Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 7/13/21: Global Chaos, Haiti Situation, Billionaire Space Race, Vaccine Surveillance, Child Tax Credit, White Liberals, White House Corruption, and More!

Episode Date: July 13, 2021

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and you don't need to hear our annoying voices pitching you like I am 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. So we're taking a look at the very latest developments out of Haiti.

Plot there continues to thicken. Really have no idea what's going on at this point. It's pretty wild. Some new details that are pretty wild. Further implicating some U.S. citizens, as I talked about yesterday, a plan seems to have been hatched in the United States. We'll get to all of that. Going to talk about the billionaire space race.

I have lots of feelings about it. I know soccer does as well. New levels of surveillance now going after your text messages. That's interesting. Child tax credit. People are starting to have that money hit their accounts. That's actually a huge deal in American politics. Sager's going to be looking at why liberals are the worst. White liberals specifically. White liberals specifically. Okay. And I'm going to be taking a look at the media and political reaction

to what's been going on in Cuba. We've got David Suradon. He actually has two phenomenal stories, a really important one about corruption, Susan Rice, another one about the way that workers through pension funds are basically being forced to fund the war on themselves. We'll have him break all of that down. But we wanted to start with not just what's going on in Cuba, but a lot of protest cropping up all around the world, some of which the media likes to cover, some of which the media doesn't like to cover. We wanted to give you a more sort of fulsome picture of what's happening on the globe right now, because it could portend a broader trend as the coronavirus pandemic continues in a lot of places, as the temperatures literally rise in a lot of places, of more and more global unrest. So we do want to start with Cuba, which of course captured a lot of attention this week

as very rare anti-government protests took to the streets. Let's take a look at a little bit of what that was like this week. Thousands of Cubans on Sunday took to the streets over a worsening economy, a display of civil unrest rarely seen in the communist-ruled island nation. Demonstrators in the capital city Havana chanted freedom amid heavy police presence. Many called for better access to vaccines, while others blamed the government for daily blackouts. One protester said he was struggling to make ends meet in an economy plagued by sanctions and the global health crisis. So journalists are saying they haven't seen protests of this size in Cuba in decades.

Very rare. You know, some of the things that they mentioned there, food shortages, medical shortages, just basic supply shortages, a lot of economic pressure. Coronavirus cases continue to spike. Of course, you can't talk about any of that without also talking about the now 60-year-long U.S. embargo. Trump actually amped up the level of the blockade to make it even more stringent, even more

intense. The Biden administration has kept all of those restrictions in place in spite of the fact that the country, like the rest of the world, is suffering under the pandemic. So that's sort of the backdrop of what's going on in Cuba. Yeah, it's a really weird situation because what happened is that Obama slackened some of the blockade, urged Congress to undo the embargo,

which Congress, people should understand, is what has officially enacted the Cuban embargo. And that is one of the reasons why, given the narrow margins in the Florida delegation, it probably will never, ever be lifted. Then Trump came in, reversed the policy. Biden is essentially stuck to that policy, even though he's verbally said that he agrees with the Obama policy. So it's a strange thing. Cuban relations have really just been a wild ride since I think like 2014 under Obama. And it's a strange thing. Cuban relations have really just been a wild ride since I think like 2014 under Obama. And it was one of the things that actually spurred some of the Republican votes down in Florida in 2016 and again in 2020, which people shouldn't underestimate

just how large that constituency is and how passionately they feel. So it's an interesting situation, but you're right, which is that, look, we've heard from people who are like, oh, you guys are going to cover Cuba? Of course we're going to cover Cuba. And the reason why, though, is that we need to put it in the context of the media is saying it's just about Cuba. And look, all God-blessed Cuban people certainly have suffered. There were a lot of people who were cracked down on yesterday. But as we pointed out, there's a lot going on in the rest of the world. And South Africa is actually also in the midst of some pretty horrific violence, which we have a little bit of video from. Let's take a listen and just take a look at what it looks like there.

At the moment, what we are watching is a shop. We are watching people who are walking out with things like fridges, beds. I mean, foran, they're walking out with furniture now. So it has gone from food to clothing to furniture. There's a shop that they're trying to hit at the moment. We understand it's food lovers. They're also coming out of their Bredan. The whole mall has been looted. So you can see there, there have been really pretty violent riots, protests, looting. This was all sparked by former President Jacob Zuma being imprisoned for, well, not directly for corruption, for refusing to appear in that corruption trial. And the reason that sparked this sort of protest and riots and looting and whatever else is going on in the streets there is because he was the first Zulu president. That's right. And so the Zulu people

feel that this was a political witch hunt. You know, all indicators were that he was genuinely quite corrupt when he was in office. So but, you know, you should you should also with all of these things always take a little bit of a look underneath the surface. And I don't claim to be a South Africa expert here. But if you look at the inequality within that country, of course, famously, you know, white-black inequality, massive, massive gulf. But even within the different black ethnic groups, Zulus tend to be at the lower end of the income scale. So even within, you know, a relatively impoverished group, they tend to be at the bottom of that pyramid. So a lot of pressure there, a lot of strife.

And all of this is in the context of, yeah, what's happening in Cuba is important and we want to focus on that. We've also talked about, you know, the protests that have been unfolding in Haiti even before Moise was killed. But there's a trend across the globe that goes a lot further than just the countries that the media wants to pay attention to. So this is not going to be a comprehensive list, but we wanted to give you a little bit of a flavor of that. So in addition to South Africa, there's a full-on civil war going on in Ethiopia that we have heard precious little about.

This is a crazy, crazy story. civil war going on in Ethiopia that we have heard precious little about. This is a crazy, crazy story. So the guy who's in charge there, who was given a Nobel Peace Prize by the global community, then almost immediately after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, turns around and starts what's essentially an ethnic cleansing of the Tigray people. That's one of the ethnic groups in Ethiopia. Longstanding tensions here because the Tigrayans for a long time, even though they're a minority ethnic faction, they essentially ruled Ethiopia until this latest president came into power. So there's been an ongoing civil war there. The New York Times, I actually recommend you go and read this article that gives some of the background,

but also shows how the Tigrayans are fighting back and actually winning against the government forces. The government forces are aligned with the Eritrean, their neighbors who they long time were at war with. That's actually what won this dude the Nobel Prize was for coming to this peace deal with Eritrea and then turning around and allying with them to conduct this ethnic cleansing. So, you know, this is a full scale civil war, ethnic cleansing, all kinds of atrocities taking place and precious little media coverage of what's going on. Yeah, it is. And actually, I've heard a little bit about it. We have the largest Ethiopian population outside of Ethiopia here in Washington. Yeah, that's right. And so, you know, I've heard a little bit about it. We have the largest Ethiopian population outside of Ethiopia here in Washington. Yeah, that's right. And so, you know, I've heard a little bit about some of the stuff that's going on there.

There have been protests here in D.C. that I've seen, too. Exactly. I've seen them on the street. That was why, because I was like, hey, what's going on? And they were like, hey, man, there's a whole civil war. And I was like, wow, this is crazy. And it's funny in that context. So Aung San Suu Kyi, I forget her name, A Aung Suu Kyi, I believe, the Myanmar leader,

Obama, and now this person, all three Nobel Peace Prize winners who went on to kill people afterwards, which I do think is kind of fascinating. And when you think about it in that context, it just demonstrates how facile so much of this is. Like, oh, you brokered an agreement here, and we don't want to go after it too much. But there's very, very little follow-up. There's very little actual coverage and context that people, especially here in D.C., are willing to put that into. And if anything, I think it makes us both upset in that selective coverage over specific types of protests cheapens the response because Washington will mobilize to one. And like we're saying, look, nobody is saying that what's happening in Cuba is unimportant.

They don't wish the people in Cuba the best, all of that. But it makes it so that it can trigger, you know, the Washington machinery of a type of response. And that's not necessarily a good thing. I mean, let's consider a long history of American policy, particularly in Cuba. And I am not one of these Howard Zinn leftists, okay? I'm saying like, look, this is not a good legacy in terms of what's happened in that country in our own policy. And over a long period of time, probably backfired more than anything. Yeah, pretty much anything that anybody has tried to do and probably bolstered the Castro regime,

if you really want to think about it. Well, that's the thing is, you know, people rightly point out that they make excuses in Cuba. They point to the American sanctions over everything. And you, by continuing that embargo, you're giving them an excuse to cover for their own domestic failures i mean we've been doing this for 60 years now people you've been thinking it's been work gonna work for that long so if you actually care about the misery and the suffering of the cuban people there is a thing you can directly do right now which is to lift the blockade and take another course with regards to cuba if you actually care about the suffering of the people there.

