Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 6/22/21: American Airlines, Amazon Destruction, Supreme Court Rulings, Barstool Conservatives, and More!

Episode Date: June 22, 2021

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right now. So what are you waiting for? Go to BreakingPoints.com, become a premium member today, which is available in the show notes. Enjoy the show, guys. Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. We've got a bunch of really fascinating stories this morning. So Amazon was caught destroying out one warehouse, over 130,000 items per week.

We're going to dig into that. Some really fascinating rulings from the Supreme Court, including on the NCAA. And then I'm also focused on my monologue on one regarding Goldman Sachs. Everybody coming together to let them off the hook. Good old fashioned bipartisanship. Got to love that. Sagar's taking a look at the rise of barstool conservatives. Today is New York City's mayoral race primary in like the worst political contest of all time. Ross Farquhar is going to dig into all of the dynamics there and what to expect. But we wanted to start with American Airlines

canceling a whole bunch of flights and basically blaming their workers. This is a huge story that actually ABC News, mainstream media actually does a decent job enough, at least in order to sum up the situation. Let's take a listen. We'll dissect it on the other side. This morning, the cancellation of hundreds of flights is being partially blamed on a staffing crunch as a record number of travelers return to the skies. American Airlines canceling 123 flights on Saturday, 178 on Sunday, and today more than 100 flights are canceled already. The airline blaming significant staffing shortages and maintenance issues. American says it will continue to cancel at least 50 to 60 flights a day for the rest of June and 50 to 80 flights per day in July. So there's a lot going on here, Crystal.

Obviously, people look at that and say, hey, what's going on here? Do we have a labor shortage? All of that. Well, you know, it just turns out, though, that if you dig a little bit deeper, you might remember about a year and a half ago, whenever we designed a custom bailout for the airline industry, which I was fine with. We had Sarah Nelson on the show, who was talking about how vital it was in order to make sure flight attendants got paid. And because the airline industry itself, like, if you let it bottom out, you're completely screwed. Part of the thing, though, is if you're going to bail them out, you would say, oh, maybe we're going to put some restrictions on that money. Well, let's take a trip down memory lane, shall we? Put it up there on the screen in terms of how exactly we designed this thing. $10.6 million in

compensation the CEO received last year and still forced thousands of workers into leave, early retirement, and furloughs, now blaming labor shortages. Go ahead and throw the next one up there in terms of how we exactly designed this bailout. $5.8 billion in pandemic assistance from the Department of Treasury. $4.1 billion of that was a grant. It wasn't even a loan. Only $1.7 billion of that was actually the loan.

And yet today, they are canceling now 1% of their total flights. And it's not me saying boo-hoo for commercial airline passengers. There are freight concerns. But really what it is is that these companies took literally billions of dollars in pandemic bailout. And now they spent that time furloughing people, firing people, reducing their labor, and now they can't keep up with the demand. And they're trying to create some artificial story about, oh, we have the labor shortage or whatever. We gave you literally billions and billions and billions of dollars, and now you're crippling the US economy once again. And you're making it seem as if this entire thing was a total joke in the first place. It really is terrible what they've done here.

And I do feel bad for people who maybe this is like their first vacation, their first venture out after the pandemic. Not the business travelers, but those people. Like the regular families who've saved up their money to go somewhere after the pandemic. And it's like their first time. I do feel really bad for these people where it turns into a total nightmare. Your entire trip might be ruined. And I love that they don't give any context for, oh, it's a labor shortage. Well, why do you have a labor shortage? We bailed you out with the express provision in the original bailout package that this money should go to keeping your workforce.

So what happened? They took the money. They kept those workers until the date that we said, OK, after September 30th, I think was the last date. Then you can do whatever you want after those bailout provisions expire. And they went ahead and laid off, furloughed or forced down 30,000 of their workers. So it's not like just, oh, boo-hoo, we have a labor shortage and there's nothing we can do about it. You're the one that created that labor shortage. And somehow that context is wildly missing for most of the mainstream coverage. I took a look at, I was actually perusing CNBC yesterday. I need to watch them more often because it is incredible the type of content they put on.

I jumped right from a segment. The headline of the segment was Jim Cramer weighs in on American Airlines layoffs. Yeah, go ahead and put a bullet in my head. But it was even worse than that. He didn't even say anything about it. It was just him complaining about

lazy millennials not wanting to come to the office. And then the next one up was some dude who was trashing Redditors for not respecting the fundamentals. Anyway, this is how CNBC covered the American airline situation, just framing it as a labor shortage, just coming dropping out of the sky with absolutely zero context. Let's take a listen. CNBC.com airline reporter Leslie Josephs is covering the story for us. She joins us now.

Leslie, why is it American in particular that can't seem to get workers? So what American is dealing with now, they have packed their schedule a little bit fuller than some of their competitors or closest competitors like Delta and United. And what they're finding is there are a shortage of workers. They're in the middle of training pilots that might have been idled during the pandemic. I mean, remember, think back to a year ago, we were retiring planes. Airlines were telling employees to please, please, please take an early retirement or a buyout package. So their focus has switched entirely.

So that's why they're seeing a little bit of this strain. Add to that a little bit of seasonal weather, and this is the recipe for what we're seeing right now. It's amazing. Nothing about the bailout provisions, nothing about how they laid off 30,000 workers. Just like, well, you know, they're ramping up a little different than everybody. They got to get these pilots back online. Ridiculous. No, it's terrible. And this is actually, this maybe is a little bit of a

corollary to what I've talked about how in many ways, I think the labor shortage is just revenge for Americans' bad policy, which is that at the beginning of the pandemic, we made the choice to force people onto unemployment. What we should have done is actually what we did for the airline industry in the very first place, which was say, hey, we're going to pay you billions and billions of dollars. Fine. And in exchange, you have to use that money in order to keep people in your workplace. Because the airline industry is critical to the way we function, freight and all of that. Actually, I think every industry should have been declared critical and that's how we should have done everything. But what did I forget? Which is that in the United States, what they did is they wrote in

these ridiculous provisions making it so, oh, until September 30th. I actually remember covering it at Rising. It was maybe David Dane or somebody else there who was like, listen, guys, like come September, or not September 31st, what, August or whatever comes next. October. Okay, there we go. October. Come October 1st, he's like, everyone's going to get fired.

Everyone's going to get furloughed. And I was like, oh, my God, he's totally right. And that is exactly what happened. And now here we are, 16, 17 months now into the pandemic. These people have been laid off. Travel demand has actually surged. A lot of people have savings, like you were saying, people who bought flights and want to take their first vacation. And now there's a fake labor shortage in terms of American Airlines. We actually did everything that we were supposed to do in terms of designing that program. We just wrote it so that they get billions,

then they didn't actually have that much restrictions on the way that they were gonna spend the money, and then made it so that they created their own fake labor shortage. And what also grinds my gears is, if you were a small business and you're a paycheck protection program, and you got a loan like this,

you did not have the ability to fire people at all. You had to use all that money to keep people on payroll. Again, a provision I support. So if you were a small business, you had all these restrictions on how you got your money. You didn't get some custom bailout from the Fed. You didn't get some custom bailout from Congress. You had to apply to the bank and even then the bank like put you in whatever order they want limited pool airline gets a specially cut and tailored design bailout and they get all this money and then in the end at the end of the day what's going on they didn't even use it in the way that we told them to it's fundamentally unfair the way that we did this entire thing so this whole episode

with the airlines and as i was thinking about this yesterday, has actually kind of changed my mindset over what we should have done at the beginning of the pandemic. I'll tell you why in just a second. So I was reading Andrew Ross Sorkin, when these bailout programs were being contemplated a while back, wrote a piece about, does the airline industry really need this bailout? And what he wrote is, no other industry affected by the pandemic received more from the government. There was no special program for hotels, for restaurants, for travel agencies. Companies in those industries had to line up

