Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 7/6/21: Exxon Corruption, Surfside Tragedy, Amazon's Inhumanity, Britney Spears, Sock Eating, Kamala Harris, Freedom, and more!

Episode Date: July 6, 2021

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New developments in terms of that building that collapsed in South Florida. First of all, the rest of the building was demolished. Second of all, we're starting to get a picture of how many other buildings could potentially be in danger and completely lacks regulation that they've just ignored these requirements that are on the books, but they haven't been paying attention to it. We're also learning more about just how inhumane Amazon treats their workers, how casually they treat their workers and fire them as collateral damage, not even using human beings, but just using bots. But we wanted to start with what is truly some bombshell revelations unearthed about how the Biden administration is going about crafting this infrastructure package and exactly why so many of the climate

change pieces have been stripped out and the package overall has been reduced. So Greenpeace in the UK was able to secretly record an Exxon lobbyist explaining his interactions with prominent senators, people like Joe Manchin, of course, but also Kyrsten Sinema, John Tester, and many others. Other links into the Biden administration, close relationship with Gina McCarthy, also with Cedric Richmond, top advisors to the White House, and really revealing their entire strategy to try to undercut climate action. And Sagar, there's a few things here that are very revelatory. First of all, he talks about this. Lobbyist talks about how, yeah, we've put out there that we're in favor of a carbon tax so that we can get the good PR points. But we just support that because we know it will never pass. So this enables Exxon to have this halo around, like, look, guys, we're different. We're really serious about climate action. But behind the scenes, they know there's no chance that a carbon tax is going to pass. So it's not a threat to them whatsoever. The other piece that he reveals, per the transcript and the video of this interaction, and by the way, the way they set this up is this lobbyist

thought that he was doing like a job interview. And so he's bragging about all the influence he has and all the ways that they've been able to shape this bill. So the other thing that they did is rather than directly attack the climate change pieces of the legislation, they attacked the payfors, right? The taxes, especially on corporations that were going to be raised in order to pay for this bill, that would dramatically reduce what they're able to do in the package. And once you get it down to roads and bridges and those sorts of things, that's no threat to ExxonMobil whatsoever. So it really, look, I saw one tweet that really kind of summed it up. It's like, listening to this Exxon lobbyist, you get the sense that the description of how government works is identical to what the left claims, what like the populist and people who see the government as totally corrupt claim plus nihilism is essentially what's revealed here. Yeah, that is exactly what's going on. It's very, very rare

in order to get these things happen. Also, you know, we should give credit where due. Congressman Ro Khanna, let's put this up there on the screen, is actually threatening to subpoena Exxon after that secret video. Now, I guess I'll cover my basis here and say that Exxon's CEO says that this has nothing to do with their, it says, Exxon's chief executive said the comments in no way represent the company's position on a variety of issues, including climate policy and our firm's commitment that carbon pricing is important to addressing climate change. It's interesting, though. First of all, I remember when you showed this to me, I was like, why is this coming out of the UK? I was like, why is Greenpeace UK the one who is putting this out there? Which I do actually

think is even more interesting that it came around, you know, quote unquote, official US media channels and aired on Channel 4, which is a, you know, a news organization out in the United Kingdom. All of this was via a group called Unearthed, which is an affiliate of Greenpeace. They have a little bit of what they cut from that. Let's take a U.S. president, and it would have been paid for by higher taxes on corporations like Exxon. But these ambitious proposals are on the verge of being defeated. According to Mr. McCoy, Exxon has been working to scale back the legislation and stop Exxon paying more tax. He told us which United States senators the company sought to recruit to their lobbying campaign. So the senators that they list there, Joe Manchin, John Tester there from Montana,

Gene Shaheen in New Hampshire, many of these people right on the edge of, you know, of battleground Democrats, and they're going to need a lot of the campaign cash. This is actually a good view of how exactly some of the campaign cash can be funneled and more. And look, I've said this so many times, which is that American politics and corruption today does not or very rarely works in terms of I give you a briefcase full of cash and you vote this way. There's an entire ecosystem in the legal framework. Give it super PACs. Give it what exactly is going on in terms of who can be funneling to you cash or not, in-kind donations, whether you can tell somebody to give a support fundraiser for someone. All of this network has been created

such that it's 100% legal in order to create an entire political infrastructure. This has been going on now for 40 or 50 years, and this is a very good example of how exactly this works. As you said, it is almost cartoonish the way that, and this is almost a 10 minute video, encourage people to go and watch the entire thing because it's very important about how exactly the levers of power work. As you said, you want to kill the carbon stuff. You don't go after carbon. You talk about the payfors. And this also, if anything, validates a critique of Biden, which is that, look, we said this a million times, infrastructure is the one thing that if you're going to deficit spend for, it makes sense.

