, for example, like a work of art that you know was crafted by a human with all of their complex emotions and backstory and all of that versus something that was spit out by AI?

You're not going to have perhaps the same emotional reaction to those things. That's one example. The other example is like, you know, we talked to Starbucks baristas who are organizing sometimes. You could certainly imagine a coffee shop where everything was automated. You punch in your thing. It does your order, whatever. But in reality, that's not the whole reason people are not just going to their favorite coffee shop because they like the coffee. That's part of it.

Part of it is you like that little exchange with the person that you see every morning and being in the line with the other people who are going through their routine as well. Like the humanity of it is part of what you were buying in that experience. And so I agree with you that perhaps some of the most maximalist claims about what this means in the short term, I am also skeptical of, but I'm also open to the idea

that even some of the small changes, like for example, in the news business could in and of themselves be transformative. Yeah, we can still acknowledge Titanic change while also being like, hey, let's not take it too far. I mean, I always use this example, but, you know, self-driving is a good example. Right. So, like, for example, if you ever in a Tesla and they're on full self-driving and you're exiting off of the highway, right, well, it will slow down to like 30 miles per hour on the ramp. Who actually goes 30 miles an hour?

Nobody. And actually, whenever it fully slows down, you're now a danger to everybody in traffic because the flow of traffic is 70, not 30. But technically, it's like we got to go to the speed limit. And then you manually will have to change it back up. It's actually pretty weird. And, you know, when you turn left, who actually makes a right angle left turn angle left turn everybody cuts the line right but the AI doesn't want to cut the line because that's against the rules or if you're in a tunnel and there's like there's like green lights or whatever they'll be like oh it's emergency light

there are all these little things and you're like oh okay like cute there's a reason the humans you know humans drive like we drive very differently technically the speed limit is this what idiot goes to speed limit when the flow of traffic is 65 miles an hour in a 40-mile zone? Computing that or changing that, that's very, very difficult to solve. I just don't see it yet. Yeah, I agree with that. All right. So anyway, we'll keep looking at it because it is a fascinating debate, a little glimpse into our future.

There you go. Joining me now is my old friend Amber Athey. She's the Washington editor at The Spectator, and she's the author of a new book. Let's go and put it up there on the screen. The Snowflakes Revolt, How Woke Millennials Hijacked American Media. Amber's an old friend of mine, as I said, and also a former member of the White House correspondent. And she witnessed both of us, some interesting shenanigans inside the press briefing room at the time that I thought the audience would be interested in. So welcome to the show, Amber. It's good to see you. Yeah, it's good to see you too, Sagar. Thanks for having me.

Yes. All right. So let's dig into a little bit. We were talking a little bit before about the WHCA and what we can get into, how the entire system is rigged, something our audience is really interested in. What do you talk about in the book and what did you witness there that you saw? Yeah, absolutely. I'm actually still a member of the WHCA, believe it or not. They haven't revoked my credentials yet. I know it's truly amazing. But what we uncovered and what I write about in the book is the fact that the entire system of the WHCA is set up to benefit establishment and corporate media outlets. And for those who don't know, most of the access that's given to reporters in that White House briefing room is given to them by the WHCA. It's not an administration decision. So this is something that cuts across all political parties in terms of who's actually

in office. The WHJ is responsible for deciding, for example, who gets permanent seats in the briefing room. And it wouldn't surprise anyone, I think, to hear that the corporate big outlets get the first two rows, which are, of course, the rows that guarantee you a question. And everybody else is either relegated to the back of the room or in our case, Sagar, we actually had to stand in the aisle and just pray that the press secretary could see us around all the cameras and all the other clowns who were in the briefing room on any given day. Yeah, it was a real pain. We've both worked through it, but the system itself, it shouldn't be so difficult for somebody who's not traditionally in the corporate media to be able to get a question in there.