for the small business focus, paycheck protection program, and pray. The largest loan the program could make was $10 million, as opposed to the $5 billion that the airline industry received. And so what I realized here is that you're right. We actually sort of held this up and we talked to Sarah Nelson as the model

of what they should have done for other industries. Well, you know what? It turns out actually the most effective part of the program of all the different relief programs that we had in place was just giving people cash. Just straight giving people cash, the addition of the child tax credit, the unemployment insurance system. Yeah, it was clunky, but that also just putting cash straight

in people's pockets, if that worked more effectively, those were the pieces that lowered poverty and actually now are giving workers a tiny bit of cushion so that they can say like, screw you. I'm not going back to work on the front lines for $7.25. Screw you, I'm not working for tips at whatever, what is it, $2 and whatever. So I actually think we have so much of a mindset in this country that like, oh, we have to be skeptical every time we're handing out cash directly to people. Maybe they're going to be lazy. Maybe they're not going to spend it in the right way. Maybe they're going to be irresponsible for this money. But the reality is actually the individual human beings use the money in far more efficient and productive ways than these giant companies. So even this program, which again was kind of the best of the best in terms of it required that you

kept the employees on, of course, the minute that they can lay them off, the minute those provisions expire, they go ahead and do that. They give their CEO $10 million pay compensation so that he can apparently like completely fail on the other side of the pandemic. So even in the best case scenario, we were better off just straight giving cash to people. And oh, by the way, that's something our federal government, which is capacity has been stripped down over years and years and decades and decades, something that they were able to do very efficiently and very effectively. Yeah, actually, it's more of a matter of timeline.

I agree with you. Look, at the end of the day, I want people to have the money. I think at the time, the reason I was arguing for it was because people's bank account information already existed with their employers. And we had some initial implementation problems around the stimulus checks.

I want to say it took two and a half weeks. I think we also just didn't think it was likely that the American political system would be like, instead, let's just hand out large amounts of cash. This was more like— This is pre-Overton window. I was like, look, we've got to give people money. We need it as soon as humanly possible. And the way I was thinking about it was that, look, people are already attached to their payroll.

And also, if you think about it from a business concern perspective, businesses are like, we can't find anyone, et cetera. I actually understand that. I sympathize, especially if you're one of the smallest businesses or one of those people who truly can't compete or you didn't get a PPP loan or any of these things. The problem that we had, again, is that Washington basically kicked people off onto unemployment, then left them to dry and screwed around with the plus-ups.

Didn't we not have any plus-up in terms of extra cash for months on end while Congress was getting its act together? And then people, because of these crazy lockdown procedures, some people were on unemployment, went off unemployment, back on unemployment. That takes months. And those systems are totally rickety and overwhelmed. Were a total disaster. I've heard from many of you actually telling me

about how often and difficult it was in order to get your unemployment. And so I was saying, look, the easiest way to do this is the payroll. But all the retconning of what we should have done, etc. It's just so disgusting to watch this company who got billions of dollars and to come out and now say they have some labor shortage. It was like, what was the point? Why did we bail you out? We gave you billions and billions to make sure your industry remained robust. And again, fair.

Airlines are, we need airlines. The country needs it in order to move freight. Passengers, it's critical. Even at the height of the pandemic, we had it all for a reason, but it really pisses me off watching them come out and make these fake excuses. And it just makes you think like, can we do anything fairly in this country anymore? Like, what are you supposed to think

if you can't catch a flight because of this? And you see how much money that these people got in the pandemic. So this is also from Andrew Ross Sorkin again, about, how we could have used the money in a better fashion. So the money that we gave the airlines likely saved about 75,000 jobs. Really significant. Critical for those people. At a cost of $300,000 per job.

Wow. Those people are not making $300,000, by the way. Where did that money go? You know, some of the pilots, flight attendants, like these are good middle class jobs for flight attendants, but they're not making 300K a year. So we spent that much money. It's just wildly inefficient, right? human beings can be trusted with direct cash infusions to a far greater extent than any of these businesses that are always, always, always looking for every way to cheat, suck up that money for themselves, like buy back their stock, all of that stuff. And that's the other piece of this.

If we even go back before the pandemic, why were the airlines so close to the wall that the minute there was a drop in their revenue and their passengers who were flying, they were totally screwed? Well, it's because they spent all the corporate tax cut money from Trump. They spent that on stock buybacks so that they could enrich themselves and enrich their shareholders rather than investing in their business and making sure that they had that resiliency if there was a downturn. So again, as I look at this, kind of my big takeaway is we should just trust people and working Americans way, way, way before we trust these idiots who find every way they possibly can to fail and then just expect that they're going to be bailed out no matter how unconscionable their actions.

And this is the thing these people don't get. People, I don't know how often you think you can get away with this. Like in terms, we had it in 2008, Wall Street bailout, give everybody bonuses, AIG. I mean, that was probably this close to the biggest popular outrage that we saw on something economically in a long time. Obviously that faded. But then you see this American Airlines story. Next time around, how are you, like, do you think you're going to get bailed out? Do you really think so? Maybe. Now, maybe you will because the government and all of that congressional system is there.

But, like, this all has to break at some point. And so, look, I mean, American Airlines yesterday, it was, like, trending. It was one of the biggest stories in the country. And coincidentally, I didn't see very much coverage of it. Like, yes, you know, CNBC goes and covers it. For 30 seconds with some very misleading. American Airlines PR tells us. And they're like, and now back to you.

Let's have their CEO on to tell you. Yeah, let's have the CEO back. Not how shitty their workers are. CEOs here on to explain why he can't get any workers and didn't misspent $5 billion. Same thing, though. I mean, I saw it trending all across the country in terms of the internet outrage, people were contacting us about it and more, but the actual mainstream coverage of it wasn't there. So it just seems to me like one of those mainstream

backlashes, sorry, a backlash against the mainstream and very popular outrage around this type of story because people understood and saw that while they were waiting for a check, while they were waiting for extra unemployment, while they wanted the lockdowns to end, while they wanted some proper information, that these people were getting bailed out to the tune of billions. And we remember some of the initial bailout outrage whenever people understood. I think it was David Dayen talking about the trillions of dollars the Federal Reserve and all that were shooting, which would have been fine if you had reciprocal programs for people who were working. And that just faded off as time

went. Now we're at this strange time. Like, people do have money in the bank, 200 million Americans or so or not. I mean, they're not like a, you know, they're like still a paycheck away from bankruptcy. But, you know, that's a little bit better, apparently, than where things were before. And yet the memory has not faded around how people remember this type of stuff. And I suspect that the next time around that it made things be different. Although, you know, maybe I should be more cynical. Our political class doesn't respond to popular will. I mean, that's just the reality. And so, and especially when you have a situation like maybe you're in Atlanta or what is it, Houston? That's a big hub in Texas where there's a lot of jobs at stake and the airlines go, oh, well, your economy is going to crash if you don't get the bailout. It's very

compelling case. You know, your your point about media, I think, is really important, really interesting, because why does this not get coverage? Because there's not a Trump angle and there's not a Biden angle. So because you can't fit it neatly into this like Democrats are bad or Republicans are bad narrative, they're just like, we don't really care. Even though it was something that says so much, not just about this current moment, but there's so many lessons to be taken from it about how we approach this entire situation to start with. And if you don't think that we're going to find ourselves in another downturn, pandemic, collapse, crash, where we're faced with these kinds of questions, again, you're fooling yourself. Oh, 100 percent. And actually, to that point, it's not just Democrats bad, Republicans bad. Everybody was complicit in this. The White House, all parties. I mean, it passed 99-0,

if I recall, through the US Senate. This is what happens when you have total and complete bipartisanship. And I think it's an important lesson to remember exactly how these things play out. Speaking of corporate malfeasance, we got another good one for you from Amazon. Yeah. Okay. This is probably one of the craziest things I've ever seen. So ITV News out of the UK has caught Amazon destroying millions of dollars worth of merchandise for no discernible reason. And I'll explain why they say that they do so, but let's watch this video first because it target was approximately 130,000 items a week. The target to destroy from one center was 130,000 items? Yes.