But it's all very selective. I'm going to talk about this more in my monologue. You know, the only protest or human suffering that plenty of Democrats, but, you know, off like sort of uniformly people on the right seem to care about are in like Cuba, Venezuela, and China. The rest of the world, we don't care so much about, especially if it's protests against a government that happens to be right-wing. We don't hear anything about those protests or liberation struggles or freedom struggles or police brutality. We don't hear anything about that. So one of the things that we talk about here is, number one,

what the media chooses to show you and our politicians choose to fixate on is important. And even when they're being accurately portrayed, which, you know, I wouldn't say that the Cuban struggle has been completely accurately portrayed, but even when they're being accurately portrayed, the fact that you have this narrow lens leaves out a bigger picture of what's going on all around the globe. And number two, you don't get to pick and choose like your principles when they're convenient. You don't get to be against foreign interventions, except when it's this one regime that ideologically suits my interest to have them overthrown. You don't get to say like, I don't really care about these humanitarian struggles going on, except when it gives you

this like, I hate socialism talking point that's convenient for your cable news hits. And that's what we see a lot of the political news hits. And that's what we see a lot of the political class doing. That's what we see a lot of the media doing. I do think that this trend, though, that's happening around the world of a lot of unrest is something that we are likely to see continue. So we just talked about Ethiopia. We also have in Colombia, there have been months long protests against a right wing government there. The thing that initially sparked this was a tax reform package that was seen as exacerbating the burden on poor and middle class families. It's really expanded, though, to be a sort of broader critique.

There's been huge state sponsored violence, police brutality and crackdowns. Again, something you haven't heard about, even as there's a lot of concern, rightly and justifiably, about the crackdowns that are happening in Cuba. So this has really expanded to focus on the inequality in Colombia writ large, desires for better health care, desires for a more just society, pushback against police brutality. All of that has sort of come to be encompassed in these protests that, again, have been going on for months that you probably have heard very, very little about. No, you're right. And I think this is why it's important that we try to cover it in a measured way.

And, you know, I see the same thing. Like, all these leftists, like, oh, no, there's no Uyghur genocide, you know, going on in China. Actually, Maduro is the greatest president who's ever lived in Venezuela. Oh, but in Cuba, they have... Listen, let's all just be honest about what is happening everywhere. If we can start from that place, okay, then we'll figure it out. You can acknowledge Uyghur genocide without saying that you want to invade China. You can say that Maduro is a bad guy without saying that also this

weird effort, failed coup Guaido thing is a total failure. You could say what's happening in Colombia seems bad and that, yeah, we've supported that government for a long time. And you can also say, hey, what's going on in Cuba is also bad, but, hey, given our history of intervention in the country, we probably shouldn't do anything about it and let the Cuban people decide their own fate. And it's the same thing whenever it comes to Haiti. It's just amazing to me watching people whitewash and twist narratives.

And, you know, you always talk about this. Who are the people who actually suffer? The people in Cuba, the people in Haiti, the Uyghurs, people in Venezuela. Nobody cares about them. They become these like political footballs here in D.C., which is that, oh, you know, these people get weaponized and then it becomes like a political talking point. And then, you know, everybody on YouTube is apparently an expert in Uyghur camp genocide and all this. And it's just disgusting. Like, I've met people there. I've met here in Washington whose relatives are thrown in camps and are forced to FaceTime them while the Chinese police are sitting there with a gun to their mom's head saying you better tell them everything is okay and they better shut up or you're going to go back to the camp.

Okay, you know, go ahead and tell me that that's fake. And once again, though, you can acknowledge these things without saying that the United States should, you know, put the full front of the U.S. military or our State Department. You can just be like, yeah, that seems really bad. We should talk about it. We should, you know, there are different levers of policy or whatever on the outside, like, hey, let's not buy slave cotton. I mean, that seems pretty reasonable to me. Or, hey, maybe the blockade, maybe that hasn't worked.

Exactly. Maybe that's further immiserating the Cuban people and isn't actually getting us anywhere in terms of if your goal is regime change, guys, it isn't worked so far. So maybe take a different tack. Right. I mean, it's the level of consistency here. You can acknowledge what is happening and you can also say that, you know, we should not use the full force of our power of our country in order to, quote unquote, do something about it. Right. And it's just that level of discourse seems impossible apparently in politics. Because if you look throughout history, and Haiti is a perfect example of this. You know, I've been digging deep into Haitian

history to learn as much as I possibly can about that country and what led to the crisis that they're facing right now. Another country where protests have been going on for months against the corrupt government of Jovenel Moise, who, of course, was just assassinated. Moise had been backed by the U.S. government. We're going to get to Lebanon here in just a second. But Moise had been backed by the U.S. government in his decision to, hey, I'm going to stay in office for an extra year and I'm going to rule by decree. U.S. government backed him. And so we haven't heard anything about those protests that have been going on for months. And the violence that had been occurring on the streets there as gangs have really taken over, the streets of Port-au-Prince in particular. And one of the arguments I heard

yesterday for why so much attention on Cuba, but not these other places, is, well, Cuba's closer. Well, Haiti's also pretty close, guys. Haiti's pretty close. So maybe Cuba's a little bit closer, but Haiti's right there next door, too. So if you're thinking like, oh, it's right next door and we could have a refugee cry, we could have a direct impact on Florida, the rest of the nation. You should also be caring about Haiti in that regard as well. The last one we wanted to bring up here. And again, this is not a comprehensive list. We just wanted to give you a sense of how much unrest there really is in the world right now, all with different root causes and reasons and specifics to that locality in that nation and what the people there are struggling with.

But I do think there's a connective tissue here. When you see these trends unfold, you have to say what's going on. You've got a pandemic that's been keeping people locked up and frustrated and unemployed. You've got in a lot of, a failure to be able to get vaccines, a failure to be able to distribute vaccines, something, by the way, the U.S. could do a hell of a lot about. But we have yet, as of yet, not taken a full leadership role in terms of making sure that these places can get the vaccines that they need. And also, we should keep in mind that there is a direct correlation that has been studied for a long time between higher temperatures and more violence. Like down to the degree, the hotter it is, the more likely you are to have violence,

not just here, around the world. So as we're seeing these record-breaking temperatures that are truly terrifying around the globe, not surprising that that is helping to fuel some of this unrest as well. So last one we wanted to bring to you here is Lebanon is virtually on the brink of collapse. They have had an economic crisis that's left 70 percent of the population in poverty, shortages of fuel and medicine and food. The New York Times says they're suffering through a financial crisis that the World Bank has said could rank among the world's three worst since the mid-1800s in terms of its effect on living standards. The currency in Lebanon has lost more than 90% of its value.

Since the fall of 2019, unemployment has skyrocketed. Businesses have shut down and imported goods that were once commonplace have become scarce. And as a result of all of these pressures, there have been also mass protests in the streets. And, you know, this is a really heartbreaking thing because Lebanon has long been one of the places in the Middle East where you had a true middle class. Beautiful country, true middle class. And now you have people, if you read through this article, it's truly heartbreaking, who are lining up in their Mercedes from when they were prosperous in a food line

just to be able to feed their families and be able to survive. You've got businessmen and women who are having to wait hours and hours just to fuel their cars, to save on gas. They've got accounts of people who put the car in neutral and push it while they're waiting in the gas line. I mean, things are incredibly desperate there. And once again, precious little said about it here, even as these protests in a political crisis is unclear, you know, where who's who's going to end up in charge in that country is a massive political crisis, massive economic crisis, financial crisis, and very, very little focus.

I haven't seen a single cable news segment, certainly, about what's going on there in Lebanon. I really had to dig to find out some details from The New York Times about the facts. No, that's right. And, you know, I guess the one positive thing I'll say about this, every one of these countries we're discussing has incredible food, if you think about it. Lebanon, Ethiopia, Haiti, Cuba. I'm not a fan of Ethiopian food. Really? Oh, God. Love you guys.

She's missing out, man. I'm with you, but I love that gray bread stuff. Oh, I love it. I can't get enough of that. And what's that spice, Burberry or something? See, I like the spicy food. So, look, shout out to all of you. Thank you for all for creating this incredible cuisine.

If there is a real takeaway here, it's that that look, there's a lot of chaos that's around the globe. And if you look actually deeper in almost every single one of these deep economic inequality, authoritarianism combined with horrific class dynamics is basically at the story of all of it. That's right. Lebanon has always been a deeply class stratified society. They've been in turmoil for 20 years. Ethiopia is the same way whenever it comes to tribalism. South Africa, I mean, that needs no introduction in terms of how long the history in turmoil there. Cuba, same thing.

You've got the communist elite and then you've got everybody else. There's also a deep racial element in terms of their society. And then same thing whenever it comes to Haiti in terms of tribalism and the sorting of the class. The small elite. Right, the small elite that owns 99% of the stuff. Very common in third world countries and a huge, huge driver actually of a lot of protests around the globe.