If you were to talk about pay-fors, we could have talked about pay-fors during the coronavirus package. I'm not necessarily saying that would have been a good thing. I don't think that that necessarily should have been, but it would be a lot more economically justified. Whenever it comes to infrastructure, it is the very definition of something that pays out five to 10 times more. So by artificially restricting this, you actually give a bonanza to a lot of the lobbyists who know that if you can strike out this position, strike out that position, strike out this, that will mean that the portion that they don't like will not end up happening. It is a very unique and interesting view into how exactly the people who are outside on the influence understand our government really, frankly,

much more than a lot of the people who end up voting for these people. And they don't have the awareness as to how exactly this works. And they're playing you for fools. They're thinking that when they say, oh, Exxon is for a carbon tax, that you're going to believe that they're really doing that. They really care about climate change and they're really acting in good faith. A couple other revelations here. And I want to read the full list of senators that they mentioned, because I think that that is, you know, a list of shame that's important. Joe Manchin, of course, Shelley Moore Capito, who's the Republican from West Virginia. They also mention John Tester, Maggie Hassan, Mark Kelly, Chris Coons, who's considered the closest ally of Joe Biden in the Senate right now. They talk about how they downplayed the

science. They're like, we didn't necessarily lie about it, but were we totally upfront about it? Did we hide some of the science? Yes, we did. They also talk about one who brags about the wins that they got in the Trump administration and how they got billions of dollars worth of tax credits and goodies that were to their benefit during the Trump era. So totally bipartisan, their access here and the way that they operate. But what is so troubling about this is that

from the looks of it, they got their way on everything. I mean, they got the package stripped down to bare bones. They got it cut way back. The climate change provisions, that's all been pushed off to like, in theory, we're going to get to that in that second reconciliation bill. We'll see if that ever actually happens. Even the way that prominent Biden officials like Jennifer Granholm are talking about carbon capture technology seems to be echoing the Exxon talking points that they're putting in front of them. The New York Times in their article has this paragraph here that I think, you know, kind of makes the case for just how effective this sophisticated operation, influence operation has

been. They say in the video, Mr. McCoy, that's the lobbyist, describes how the company targeted a number of influential senators with the aim of scaling back the climate provisions in President Biden's sweeping infrastructure bill by attacking the tax increases, the pay-fors that would pay for it. A bipartisan package that Mr. Biden agreed to now leaves out many of the ideas that the president initially had proposed to reduce the burning of fossil fuels, which is the main driver of climate change. So you have this person admitting the whole scheme. And by the way, the bill that now is being proposed reflects every one of Exxon's goals and priorities here. You tell me what that's all about. And by the way, to my knowledge, the Biden administration has said nothing about this incredibly explosive revelations of how their government and how their administration is actually operating, who they are truly listening to,

and who they are actually serving here. And Ro Khanna actually makes a really good point within this. Didn't know I was going to be a Ro Khanna stan today, but hey, he's like, hey, we have people who are tech company CEOs, Wall Street executives, pharmaceutical executives have all come and testified before Congress. Why won't the fossil fuel guys? And I was like, hey, you know, that's actually a pretty good point. Which is that actually we drag CEOs before Congress all of the time. I actually think it's very good even though most of our elected representatives are idiots and they don't ask the right questions. Maybe in this particular case they will.

It doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever why, in this case, why Exxon shouldn't be called in order to at least talk about it. And this actually, I want to make it clear, for whoever you support, don't, or whatever, maybe even, I actually think carbon pricing is a pretty good idea. But all of that being said, which is that if you bring it together, you should understand how your government works. And when you have somebody out there so flagrantly admitting how exactly they manipulated the American political system at the highest levels of government in the United States Senate, I actually think that's very important, regardless of what the cause is or not, because I guarantee you this. What Exxon does here is what every industry in Washington does whenever they want something to get done. Be it

pharma, be it big tech, be it the financial industry. I have stories about all four of those. And if you're on the left, you're going to want to hear about that. If you're on the right, you want to hear about some of how your priorities were destroyed in Congress. So this actually very much is a bipartisan issue, in my opinion, which is that corruption is at the root of a lot of the biggest problems that we have within our political system. This is a golden view into how exactly it all works. And I encourage people to go, like I said, watch the whole video. Kudos to these people. You know, these types of sting operations. One other note on this, Crystal, whenever Project, I know everybody hates Project Veritas. I get it. And whenever it comes out, you know,

you have these CNN and Washington Post people, but this isn't real journalism, blah, blah. Look, you don't have to like it, but it is real journalism. And it's the same case here. I think we are all better off for the fact that Greenpeace UK ended up doing this sting video operation. It's a means to an end thing. And at the end of the day, like, more view into this type of behavior is important. You don't have to like it, but it is important.