Okay, so let me explain this to you, which is that what they caught there with the guy who was on camera was that Amazon is destroying millions of items of unsold stock in just one of its UK warehouses every single year, and that this is indicative of a company-wide policy. So what they found is that they are destroying 130,000 items a week. And we're talking about brand new stuff. Dyson fans, Hoover vacuums, the occasional MacBook and iPad. The other day, 20,000 face masks still in their wrappers. Here's what he said. Overall, 50% of all items are unopened, still in their shrink wrap. The other half are returns and in good condition. Staff have become numb in terms of what they are asking to do. So you might ask, why exactly is all of this happening? Well, what's happening is that

because of their business model, they have it such that they store stuff inside of their warehouse. It's called fulfilled by Amazon. It's actually one of the most profitable parts of their business, which is that you're a third-party seller, but in order to take advantage of Amazon's distribution, you can, Amazon will list your goods on its website, obviously. And then when I buy it, Amazon will fulfill the order because they have the third-party goods inside of their warehouse. But then the question arises, what exactly do you do whenever you have extra stuff? And it turns out that the actual physical policy, at least look, at least in the UK, in terms of what's happening, is that they are destroying it. They're not even going and trying to donate it to anybody. They're not

making any efforts. They're literally incinerating and destroying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of goods. And this is so insane. It's actually roiling UK politics. Even Boris Johnson weighed in on this. But I thought this was important enough, Crystal, because are they doing the same stuff here? We should ask a lot of questions because if they are, I think there's a lot of people out there who could use some of this stuff. And it's just totally unopened and they're just destroying it. It's insane. It is completely nuts. And your question is the right one, because just to emphasize again,

130,000 items from one warehouse every single week. Yeah. Like, think about that. Well, you think their policies are different here? Do you see Amazon giving out goods to the needy across America? No, we don't. So what's happening to those goods? It's an excellent question. And kudos to them for doing the reporting here. They got basically a whistleblower inside the warehouse. They were able to film undercover footage revealing how this was taking place. They even had footage of them like taking these electronics to essentially the dump for them to be destroyed. You know, I got to give it to him. Boris Johnson actually made a pretty good comment about it. He said, this is an indictment of a consumerist society. So as much of it as it it would depress demand for the other stuff that they're trying to sell. So rather than giving it to people who need these goods, who can't afford these goods, they'd rather

just destroy it in order to protect their profit margins. So certainly an indictment of Amazon and their practices. And also, by the way, there are a lot of questions over whether they've been lying about exactly what they do because apparently they'd been asked before, like, how much of your goods are destroyed? And they're like, almost nothing, next to nothing, very, very little. Is your definition of very, very little? 130,000 items at one warehouse every single week? I don't think that that would be a reasonable person's definition of very little. So Amazon, totally culpable. But it does just show, you know, how gross it is.

The fact that we've all had drilled into us in American society, Western society writ large, like this religion around consumerism. Like we're always sold this bill of goods that like the next item, the next purchase, the next whatever is going to make us happy. It's going to make us popular. It's going to make us beautiful. It's going to make us fulfilled when the reality is anything but. And at the same time, it's just it's such an incredibly wasteful. It's like grotesquely wasteful. So while we're at the same time at the individual level, like trying in different ways to be responsible, let me see if I can recycle a little more. Let me see if I can use a little bit more of the food rather than throwing it out.

These giant corporations are just incredibly abusive with the resources of the world. you know, all of these manufactured goods that create tremendous pollution and tremendous waste then just being tossed aside into a landfill to decompose over hundreds and hundreds of years. It really is a sort of like grotesque picture of exactly what we're doing here as a society. Yeah. And what's crazy to me, too, is it just shows how full of it they are and how much they bought the political system. Because yes, while Boris Johnson may have said that, I love this. And it's just good to see that all Western societies are the same. The business secretary told ITV News, this is in the UK, was very surprised about the findings of our investigation

and said he wanted to get to the bottom. But he adds, I know Amazon is committed to net zero. They've committed huge amounts of investment to the rainforest to keep the rainforest going. I'm surprised. I haven't read the report, so I'll have to take a look at the responses. But what's funny is, if you read Amazon's statement, they basically use the same language. We are working towards a goal of zero product disposal. Our priority is to resell, donate to charitable organizations, or recycle unsold products. No items are sent to the landfill in the UK. As a last resort, we will send items to

energy recovery, but we are working hard to drive the number of times this happens down to zero. So it's like- Work a little harder, guys. The same language that Amazon uses, making like, we're working hard to get to zero, and they talk about net zero climate and all this stuff is the same stuff that comes out of the mouth of the business. I think it's the equivalent of our commerce secretary in the UK. Amazing. Even Amazon runs stuff over in the UK. I didn't even know.

Of course. And this is the amazing thing. If they're throwing away millions of things in the UK, which has a population, I think like one sixth or like one seventh the size of the US, what the hell's going on over here in terms of what's going on in our warehouses and what exactly is being done? Because not just in terms of the way they treat their workforce, but the physical goods inside of these warehouses that could be used for so many better purposes. I think it just reveals again, and it's true, which is that we were talking yesterday about widget brain around housing, where people are like, oh, look, when

you're a widget, you're just better off if, you know, renting and, you know, disregarding any of the social benefits of housing. This is the same thing. They're like, look, we need 30% more warehouse space. The fastest way to get of that warehouse space is just to junk it. I mean, in one of these pictures is a Samsung QLED TV. That's like a $3,000 TV. That's nuts in terms of who could imagine like a nursing home or like, I don't know, a kid's home. There are so many people out there. UK too. They're not actually that rich of a country in terms of what some of the people over there could use it. So I just think it's a really gross indictment of everything. I am very glad that ITV did this investigation. Yeah. And you're right to say like, let's not give Boris Johnson too much credit here. You made a nice comment, but you know, you have power to do

a lot more than make a nice comment. And it is also interesting that his focus is not, he says this is an indictment of a consumer society rather than like this is an indictment of Amazon and we're going to get to the bottom of what happened here. Right. Right. So, yeah, that's a good point. Excellent point there. Hey, so remember how we told you how awesome premium membership was? Well, here we are again to remind you that becoming a premium member means you don't have to listen to our constant pleas for you to subscribe.