So I think that that's a thread that really unites things. I was looking, South Africa's unemployment rate is 32%. That's incomprehensible, I think, to a lot of people in the West. And that's overall. And if you look at the Zulu people, it's going to be double that, likely double that. And I think that the way you phrase that is really important, because if you just focus on one of these countries, you may get a misleading picture. If you're just focused on Cuba, you may take away that communism is bad and Marxism is bad,

and that's what's leading to these protests. If you just look at Colombia, you might just say this right-wing government is bad. And there are those specific elements that are important to look at that are significant to each individual context. But we also have to see the trend that's happening around the globe

and brace ourselves that this is probably each individual context. But we also have to see the trend that's happening around the globe and brace ourselves that this is probably going to be another year of a lot of unrest, of a lot of people pushing and fighting for more, of scarcity, of, you know, bread lines and fuel lines and all of that. And, you know, we don't want to take our eye off the ball of these struggles happening all around the globe. Absolutely. New developments in Haiti, and this is crazy. So, okay, as you guys know, Haitian President Jovenel Moise was assassinated. And obviously, there are a lot of questions about who and what and why, and we still don't have a lot of answers here. So, first thing we learned, we saw some of those videos.

We saw that his own security really didn't seem to put up much of a fight. That's still very much a question mark of why that would be the case. We learned that there was a Miami area security firm run by a Venezuelan immigrant that appears to have, and some of this is according to the Haitian government, take with a grain of salt, but appears to have hired a lot of ex-military Colombians and also a couple of Haitian Americans who claim they served as translators to actually serve as mercenaries and carry out that plot. Then yesterday, as I brought to you, the Haitian government is pointing the finger at this Florida, Haitian, a Haitian born Florida doctor. So Haitian, but lives in Florida and says he's a

doctor, although there's some questions about whether he's actually has a medical license in the U.S., appears to have filed for bankruptcy. There's more and more sort of sketchiness about who this guy is and what he exactly was planning. But what the Haitian government, the Haitian police chief is saying is that he wanted to have himself installed as president. How was that going to work? How did he think that was going to work? I don't know.

Given the history, I guess it kind of makes sense. But they're saying, okay, he hired these mercenaries. Another question is they were very highly paid. How did he afford that when he just declared bankruptcy? So the story is he hired these mercenaries, wanted to install himself as president. They assassinate Moise. I don't know what they thought was going to happen next. But that's the story that we learned yesterday.

So the latest information, according to CNN, throw this tear sheet up on the screen, is that some of those involved in this assassination plot of the assassins here had served as informants for them. One in particular, who apparently, after this assassination went down, called into the DEA to be like, what do I do now, guys? And they were, you know, hey, go turn yourself in to the authorities. And the FBI, too. There also, according to CNN, were confidential informants for the FBI involved here as well. We know the most about the DEA informant guy, and there's some new reporting from the Miami Herald that they've been really at the bleeding edge of the reporting with regards to what's going on in Haiti right now. Some reports that this DEA informant had been involved in some really large and significant operations with regards to Haitian drug traffickers, a guy named Guy Philippe in particular. This informant was involved in helping to bring him down. That dude had actually just

been elected to the Senate, and they got him just a few days before he was going to be sworn in, because if he had been sworn in, then he would be immune from prosecution. So so anyway, this this person is involved and then we don't know anything about the FBI informant or informants who were apparently also involved. But a very strange turn of events that these are the types of people who were involved, who had been working with our government, and now were involved reportedly in the murder of the Haitian president. So that's where we are right now. You'll recall part of why this is significant is we played for you the first day we covered this story, some of the videos from the scene that were immediately perplexing, where you have people with American-accented English saying that they're DEA agents as they're going into the president's home to murder him. Let's take a listen to that video

again so we can recall what that was like. The DEA has no answer. No. This is the DEA has no answer. That's just what the DEA says. They don't buy our stuff. Yeah, see, that's the rule. So, obviously, the DEA says they didn't have anything to do with us. When this was going down, some of them may have been informants for us previously. This was definitely not on our behalf, but that video was the first thing that we were like, this is

really weird. This is what makes sense, though. The fact that they might have made it sound really legit is because maybe one of them were informants, right? So maybe they've been on raids in the past. So they knew how to do it, right? And they knew the protocol, and as you talked about, there are actually DEA raids in Haiti all the time.

And so if they could replicate what it would look like if they had previously worked with the DEA, it would make a lot of sense. There's a whole lot going on here. And so it all comes back to there's these Colombian suspects who were actually killed by police, who had links to a security firm which is based in Florida, but is owned by a Venezuelan national, who was hired by this Haitian doctor, who didn't have any money, who was also working in Florida, who wanted to be president of Haiti. And yeah, that's kind of the clearest picture that we have. Oh, and some of the people involved were U.S. government informants, so much so, I mean, considered informants of the highest

level who were involved in some high-profile operations. So I don't know about this whole thing. There's a lot going on here. It seems like that Netflix movie I once watched about a Russian guy who stole or wanted to buy a submarine and sell it to the Colombian drug cartels. There seems to probably, very likely, what is all this? It's an intersection of drug trafficking, political corruption, the DEA, which has his hands all over all of these things, and just a really screwed up country in Haiti. I think if you put all that together, you get some wild plot like this one. Whether there's a conspiracy, maybe. I mean, it's's certainly possible but we don't have any evidence at least to suggest

that yet um one thing we do know obviously is that even as moise was uh reportedly incredibly corrupt uh and was for sure this part is definitely true. Ruling by decree had effectively decided casually to overstay his term, something, again, that the U.S. government for some reason decided that they would support. There is a massive political and developing humanitarian crisis in a nation that already was really in a political and humanitarian crisis and a violence crisis as well, where these gangs and these thugs really rule the streets in Port-au-Prince. The political situation is such that, you know, the dude who sees control and I've explained this before, but I think it's important to understand the guy who sees control, who was the prime minister, Moisa just fired him and was planning on bringing into office the following week a young neurosurgeon, apparently, who was politically inexperienced. So even the guy who's trying to claim control and trying to use some of the U.S.'s words to say, look, I'm the rightful president now and

you got to listen to me. And he's the one who asked the U.S. for troops to come in, which, which, by the way, the Biden administration has not done yet, but also has it ruled out, which, again, is a terrible idea. So there's no it's not clear that this guy is the legitimate leader. You have only 10 elected members of the legislature at all because Moise had overstayed his term and didn't call for election. So you only have 10 legislators writ large. The judiciary, which should be, which is powerful in the country, and some, there's also multiple constitutions, under some versions of the constitution, the chief justice would be the rightful successor. Well, first you had a lot of judges resign en masse over Moise overstaying his term. And then the chief justice died of COVID about just about

a month ago. So really, everywhere you turn, it's question marks and disaster and, you know, just a complete power vacuum in terms of what is going to happen next politically. And it's truly heartbreaking. I mean, the people of this country don't deserve this. They don't deserve any of it. And I was talking to someone who's kind of an expert in the country, and obviously, like, the drug trafficking, understandably, gets a lot of attention here and is central to the gangs and then the grift and the corruption, all of that. But what they were telling me is that one of the primary political grifts in Haiti is actually to accept bribes from different importers to allow them to bring in their goods without paying the import tax. So to bring in, they call it contraband, but it's normal goods, sodas and chips

and whatever they want to import. And so that's one of the primary growths. So when you talk about political power in Haiti, you're also talking about a lot of money at stake. And that could be at the center of who wanted this power, who was Moise at odds with, who was hoping to be able to come in and fill the vacuum. Those are the sorts of questions that people are asking. And again, one big question mark here that should be easily resolvable by the surveillance cameras within

Moise's residences. What happened to his security personnel? None of one of them was injured or wounded. There's no appearance that they fought or resisted at all. Was the DEA ploy really so effective that they just stood down and did absolutely nothing? Or were they in on it? Some of the legislators in Haiti are suggesting in radio interviews that perhaps the security personnel themselves were in on the job. So that's some of the speculation that's out there. Again, the latest reporting is that you have the DEA confirming that at least one confidential DEA informant

who seems to have been involved in some high-level drug trafficking stings, that person was involved in the assassination plot. You also have indications there were FBI informants involved. That's the very latest we know. And we're definitely going to continue to follow it because it is just, first of all, it's really important to know what's going to happen in that country. And second of all, just a wild story to understand who and what and how and why this all transpired. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. 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. And then next to a story deep in my heart. I have a lot of feelings about the oligarch space race.

Everybody knows I love space. I've actually just finished a book on Project Mercury, which some of you might know about the right stuff and more. So I've been thinking a lot about this and how to frame it properly.

And, you know, there was a speech yesterday by Richard Branson. He recently went up to 50 miles, which is the technical edge of space. What I call fake space. What Crystal calls fake space. Which, I mean, it is kind of true because it's not real. Unless you can see the ocean blue and you're in the blackness and you can see the International Space Station,

I personally don't think it counts, but all these guys apparently think that it does. If you want to experience weightlessness, you can literally go up to like 40,000 feet and just plunge. People have been doing it since like 1945. All that being said, let's take a listen to what Richard Branson had to say, and we'll talk about it on the other side. We're here to make space more accessible to all, and we want to turn the next generation of dreamers into the astronauts of today and tomorrow.