I will say with Project Veritas, I mean, they have been caught editing stuff in ways that's completely misleading. It's a dirty game. So look, we've covered some of their stuff. Many times, sure. It's actually really unfortunate that they've engaged in those sorts of deceptive tactics because some of the things that they have brought to light have been important, but you can't cover it responsibly without a lot of caveats

because they have engaged in those tactics before, which is, again, really unfortunate. We've covered some of their stuff here and we always put those caveats on it. But what I will say finally on this is this is even more brazen than honestly even I thought.

It's more direct because we tend to think in terms of like interests and incentives and influences. This is so direct. And everything that this lobbyist lays out of how they use the third party groups, what their strategy was to make sure that Exxon's bottom line is protected here, the way that they've recognized like they've lost the PR battle on climate change. So they cloak themselves in this rhetoric about a carbon tax and, look, we really are committed to climate change, knowing how dysfunctional the American political process is and that there's no way the solution that they're offering is actually going to come to pass.

So what does it hurt for them to advocate for something that is never, ever, ever going to happen. The way that they went after the payfors, the particular senators that they targeted and the role that those senators in particular have played, the outsized role that those senators have played in these negotiations. Final thing that I'll say here is, we've said this before on the show, the D.C. press gives Joe Manchin all this credit, like all of his actions are to represent the people of West Virginia, that he's just reflecting the values and the priorities of his state. You can see very clearly here whose interests and priorities he's actually reflecting. He's listening to these lobbyists. He's doing their bidding. Sometimes that overlaps with what the people of West Virginia want, and sometimes it does not. I've looked at polling of West Virginians and how they feel about green energy and job creation in light of climate

change. We covered how even the mine workers union is also pushing for, look, jobs are jobs, right? Ability to have a middle class life and live in the state and the hometown that you really care about. That's something that West Virginians really value. And I've seen the polling to back that up. There's always this assumption that whatever Joe Manchin says on an issue must be what the people of West Virginia really want. And I think that this expose should blow up that assumption completely. Yeah. And it's funny, too, within the New York Times story, Manchin's staff issued a statement saying that Mr. McCoy greatly exaggerated his relationship, adding that he meets with a broad range of people. What does that tell you? They confirmed in the statement that they met before. That's Washington

speak for, oh, they've met before. This is actually all pretty much true in terms of what's happening there. Take that from me, Will. Doesn't deny they met. Says, oh, they meet with a range of people. We've also, I think, had tape of him listening to some Coke industry lobbyists as well. I think on the phone or something. So a wide range of interests that he's listening to there. Fun stuff. Okay, we want to stick with important stories today.

So let's put this next one up there, Surfside. The building collapsed there. We are learning a lot about some really troubling stuff about what happened in terms of lax enforcement in South Florida, which allowed buildings, high-rise buildings in particular, to skirt inspections for years. So what the New York Times has actually done is put that great map up there on the screen, which shows the dates of construction between 1970 and 1989. There are dozens of buildings there that dot kind of the South Florida coast. And what they talk here is about how hundreds of buildings,

an analysis of property records shows 270 such buildings have dotted the skylines of Miami-Dade's counties, cities, villages, and towns, with dozens more in the county's unincorporated reaches. Now, the investigators and more, we have no idea yet exactly as to why that Surfside building collapsed. But what we do know is that the patchwork amount of enforcement, regulatory response, review of the records, review of exactly how the building was built, that has actually been lacking for years, not just on Surfside, but across the entire spectrum. I actually learned a little bit about this when I was down in Miami because I was asking around.

I'm like, what is going on here? There's a mayor of Miami. then there's a strong mayor, then there's Miami-Dade County, then there's like 39 different cities, states, villages, whatever, cities, villages, et cetera, that are underneath Miami. It's a very different and interesting municipality in terms of the way they actually govern themselves. And all of these overlapping things with different mayoralties, different regulatory structures, and more, have made it so that it's a little bit chaotic whenever you want to get this done. The other interesting thing, and this goes into the history of South Florida itself,

which I've always been fascinated by, is that a lot of these buildings were built in the boom years right around the time that South Florida was trying to crawl out of a lot of the drug violence which was plaguing Miami. And so they wanted to greenlight a lot of different construction. So the buildings of the early 80s took shape against the backdrop of the turmoil and the economic uncertainty. So with all of that, it kind of comes together. The Times stitches together a picture

where you have 30 high-rises built in coastal Miami from the late 70s to the late 80s, and that the states of repair vary widely from building to building. And so in every single one of these cases, we actually don't have a very good idea of how are these buildings doing. And the uneven enforcement in particular, given a lot of the hurricanes and the codes that a lot of these people have to come and abide by, makes it so that you have a situation where a surf side could come through and could come through that situation, through that chaos that I've kind of just described

here. And it begins to make a lot more sense because we always ask, how does this happen? I mean, we have a hundred something people who are likely have perished, which is horrible. And we've seen now that we've had controlled demolition. We have a video of that, actually, of one of the second buildings nearby ordered to evacuate. And then this 11 days, actually the remaining part of the building there, which was demolished over safety concerns. And, I mean, this is, oh, God, just look at that. People's homes. Those are people's lives.