So what are you waiting for? Become a premium member today by going to BreakingPoints.com, which you can click on in the show notes. Okay, we have an update for you on the bipartisan infrastructure negotiations that have been ongoing. I mean, the bottom line here is this whole attempt at a bipartisan package is pretty much a hot mess. One good thing did happen. Biden came out. Remember, one of the pay-fors that they've been floating with this is a gas tax, which is absurd, absurd that you're going to make the working class of this country

long-suffering and with, like, the least ability to pay, that you're going to put the infrastructure price tag on their back. So Biden did come out and ruled that out. And they're framing it. And I mean, he is on these sorts of things. He has pretty good political instincts, I think. And he also sees it as would be breaking his pledge not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year, which I think is true. We can throw this tweet up on the screen showing what Biden had to say there. So this was Jen Psaki to CBS this morning, said Biden is a

hard no on the gas tax. An idea that's been floating around that certainly the president would not support is a gas tax, which would raise taxes on people making less than 400K a year. We're not going to stand for that. So very clear language, very unequivocal. At least someone has half a brain over there because a gas tax is like the dumbest idea that has ever. It's politically dumb and it's also the wrong thing to do. It's immoral. Just like on every level, it would be a bad direction to go in. Okay, so that's off the table. So what are the other pay-fors that are being proposed in this bipartisan infrastructure deal? Well, David Dan, who always, always follow what this guy is doing, he's one of the few that really digs into the details and gets down to the nitty gritty of

what's actually being proposed. And it turns out, remember when Trump was proposing his infrastructure deal time and time again, and a lot of liberals and a lot of progressives were rightfully very exercised that this was like basically it was a privatization of infrastructure, give away to the private sector, and the payfors there were very unconscionable. Well, a lot of those same mechanisms are being included in this bipartisan deal. So let's throw David Dayen's tear sheet up here on the screen. He says, bipartisan Senate infrastructure plan is a stalking horse for privatization. The scheme would fund new infrastructure by selling off old infrastructure. And by the way, Trump proposed the same thing. So here's some of the details. Let me just read you a little bit from the piece. He says,

the really scary piece in terms of the pay force is labeled public-private partnerships, private activity bonds, and asset recycling, okay? In the name of building world-class infrastructure, these lawmakers will sell it off in fire sales to private financiers. We have lots of experience with infrastructure privatization that strongly suggest it should be avoided. Those first two things, public-private partnerships, you can imagine what that is. That's basically like toll roads, that sort of thing where you're like, hey, private company, why don't you build our infrastructure? And then you can charge user fees, again, largely to working class people to pay for it. You have private activity bonds.

That's just like debt by another name. And asset recycling, which is one of these terms that you'd read and you're like, oh, recycling. That sounds good, right? Like what's going on? That sounds creative. What's going on there? Love it. What they mean is we're going to take our existing port or whatever, sell it off, and then use that money to build some other thing.

This has been tried here. It was tried. He points out it was tried notably in Australia. Total failure. Total disaster. Oftentimes the projects that they sell off were actually good public works projects that the public was benefiting from. The government was receiving tax revenue from, like a port is a good example of that. And then the things that they build, the like asset that

they're, I guess, recycling this into, turned out to be sort of like harebrained and useless and not particularly well done. The other bottom line piece here is we talked about this a little bit yesterday. There's always this assumption that's like baked into the American economic political ethos that, oh, the private sector must be more efficient. They must do a better job. They must do it in lower costs and all of that in a shorter time frame. But it's really not the case because, I mean, for a very obvious reason, the private sector has to build in profit margins into whatever it is they're doing. So we've seen time after time that you should not assume that relying more on the

private sector is going to get you into a better place. But it's just, it's interesting, because a lot of the criticism of the infrastructure package, the bipartisan infrastructure package thus far, has been around it's not enough money, something we've talked about here. Also from the left, like this isn't dealing with climate change whatsoever, both totally, in my view, legitimate criticisms. But this piece has been ignored until David Dayen pointed it out, and it's also really super important. It's super important, and also he just shows how many Democrats are full of it. I mean, I love this line. There was a time when Democrats opposed such schemes. It was during the Trump administration. It was two years ago. And he talks exactly about how Democrats rightfully

and loudly objected to giving up public assets to private investors because the biggest money makers would be favored. But so why would he, I love this, why would Democrats entertain going down the exact same road under Biden despite the fact that they rebuffed it under Trump? And I think that we all know what the answer to this is. And it actually is a decent example of like uniparty whenever it comes to the economic proposals that we put forward. And I agree, this is a terrible, absolutely terrible idea. And the Australia part, I actually didn't know. I looked a little bit into it,

and he's totally right, which is that we borrowed this from a previous scheme. And in that case of what happened in Australia, there was actually a lot of outrage over some of the things that were auctioned off that were actually quite not profitable, but net positive or whatever in terms of tax revenue. And I've said this a million times. Instead of faking all these pay-fors, if there is one thing on earth that you deficit spend, it's called infrastructure. Because we all know that the social and economic benefits explode whenever you have infrastructure. It can open up new areas of commerce. It can open up new business lines. It can open up all sorts of different things, and that you will more than recoup it in terms of tax revenue, benefit to the community, and more. Infrastructure is by definition the type

of thing that you're supposed to deficit spend for. And instead, we're playing all these like kabuki theater games in DC around auctioning things off that we already have, around raising the private bonds or whatever. We're reading, like, why is any of this necessary? Go out and ask people, do you care about how the infrastructure package is paid for? In the most intuitive thing, even people who have businesses and more understand that the type of things that you deficit spend for are investments which are going to pay out 10x longer in the long run. So you put the money down.

Well, when you're a government, this is one of the few times that the business whatever example actually does apply, you should do the exact same thing. And so I think the politics around this are just so farcical generally, and that the David Dayen piece reveals how, in a way, people use deficit politics and pay-fors in order to just cover up for a lot of corporate giveaways. Yeah, it's an ideological agenda. That's right. And actually, I think if you ask people, and we've seen some of the polling on this, how they want it to be paid for, they do have a preference. They want rich people in corporations to be taxed. That's what they want. I mean, we saw in some of the polling that just the infrastructure package on its own, like,

oh, we're going to invest in roads and bridges, et cetera, et cetera, pretty popular. You add to that like, oh, and we're going to pay for it by taxing rich people. And they're like, oh, hell yeah, I'm in. The polling numbers actually jump up. So it says everything. I think that's really important to keep in mind as you're watching these negotiations play out, because oftentimes the way that they're portrayed in mainstream media is like, oh, the bipartisan deal, they have to make these tradeoffs to make it politically palatable for frontline Democrats in the midterms, et cetera, et cetera. No, no, you're actually proposing a plan that is less popular because you're trying to pair it initially with a gas tax, which is ridiculous. But now with these various privatization schemes, which are

also unpopular versus what is a clearly extremely popular position of paying for it with increased taxes on people who got tremendously wealthy during the pandemic, whether it's wealthy individuals or corporations, that is what the American people actually want. And so the fact that the political class is so nervous and unsure and basically putting off the table any of that tells you something. This isn't about them wanting the good politics of it. It's about them protecting their donors and protecting their friends in their social circle. And that's exactly how you end up with these harebrained schemes of like, let's sell off a port in order to build a new bridge. Watching this thing become Obamacare 2.0 has been really sad to show that Biden and them actually just learned nothing. Obamacare ended

up becoming a corporate nightmare mess. It became the political albatross that hung around his neck. Now it's June 22nd. Remember that they've already said they cannot hit the September deadline. Okay, I think the exact same thing is going to happen. Republicans are going to filibuster. It's going to go all the way up until Thanksgiving or Christmas Day or whatever. And at the end of the day, it's going to be a BS bill, which actually doesn't even do very much. It would be probably like a trillion dollars or whatever in new spending.