We've all, us on this stage, have just had the most extraordinary experience, and we'd love it if a number of you can have it too. And with that in mind, I have some news. So today, Virgin Galactic is thrilled to announce that we have partnered with Amaze to open space for everyone. OK, so as we were joking, it's space for all who want it, for everybody who's rich and all that. But that's what the people have been asking.

Let's just think about it. Well, I do think people are mystified by space and people are, you know, really invested in it whenever it's a national project. But part of the problem that we've had, and we saw this would happen when Congress tried to give that special giveaway to Blue Origin, is that Bezos wants money for space. Oh, here's $10 billion. But if NASA wants money for space, no, you're going to have to jump through a lot of hoops. And we should really consider, like, should we be we be look what's happened is that richard branson and then blue origin musk in particular has actually done something revolutionary the other two are really just like literally recreating projects that we did in the 1950s in order to

get into space like we accomplished this already you're yuri gregarin did this in 1961, okay? That's how long ago we went into fake space or whatever. Alan Shepard went into suborbital flight in 1962. It's already been done. John F. Kennedy was literally president when all this was happening. Why are we outsourcing these capacities, which we have as humanity, as Americans, to the private sector? I mean, do you really want them to have control over, if you consider, you know, Star Trek and all of that, space is the next frontier, the final frontier. Well, if you think about it, why are these billionaires who are specifically come from Silicon Valley obsessed with it? Because the

way that they made billions of dollars is you own the infrastructure of the next big thing. Amazon is the infrastructure of the world's store. Amazon is the infrastructure of the World Store. Elon Musk and then PayPal, the financial infrastructure online. Richard Branson is a little bit different in the way that he became a billionaire, but the mindset is the same, which is that if you want to make billions

and billions in the future, you want to own the railroad, so to speak, of the next infrastructure of what we're at. I personally think that should be public. Think about how much investment and the semiconductor and all of the technological advances that came from Apollo, from the Mercury program, Gemini program, and all of that. And that just seems gone. And I thought it was really crystallized in this clip of a young reporter on CNN being like, I'm just never gonna forget this day. Just watch this.

Really absorbed that this has just happened and there was no mishaps that we know of. From our perspective, it went off without a hitch and Richard Branson will soon be awarded his astronaut wings along with two of his fellow mission specialists. I mean, really, it's a moment that gives you goosebumps. It's a moment, Ryan, as a reporter, you know, we all have those moments that we put in the memory book forever

that we know we're never going to forget, we're going to hold on to for the rest of our lives. Memory book forever, Crystal. She's trying way too hard. She is trying way too hard. And, you know, my mom was not even born when Alan Shepard went to space. Like, that's how much we seem to have, that's how much we seem to have, like, forgotten in terms of our legacy

of what we can actually do. And so watching the private sector just recreate it, it makes me sad. It just shows you that, like, how much you've just let,

you know, kind of go away in terms of our national imagination and of our technological capabilities. A non-Garrett artist who always has good takes on, like, billionaires

in this regard, he wrote a Substack piece that said, I have an idea for a new reality show. It's called Billionaires Solve Problems the Government Solved a Long Time Ago, and then explain how much more efficient they are than the government. I'm going to ask Richard Branson and produce, which pretty much sums up what you're saying here. It's like, how is this impressive? We've been doing this forever ago. Y'all are wanting, especially, you know, Musk and Bezos, they're wanting all this money from the government that they're getting in a lot of cases to do what NASA accomplished 60 years ago. Like, what exactly are we doing here? So there's that very specific question. There's also this sense of like, you all are the richest people

on the planet and you could do anything you want with your money to make this world that we all live in a better place, right? You could make a lot of different choices to focus on the human beings that are actually here. And yet there's this aura about it of like, you know, the elites of the world have basically screwed up this world. If we look at what's going on with climate change now, it really is terrifying because we seem to be leapfrogging every projection that's like worst case scenario. We seem to be getting there faster than even the worst case scenarios envision. And, you know, elites disproportionately contributed to climate change and corporate interests and business interests and all of that. So there's a sense of like, OK, y'all screwed up this planet and now you're just like, that's

OK. We'll just figure out how to get on to the next one. There was an exchange. Let me find this. Elon Musk tweeted last night, those who attack space maybe don't realize that space represents hope for so many people. And Marianne Williamson, as she often does, had a phenomenal reply, which is that the problem is that Earth represents hopelessness for so many people. And Marianne Williamson, as she often does, had a phenomenal reply, which is that the problem is that Earth represents hopelessness

for so many more. And so there's this sense of, like, number one, why are we outsourcing these public goods and government function and government capability to a private sector that's, like, 60 years behind and way less efficient than the U.S. government has been in these things? And also, why is this your focus? Why is it that all these billionaires

are jumping in the space race rather than figuring out, you know, the next big technology to make things good here at home? I think all of that kind of goes together. I think it all comes down to this, which is that, look, and this is Anand's always bigger point, which is that why do you outsource public goods in all forms? So like, once again, it's actually, people are always like, why doesn't Bill Gates and Elon Musk or whatever donate their money? It's not, it shouldn't be up to them. Their whims of their philanthropy should not be up to them. We should determine our societal problems together and use our government to fix them. And if we have to raise taxes, so be it. And, you know, I mean, like I said, I'll cut Musk much more of a break

because they actually did, you know, revolutionary technology in terms of relanding rockets, trapping the price of satellites and all that. I think that actually is something inherently better for the public good. Same thing in terms of delivering astronauts to the space station. But Blue Origin and Virgin have not accomplished any of that. Literally not even close. And it also just feels like a vanity play. It is a vanity play. I mean, Branson explicitly wanted to go before Bezos.

I mean, look, I don't want to go after the engineers and all that that made it possible. What it is, is that why are we celebrating and forgetting our own legacy of being able to accomplish astounding and incredible things? It's like that reporter probably doesn't even know that we did this back in the 1960s. 1961 is whenever we went into space as mankind.

1962 as the United States. John Glenn orbited the Earth in 1962 a couple of times. It's like these were things which were huge in the national memory, and it's just like forgotten within a single generation. And you look now, we don't even have, I mean, I always see NASA being like, oh, well, we're going to have a moon base by 2020. I'm like, get out. No, you're not. Or we're going to Mars by 2040.

It's a total joke. And the real truth is that if there's anybody who's going to make it back to the moon or Mars, it's probably SpaceX. And God bless, you know, okay, good. But I will always have qualms with the idea that a private company, which also has contracts with the Chinese government and all these other people, at the end of the day, SpaceX is loyal to the dollar. That's not their fault. That's just how it is. Like, you shouldn't necessarily have your next space program, especially if it's something that could be the future of humanity. It shouldn't be, it should be beholden to a country or to the, you know,

to the people in the spirit of the International Space Station. That's very well said. We're taking, you know, science and exploration and potential hope for the future of humanity and from the jump turning it into a commodity to be subject to the same capitalistic whims and corrupt forces and dedication of the profit margin over literally everything else that everything here is already subjected to. It reminds me of the scene from Fight Club when the guy, I forget what he says, like the IBM stellar sphere, or he talks about how corporations are going to be naming the constellations or whatever in space as the future. Yeah, here we go.

And, you know, he wasn't that far off. I remember with the Red Bull jump, that's when I was like, man, this is a little bit too close to reality. The Red Bull jump, the moon brought to you by Amazon. There you go. It's not too far away. We do want to stick to also a very important story. Yeah, yeah. Speaking of dystopia, we've actually entered that.

So this story flew completely under the radar yesterday. But if you read this, it is some of the most stunning things that you'll see proposed yet by the U.S. government in terms of surveillance. Let's put this up there. So the administration is very concerned with the unvaccinated. Okay. You know, in terms of surveillance. Let's put this up there. So the administration is very concerned with the unvaccinated. Okay. You know, that's absolutely true. 99%, I believe, of the deaths from the Delta variant in the United States so far are from the unvaccinated population. But look at what they're calling for. They are calling for taking such an aggressive approach. They want to call on SMS carriers to mete out false messages. And it's not just the government. Read this sentence. Biden-allied groups, including the

Democratic National Committee, are also planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages. Uh, what? Now look, I think people should get vaccinated. I have two doses of Moderna, and so does Crystal. Happened months ago, feeling completely fine. But this is way over the line.