I mean, how does the book in itself, some of the stuff that you uncovered, just align with some of the media coverage that we found so frustrating at that time? Yeah, well, I think the major problem in the media is that it's become an echo chamber filled with people who all basically have the same background. And this goes back to the credentialing system that was implemented in the mid-1900s. One of the major problems with the underlying journalistic ethos of objectivity is that they also decided at that time that you had to have some type of higher education in order to be objective. You had to have basically a training ground. And that training ground was typically through journalism school or at the very least, a bachelor's degree at a major prestigious university. And the big corporate outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post still hire mostly from those universities.

So you have a group of people who tend to come from backgrounds where their parents were white collar. They tend to be wealthier. They're more likely to have lived in a city their entire life, and they're more likely to be liberal. So everyone who's in that briefing room, for the most part, there's a five to one conservative split in terms of who actually gets a seat in the briefing room. They're all kind of asking questions from the same perspective. So that's why you hear over and over and over again, everybody is asking basically the same thing. And any undercovered story really just doesn't get airtime in that room.

Yeah, I think it's really interesting too. You know, if you take it out a little bit further, you know, something we witnessed a lot was just the complete absence in a lot, not even editorially, but from the way that they approach news stories is always from a framework that is both groupthink and also happens to align mostly kind of with establishment thought. So since the time that you wrote the book, do you think that things have gotten better or worse? It's kind of split. I was actually in the briefing room yesterday with Corrine Jean-Pierre, and I heard basically the same thing that we would hear five years ago or three years ago when we were in the briefing room, which was question after question on the exact same topic. And yesterday, John Kirby was in

there talking about this upcoming democracy summit. And they were asking, you know, about which countries are allowed to be included and which ones aren't. And none of them were really asking interesting questions except for Stephen Nelson, who was asking about the IRS's targeting of Matt Taibbi. And that was met with eye rolls from Korean Jean-Pierre, because how dare he actually go off script? But I will say in terms of the larger media, there's been a bit of pushback recently against the illiberal progressives who have been trying to turn journalism into purely activism, specifically at the New York Times, when reporters sided with GLAAD, the LGBTQ plus advocacy organization, to accuse the New York Times of transphobia, the New York Times newsroom leadership actually said that they weren't going to tolerate reporters siding with activist groups any longer

and that they were going to start disciplinary proceedings for the reporters who had done so. And that's a huge shift, of course, from how they reacted to staffers accusing the paper of putting black lives in jeopardy when they published an op-ed from Tom Cotton calling for sending in the National Guard to quell riots in the summer of 2020. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, I agree. You know, you could see two sides

of where things are headed. But I encourage people to go buy the book. We'll have a link down in the description. As I said, Amber is an old friend of mine and I appreciate you joining us. Thanks for the platform, Sagar. Of course. All right. We'll see you guys later. Fire at the Mexican border has killed at least 38 migrants, potentially more held at a detention center just south of the U.S. border, exposing what is the consequence of years of failed immigration policies coupled with recent surges, Biden administration announcements that they're going to get rid of

Title 42, and then immediately saying, well, actually, we're not getting rid of Title 42 until later. And in the meantime, we're going to put in these other restrictions and people are going to have to stay south of the border. And you're going to have to use this app to get across the border. And oh, of course, the app doesn't work because government contract and there's some corruption, who knows what corruption is involved, that they can't make an app. And so you wind up with people crammed into these holding cells. This is apparently, and we could put up this second one for you, this Haaretz reporting that there were some 68 people held without water all day in a cell meant for 50 people. They started protesting. A fire ended up breaking out,

and you end up with this tragedy. What have you made of the reaction so far to this? I think it's been shockingly quiet. I think there hasn't been much reaction to this news, despite the fact that we're talking about 38 people just south of the American border. This is in Ciudad Juarez, so very, very close to the United States, in an official Mexican immigration facility, in an INM facility, the level of death, I mean, that is just a tragic number, incredible. And I feel like there's been sort of crickets from American observers in this question, despite the fact that American immigration policy is almost certainly to blame. It's a huge pull factor. There are plenty of push factors that