Those are people's homes. And you read about people who were standing on their balconies and screaming, and there were children trapped in their beds and more. Some of that has been confirmed. The nearby building ordered evacuated because people said that it might be vulnerable to the same forces. There's also a video that came out hours before the crash actually showing water pouring through the parking garage, which could give investigators some more of an insight into what happened here. But all of it does come together, and it does paint a portrait of if you allow lax enforcement and more, eventually a bill will come due. And that seems to be the case of what happened here. It's actually a fascinating story going all the way back to 1970s Miami. So the big question on everybody's minds after, you know, how many people perished and how many

lives were destroyed in this collapse is, is this a one-off? Is this a freak occurrence? Or is this something we need to be concerned about writ large? The first indication that this might be a bigger problem was when they evacuated that building. And the New York Times reveals new details about why that second building was evacuated. Just to give you a little bit of background here in terms of the regulations, there are actually pretty stringent building regulations, both in terms of when you're constructing the building and then 40 years after it's built, you're supposed to submit this engineer thorough review that addresses if there's any safety concerns so that those can be ameliorated to make sure that the building

continues to be safe. One of the things that the Times reveals here is that that 40-year requirement might be on the books, but it is not really enforced at all. A lot of these buildings that should have submitted their 40-year report by now just didn't do it. And then others of them submitted the report and said there were problems and they haven't fixed it, which was the case, I think, with the building here in Surfside that actually collapsed. So that second building that had to be evacuated over the past couple of days, here's the backstory there. They say the city of North Miami Beach had tried and failed for years to bring a 10-story condo building within its borders, Crestview Towers, into compliance with that

40-year recertification requirement. When the building's condo association finally submitted the required paperwork last week, about nine years late, nine years late, it documented critical safety concerns. Officials evacuate the building on Friday. So it took the collapse of the building in Surfside, the loss of more than 100 lives, in order to get this 40-year report nine years late. The very first page of the report said this building is not safe. Yeah. Okay. That building is far from alone, though. They document and they have some great charts and maps here that show the age of these different buildings.

And also, I guess a critical factor is how tall they are. It makes logical sense. The taller the building, the sort of more risks and the more potential safety hazards. They say even if building auditors focus only on towers of 10 stories or more that were built in the 70s and 80s, the task would still be daunting. An analysis of property records shows at least 270 such buildings that dot the skylines of Miami-Dade's counties, cities, villages, and towns, with dozens more in the county's unincorporated reaches.

And again, the laws are on the books. The regulations are on the books. Some buildings have basically been voluntarily complyinglying and a whole lot haven't been. And the cities have either not had the resources or the will or whatever to make sure that these 40-year research happen and that the relevant fixes are put into place. So that question of whether this was a one-off or there's a broader, more dangerous situation down here that impacts multiple buildings in an area that where it's, you know, very, that's the reason they have these laws on the books is you do have hurricanes and high winds and storms and you've got salt water and you've got sand that it's being built. And then you layer on top of that the impact of climate change. You really have to be careful with these buildings

and make sure that they continue to be brought up to code and continue to be structurally sound. So while, again, we don't know the specifics exactly of why this building collapsed, we're getting a view of the type of lax enforcement that may have contributed and allowed these repairs to go unaddressed for so many years. There was one other piece, a clue that the Times covered in a different story as well of what may have been part of the problem with the building. Some of the experts after the demolition, they were reviewing photos.

And this is preliminary. This is not certain at all. But it looked like in some of the columns, the critical columns that supported the building, that there wasn't as much rebar in there reinforcing the concrete as had been called for in the design. So this is one possible explanation. Likely, in all likelihood, there were multiple causes of this failure that led to this catastrophic collapse. But that is one specific thing that they're looking at is whether they cut corners and didn't follow the design in the initial construction of how much rebar needed to be in those critical supporting columns.