You cannot censor people's text messages. Or imagine getting a text from your kooky uncle who's like, there's a 5G chip in the back. And you're like, okay, uncle, you know, whatever. And then AT&T is like, your uncle has sent you misinformation. Here are real links. No, absolutely not. Because as we have now seen, when YouTube and when Facebook and Twitter

underwent the most censorious campaign in modern history around vaccines, you can think what you want about that. They paved the way to take off anything that they possibly want, where there's a lot of special interests with a lot of ways and wants to weaponize this. Once you do it once, it will continue to happen. This is a line that we cannot break. Going through to people's private communications between each other via text message. Imagine AT&T should have, and they make this argument all the time, we don't want, we

have nothing to do with our customers' phone calls. We have nothing. This actually will put them in the relationship between you and somebody else. If they want to be common carriers and treated as utilities and all that, then you can't be doing stuff like this. This is straight up, like, I mean, I saw all these people talking about what's happening in Cuba. Yesterday the Cubans cut off the Internet, and everyone's like, oh, everybody understands the Internet and free expression and the ability to communicate is vital. Yeah, I mean, I agree. Meanwhile, the DNC and the government

want to censor your text messages. Again, even if you agree that everybody should get vaccinated, if you want more aggressive, fine. That's up to the White House. They can go with speech and they can plan a whistle-stop tour and they can go all over the country

and make the case, okay? Go for it. But this level of intrusion into people's lives on the SMS, there is no going back from that. It should only be used in a single case. A nuclear weapon is incoming. Take shelter. That's about it whenever it comes to that.

This is the dystopian future that we've been warning you about. And, you know, there's a direct line. I have a lot to say about this. First of all, it's really interesting the way that they framed this article. Like this completely bombshell news about their thinking of monitoring your text messages for misinformation is like buried down in this thing. It's like the classic buried the lead. The headline is potentially a death sentence. White House goes off on vaccine fear mongers when the headline obviously should be White House considering censoring and monitoring your text messages. So there's that, that like they clearly whoever wrote this didn't see this

as that big of a deal, which is very telling in and of itself. The other thing is, you know, since the time we were at Rising, we've been covering the way that elite media has been pushing towards this exact outcome. Anywhere that there's unfettered conversations going on, the New York Times in particular has been making it a point to go after those spaces. So we saw them go after podcasts. We saw them go after Par spaces. So we saw them go after podcasts. We saw them go after parlor. Signal. We saw them go after Signal, which was a real warning sign because that's, for those of you who don't know, Signal is an encrypted app where you send text messages. Even your encrypted messages sent privately to people in your contacts should be checked for misinformation.

This is normalizing it to the public, and then the White House can come in and say, yeah, actually, that's what we're going to do. We're going to start looking at SMS, at text messages. I just have a million questions about the legality of this, what the plans are. I mean, how would this even work? Who makes the decision? What is misinformation and what is accurate? I mean, we've seen it on YouTube plenty of times where, you know, things that are completely legitimate are taken down or they're taken down when they're shared by an independent journalist. But when CNN licenses that exact same video, it's not taken down. So how is this going to be applied? This is really wild stuff if they're actually thinking about monitoring and censoring your

text messages. Right. And look, we already saw how this played out. So everyone was generally OK with the people out there who were like, they're implanting chips into people. And YouTube took it down. Nobody really was squeamish about it. But then what happened? We talked about ivermectin when Dr. Pierre Corey testified before the U.S. Senate and his testimony was removed by YouTube. Now what's going on? Is that on the line? What if somebody texted somebody about Dr. Corey? Are they going to get taken down? I mean, think about back in January of 2020, the World Health Organization believes the Chinese government and says that coronavirus is not human to human transmission while the Chinese are lying about it. I mean, by the standard in the next pandemic, are they going to block text messages or send you an official fact

check around that? This is where things get dicey here very, very quickly. And like, I mean, look, I'm stunned that it's not actually a bigger story, that they buried it down in the seventh graph because they considered it okay. Also, why are the Biden-allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee, working with AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile. I don't think Sprint is around anymore. I think it got bought. I mean, there's only three carriers or three or four, I believe, and a bunch of discount ones to piggyback off their networks.

I mean, if they're working with a political party to discuss health information, what are we doing here? And I've seen this, Crystal. California right now has mask mandates around kids and schools. That's against CDC guidance. I mean, who's, you know, who's sciencing more? Anyone fact-checking that? Actually, yes. I mean, mostly people on Twitter. But like, are there text messages being, you know, swept up? Should Gavin Newsom's text

messages be censored because he's explicitly violating CDC guidance here around masks? I don't agree with that decision. I think he has the right to say whatever he wants. If he wants to put kids through that, be my guest, I guess. And it's just one of these things where

you can see how it will only be probably applied in one direction. Once you have that capability, it's not going away. Once the DNC and these groups work with the text message carrier, what's going to happen next? Let's say Trump runs again for president and he says something. They're going to be like, you have a responsibility to correct misinformation. And so the Trump campaign, as any campaign, sends out a text message for fundraising. Are you going to get a text from your carrier saying that

this text is full of misinformation? This is the road to hell. Or is it just going to be blocked? Is it going to be blocked? Or they did it with the New York Post. I mean, can I text you that? How are you going to monitor everyone's text messages? I mean, we know they already have a capability. Yeah, I mean, look, we know the government has that capability. But, I mean, last time I checked, at least, AT&T hasn't been doing this. So all of it becomes a big problem very quickly. I'm shocked that more people haven't looked at it. And part of the problem is it's under the guise of vaccines.

Which reasonable person can argue and say, oh, I want people to get vaccinated. You know, everybody knows I'm vaccinated. But it doesn't matter. I mean, we're seeing already also, I don't think we have a tariff sheet of this necessarily, but the people who are not vaccinated are disproportionately poor, below $50,000 a year, and likely to be in poverty. I mean, these are people who don't trust institutions. They're largely downright immobile. They've been screwed over by the medical system and many more.

Who can blame them? And you think blocking their text messages is going to accomplish this? Here's the other piece of that. From that same survey, somewhere around like a quarter of people under who are earning less than $50,000 a year who haven't gotten vaccinated yet actually want to get vaccinated. Oh, there you go. But guess what?

We don't have paid sick leave. Or can't take a day off. In America. You can't take a day off from your job, let alone if you have symptoms and you're sick and you can't come in the next day. That's a good point. You can't do it.

So, you know, for you and for me, it was no big deal. Took it on Friday. If I needed to take off, you know, we got the weekends off. If I needed to take off, we would have figured it out. It's fine. A lot of Americans, especially making less than $50K a year, where you're close to the line, you can't afford to take that time off of work. And we don't have paid sick leave to do it.

So one of the things that James Medlock, who's, you know, a policy analyst and very online also, has been advocating for, which I think makes a lot of sense, is give people paid sick leave to go get the damn vaccine. That would do way more than your SMS misinformation monitoring bullshit or whatever else it is that you're planning to do. Because you have a large group that wants to get the vaccine but has logistical life hurdles. Reduce those hurdles. Make it easier for them so that they can actually get it done. And then you start to get to the place of, you know, right now part of why they're, I guess, freaking out and reaching for these sort of extreme solutions is we've had a good – we've done a good job of getting the people who want to get vaccinated and for whom that's an easy proposition of getting them vaccinated. Now there's a flattening off of people going in and getting the vaccines. So they're reaching for these kind of extreme solutions so that we all can get to herd immunity and just get as many people vaccinated as possible. Well, really obvious one that Medlock has been pointing out is give people paid sick leave so that they can take time off work and get this done and not worry

about if they have a reaction, they have symptoms and they need an extra day to be able to rest and recover. Seems like a way better, way better approach than whatever this nonsense is ultimately. And one thing that I disagree with that you said is that you think it'll only go in one direction. On vaccines, yes, that's true. But look, Trump gets reelected. You think he's not going to use this power? You're right, actually. You think he's not going to use this same power against, you know, liberals or leftists or whoever or whatever against Medicare for all? Who knows, right? Because one thing we know about presidential power is once you have a tool in your toolkit,

they never give it back. Once the powers are expanded, they never ever take a step back and say, you know what, this went too far. So this precedent gets set, then you better be comfortable with Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis or Don Jr. or whoever ends up as the next Republican president having the exact same capability.

Actually, you know what? I'm glad you corrected me because you're right, which is that once it gets codified by the government and once it gets codified by a political party working with a private carrier and the government gets to set the terms of what's true and what's not, that is... Yeah, next time it'll be the RNC working with the government. Do you want the RNC pumping out election information to correct misinformation when all that was going on? Yeah, just think about how haywire this whole thing goes. Yeah, anyway, that's all we have to say about that.

It's just something that really stopped me in my tracks. We're going to track it incredibly, incredibly closely as we move forward. Let's move on to this next thing. Slightly more optimistic. Actually, I think, Crystal, a very good test of whether you and I are right in any way about politics, which is that can some of our bigger social problems just be fixed with money? I personally believe yes. Let's put this up there.