we can talk about too. But the reason that so many people are packed into these migrant facilities in Mexico is because right now they feel they have a pretty good chance of getting humanitarian parole in the United States. There are a lot of Guatemalan migrants in this particular facility, according to, this is at least 28 Guatemalan migrants in this particular facility, according to, this is at least 28 Guatemalan nationals were among the dead. That's according to Guatemala, their Institute of Migration. One man was Colombian, one was Ecuadorian, 12 were Salvadorans, 13 were Honduran, 13 were Venezuelan. So people from all over South and Central America who, you referenced CBP1, that's the app that has all kinds of

problems and corruption. And that's the thing right now. There's just no clear pattern of who gets in when. So enough people believe if they come up to Ciudad Juarez or to Matamoros or Reynosa, they have a good enough chance to sort of wait it out. And that's why there's just this incredible overcrowding. Obviously, the push factors are involved too, but the overcrowding is not tenable. None of what's happening in these border towns is tenable, whether it's Ciudad Juarez or

El Paso, whether it's Brownsville or Matamoros, it is not tenable. It is not a sustainable situation. And we are going to see more of this. 38 people dead in a fire, not less of it. And I think we should name names here too. And Susan Rice somehow has managed to skate by without much focus on her role in immigration policy within the Biden administration. Her presence in the Biden administration is completely inscrutable beyond just pure kind of nepotism and inertia in the sense that she is a foreign policy expert. Her entire career, she has focused on foreign relations. By all accounts, utterly qualified and talented person when it comes to foreign relations. Well-educated, lots of experience, an appropriate appointee for a Biden-type

administration to put into its kind of foreign relations apparatus. They made her domestic policy head. Why? It's still an unanswered question. We have absolutely no idea why Susan Rice is domestic policy head. And she still is. It's 2023. She still is domestic policy head. And so with zero experience in any domestic policy issue, in zero experience in immigration, she is kind of driving the Biden administration's immigration policy, which has just been a disaster. And on top of the unanswerable question of how and why she's even in that position is, how has she escaped scrutiny from the press

for her role in this? That part, to me, I'm still trying to figure out. Because normally when something has gone as badly as it has for an administration, the press will figure out, okay, well, who is the person that we can write about? And who can we kind of, you know, who can we investigate and ask the question of what decisions were made at what point? And you basically never see Susan Rice's name in any of these immigration articles, which actually might be the answer to the first question, because that is the sign of somebody who is a very effective kind of internal political player. If they can be kind of leading the charge on an issue that is going poorly and still manage to keep their name out of it, that's the sign of somebody

who really knows how to operate within Washington. But you might want instead somebody who has an idea of what they're doing when it comes to this. Well, and yes, domestic policy has just been a complete success for the Biden administration. So there are no questions to be asked of Susan Rice. But, you know, this comes as Alejandro Mayorkas was grilled by congressional Republicans. I mean, they lit him up. The Senate Republicans lit him up. Ted Cruz in particular lit him up. Mayorkas didn't know why migrants were coming to our border with wristbands.

It was one of the most basic things that if you spend time in border facilities, you know about. If you follow immigration, probably a lot of you watching this know exactly why people are wearing wristbands. It's because they're given to them by cartels, because they paid cartels or they owe money to cartels. Mayorkas didn't know that in a congressional hearing in front of the Senate. He did not know how many migrants died in U.S. custody, and that's an increased number under his tenure, by the way. He's getting lit up by Senate Republicans for just lacking basic knowledge of the crisis that's unfolded over his tenure. And then you see the other side of this, the humanitarian crisis of this, and I know it's

unusual for people to see Republicans, especially if you're Republican skeptical, conservative skeptical, talking about human rights, talking about humanitarian crises in other countries. I understand the skepticism. I do. But it is a direct result of United States immigration policy and the fact that Alejandro Mayorkas can't even answer these questions with basic knowledge. He doesn't even seem to know what's happening, let alone have an ability to explain why it's happening. It's just an embarrassment, not just for us on the world stage, but to us as the American people that are affected by this too. It's unbelievable how the Biden administration