I think it's one of the most important stories in the country. I think it's shameful how it's been covered. And from a political angle, I actually have been quite impressed by Governor Ron DeSantis in his response to this. I'm not sure if you've seen this, Crystal, but Trump actually held a rally in Florida. And there's some background reporting that DeSantis was like, hey, man, like, you need to cancel this. Like, we have a horrible tragedy. Trump apparently refused to do so. DeSantis said, look, then I'm not coming. He's like, I have to deal with Surfside and all that.

No, seriously, real props to him because there is actual political cost to that. I would not put it outside of Trump to be angry that DeSantis didn't show up or, you know, having his staff leaked. Yeah, Trump's petty as hell. Yeah, right. Get angry at DeSantis for leaking the fact that he was like, hey, I kind of don't want

to do this. And DeSantis, I know this is absolute bottom of the barrel. He did appear at that press conference with Biden, sat next to him

and was like, thank you very much for doing everything that we've asked you to do. Think back to Chris Christie and how people were pissed at him in 2012 for what was hugging Obama.

He gave the Obama hug. Probably shouldn't have hugged him. My own political advice. The right blamed Christie for losing. They were pissed. They were really pissed at him. Christie's hug was what Obama re-elected. That stuff actually does matter.

And so I will give absolute credit to the man where it is due. He has acted like an actual leader here. And it's from what I can tell him and his staff, I think it's a reckoning there down in South Florida construction. So for a lot of money for a lot of years, not submit voluntarily only, not submitting their inspection reports, bills come and do here because they cannot allow this to happen. I mean, they need in order to prop up their tourism industry. Florida is currently, I think, the second state where people are moving the most from New York City and California. And this is the type of stuff which could absolutely stop people in the tracks from coming if they think that this is going to be an

issue. So it's a big problem. Certainly going to depress some prices in like these high-rise condos built in the 70s and 80s. I wouldn't be moving in one of those babies. Maybe now's the time to buy on Brickell. It's actually a cool view. Okay. 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. You found this interesting story from Amazon. I mean, just more dystopian nightmare from them. I wanted to cover this today because actually it's Jeff Bezos is officially no longer the CEO of Amazon. And it's kind of amazing to see what exactly has happened since the year

1997. I mean, Jeff Bezos was this guy working in private equity, drives across the country, famously creates the bookstore, but always has this vision of his head of the everything store. And in a way, what he's created is kind of amazing. But there's a big downside to packages that come to your house within eight hours. Sometimes I look at that and I'm like, how is this even possible? Now I know how it's possible. And I think all of us have to really reckon with what this means for millions of people. Amazon is the second largest employer in the United States. Think about how much impact they have on our labor market. They have grown by orders of magnitude during the pandemic. They are probably, in my opinion, the most powerful company

in the United States, even more so than Walmart, because they have online plus the retail force. So let's put this up there on the screen. This is from Bloomberg, which is fired by bot. It's you against the machine. And what Bloomberg here does, this is a really good piece of reporting, is talk about how contract drivers say that algorithms terminate them by email, even when they have done nothing wrong. He talks about how a 63-year-old army veteran was stunned. He had been working and delivering packages for Amazon for four years. The algorithms had tracking him, decided he was not doing his job properly. He had been fired by a machine. He said that he took the termination hard. He had prided himself on a strong work ethic, and he helped cook for 250,000 Vietnamese refugees at Fort Chaffee in Arkansas. He says, I'm an old school kind of guy.

I give every job 110%. This really upset me because we're talking about my reputation. They say I didn't do the job when I know damn well that I did. And here's, I think, the craziest part. He has no idea why he was fired. Zero. Just that they determined relative to other drivers and more that he wasn't doing the job properly. And what's even crazier is that Amazon doesn't actually control this. It's all, well, it's third-party contracted out to another company, which oversees their contract drivers and the performance then of its workers. Now, people familiar with the strategy say that Jeff Bezos believes that machines make decisions more quickly and accurately than people, reducing costs and giving Amazon a competitive advantage.

Now, maybe he's right, but that reducing costs and competitive advantage, it comes exactly at the price of having somebody like a 63-year-old Army veteran who is fired. I mean, being fired from your job is one of the – I think they say it's up there the second most amount of stress, except for divorce that a person can experience in their life. And this is now happening on the scale of tens of thousands of people all across the United States who are being tracked by algorithms. And I want to make sure that people know this. It's not just Amazon. Remember, I talked about this on Rogan's podcast. Walmart just said, we're going to give all our employees, 700,000 employees, a new Samsung smartphone. People are like, hey, cool. Now I get a smartphone. Checked in the permissions of all of those. They can track you. If they have