So the Biden administration is days away from beginning monthly payments to families with children with the child tax credit, up to $300 per child a month to most American families. Now, that is thanks to the temporary increase. I think it's only a couple of years here. But this, I believe, expires in the middle of the midterms strategically in order to make sure that people won't vote against it. It's a very interesting test of if you give people $300 a month per child, A, why do people on the right support this? Is it going to increase fertility rate? Because a lot of moms say that the number one reason they can't have more kids is because they can't afford it. A lot of families say they can't afford either the daycare or a mom or a dad, anyone, wants to take off work and or doesn't want to work anymore

and stay home, but they don't have the financial capability. People say that they can't necessarily get married, even if they already have children because of the financial barrier. Already, I believe diaper prices are one of the highest that they've been in a long time, which is huge tax, especially on the working poor. So $300 per month per kid, that's a lot of money. And when you consider, especially almost what the average American family, if they do have kids, like two kids, that's $600 extra per month. I mean, in some places, that's not necessarily rent. Maybe that's half your rent. Maybe that is your diaper budget. Will that affect your behavior? More importantly, will you remember it come election day? And because this is basically a universal program,

I don't think you can take these things away. But I could be wrong. It could be that the culture war is so powerful that this will fade away and we'll just forget about it. In some ways, that's what happened with the stimulus checks, but those were one time. This is a monthly payment, which people will receive for more than a year. So once it becomes part of your financial budget, once it becomes part of your life, are you going to A, reward the people who gave it to you? And B, are you going to fight for that program? Are you going to make it and change societal behavior? Will it make things more stable? Like, you know, we were talking about global chaos in the show.

It's a big test. I honestly have no clue. Yeah, that's all really accurate. And for once, Democrats were actually a little bit smart about the way that they did this politically. George W. Bush and then Trump, like, when they give out a tax credit or a check or whatever, they're happy to like put their name all over it. So everybody knows this came from me. I actually got a letter in the mail from Joe Biden letting me know about the child tax credit. And, you know, so they've done a more effective job just of marketing this of like, hey, guys,

you're getting this money and it's because of us. I wanted to read to you a little bit of what this could mean for families and single moms who are right at the poverty line, who are struggling to make the budget work month to month. This is from that New York Times story. They say few places evoke the need for this credit more than Lake Providence, Louisiana. It's a hamlet along the Mississippi River where roughly three quarters of the children are poor, including those of Tammy Wilson, 50, who's a jobless nursing aide. The $750 a month she would receive for three children will more than double a monthly income that consists only of food stamps and leaves her relying on a boyfriend right now. She says, I think it's a great idea. There's no jobs here. And while the money will help with rent,

Ms. Wilson said the biggest benefit would be the ability to send her kids to things like camps and school trips. She said, kids get to bullying, talking down on them, saying, oh, your mama don't have money. They feel like it's their fault. And, you know, it just gets to me

to think about kids who are being bullied like that, who are struggling, who don't have, you know, these basic, basic experiences of childhood, who have to worry about things like whether they're going to have enough to eat. And one of the things that's been encouraging in this is, yes, this was a Biden administration effort, but there are some Republicans who've been pushing in this direction, too. Mitt Romney, in particular, had a different plan. And this isn't revolutionary. This helps to get us closer to where most of the rest of the developed world is. And if we're not investing in our kids, what are we doing? If you take the heart and humanity out of it and think about just our trajectory as a nation, there is literally no better investment that you can make in our people than in childhood. In the earlier, the better.

That's what all the research shows. The more money you invest at the beginning of a child's life, the better off they're going to be for their entire life and the more in a position they're going to be to contribute to society. We've also seen through these little trial runs of the stimulus checks that we had during the pandemic, we've seen the way that this has eased the burden for people. We've seen the massive impact that it's had on poverty. Here's some of the numbers. So among households with children, after the stimulus checks, reports of food shortages fell 42 percent from January through April. Another broader gauge of financial instability fell 43 percent among all households. Frequent anxiety and depression fell by more than 20 percent. And they say while the economic

rebound, other forms of aid no doubt helped, the largest declines in measures of hardship coincided with the $600 checks that people got in January and the $1,400 checks that mostly they got in April. When you give people money directly, this isn't, this is the old trope of how they're going to spend it on booze or cigarettes or whatever, you know, the lobsters or like sneakers is the other one that you hear all the time, particularly in like a racialized context. But no, what we've seen from study after study and real world experience with these checks is people spend it on rent, on their electric bill, on food, on, you know, clothes or experiences for their kids. They spend it on being able to like take a day off of their

current miserable job and find something new that meets their skill set more, is more fulfilling or has a higher wage or gives them more time to be with their kids, gives them that little tiny bit of power. And that's part of what we're seeing in the market right now is like because people had even just this little bit of help during the pandemic and were able to get just a tiny bit ahead, they've been able to leverage that into more power in the workplace, more, you know, the labor market for the first time has tilted ever so slightly back towards workers. That hasn't happened in like 40 years. So look, I wish they would have made it permanent from the jump. I hope that you're correct, that ultimately they're able to, you know, this becomes so integral to people's lives and their budgets and it's so supported. And I think the way they've structured it where it's not completely universal, but it's more or less a universal provision makes it much more likely that politically this will succeed and will disproportionately benefit the most disadvantaged people in the entire country, which would be, by the way, poor children. Those are the most disadvantaged people in the entire country. I do want to give one warning, which is, look, we're entering a very strange economic period.

The level of economic optimism is higher, is the highest it's been since 2005, if you can believe it. So welfare politics could easily come back in a big way. And I don't want people to have a false picture about how that might look like. And they actually quote somebody here in the story. A man, Mr. Sullivan, he has four children. He's gotten by on unemployment insurance, food stamps and odd jobs, could collect $11.50 a month, but is so skeptical of the program he went online to defer the payments and collect a lump sum payment next year. Otherwise, he fears if he finds work, you have to make the money back. He says, quote, government assistance is a form of slavery. Some people do need it, but then again, there's people that are doing is living off the system. And same thing. There's another woman who's a low income parent. She describes the program as wasteful and counter to productive, and she lives 90 minutes away from the person who you discussed. So don't underestimate the power of welfare politics. I'm telling you, this could come back in a big, big way. And it could be actually a huge

blow against the program. That's actually another thing we just frankly have to contend with. I saw unemployment insurance, for example, 52% of Americans supported ending the extra unemployment plus up. Well, what I would say, though, is that the programs that have been most successful and both most politically successful in U.S. history are universal. So that's why Social Security and Medicare can't touch it. But you have to pay into it. Third rail. That's where things get real dicey. But they're universal programs.

The way that welfare politics generally works is something becomes racialized or something becomes, well, this is a benefit that is just for the undeserving poor. Typically what we've seen through American history is when you have a benefit that is universally applied more or less, it garners more political support. Because it just makes it harder to be like, oh, well, it's those bad poor people who are getting this. You know, the Ronald Reagan, the welfare queen, the young bucks buying T-bone steaks. I do think it helps that the middle class is getting this significantly. So I do think that helps a lot in terms of mitigating that. But, you know, I just want to put out there that this could be a problem. Yeah, I mean, welfare politics have been very powerful in American history.

But I think it is somewhat protected against that because of the breadth of who is ultimately getting this. It makes it hard to be like, oh, it's those lazy people who don't deserve anything and just need to like bootstrap themselves up. We shall see. Hopefully. 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 Sagar in your daily lives. Take care, guys. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, we talk a lot here on this show about the detrimental effect that the culture war is having on our politics today. All of us can feel it when we interact online to how it bleeds into our personal lives and it hurts friendships friendships and offends feelings, uncomfortable conversations at Thanksgiving. Everybody knows what I'm talking about. It seems collectively we all lost our minds in the last several years. Part of the problem, though, seems to be this. Where can we all agree that it sucks? We agree on that. But it doesn't seem to be a way out because at the end of the day, most people still feel like the other person is

the aggressor responsible for the tenor of our politics with no choice but to fight. Now, I find that question really interesting. Who is to blame for the culture war in its 2021 form? There is a lot of blame to go around. There's some interesting new analysis, though, who tell us might be some of the biggest instigators. Blogger Kevin Drum, he lit the internet on fire recently with some charts that he assembled. He glibly titled it, If You Hate the Culture War, Blame Liberals. Now, before our liberal viewers get up in arms, consider this. When Drum says liberals, who he's really referring to are a specific subset, the MSNBC, CNN, white, upper middle class person who likely went to a four-year college degree institution and has a lot of power in American life. Drum demonstrates that aside from same-sex marriage,

the share of partisans adopting a more partisan view since the year 2000 on issues like immigration, taxes, abortion, religion, and guns have nary moved at all on the Republican side, while skyrocketed on the Democratic side. In other words, people who overwhelmingly identify as partisan Democrats have become much more partisan Democrats in the last 21 years. This chart in particular is striking, which shows that on a partisan scale of 1 to 10, if you look at 1994, the average Democrat was a 5, the average Republican was a 6. That seems consistent with the America that I grew up in in the 1990s. But look at today. By 2017, the average Democrat was a 2, while the average Republican was a 6.5. So that shows