has bungled this. And it's remarkable that the Biden administration has started to make things even less efficient than they already were. So you used to have a policy where you would have attorneys who were steeped in immigration law, who would be on the Mexican side of the border, who would identify the most vulnerable people who had the best chance of making asylum claims and otherwise moving through the system. And they oftentimes would kind of physically walk those people. And oftentimes people who had health issues and didn't have time to wait. Now they've replaced that with this CBP One app that doesn't work. So now you have tens of thousands or more people who are all just trying to get an appointment

through this app, whether or not they are, there's somebody who is in the most legitimate and immediate need or, or isn't. And that's the point. Times or somebody else wrote about a four month old child who in, in the past, there was a four month old child who was having a medical crisis who in the past system would have just been walked by an attorney over to the border patrol. Border patrol would have quickly kind of moved them through the system and gotten them medical care. Instead, the app doesn't work. The four-month-old dies. It's like gambling. Yeah. The app, there's just no rhyme or reason into who gets in when. No ostensible rhyme or reason.

I'm sure immigration officials on the border have whatever reason they have. I mean, you see it. Nobody knows what's happening. You will talk to people who run the migration facilities, and they're like, we literally do not know. We just get a list. And then we call people from the list. We put them on the bus. We take them across the border, and they're put at a facility on the American side and they're given humanitarian parole. And again, that's why you have so many

people gambling because there is a chance and it's worth it to make a better life for your four month old, for yourself. And people die. Again, this is Cruz talking to Mayorkas, how many people died in 2022? So Cruz says, how many migrants have died under President Joe Biden? Mayorkas says, I do not know. Cruz says, of course you don't. 853. 853 is an increase. And you would think that the flippant answer that Mayorkas gave to that question would be, and the fact that he didn't have the numbers in front of him, right? Like your staff preps you and they put the important numbers and documents in front of you. You know that stuff. The fact that he came so unprepared should be a massive embarrassment to the Biden administration. They stand by Mayorkas. They don't seem to have

any concerns about Mayorkas not knowing these like extremely basic facts. I mean, it's just unthinkable. I cannot believe how he's gotten away with this and to show up in front of the Senate and not even have basic facts at your fingertips, just unreal. And one root of this, of course, is that the immigration process and system is completely broken and Congress has no ability to come together and fix it. But the other root of it is that for people like Susan Rice, who are running this policy, they're running it based on optics. What they care about is numbers. What are the numbers of encounters? What are the numbers we What are the numbers of encounters? What are the numbers we saw at the border this month? What are the numbers that have been released? And all they

care about is manipulating those numbers. And so then they come up with these policies that will say, well, what if we keep, and Trump was doing the same thing. What if we keep these people on this side of the border? Then they don't count for the numbers. Obama manipulated the numbers in a ridiculous way when he was president. What he started doing is saying, we're going to count these encounters of people at the border in the early part of my administration as deportations. Under Bush and presidents before that, if Border Patrol caught somebody right across the border and put them on a bus and sent them back, that was recorded, but it wasn't counted as a deportation. So then Obama started counting that as a deportation. So it went on his record. Look how tough I am on enforcement.

He starts getting called deporter in chief, which he liked from the left because then he thought, well, I'm going to go to the Republicans that having proven how tough I am on the border, and then they're going to work with me because I'm a tough guy. Yeah. And of course, that didn't happen. Well, that's what CBP1 is. It's a trick. What the Biden administration is doing is even worse than, as you mentioned, it's worse than that. It's less efficient than all of that because what they're doing is to get the number of illegal crossings down, granting humanitarian parole on this totally arbitrary basis or on inscrutable basis via CBP1. And so that takes down illegal crossings. And so they've actually even said, you're not going to be eligible for asylum

if you are caught crossing illegally, which doesn't mean that people aren't coming into the United States. It means the government is giving them humanitarian parole in higher numbers to come into the United States. And humanitarian parole, we could have a debate about that. I think the way that it's administered in this country is a damn shame because there are people who deserve to be prioritized. There are people with legitimate asylum claims who shouldn't have to live in the shadows of American society on this like totally, you know, tenuous humanitarian parole legal designation, which is difficult, and just wait for a court date in two years. I mean, it's just absurd.