that thing in your pocket, they know everything about you, how many steps you're taking, how fast you're working, how long your break really was, and more. This is the beginning of automated firing, of automated tracking on a scale that people really have not even understood. Amazon's been at the forefront of this. And unfortunately, I think this is just the tip of the spear of what's coming. I think the government should do something about it. Amazon is at the forefront. They are at the bleeding edge of this type of inhumane treatment of workers. I've long believed that the biggest divide in this country is people who are actually

treated like human beings with wants and needs and dreams and desires and concerns outside of the workplace and people who are treated like they're not, like they're human, not even human, that they're bots and widgets to be plugged in and used and abused. And Amazon, what we know, what we have covered and documented time and time again, is that is exactly how they treat their blue collar workforce. They intentionally use them up. There's even a time frame, three years, they think basically Bezos, and this comes from the top, this comes from Bezos, who believes that after three years, a warehouse worker is basically done. They put all these incentives in place to push them out the door, give them absolutely very,

very little ability to rise through the ranks to a higher level position. And so people get frustrated and they just have an intentional high rate of burnout and churn. What you learn here is some of the even more sort of like dehumanizing tactics that are being used. This is specific to what they call flex drivers in that program. It's sort of like it's like a gig economy type of thing where you're not one of the regular Amazon delivery drivers, but you go and get the packages that he thinks he got fired by automated message with no ability really to appeal to anything other than an additional series of bots and automated messages is because he arrived in an apartment complex. The complex wasn't open yet. The gates were still locked. He's trying to figure out what to do. There was no one to call. There

was no manager call. Couldn't get the customer on the phone. You're supposed to leave it in that cases at the front desk. The front desk isn't open. So that sets him behind. And of course, like every aspect of Amazon, everything is tracked. Everything is monitored. You have a certain amount of time that it's supposed to take you to perform these tasks. And it doesn't matter if there's massive traffic, if the apartment building's locked. In another instance, there was a locker that the package was supposed to be left in. Well, the locker was locked. There was nothing he could do. So he's calling. He's trying to figure out what to do. He documented all of these things. And this is after years of working for the company reliably and delivering and even being praised and considered for position training

other drivers because he'd done such an effective job, just like that, they let him go. And when you try to appeal, you get back these fake, automated, pre-canned messages. There's no ability to actually talk to a human being and say, look, this is what happened here. This is my livelihood. Any boss who heard that would be like, oh, don't worry about it, man. All good. Yeah.

And you have this long track record of total loyalty to the company and total effective delivery in terms of your job. There's another woman who almost lost her home because similar circumstances where it was really outside of her control what was thrown at her. And she went from having a great rating in the Amazon app to being fired overnight. The thing that really got me, though, is they talk about how the executives knew that there would be what they called collateral damage. That's according to a former engineer who helped design this automated system. Quote, executives knew this was going to shit the bed, this person said. That's actually how they put it in meetings. The only question was how much poo we wanted there to be. So they knew that some drivers like the two individuals who are profiled here would be cast aside, fired wrongfully, have their lives turned upside down, total stress, potential loss of home, all of that stuff, that there would be collateral damage. But they didn't care because that's what when you're this giant multinational corporation

and all you care about is the bottom line, you say, well, are we going to save a little bit more money? Right. Then we are going to cause pain. Like, is this going to be good for us? Who cares about this, you know, one or five or 10 percent or whatever if workers who are treated so terribly and fired wrongfully again by a bot. So that is the like heartless, soulless, cold, hard calculation at the center of all of this

that the executives were totally aware of and totally cool with. This is why you should care. Amazon employs 1.3 million people across the world, added 500,000 workers in 2020. Their headcount is up 63% from just a year ago. They're actually just getting started. They hire 700 people every hour. Now, here in the United States, think about this too, which is that I've thought a lot about, if you're 16 in this country, and especially if you don't decide you don't want to go to college, which is more than half, what do you think you're going to do? Now, in the past, there was a semi-variety of options.

If you wanted to stay in your hometown, the various trade work and stuff that you could pick up, other types of work, which would enable you to live not necessarily middle class, but not too far away a decent enough life. As the Amazonification of America, which has followed the Walmartification of America, happens, it will soon be, in my opinion, Amazon will basically be the only choice if you do not live in an urban or suburban district. All of the economic activity sucked out, all of the rural parts of this country becoming serviceable only because of their proximity to other big cities. I remember reading this in Alec McGillis' book on Amazon. Dayton, Ohio, which at the time, I mean, 100 years ago, Dayton, Ohio was one of the Silicon Valleys of the United States in terms of how much manufacturing output and some of the inventions that happened there. Well, now it is