between 1994 and 2017, consistent Democrats were three whole points more liberal than Republicans who became more conservative. Now that's pretty astounding, and yet it makes complete sense in the context of the 2020 election. Newly validated data from the Pew Research on people who voted in 2020 shows that 2020 was actually one of the most racially depolarized elections in modern history. Hispanic voters, particularly Hispanic men, gravitated to Trump, with the highest share of Hispanics who voted for Trump holding not a college degree, at 41%. Nearly half. At men, it's even higher. Biden, meanwhile, dramatically improved his position over Hillary with white men, especially those who hold a four-year college degree. Are you beginning to see the pattern? I've said here

on the show many times. The overwhelming dividing line in America today is did you go to college or not? If you did, you probably hold more doctrinaire attitudes on race, gender, abortion, and policing than people who didn't go to college. And as those college special flowers graduate and permeate all of our elite institutions, they have done many things. They've hijacked the Democratic Party away from its base of largely elderly black people and formerly white working class voters, while also hijacking every modern institution in American life. And the good news is if there is one, is that there is an obvious lesson here. As Democratic data analyst David Shore has said ad nauseum, Quote, we ended up in a situation where white liberals are more

left-wing than black and Hispanic Democrats on pretty much every issue, taxes, healthcare, policing, even on racial issues or various measures of racial resentment. So as white liberals increasingly define the party's image and messaging, that is going to turn off non-white conservative Democrats and push them against us. He's speaking there as a Democratic strategist. The good news is that while white liberals run everything, they aren't a majority of the country. Racial depolarization in 2020 elections shows that even a buffoon like Trump can come 45,000 votes away from the presidency by just holding up a middle finger to them.

White liberal cultural attitudes on race in particular are so overwhelmingly unpopular, they turn off many of the voters that they purport to speak on behalf of. And it is unironically, in my opinion, a good thing because the vote is the one thing that these people do not control. Joe Biden's ascension to the presidency, the Democratic nomination, Eric Adams, his recent election as mayor, high profile contests where these issues are smacked down by the very constituencies that white liberals claim to speak on behalf of is the real world corrective to our problems. Now notice, I haven't said the Republicans are the only ones who can solve this. Frankly, I think they love this situation because they can harvest tens of millions of votes with opposition to cultural leftism without changing a damn thing in support for big business. But what it does do is it creates a gigantic opening. Look again at

that graph I showed you on changing attitudes. It leaves all these people out who are in the middle of that graph. Millions. What you should take away is that people are not very partisan at all. Only partisans are. It's simply that we live in a system where the partisans are the people in charge of both the Republican and the Democratic primaries. Whichever primary base just so happens to kind of sort of be near-ish to the center, that party wins.

That's an okay strategy, but it doesn't actually lead to anything. So my hope is that the middle will prevail culturally, economically, and more because they've been shut out of the conversation and neglected for far, far too long. I thought this was a really interesting data set, Crystal. 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.

Crystal, what are you looking at today? Well, as protests broke out across Cuba, of course, American politicians and American media were quick to jump into the fray, walking right up to that endorsing regime change line and sometimes jumping right on in. It's now almost 10 p.m. Eastern time. It's now been over 12 hours since over 32 cities in Cuba, brave people have taken to the streets to protest against a communist Marxist evil tyranny. And so far, not a word, not a word, not a statement from Joe Biden, from the vice president, from the White House, not a word. What is it so hard? Why is it so hard? Why is it so hard? Why are they so uncomfortable coming forward and just condemning this evil socialist Marxist regime? Well, first of all, I americans understand that this impacts america uh you know

the cuban dictatorship is uh you know a drug trafficking dictatorship they sponsor uh terrorism and they have also exported communism throughout the hemisphere and throughout the world so it affects u.s interests and that's something that i think sometimes is not emphasized enough of how this affects U.S. national security policy. And I think the U.S. has to understand that these kinds of regimes that are enslaving not just Cubans, but Nicaraguans and Venezuelans and are involved in a variety of different places throughout the world impact our sovereignty and our security. And so I think the U.S. has a vested interest and a right to intervene on behalf of the Cuban people, but also on behalf of the United States. If we could find a way to add some freedom and democracy in Cuba and overthrow the last remnants of communism and the Castros,

this would have a ripple positive effect for the region. So in addition, Senator Menendez, the powerful chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, tells us, for decades, Cuba's dictatorship has used violence and repression to silence its people rather than permit the free exercise of democracy and their basic social rights. This must end going on to promise to use the force of his office to make sure the U.S. stands in solidarity with the people of Cuba. Florida Congresswoman and Senate hopeful Val Demings wrote in a rather unsettling tweet that America stands for freedom. We must stand with the peaceful demonstrators in

Cuba. The White House must move swiftly. Move swiftly to do what exactly? Now, few come out and say what that something we must do immediately is, but history provides a whole lot of bad examples of ways that the U.S. helps to topple regimes and usher in, quote unquote, democracy. And last but not least, the guy running the army and the CIA, that'd be Joe Biden, had this to say. We stand with the Cuban people and their clarion call for freedom and relief from the tragic grip of the pandemic and from the decades of repression and economic suffering to which they have been subjected by Cuba's authoritarian regime. All right,

I have a few things to say to all of this. First of all, for all of those loudly screaming that we must do something to support the Cuban people, I completely agree. We should do the something that is directly in our power and purview, which is to immediately remove the brutal sanctions that have fueled shortages and are especially murderous during a pandemic, we could also do something by lifting vaccine patent protections and helping supply vaccines to Cuba and everywhere else in the world, by the way. After all, it sure does take a lot of nerve for these people to pretend to rend their garments in agony over the plight of the Cuban people when they're all directly complicit in the suffering of that nation. And oh, by the way, it is true, as some have pointed out, that the Cuban government uses the American sanctions to

distract from any of their own domestic failings and repressive actions. So don't give them the excuse. Biden's calls for relief from the pandemic and economic suffering are particularly enraging, given that he specifically has the power to act. Ada Chavez points out all of Trump's Cuba policies are still in place. President Biden could lift all 240 of the sanctions that Trump imposed to toughen a genocidal blockade at any moment with the swipe of a pen, but he won't. So don't tell me you care about the Cuban people when the official policy of your administration is to make them as miserable as possible and pray and hope for regime change. In order to maintain the talking point that capitalism is the only way and socialism has never succeeded, it is incumbent on every administration since Eisenhower to do whatever it takes to guarantee that that is the

case. Oh, and also to pretend that the examples of democratic socialism in the Scandinavian countries somehow don't count. There's another piece here that really also annoys me. So as we discussed, protest movements have been popping up all over the world for all sorts of different reasons. But the second anything happens in Cuba, well, then it's wall-to-wall media coverage and outraged politicians running to the nearest camera to demand that we stand with the people and take action and that America loves freedom. Casual observer would think that the only protests on the planet right now are happening in Cuba. Sadly, the reality is there are a lot of horrifically oppressed people all over the globe.

Yet somehow the only ones who the right and plenty of Democrats, by the way, seem to care about are in Cuba, Venezuela, China, and a few other countries. Because the Cold War is literally never over. So as long as there is one U.S. corporation that can't do business in a single market in the world. Colombians have been protesting the neoliberal policies of their right-wing government for months and were met with government-sponsored violence, but I didn't hear too much about that from our newfound freedom fighters. Ethiopia is in the middle of a whole-ass civil war, with their repressive government attempting to exterminate an entire ethnic group. No one said a whole lot about that. The Haitian people, nearly as geographically close to U.S. as Cuba

and impoverished by hundreds of years of exploitation and U.S.-backed regime change there, they've been protesting against their now-assassinated U.S.-backed authoritarian president for months and none of y'all said a thing. Almost no U.S. media outlet sent their considerable journalistic resources to find out what was going on in Haiti. I certainly didn't hear any of these calls to stand in solidarity with the Haitian people in their yearning for actual democracy. Marco Rubio, representing a state with a lot of Haitian Americans, certainly couldn't be bothered to comment.

And we heard nothing but silence from any of these other Twitter-based freedom fighters. Now, I know it's controversial to say, but I like Americans. I like the American people. And in my experience, there are a lot of good people here who genuinely believe in their own imperfect ways as we all are in freedom from oppression and in free speech and genuinely want to see human rights for people all around the world. A lot of Americans really believe in the stated values and

aspirations of America, even as our government sometimes acts, often acts, counter to those principles. And frankly, it makes me sick to see the selective weaponization of this humanitarian impulse, to turn it off and on like a spigot in order to justify and serve as cover for actions that, if we're being honest, are really about enriching elites, protecting corporate profits, and fighting for the right to exploit the resources and humanity of every single country on the planet. Actions that end up creating more misery for the very people we pretend to be helping. The Cuban people do deserve freedom of the meaningful kind, liberation, relief from economic suffering. And if we actually cared about them, rather than sending out another tweet about how socialism is evil,

we'd do what is actually in our control. We'd lift the sanctions and we'd help with vaccines. Until we do that, I don't want to hear one word from any of these fake humanitarians who only care about scoring a good talking point for their next cable news hit. And that is what disgusts me, Sagar, the manipulation of the American... We are very pleased to be joined by the one and only David Surratt. Of course, he is the founder and what do you call yourself? Editor-in-chief of Daily Poster, which you can find. Where do people find you, David?