And it's all, you know, getting funneled through CBP1 in higher and higher numbers so that Joe Biden can bring down his illegal crossings. And the poignant part of it all is that it appears that people in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Venezuela, Haiti, elsewhere, watched the Democratic rage at Stephen Miller's immigration policies, watched the compassion that they showed toward migrants and believed it was real. Right. And believed that when Democrats came into power, that there would be a shift in immigration policy, not understanding that it's roughly the same United States immigration policy, but with a kind of a smile instead of kind of nativism.

Right. Well, they don't even know. I mean, that's the thing with like, I think Democrats have gotten into this habit of dismissing concerns about the humanitarian crisis on the border as just Republican culture war posturing and don't even look at the situation. Like the fact that Mayorkas doesn't know about the wristbands is insane, but I bet a lot of people on the left don't know about the wristbands and don't know about cartel control over migrant flow. It's become this massive industrialized system and economy. Right, because if we're not going to organize it, somebody's going to organize it. Yep, and make money off it to the tune of tons.

And they make money off it and then tune of tons. And they make money off it and then hold these countries hostage to their illegal rule. I mean, it's just a complete disaster. And Democrats, if they had the compassion, as you say, that they projected during the Trump era, would look at things like this migrant fire and be able to connect the dots between Joe Biden's policy and what happened there very easily. But I doubt that will be the case. Yeah. I think they should just open up the border. I know that's what you think. Just open it up. There's not that many people on the North American continent.

We can work collectively as various cultures together and find a solution to this. And I've said this a million times before, but we're entering a period of, we're going to enter a period of population decline. And countries that are able to attract immigrants are actually going to be the countries that out-compete the ones whose populations are aging and declining. Nobody wants to hear that because they think that they're going to lower wages, they're going to take something from them, there's not enough room. That's not the case. The countries that are keeping people out are going to be the ones that are going to suffer. I mean, I generally agree with that. I just don't agree that open borders is the best way to accomplish it. A little more open. You can still check passports and stuff,

obviously. But like, this thing where just people can't move just feels wrong. We should do a full segment on this in a future episode because I don't think we've ever had that specific conversation before. So yeah, look forward to that. There we go. Alright, so we'll stick around for that at some point. See you later. While coverage in the corporate media of the general strike rocking France has increased of late,

the fact remains that for the past six months, one of the most massive stories not covered with corresponding urgency in North American media has been the massive, sustained, and growing strikes by workers across sectors in the UK and in France, but also large strikes in Spain, Greece, Belgium, and elsewhere. Between inflation and endless war spending and corporate price gouging affecting everything from energy costs to rent and grocery bills, working people across Europe and around the world are being pummeled by a cost of living crisis right now. And we are seeing organized labor, namely unions, resort to using industrial action, namely strikes, as a means of forcing the bosses, the business class, and the elite-serving, ruling-class-serving

politicians and government to halt their multi-fronted attack on the working class. And they're being joined by students, retirees, delegations from other countries, and organizations representing other social movements. The top-down assault on working people is taking many forms, From French President Emmanuel Macron's deeply unpopular plan to raise retirement ages and further weaken the country's beloved pension system, changes he has opted to force into reality by controversially and undemocratically invoking constitutional special powers to override parliament, to the French police's brutal crackdown on strikers, to the Tory government in the UK drawing out and throwing a wrench

into negotiations in the national rail dispute involving the National Union of Rail, Maritime, and Transport Workers, or the RMT. And on top of that, responding to the massive wave of strikes in the UK by ramming through a draconian anti-labor law that will force striking workers to cross their own picket lines. When I say these strikes are a massive story, I mean it. If you've been watching our continued coverage over at The Real News or our reports here on Breaking Points, then you know that both France and the UK are in the midst of history-making nationwide strike waves. Whether they're fighting against Macron's Wall Street serving attack on pensions, or fighting for real pay raises, lower energy and housing costs, or more job security and safer staffing levels,