known as the corrugated cardboard capital of America and as a great distribution point because it's a one-day drive from one-third of the U.S. population. As in, the economic value of Dayton only comes from the fact that it is near places where other people want to live. Now, that's going to happen to everyone. And if you make it so that your first job is not about a grocery store, if it is a grocery store, maybe Amazon owns that grocery store. If it is grocery, maybe it's delivering groceries for Amazon delivery. If it is a warehouse job, and hey, $15 an hour in a rural part of this country, that's a lot of money. $15 an hour, $17 an hour. You may not have a say. You may get fired by a bot, but that's okay. So you go and you work for Amazon and you can just see how this scales up all across the country. This company is moving at a pace that we haven't

come to grips with because of the pandemic. 63% year over year increase in employment alone. What's that going to look the next year and the next year? Soon, I think it'll be the largest employer in the United States. And even more so after that, I already think it's the most powerful company in the world. And today is Jeff Bezos' last day as CEO. In a way, he built one of the greatest companies the world has ever seen. But at a certain point, it's like with the graph, you begin to intersect with what is good for this country versus the bottom line of Amazon. And I think that we've passed that point not too long ago in terms of why we should all be concerned. People ask why we talk about it so much, because this is the future. This is where things are trending. And I hope people get their

minds around that. And it's a picture of total and complete worker powerlessness. Yes. There's no one you can appeal to. There's no union to file a grievance. Nothing. You can't even get a human being on the phone to say, look, this is what was going on that day. That feeling of powerlessness and inability to do anything, when you know you did everything by the book, that you did everything right, that is just so soul-crushing and so destroying. That's why this story really landed so much with me.

At the same time, another story that really lands with me. Speaking of lack of power. Lacking power, very good transition there, is what's been going on with Britney Spears. And so last week, of course, we were all riveted by the searing testimony that she gave Britney Spears, who is 39 years old. We really haven't heard in her words what her life has been like since 2008 when she was put into this conservatorship, which means that her dad and a team of other basically grifters control her every move, her life, her career, whether she's working or not working, whether she can have a kid, whether she can have a boyfriend, all of that, whether she can have a cell phone,

who her own legal counsel is going to be, all of that. We really haven't heard directly from Britney. So we heard her searing testimony about how horrific that has been for her and how she just wants to have a normal life and be able to make some decisions for herself. Ronan Farrow and Gia Tolentino at The New Yorker have done a major expose here in The New Yorker with some major revelations. I'm going to go through a few of them. It's a relatively long piece, but the portrait it paints is deeply troubling. I mean, this is a portrait of the way that American capitalism has chewed up and spit out one of our top stars. This is a story of the way that power and money completely corrupted and tore apart this family. It's a story of how all of

these bloodsuckers have been leeching off and living off of Britney while she herself has, she's actually, her lawyer gets paid more than she herself is given in living expenses, just to give you a sense of how absurd the situation is. And oh, by the way, and this I thought was also really galling, her dad has used her money to hire PR professionals to try to keep control of the conservatorship and push back on any of Britney or anyone else's, you know, questions and concerns about what exactly is going on here. The big context is while her every move has been controlled and while the courts continue to insist that she's unable to make any of her own decisions in this conservatorship, she's released four albums, headlined a global tour that grossed

$131 million, and performed for four years in a hit Las Vegas residency. Yet, even while she's able to clearly do all of that effectively and make a lot of money, her conservators, including her father, have controlled her spending, communications, and personal decisions. And last week, even after that searing testimony from Britney herself, the judge denied her request to remove her dad, who she paints as particularly abusive, and there are some details regarding that in this piece as well, to remove him from being in charge of her finances. A couple things about him that are revealed in this piece. as well, to remove him from being in charge of her finances. Couple things about him that are revealed in this piece. First of all, there's a moment after Britney had, you know, one of these, whether it was a mental health crisis or whether it was people around her wanting to paint her as crazy. After one of these incidents, they're all gathered together.

And one of Britney's longtime, like a family friend, recounts that her dad was sitting there at a desk, flat screen TV was playing nearby, and her dad said to her baby, and the friend said, I thought he was going to say, we love you, but you need help. But what he said was, you're fat. Daddy's going to get you on a diet and a trainer, and you're going to get back in shape. You see that TV over there? You know what it's going to say in eight weeks? That's going to be you on there. And they're going to say she's back.