Go subscribe now. Dailyposter.com. And link in the description. So there we go. As you are about to experience, David is doing incredible journalism over there with a great team and uncovering stories that expose the way power really works in this country. So if you care about that kind of thing, you should definitely subscribe. And if you don't care about that sort of thing,

I really don't know why you're watching this show. Anyway, your latest scoop, David, is really quite a bombshell about Susan Rice. We can throw this up on the screen. So she stands to directly benefit from the construction of, what is this, like a tar sands pipeline that while the Biden administration got a lot of credit and a lot of applause for killing Keystone, they went ahead

and greenlit this one. And she really stands to personally benefit. Just break down for us what you found here. Right. So Susan Rice is the domestic policy advisor, the top domestic policy advisor for Joe Biden. She has a number of serious ownership stakes in major companies with business before the federal government. One of the stakes that she owns is a stake in a company called Enbridge. Enbridge is the company behind the Line 3 pipeline that is designed to bring tar sands, very dirty, particularly dirty oil down from Canada into the American market. The Biden administration recently, sort of over the objections of environmental groups and indigenous tribes, approved and backed the Line 3 pipeline, backed the Donald Trump policy of boosting that pipeline, the construction of that pipeline.

And Susan Rice owns, as I said, a major stake in the company that is behind that pipeline. So Susan Rice, while advising the White House on domestic policy, has been in the White House advising on domestic policy when the president and the administration made a decision boosting a company that she has an ownership stake in. And federal ethics regulators have now sounded the alarm. We obtained a document from the Office of Government Ethics in which they are effectively instructing her to divest her holdings in Enbridge and a number of other companies whose worth right now in the public markets is about $30 to $31 million. So we have a situation where you have ethics regulators saying there is a serious problem here. Now, if that wasn't mind-blowing enough,

the other part of this is what I've called the corruption deduction. And if you can believe this, that because the ethics regulators have flagged this as a conflict of interest, there is a special law on the books that allows government officials who have such conflicts of interest to cash out of the holdings and defer capital gains taxes. In other other words they get a tax break if they have a corporate conflict of interest when they sell off the holdings now the argument is is that they that's worthwhile because that says that if the government forces you to divest your holdings the government has to give you something but i i kind of look at it as like the federal government has created a special tax break uh for corporate conflicted government officials to benefit from.

That is stunning, David. I didn't know about the tax piece of it. And I want to reiterate the sums of money. We're not talking about a couple hundred grand. That's a lifetime fortune, $32 million from more than three dozen companies and one index fund. And this pipeline alone is a windfall of $2.7 million worth of shares. And having direct conflicts of interest like this is not new. She's probably not the only person in the Biden administration, but it just goes to show how much confidence is undermined in the government, as you're saying. And not only does she have it and has to sell it now, but she's not going to pay taxes on it. And has she addressed this in any way, David?

No, the White House did not offer us any comment. She has not. I haven't seen her say much of anything about this. I mean, the amazing thing is, if you really think about it, is to go into that particular job where you are overseeing, and I want to underscore that, overseeing the White House Domestic Policy Council. You're basically making policy on essentially everything domestic. To go into that job with those holdings, not getting rid of those holdings even before you go into that job, I mean,

it is just mind blowing. And look, there have been in the past, you know, Hank, this came up when Hank Paulson became Treasury Secretary, the use of the so-called certificates of divestiture to defer millions of dollars of capital gains taxes. I mean, it is just kind of mind blowing that on top of having a conflict of interest, you then get essentially financially rewarded for having it. How is this legal? Like, I mean, seriously, for someone to have this blatant conflict of interest in, you know, a policy area that, you know, she could very well have advisory capacity, some power and jurisdiction over, how is this permitted? And how common is this? Well, I think it's quite common. I mean, I'm not sure it's so common at the levels of holdings that we're talking about. And look, to be honest, the federal law we're talking about, this tax loophole, you could argue that it was designed to try to find a common ground here, a legitimate way to deal with this. Hey, listen, if the government

orders you to divest your stock, the government has to kind of give you something to make it easier for you. But in this case, and in the case of Hank Paulson and people with, you know, tens, hundreds of millions of dollars, it essentially offers them a way to evade the taxes that they would pay otherwise. In other words, I'm not saying Susan Rice did this, but if she had wanted to, and she had previously been in government, let's remember that. If she had wanted to, if she had thought through it,

say, hey, listen, I got a bunch of holdings here. I don't really want to pay capital gains taxes on this. I'm going to go back into government. I'm going to get myself a nice job for a couple of years. And I'm going to get myself a certificate of divestiture. I'm going to get the ethics regulators to say there's a conflict of interest. And then, boom, that means I now get to use this special law that nobody else gets to use that allows me to defer capital gains taxes way into the future. It also just it seems like the damage is already done because you had the

conflict of interest when the decision about the permit was made. And I'm sure the stock jumped on the news that this permit was going through. And so now she gets to divest at the higher stock price. So it seems to me like in a lot of ways, the damage here has already been done. David, I also wanted to get you to break down, though, for us another incredibly important story that I know you've been working for a long time on, which is how workers are being forced to fund the war on themselves. And this is happening through these pension funds where there's all kinds of incentives to, rather than just going for the kind of like normal, boring, solid, safe returns, there's

incentives to get into all of these more exotic, elaborate type of financial instruments that actually don't provide a better return. They're just way riskier, but they come along with these gigantic fees. So using worker money to prop up these Wall Street firms, talk to us about what you found here and what's going on. Sure. I think a lot of people don't understand that the richest, most powerful people in this country are effectively funded by teachers, firefighters, sanitation workers, and other government workers through enormous public pension systems. There's right now, there's about $5 trillion in public pension systems. Every couple of weeks, the government workers put in money into their pension systems to save for retirement. The question then becomes, well, what is done with all that money? Because it's a lot of money. And as we've seen over the last 10, 15, 20 years, a larger and

larger share of that money is not going into basic plain vanilla investments like a Vanguard fund, a stock index fund. It is going into so-called alternative investments. And that's a fancy word or fancy term for private equity, hedge funds, real estate, all sorts of exotic investments. Now, you could argue that that's a good deal for the workers if those exotic investments were delivering outsized returns to beat the market. But that's not what has been happening. Pension funds have largely been trailing the market in many ways as they've invested more and more of this money in these investments. And part of the reason why these investments don't deliver outsized returns is because they charge, as you allude to, such enormously high fees.

The 2 in 20 fee model is what it's called, 2% management fee, and then 20% of the profits off of the investment go to private equity firms. So this is, and by the way, a lot of the billionaires who own private equity firms then use the so-called carried interest tax loophole to classify the earnings they're making off of workers' money at a lower effective tax rate than everyone else in the economy pays. So you have a situation where workers' money is essentially funding the economic inequality. And by the way, the investments themselves, many of the investments themselves are the kinds of investments that aren't good for workers, right? I mean, you've got worker money funding a private equity industry that has become famous for driving down

wages, famous for mass layoffs, famous for, you know, behind the surprise billing scandal in the United States, behind the health care crisis. So you have workers' money that is effectively financing all of this. And by the way, financing the fossil fuel industry. A lot of this money is going into the fossil fuel industry that's creating the climate crisis. So what we need to understand is, then we ask the question, well, why is this money going into these high fee investments

if they're not delivering good returns for workers? What would be the reason for that? Well, the politicians who appoint the people who direct the pension money, those politicians, guess what? They get lots of money from Wall Street firms. They are very closely connected to the donor class that is making a huge amount of money on this.

And again, we're not talking about a couple million bucks here. We're not talking about a couple billion dollars here. We're talking about a $5 trillion pool of money. And as I always say, some people, their eyes glaze over when they hear the word pension. You know who really cares about pensions? Maybe a lot of viewers, listeners listening to this don't, I don't really care about pensions. You know who cares about pensions? A handful of the richest and most powerful people in the world. No, absolutely right. David, you're the only person who does work like this and goes through

the term sheets and all that and puts it into a way that we can understand. So I really encourage people to go and to subscribe to The Daily Poster. Like I said, link is down there in the description. And we rely on your work for our show all the time. So thank you, man. We really appreciate it. Thanks, David. Great to see you.

Thank you. Thank you both. You're very welcome. Thanks, everybody, for watching. We really appreciate it. You can become a premium subscriber today, get the show an hour early, listen to it, all of that. You guys know the drill. Lifetime members, we've been talking with the metallurgist, so that beautiful desk is going to look... It's happening.

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