workers have been hitting the streets and holding picket lines. From freight and passenger rail workers, oil refinery and sanitation workers, civil servants and farmers, to school teachers, university lecturers, postal workers, nurses, ambulance drivers, and Amazon workers. To get an on-the-ground update on the class struggle playing out across France and the UK, I'm honored to be joined today once again by Mathieu Bauderadat, calling in from France. Mathieu is a train operator and General Secretary of the Versailles branch of the CGT Union, or the General Confederation of Labor. We're also joined by Gaz Jackson, calling in from England, another familiar face for Real News viewers. Gaz worked on the rails for 15 years

as a train guard, and now serves as the RMT's regional organizer in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. Gaz, Mathieu, thank you both so much for joining me today on Breaking Points. I really appreciate it. I know it's late on a Sunday and you guys have been fighting your asses off for months on end, so I promise I won't ask you guys like I have in past interviews to give us the full backstories behind these strikes across France and the UK. If folks are looking for that background context, we've got a treasure trove of reporting for you. You can go watch our past segments on breaking points, including my last interview with Mathieu. Go watch the many documentary reports that we've published over at The Real News on the strikes in Greece, Spain, and across the UK and France. You can

listen to the podcast interviews with Gaz and other great British rail workers that we've published. But for right now, I just want to give people an update on where things are right now. So, you know, why don't we just start by, you know, telling people from your vantage points as members of and fighters for the working class, what has been happening in your countries over the past week? So Gaz, why don't we start with you and then Mathieu, we'll to you yeah good evening everybody um so over the last week um within the rmt we've suspended our industrial action on the national rail dispute because we've we've seen some movement um from the government and the train operating companies what this is going to allow us to do is get the information out to our members so they can make a judgment on whether or not they

want to accept the proposals from the government and the train operating companies. Being a democratic union, it's only right that we believe that our members should have the final say. But just generally across the UK, we're seeing people winning these disputes. You know, the doctors have got a pay rise. The nurses are in in-depth talks and the Communication Workers Union are also in-depth talks with the government as well to try and get their disputes. So what we're seeing really in the UK, certainly in the last month or so is some victories which is really good to see so we just want that to carry on and our members will have the final say on whether

the deal is acceptable that the government will give them and Mathieu you can hop in whenever you're ready Hi everybody thank you Max for this calling good evening to all brothers and sisters in Baltimore and all comrades from USA. So from across the ocean, I have my report to do for you about the situation in France. Of course, you know, since the 7th of March, there is an unlimited

strike in France of strategic sector in the economy to blockade the economy. So, railway, of course, but a metro and a bus, of course, and electric and gas power, and the workers from the refinery, and the people from you know, the collecting garbage, the collecting trash in Paris, and in seven big cities in France. So we are in an unlimited strike since the beginning of March, and one day by week, there is a general strike with other sectors come with us to go on strike. So, as you know, maybe, because it was on every newspaper in all over the world. Last week, the government was in minority in the country, of course, because there is all the oppositional party, political party, all the trade unions are against the law.

But we discovered he was in the minority, even in the parliament, at the parliament. So he used the tricks in our constitution to bypass the parliament and pass the law without vote. So, of course, it pissed us off. And there is not just the unlimited strike of the strategic sector of the economy. There is the young people. For the first time since the beginning of the movement, the youth, they came every night, every evening, every night to demonstrate in the center of Paris,

but in plenty cities of France and demonstrate, burn garbage, a fight with the police. And I think it was a very brutal fight. A lot of people were injured, were hurt during the fight against the police. So the movement continued, but it takes the new crossing line now because with the entrance of the youth people in the movement. So it's very important because we, the working class, we still continue to be on strike, but we will not let our children be beaten, badly beaten by the police during the night in the street.