It won't be forcefully felt in many different communities. And there'll be some like windmill package, which will become the bane of every single Democrat running in the midterms because of a bunch of attack ads. And what do we get from all of this? I think maybe, what, a modest tax increase on people who are wealthy? Maybe. Even then, I don't actually think that's going to pass at all. So yeah, actually, the only thing that might pass is some sort of fake gas tax. So he may have ruled it out now, but I won't hold my breath understanding how these things are moving through Congress. It's a huge political failure for the Biden administration, in my opinion. Yeah. And again, a totally unnecessary one,

totally unnecessary. And I just think, I'll say it again, I think it says everything about the sort of failed state nature of this country that just the least controversial thing you could possibly do, like fixing a damn bridge. You can't even get your act together to do that. The basics of providing not just an investment for, you know, jobs and business community, et cetera, but part of why these privatization schemes are such a problem is there's a lot of basic infrastructure that provides for safe quality of life, water systems, wastewater treatment plants, as I covered yesterday in large parts of West Virginia, other rural communities across the country. They don't even have clean drinking water. That's never going to turn a profit for a company. Of course not. So we can't be in the business of only doing projects that are, you're going to be able

to like charge enough toll fees to turn a profit on or charge enough user fees to turn a profit on. You're not going to make money building a wastewater treatment plant or a water, a new water system in McDowell County, West Virginia. So what, and that's basically what's happened is anything that hasn't been profitable for the private sector hasn't gotten done. And so you've got parts of the country that are reverting back to like pre-New Deal era conditions, reverting back to like developing world conditions, because we don't put any sort of a priority on people having the basic

standards for like the basic level quality of living. Everything is about profit, profit, profit. And apparently that ethos has thoroughly pervaded this new bipartisan infrastructure efforts. Really sad to see. Very sad story. But I think we have some good news, slightly. Yeah, good news. I would temper my enthusiasm for this a little bit more than what some of the media coverage has been. So we got a couple of notable Supreme Court decisions yesterday. I'm covering one of them in my monologue, which is everybody coming together to give away the store to Goldman Sachs and make sure they can be held accountable for any of their crimes during the financial crisis. We'll get into that one in a second. They did do something modestly good here, though, in a case involving the NCAA.

So I'm sure a lot of you have been following this sort of back and forth of the NCAA is basically like a racket and a monopoly that completely abuses their workers, which are the players, right? Especially in lucrative sports like basketball and football. NCAA raking in billions in viewership fees to the television networks. And meanwhile, you know, they're very adamant about, oh, we have to protect the purity, integrity of the sport and amateur competition as if this is some virtuous thing that they're doing, even though they themselves can't really even define what it means to be an amateur. They've changed the definition over the

years. So I'm going to read here a little bit from Vox. Yesterday, the Supreme Court handed down a heavily caveated victory for elite college athletes on Monday. The immediate impact of the court's unanimous decision, nine to nothing, in versus Alston, is that many elite student-athletes will receive additional education-related compensation, such as additional scholarship money. But the case could have broader implications and could eventually lead to these athletes being paid salaries. So let me break down for you what that means. The question in this case that they decided to rule on was not whether these athletes could be compensated for playing their sport. The question in this case that they decided to rule on was not whether these athletes could be compensated for playing their sport. The question was this one that they made very

narrow around this question of additional educational scholarship benefits. Right. So this was, again, this isn't about receiving payment. This was about sort of like scholarships and educational scholarships, essentially. So they and this is one of the hallmarks of the Roberts court in this era is he has really tried to sort of cabin these decisions to be as narrow as possible, because I think what a lot of court watchers feel is that he recognizes the credibility of the Supreme Court and the structure of the Supreme Court as it stands is very much at risk right now. So he's trying not to make a lot of waves. And he's trying to have as many decisions as possible where it's not just the conservatives

overriding the liberals. So that's how you get a decision like this, where they very narrowly rule on this very specific question about education scholarships, but it's unanimous. And what's giving people hope that this could lead to more dramatic changes is in the opinion as it was written, I think by Gorsuch, actually. He essentially said, look, we're not ruling on the larger compensation piece because you didn't specifically ask us to, but maybe you should try again and see what happens. Actually, so what's also interesting here was Justice Kavanaugh, and here's what he wrote, quote, nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that the product is defined by not paying their workers a fair

market rate. Adding, quote, and under ordinary principles ofoup, remember, what they have said is that students who play sports as amateurs should not be getting paid because the amateur nature of the sport, which would corrupt it and make it so that these rules are cross-subsidized and it would make it unfair, et cetera. Now, maybe there was something to that in like 1960, but right now it's totally ridiculous. Just to give you guys insight, like I'm from College Station, Texas, where Texas A&M is. Football is the lifeblood of that town. Whenever they moved to the SEC, I think over a billion dollars of new revenue came in to College Station. And I remember Johnny Football and Johnny Manziel and all that. The guy single-handedly, I think, brought in hundreds of millions of dollars into the town itself. And he wasn't making a dime.

Many of the stars that I've seen come through College Station in my entire lifetime were not compensated until at least some of them went to the NFL. Some of them, like Johnny, didn't end up doing so well even when they got there. But the point is, is that their time and the amount of economic and social benefit that they were bringing to the towns was immense. And they were being profited off of by the NCAA and by many of these schools who can sell merchandise and who can see huge additions to their endowments, to their bottom lines,

that they invest in stadiums and all this other stuff, but which the students don't get any of. And it's just a fundamental question of fairness that we've seen in the video games industry in terms of how their likenesses are used, in terms of how much they're profitive off of. It is just totally unfair. And I think the fact that Justice Kavanaugh and Justice Gorsuch both put in like little caveats there inviting it, that's kind of the more interesting part here. I think what a lot of

the court watchers saw, and this was the lead in the New York Times story as well, is that it underscored that the ban, it basically invited a new case. So it may take a couple of years, but at least in the current composition of the court, I would say that things are looking pretty good for college athletes. And I think that's the way that it should be. It's not fair to let these schools make billions of dollars on the backs of these kids and they don't get to make a dime. Again, I would I'll believe it when I see it. Yeah. Right. I mean, we've had all these big decisions over the years that people thought were definitely going to go this way or definitely going to go that way. And, oh, you know, ACB is definitely going to rule against Obamacare because she said this or that in the past. Or, you know, I mean, how long have people who really care a lot about abortion rights on either side of that debate or they're pro or against, how long have they

thought this is going to be the one and we're reading the tea leaves and it doesn't come to fruition? Roberts, the hallmark of Roberts has been to be extremely, extremely cautious and not to make any big sweeping decisions with massive ramifications, which is what we're talking about here. But to talk about like the morality of it and the actual, you know, situation that college athletes are facing, they not only they should they be compensated, they should also be able to unionize because this is this is the other thing. And I mean, I was a college athlete as I was a swimmer, though it wasn't like one of these sports where there's actually lucrative and money, money involved. So but I did have a firsthand experience of just how much control they have over your life. Right. I mean,

you're there supposedly as a student first, but your sport really controls every aspect of your day. They have entire control over like, you know, even what times you're studying and whether you're required to go to study hall. You have these like academic counselors. But obviously your schedule in terms of when you're at the gym and what your training regimen looks like and all of those things, even when you can have classes and when you can't have classes. Much more control over your life when you're an NCAA athlete than I would say almost any other, certainly, like, profession because they truly have rules that govern every single aspect of your life. So, to me, it's not just about the compensation. It's also, like, players should be able to have

a say in what those rules are and what the limitations are and how their days and their schedules are governed because, again, you know, if you're trying to balance a rigorous academic schedule with your sport, sometimes that's made nearly impossible by the requirements that they put on top of you. So I think that piece also needs to not be overlooked, the fact that it's not just about players should be profiting off of their skills and their talents that the NCAA is exploiting for massive, massive profits, but they also should have a say in what their employment looks like, essentially, on a day-to-day basis. Actually, this reminds me. There's actually currently a bill in Congress which was introduced by Bernie and by Chris Murphy.

I remember reading about this at the time, which would actually allow college athletes to form unions and become employees. Coincidentally, of course, the NCAA has been lobbying hard against it. And this is actually something which they have tried to push through several times. And college football players, I know last year in particular, were really beginning to talk a little bit about this. And there's at least a little bit of momentum behind it. But of course, the NCAA is throwing everything they possibly can against this. They really are a cartel. I mean, the way Justice Kavanaugh is writing about it, it's true. It's like you can't define your industry as one which makes money by not paying its employees.

It's BS. And yeah, it's basically what it is, right? Let's boil it down. Imagine Amazon being like, they're just for the love of the warehouse work. They're getting trained. This is apprenticeship. It's like slave, you know, literally that's, it's like modern forms of obviously not the same thing as chattel slavery. Okay. So don't anybody go and quote that. But indentured servitude and all of that had its own very ugly parts in early American history and in Europe. And I think that there's a lot to be said about what's happening. And by the way, like, we always focus on the stars who then go on to the NBA, go on to the NFL.