So it's a new development, a new motion of this movement. And we will continue. You have to see Paris. You have to see Paris now. There is trash everywhere. There is rats everywhere. It's ugly. You have to see that. Very

nasty. It's definitely not the show Emily in Paris with a good selfie in the monument. Every night, there is several places. The Bastille Square, as you know, the Concord Square, they are

occupied by children, by young people, and they fight against the police. So that's the situation now. Of course, for Concord Square, they are occupied by children, by young people, and they fight against the police. So that's the situation now. Of course, for the president Macron, the 49.3, it's the article of the tricks of the Constitution to bypass the parliament. For him, it was the end of the process. But for us, it's the beginning of the new process of the mobilization. May I just say a few more words about the international solidarity with our movement? If I may?

Okay, cool. So it's very important because we knew that every working class and people in all over Europe, including across the ocean, look at for you, for us, look at our situation, look at our movement and wait for our winning. We know that. We know for them it could be a tool, a leverage to see that our way,

the way of struggle of classes is the winning way. We know that. But now it's not just an expectation. Every week we have a delegation from different countries to demonstrate with us.

And Gus Jackson came one month ago to demonstrate in Paris. People from Belgium, people from Portugal, people from Italy, people from Greece, people from Germany, from Denmark, etc. And every day we receive statements of solidarity and we know there is a lot of countries in Europe, including in America, I saw it two days ago in Los Angeles, there is trade unionist protests in the front of French ambassador. And that's very important. And in different countries, they collect money, they raise money for our solidarity fund. And we receive, my union received 10,000 euros two days ago from Italy. They collect money from us, etc., etc. So that's very important for us.

There is an international solidarity. There is a national solidarity because we collect a lot of money. Three weeks ago, there is peasants, poor farmers. They collect two towns of food, meat, food, vegetable, honey, bread, cheese, etc. All the good things of our big country. They collect two tons from my station, from the striker of Versailles, and they bring to us. So that's incredible because we know, and you have to know,

an unlimited strike, our worst enemy is the feeling of loneliness. But now we don't feel lonely. We know we are supported. We are loved by people in France, in Europe, in all over the world. People expect our victory and vox populi vox dei we will give to them the biggest victory of the 21st century about the working class fight oh yeah baby and um gaz i just wanted to see if you had anything you wanted to add there about um that the scope of all of this, right? Like you said, the RMT, as we've talked about a number of times, you, me, and your fellow rail workers, Clayton, Kat, and others at The Real News, you know, y'all really were kind of the tip of the spear beginning your strikes back in the summer,

and it feels like things have only grown across the UK since then. And we've been seeing this sort of like brutal response from the Tories doing what the ruling class is trying to do here at the Supreme Court level. Folks should watch my past Breaking Points segment about the Glacier Northwest case before the Supreme Court right now, which may give businesses the ability to sue unions basically out of existence for economic damages caused during a strike. And causing economic damages is the whole damn point of a strike. So over in the United Kingdom, Rishi Sunak and the Tory government have been responding to this incredible historic wave of strikes in sectors across the UK, not by, you know, addressing people's dire concerns about cost of living, you know, wage stagnation, corporate pillage, yada, yada, yada,

but instead, you know, focusing on taking away workers' power to organize and take industrial action by ramming through this draconian anti-strike law. So I was wondering if you could just sort of say a little bit, building on what Mathieu was saying about the scope of these strikes, the response that you're getting from the community, from other unions, or even from folks around the world. So the support that we've had has been absolutely fantastic. And I think you hit the nail on the head, Max, when you say that the RMT was almost a spearhead of the fight back in the UK. I think the analogy that I use is we kind of we dropped a stone in the pond and we've sent out a ripple effect. And all of the trade unions have started to join it because they've realised that they can't afford to not strike. Because if we don't strike, we will not get the pay rise that we deserve.