The overwhelming majority of these athletes are not going to be making it to the next level. This is it for them. I think it's like 3%. Yeah. are not going to be making it to the next level. This is it for them. I think it's like 3%. Yeah, this is it for them in terms of their career, their athletic career, and they deserve to be paid commensurate with the profits that are being made off of them for their skills and their labor.

Wow, you guys must really like listening to our voices. Well, I know this is annoying. Instead of making you listen to a Viagra commercial, when you're done, check out the other podcast I do with Marshall Kosloff called The Realignment. We talk a lot about the deeper issues that are changing, realigning in American society. You always need more Crystal and Saga in your daily lives. Take care, guys. All right, Crystal, what are your breaking points today? Well, right now, the Trump administration and Senate

Republicans are urging the Supreme Court to strike down the entire Affordable Care Act and all of its patient protections. Republicans are scrambling to confirm this nominee as fast as possible because they need one more Trump judge on the bench before November 10th to win and strike down the entire Affordable Care Act. This is not hyperbole. This is not a hypothetical. This is happening. That was then Senator Kamala Harris during confirmation hearings for Amy Coney Barrett, asserting that Barrett's addition to the court would almost certainly be the end of the Affordable

Care Act. This is not hyperbole, she said. This is happening. Of course, Senator Harris and every other Democrat confidently predicting the demise of Obamacare turned out to be wrong. Last week, the majority ruled that plaintiffs in the case did not have standing, leaving the ACA ultimately unscathed. ACB joined the majority in protecting that law. Now, this outcome was predictable. And, in fact, we predicted it at the time. That's not to say, though, that from a left perspective, this court poses no threat to egalitarian values or the quality of life of ordinary Americans. On the contrary, the problem is when it comes to the Supreme Court, the media seems to only know how to cover culture, things like LGBTQ rights, abortion, guns.

And I would submit Obamacare has achieved full culture war status. Now, I'm not saying these issues are not important, but covering them and obsessing over them exclusively can create a false impression of the court and can also mask the profound way that the court has transformed the nation into a corporatocracy. It also makes it easy for Chief Justice John Roberts and the other conservative justices to confuse the public into thinking the court isn't really so regressive. Throw a bone to the liberals on Obamacare and everyone immediately goes, golly gee, maybe we were wrong about ACB and Kavanaugh and Gorsuch. Maybe the court isn't so bad after all.

On the other hand, you're much less likely to hear about this opinion, which came down yesterday. The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday handed a victory to Goldman Sachs in its bid to avoid an investor class action lawsuit accusing the bank of hiding conflicts of interest when creating risky subprime securities before the 2008 financial crisis. So in a decision that was authored by Amy Coney Barrett, the court threw on a decision by the second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that would have allowed that class action lawsuit to move forward.

Essentially, what happened is this. Rewind back to the 2008 financial crisis. One of the things we learned about Goldman's outrageously criminal behavior was at the very same time they were selling certain securities to their clients, they were also betting against those same securities with full knowledge that they were total and complete garbage. So just to restate, Goldman knew they were selling crap. They were betting against that crap, and they stood to benefit by having their own clients bid up the price of the crap so that their gains in the inevitable crash would be more spectacular. David Seward, I want to give him credit here. He flagged this story for me and reminded me of this memorable exchange between a Goldman executive and Senator Carl Levin of Michigan about the shitty deals, his words, Goldman was pushing on their clients. Look what your sales team was saying about Timberwolf. Boy, that Timberwolf was one shitty deal. They sold that shitty deal. They sold that shitty deal. Mr. Chairman, this email was from the head of the division, not the sales force. Whatever it was, it's an internal Goldman document.

This was an email to me in late June. Right. And you sold Timberwolf. No, no, you sold Timberwolf after as well. We did trades after that. Yeah, okay. The trades after. Some context. Yeah. Might be helpful. That context, let me tell you, the context is mighty clear.

June 22 is the date of this email. Boy, that Timberwolf was one shitty deal. How much of that shitty deal did you sell to your clients after June 22, 2007? The answer to the Senator's question was hundreds of millions of dollars of that shitty deal was sold after that email was sent. And by the way, it's not just some nameless, faceless, rich ghoul that's getting hurt by this type of fraud. Obviously, the entire economy was rocked by the cumulative weight of Wall Street's crimes. But in this specific instance with Goldman Sachs, some of the institutional investors fleeced in these schemes are rather important to working

class Americans. For example, the Arkansas teacher retirement system, relying on Goldman's lies about how they always put the client first. They were hurt greatly by their investments in Goldman Sachs. In fact, the Arkansas teacher retirement system, they were part of this class action lawsuit that led ultimately to this ruling by the Supreme Court. With this decision for Goldman, ACB is doing what she was really put on the court to do, which was to protect the American plutocracy. She's not alone, though. Her majority opinion, handing a win to Goldman Sachs, wasn't just the work of Trump's evil justices. Liberals Kagan and Breyer, they both signed on to the opinion, agreeing that Goldman Sachs should be protected from accountability. Don't you just love to see that bipartisanship in action, guys?

In this way, the Supreme Court is kind of like every other institution in this country. They play to the crowd and whatever their perceived interests are on culture war issues, allowing them to quietly hand more and more power to corporations and away from workers without anyone really even noticing. The media typically plays along, creating a conversation and perception of the court that is a funhouse mirror distortion of its true intent. Chief Justice Roberts, he's a savvy operator. He knows the credibility and makeup of the court is in serious peril. So unlike Republican politicians, whose incentives are to be ever more radical on the right-wing culture war, Roberts sees his interests in mollifying liberals, not rocking the boat too

much so that efforts to reform the court into a more representative and frankly less awful institution don't pick up too much steam. New York Times is out with a pretty interesting piece on how the court appears to be very intentionally issuing opinions that can keep it from facing full liberal ire and backlash on culture war issues. narrow rulings on the most hot-button cultural issues, things like gay rights and Obamacare, getting majorities, including some liberals, to agree on these small and very technical opinions that have very little in the way of broader implications. In other words, they know that while there would be hell to pay for a major ruling on gay rights, they can give the store away to Goldman Sachs and barely anyone will even notice. As Sager and Rachel Bovard as well have long pointed out, this is also part of a shell game

of manipulation of the religious right. The Federalist Society bankrolled by wealthy business interests churns out nominee after nominee, pledging to be a true believing social conservative. But what those business interests are really paying for is to make sure the nominees are not going to give workers power

or hold business or Wall Street to account ever. So in the same way Democrats lie to their voters about the threat to Obamacare in order to gin up votes, Republicans routinely lie to their voters about nominating justices who will roll back abortion rights and protect wedding cake bakers or whatever the issue du jour is. Meanwhile, in court after court, the big money interests rack up win after win after win. Just another front in the class war that America's plutocrats are relentlessly pursuing, even as they aggressively pretend it does not exist. And Sagar, we talked about the NCAA. One more thing, I promise.

Just wanted to make sure you knew about my podcast with Kyle Kalinsky. It's called Crystal Kyle and Friends, where we do long form interviews with people like Noam Chomsky, Cornel West and Glenn Greenwald. You can listen on any podcast platform or you can subscribe over on Substack to get the video a day early. We're going to stop bugging you now. Enjoy. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, I mean, one of my favorite things to do is I say I told you so. It's a natural human inclination. I'm not above it. I love being right or at very least one of the first to popularize an idea. Some of you may have noticed, but Crystal and I were recently on Joe Rogan's podcast. Joe asked me an interesting question about social conservatism, how it applies to both my views and to the right generally.

I turned the tables. I actually explained to Joe, I thought the new social issues of our time have nothing to do with many of the fights of the past. And in my explanation, I named Dave Portnoy as the current largest conservative icon in the country. Let's review for those who missed it. I think social conservatism today is actually, one of the best pieces I read on this, shout out to Matthew Walther, is called Rise of the Barstool Conservatives. So if you were to ask me who I think like the most, the biggest like right wing social icon in America right now, 25 years ago, I would have said like Franklin Graham or something like that. I think it's Dave Portnoy. I really think it is somebody like Portnoy who is anti-PC. The current social conservatism, or at least the way that I think things are moving forward, is anti-woke, anti-PC,

and that is where I think the emerging fights are. I didn't invent the thesis. As I said, I stole it from Matthew Walther, who is the columnist over at The Week. But interestingly enough, someone else appears to have taken notice and added to the discourse, with Politico magazine writing a new piece titled, quote, How Republicans Became the Barstool Party. Now, this might confuse some casual observers of politics because the question even arises, is Dave Portnoy conservative? By his account, not really, if you're thinking in terms of old ways of doing business. Dave is pro-choice. He's had multiple sex tapes released, which he's proud of. He's pro-gay marriage. So what conservative thing is about him? Well, look,

he's conservative in the way that Trump kind of was. He just refuses to bow to the liberal intelligentsia, and he likes to drive them crazy. Portnoy refuses to apologize for past jokes. He basically holds up a middle finger up to the elite. He was one of the most prominent people against lockdowns. And look, to his eternal credit, he raised tens of millions of dollars for small businesses. Every time he tells the liberal media, F you, he gets richer and more popular. Waltler describes of Trump in a important way, describing the phenomenon this way, quote, Trump recognized there are millions of Americans who do not oppose or even care about abortion or same-sex marriage, much less stem cell research or any of the other causes that had animated traditional conservatives. He adds, quote, instead, he correctly intuited the new culture war would be fought over very different

and more nebulous issues, vague concerns about political correctness, SJWs, opposition to the popularization of critical race theory, sentimentality about the American flag and the military, the rights of male undergraduates to engage in fornication while intoxicated without fear of the Title X mafia. That's basically it right there. That's Portnoy's appeal and the direction of the new American right. The fights of the past are in the past. The fights of the future are how do we teach our kids history? Is it okay to be outspokenly patriotic in popular culture and in elite circles? Do we say Merry Christmas again? Can we say quote unquote problematic words? Can we roll our eyes at people's pronouns and their email

signatures without being called homophobic? Now look, I know none of these seem that important, but let's be real. This is what gets people going in America, whether you like it or not. signatures without being called homophobic. Now, look, I know none of these seem that important, but let's be real. This is what gets people going in America, whether you like it or not. This is how Trump won 10 million more votes in 2020. And I suspect if the GOP ever wins a popular vote margin in the future again, it's going to look like Dave Portnoy's fan base. Pretty diverse, pretty male, a huge base of support outside of its traditional voting space. I call it grill dad conservatism. I actually think it's the future. And look, already in the 2020 data, you can see signs of this everywhere. Hispanic males voted for Trump at a higher rate than anyone else compared to 2016 and cited Trump's opposition to woke shibboleths like defund the

police and lockdowns as the number one reason they voted for him. You see the same thing in the modest but still noticeable increase in black men that voted for Trump. And ironically, the only group who voted for him at a lower rate was white men, which I will find eternally funny. But look, I don't want to fully sing the praises of barstool conservatism, because if I have one great worry, it's this. The barstoolification of the GOP can easily win, but economically, things aren't going to be too great. As Walter writes, quote, where will barstool conservatism leave what remains of the old conservative movement? In the case of free market dogmatists, I believe there's almost zero daylight between them.

The policy papers on why blockchain enabled future markets and organ donation brought to you by Manscaped will revitalize Dayton, Ohio is going to write itself. Part of Portnoy's core ethos isn't economic libertarianism. And look, I mean, it served him quite well. It's obviously evident in his stand for retail investors during GameStop and more. But when you translate that to public policy, you actually get a lot of the same old Paul Ryan stuff with a new flair on it. Barstool and conservatism could easily end up being the new cover album for the tax cut GOP of old. All of this, I guess, is to say is if you want to keep your eye on where things are headed, look to our culture for people who are anti-PC and anti-woke. That's where the new conservative movement is and what actually probably could win and who will likely be in charge a decade from now.

It's interesting, Crystal. There's a lot of debate. Joining us now to talk about the mess that is the New York City mayoral race this year is Ross Barkin. He is a contributor to The Nation, wrote a fantastic piece there we're gonna talk about. He's also author of a brand new book out today, The Prince, Andrew Cuomo, Coronavirus, and the Fall of New

York. Timely stuff. Congrats on the book, Ross. Great to see you. Good to see you, Ross. Thank you. And thank you for having me. A very crazy day in New York City and also the release of my books. Big day for you, man. You timed that perfectly to make sure it dropped on a low-key day where you could really focus on it. So good job there. I want to ask you about the book, actually, but first just break down for us, for people who haven't been immersed in the details of this mayor's race, which has completely gone

off the rails, who are the main players? What's the state of the race? Who's the front runner? What have the state of the race? Who's the frontrunner? What have the contours been like? Sure. So right now there are four Democrats who all have some shot at winning. The frontrunner in the polls for the last month has been the Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams. And he's been followed by different candidates at different times.

Originally, Andrew Yang, the celebrity former candidate, was the part where he no longer is. You have Maya Wiley, who is de Blasio's former counsel and MSNBC pundit. And you have Catherine Garcia, who was de Blasio's former sanitation commissioner. And there was a fifth candidate who was once one of the top contenders, Scott Schringer, but he was accused of sexual assault. The allegation was never substantiated, but that really derailed his campaign. So there's really four contenders. Adams is the favorite. Three of them are running explicitly. I would define them as moderates, and one, Wiley, is kind of occupying this left liberal

lane. But certainly most of the candidates are talking about issues like crime, public safety, are pro-charter school, and have come out explicitly against the funding of the police. So very interesting race coming off of what happened in 2020. Yeah. And so, Ross, you wrote this piece, let's put it up there on the screen, in The Nation, which I saw at Get Some Play, where you're talking a little bit about how Eric Adams in particular, who has been really kind of a strange figure, who uses identity politics in order to cover for some of these corporate things that he's doing. Could you just explain that a bit? Yeah. So Eric Adams, he has fascinating political history. He was a police

captain a long time. He was in the transit police, then the NYPD. He was elected to the state Senate and then to the relatively powerless perch of our president. He would be the city's second black mayor. And he is someone who is both very anti-woke, I would say, in terms of he talks a lot about, you know, public safety and crime and being tough on crime. He said he'd carry a gun on him if he was elected mayor because he can legally do that. He has a history of making very incendiary statements. He once told people who are from out of town, so-called gentrifiers, to go back to Iowa. At the same time, he's also been in identity politics. So I don't know if that's like the little woke side of him or it's more just kind of a classic cynical ploy.

But repeatedly throughout this campaign and throughout his political career, he has used race as a way to deflect, whether I'm talking about tenant protection as an attack on black wealth, even though real estate developers and landlords are almost exclusively very wealthy white people or these kind of large corporate firms. And also, you know, saying he can, you know, illegally use these parking placards because the last former president got to do it. He was white. So you can't have corruption for the white guy, not the black guy. So he's a very anti and incendiary figure, a little bit like Rudy Giuliani, maybe more left wing Rudy and even tiny shades of Trump. I don't like to liken anyone to Trump, but he's definitely someone who makes a lot of outrageous statements. And it can be very hard to keep track of all of that. I mean, he's really weaponized race in what is a disgraceful manner in this campaign and has been called out by, you know, by a wily. And certainly some of his attacks have been on Yang and Catherine Garcina, who kind of teamed up together.