We'll not keep the terms and conditions that we fought for over the years. And I just wanted to touch on what Matthew said about the rats in the street in Paris. And is he referring to the politicians? Certainly Macron after pulling his dirty tricks. If you see one with an $80,000 watch, then you'll know. Maybe you could sell that for the Solidarity Fund for the CGT, eh? But joking aside, you know,

we received donations from Matthew's branch over in Paris. And we also received many, many other donations in our Solidarity Fund last year. And we'll be returning the favour in the very near future. I'm hoping to get over to Paris again in the next few weeks to show some support for Matthew and the guys over there because they've been over here and they've showed support to us. So that just goes to show that the international solidarity is very important.

And what I would say to the people out in France is don't feel lonely because the RMT are right behind you. Hell yeah. Love it. And I guess like on that note, because again, I know it's late on a Sunday. I got to let you guys go. But I just wanted to sort of highlight something that it feels like both of you are saying. And this is certainly something we hear in the reporting that we've been publishing at The Real News is these struggles, right? There's so much of it that

is focused on, you know, workplace issues, right? Like, you know, working conditions, raises to keep up with the cost of living, more safer staffing ratios and education and health care, so on and so forth. But it feels like in France, in the UK and increasingly beyond the labor movement, you know, digging their heels into the ground, trying to stop a long back, if that tracks with what you're viewing and seeing over there on the ground, if this is about, you know, what workers are going through immediately, but also what society is going through. And, you know, what can folks here in North America and beyond do to stand in solidarity with their fellow workers in the UK and France

and across Europe? Of course, it's about our immediate claims, of course, wages in France, it's the subject specifically of pension, but it's a matter of choice of society. And more the strike continue, more we the workers, we talk about that. It's an interesting period, an interesting moment. The time is sustained and we can word about the goal of trade unionism is socialism, a new socialist order of society, I think. We have the same in France. And of course, when we are on strike, we do a demonstration.

We are the working class. If we don't work the country the entire country collapse okay so we discovery and all the society discovery are true things A true thing is hiding. It's we produce. We create. Because we work. So we have to decide. We have to take back our future. We have to take back the power in this society.

Because we are the only useful class in the world. So, and it's difficult to say that because I'm from working class, I'm from a poor suburb, okay, and what we learn when we are child, then we are parasites. We are nothing. And we are losers. And the winners, we can show it on TV show. They are lawyers. They are traders. They are pharaohs, etc.

And we are nothing. But during this period, we understand finally that we are everything. And if we are not at work, the country's collapse. So we have to decide to rule this country. That's very interesting during this period. And that's giving to us confidence.

Finally, we are the cool class. We have the swag. We working class are beautiful. Make working class great again. And just for a conclusion, you talk about international solidarity, my dear brother Max. I will share to you the links about our solidarity funds. And you can put in your podcast if you want. Thank you very much.

In the UK, we've seen a massive increase in people joining trade unions, certainly with the teachers. I think they've gained over 55,000 members since they was out on dispute. That's fantastic. We're engaging more with people and we're trying to organise within communities, not just within our trade unions. I think it's important that we go and speak to people that have not had any affiliations to trade unions

or don't really know what a trade union are, because if people don't know, they won't understand. Like Matthew said, without us, no wheels will turn. The 1% won't earn their moneythew said if without us no wheels will turn the one percent won't earn their money their billions of pounds the 99 which is us we we have the power they don't have the power they think they have the power but we do if we don't work they don't earn that's as simple as it is um and we will of course matthew we will share all your solidarity funds within the RMT as well. And I'm hoping to bring over a good donation to you in a few weeks time, brother. So that is Mathieu Baudredat calling in from France.

Mathieu is a train operator and general secretary of the Versailles branch of the General Confederation of Labour, the CGT. And Gaz Jackson calling in from England. Gaz worked on the rails for 15 years as a train guard and now serves as the RMT's regional organizer in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. Gaz, Mathieu, thank you both so much for joining me today on Breaking Points, Solidarity from Across the Pond. Thank you very much. Good night. See you later. Thank you for watching this segment on Breaking Points. And be sure to subscribe to my news outlet,

The Real News Network, with links in the show description. See you soon for the next edition of The Art of Class War. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.