They campaigned together, including on Juneteenth. Eric Adams tried to pretend like that was some racial affront and they were trying to disenfranchise black voters. He likened it to horrific legacy of the Jim Crow South and poll taxes. I mean, that's how aggressive he's been in essentially using these identity politics terms and the very real scourge of racism to cover for what is essentially a like corporate police state agenda, you had this paragraph in your piece that I think is really important because it takes it out of the context of just the New York City mayor's race and poses a larger question for the left. You say, for a long time, many on the left have favored an identitarian politics over one that aligns class with race.

If identity is elevated above class and critiques of capitalism no longer matter, politicians like Adams will be emboldened. As a black man, he's been able to effectively denounce calls for greater tenant protections on the grounds they would adversely affect minority landlords while rebuking all criticism of himself as a racist. As racist, so he's basically saying like, if you're critiquing me, then you must be racist, no matter how legitimate the critique is. His supporters have attacked ranked choice voting itself, erroneously claiming that it weakens the power of non-white voters. So again, this is a guy who is basically cynically exploiting some of the, you know, well-intentioned proclivities of a lot of people on the left to position himself as a progressive while his ideals and what he stands for is anything but.

Yeah. So I think Adams poses a unique danger to the left if he wins. And it looks like he may very well win because he has a lot of the populist rhetoric. And he's someone who would come in with a real populist coalition, working class blacks and Latinos, labor unions, these kind of dying outer borough political machines. And he could say on one hand, credibly, I was elected by the people. But unlike sort of, you know, left populist type politicians, there will be no large redistributive agenda, right? Eric Adams is backed by, like Andrew Yang, is supported by, you know, billionaire charter school supporters, billionaire real estate developers.

The city's power elite are very excited about Eric Adams. They might be a bit wary because he is unpredictable and incendiary. They prefer someone like Michael Bloomberg, who, you know, very much fit in a box, whereas Adams used to be a Republican, now he's a Democrat. He's all over the place. But fundamentally, he's not a challenge to capital. He's not a challenge to the power elite. At the same time, he's very adept at invoking race and making it seem like he himself is some kind of underdog or some kind of populist, like a lot of candy politicians. So challenging him, organizing against him will be difficult in my eyes because he has a strong coalition and he's very good at using these weapons of identity against the left. That's why I'm always warning my friends in the left, you really have to pair class critique with race. Otherwise, you get this kind of woke capitalism, which is what Eric Adams ultimately represents.

So Ross, New York City progressives, how are they going to square that working class blacks are likely to elect a black mayor who wants more cops and doesn't want to defund the police. I just feel like this has to be one of the biggest reckonings for what's happening with left politics in New York city right now. I'm curious for your thoughts on that. Yeah. I mean, I would like to see that reckoning. So after the 2020 election, you know, I, and some other people on left were saying, look, you know, New York city, Trump grew his vote share in working class Latino neighborhoods. And then grew his vote share in working class Latino neighborhoods, and then to a lesser extent in working class black neighborhoods, he did not really grow his share in white neighborhoods. And this was true nationally, this really followed

national trends, not waiting for like the professional left reckoning with that. And it just never came. I think unfortunately, a lot of these kind of NGO type groups, you know, they really have incentives to ignore what's going on. So you have you have these weird scenarios where, you know, a nonprofit NGO organization will say we speak for the working class. Meanwhile, the working class is voting a certain way. I think there are smarter, cannier groups like DSA, but still, there is this disconnect, and the reckoning has not come. Yeah. Yeah. And even the, like, left candidate in the race now, Maya Wiley, the only marginally progressive person who has a shot,

I mean, she was, like, on MSNBC every day, opposed to Bernie Sanders. So, and Scott Stringer, who was the other one, was also, like, you know, a Hillary Clinton type progressive, I guess. So the left really didn't have much of a showing in this race or anyone to root for whatsoever. Look, we don't know what's going to happen. And ranked choice makes this very dicey in order in order to effectively predict what's going to happen in this race. First time having ranked choice voting in the New York City mayoral primary. But Andrew Yang was once solidly at the top of this field and has really fallen off to where, you know, I think if he were to win at this point, it would be a tremendous comeback. He's a large underdog at this point. What happened that caused him to fall off in the polls to that significant amount? So my theory is Andrew Yang really lost

educated liberal voters. Unlike the National Democratic electorate, the left liberal PMC part of the Democratic electorate in New York City is a lot bigger. So, you know, Elizabeth Warren flopped on the national stage, right? I think an Elizabeth Warren type candidate could do a lot better in New York City just because this kind of, you know, wealthier affluent type Democrat who consumes a lot of news and has a graduate degree matters, right? You really can't win the mayorality being entirely shut out by them. And my theory so far is that despite their revulsion towards Eric Adams, they're more accepting of Eric Adams because he's been an elected official. His gaps take on a different quality. Andrew Yang really came in with a lot of energy and excitement.

He just has shown a real knowledge gap around certain issues. He's gotten a lot of media scrutiny. Eric Adams did not really get any media scrutiny until I would say around May of 2021. And it's almost entirely absent from the media. It's very strange to even see this, whereas Andrew Yang, wall-to-wall coverage, I think ultimately that hurt him. I think if Eric Adams got the level of scrutiny Yang did, he would not be so high in the polls. That being said, I think Andrew Yang did a really poor job of mitigating the fears of progressives and also at least trying to assuage some of this kind of educated liberal voter base, which does matter. One with educated liberals, one with working class black voters. Eric Adams will not do well with educated liberals. But my own sense is he's probably better positioned in ranked choice voting to show up on their ballots more than Yang. That's still too determined. Yang, listen to those Bloomberg consultants a little too much, I think.

Tell us about the book. Congrats on it coming out today. Again, it's called The Prince, Andrew Cuomo, Coronavirus in the Fall of New York. We've certainly been talking to you about these topics for a while. What is it that you wanted to dig into in this book and expose about Andrew Cuomo and his reign as governor there? So I really see this book as a rejoinder to the propaganda memoir he put out last year. The focus of late is the mayor's race, but Andrew Cuomo is still the king of New York. He has not resigned.

He's inordinately powerful. He wants to run for a fourth term. So this is a book about the horrible year of COVID in New York State. It's about how Andrew Cuomo failed New York, how he downplayed COVID, compared it to the flu like Donald Trump did, was late to respond, mismanaged nursing homes, courted scandal and controversy. And it's also about his political history. So if you're interested in kind of how Cuomo came to be who he is, how he betrayed the left over and over again, and really worked to foil the ambitions of Democrats, this is definitely

a book for you. It's pretty, it's very readable. It's fairly short. And if you really, you know, you read the memoir last year or ignored the memoir last year, you want to really find out what happened with Andrew Cuomo, what happened with COVID, who is this guy? Why is he so powerful? I really think this is a book you will enjoy and you should go buy it from four books today. I'm going to go ahead and assume our audience did not read the Andrew Cuomo memoir. However, they should read your book because you have been the most astute observer, one of the most astute observers, certainly of Cuomo and his failures from the very beginning. You weren't buying into the media hype. You've had already a lot of journalistic revelations that have been

important in your incredible writer. Everybody, we're going to put the information for the book down in the description so you can find it. Definitely check it out. Again, Ross, great to have you. Thanks for joining us on this spectacularly busy day for you. Thank you, Ross. Thank you for having me. Of course. Thanks, everybody, for watching, guys. We really appreciate it. As a reminder, if you want to watch the full show completely uncut, you can become a premium member today. You get to listen to it as a full audio show as well. And you get to help support our work here. We're 100% powered by Supercast.

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