He also screamed at Britney's mother, who was trying to push back on some of the decisions, but comes off as kind of like well-intentioned but too weak to really take control of the situation, doesn't want to catch any of the blame. So she let a lot of this transpires the way she's portrayed in the piece. When she was pushing back on some of the decisions of the conservatorship, he yelled at her, I am Britney Spears. And that's the way these people see themselves. Every week they have a meeting, they determine what's she going to post on social media? What are we going to do with, you know, she has this offer and this, you know, question about whether to license the music rights here. Where is she going to be? What's she going to do? What's she going to say? A counsel is meeting on a weekly basis to determine all of those things for her. There's also allegations in here about the way that they've tried to sabotage some of her romantic relationships. She's not allowed to have her own

phone that she can just use and call. She's not allowed to go where she wants. And on the eve of this latest hearing, she actually called 911 in order to report herself as a victim of conservatorship abuse. So there is a lot in here. And there was one piece, the last piece that I'll call your attention to, because I think this exposed how horrific a situation this is, not just for Britney Spears, but I'm sure there are a lot of people who found themselves in these like legal catch-22s where they have no control over their lives, who have no rights, who've been deemed unable to control their own lives and are being taken advantage of in a similar way. And they quote an expert who says basically the idea that Spears needs his conservatorship to function is self-reinforcing.

In that respect, her case is common. A disability rights lawyer said that many guardianships can prove inescapable, which is why they're vulnerable to abuse. In extreme cases, the strategy is isolate, medicate, liquidate. You isolate them. You medicate them to keep them quiet. Another thing that Bernie alleged. You liquidate the assets. If the conservative, if the conservatee functions well, then that can be framed as this is going great. The arrangement is necessary. If they get out and they stumble into crisis or manipulation, then, and that, of course, is a likelihood that's increased by the

length of time that you've been in the conservatorship, unable to function in the real world, then that, too, might reinforce the argument, oh, we got to put these restraints back on. So it doesn't matter if you do well. They say, see, look, this is going great. If you do poorly, they say, see, they really need this help. If you actually get out and then you stumble because human beings stumble sometimes, then it's, oh, see, it was really better when we were looking out for her. So it's really just an unconscionable situation all the way around. Yeah, this is horrible. I mean, I read the piece and just I had never really been familiar with the entire concept of conservatorship regardless.

And I was like, wait, how is this legal? What is happening here? She can't even pick her own lawyer. Yeah, she can't pick her own lawyer. She can't decide if she wants to have a baby. She's a 40-year-old woman. If you're an ass murderer, you can pick your own lawyer. But Britney Spears cannot pick her own lawyer.

And like you were pointing out, I think that was the craziest part, is that at the same time where she's supposedly unfit for any of this, she's making hundreds of millions of dollars. So it's like, well, wait, pick one. So if you're going to make this hundreds of millions of dollars, then you should probably be in charge of your own money. And look, we've let all sorts of people. It's free country at the end of the day. Like all sorts of people earn a lot of money, and it's their deal.

They can do whatever they want with it. And this is the part which galls me is that it's clear that her father has been grooming is the wrong word, but crafting this star from the very beginning, molding her for stardom, one of those prototypical parents pushing their child and hoping that they get rich. A story almost as old as time whenever it comes to Hollywood, but somehow, usually those adults break away and they have public meltdowns or whatever, but at least it's their own meltdowns and at least they have the control of their own money. She's almost 40 years old. She can't decide if she wants to have a baby. She can't decide if she wants to have – she can't decide if she has a phone or not. I mean, the level of minute control that we're discussing here is just so ridiculous that it seems pretty clear that this is one of the worst examples, I think, of all time. I also think that that is why it has really captured the public imagination. I mean,

I was like, Britney Spears, like, you know, what? But then you read more about it, and I think it probably resonates, like you said, with a lot of people who found themselves just in a powerless situation. Think about, you know, when a boss tells you to do something, which doesn't make any sense, but they pay you. So what are you going to do? They just have you by your lapels, and you can't do anything about it. And that's the part, at least, I think, that resonated the most with me is that the powerlessness that people can feel whenever they're under control in a completely unfair situation. And it does seem that that's what this is.

But look, I mean, her conservatorship was just held up by the court. So it's like, what is going on there? Do they know something that we don't know? That was what some people pushed back and said. They're like, look, maybe the judge knows something that you don't. Maybe. But, you know, at this point, there's been a lot of reporting here. There's been a decent amount of visibility into the situation. And it does not seem to me that this should be legally justifiable. But again, there could be some details here. Another thing they talk about is when it was first put in place, first of all, a lot of the people who were involved in testifying in favor of the conservatorship, they thought it was going to be temporary. And at least one of them told these two reporters that she really regrets her role in putting Britney into this conservatorship where

she's been now for over a decade. So that's number one. And number two, they reveal how that initial process, which again now has controlled her life for over a decade, how that was done so quickly with so little deliberation. The judge granted her dad everything that he possibly wanted, even waiving the required. There's a requirement to inform the person five days before it takes hold. Even that requirement was waived. This was all done in this very quick fashion with massive implications. One of the things that just on a personal level really, really got me is Brittany adores her kids. And like one of the things that has sparked

some of these like public melt, I hate using the word meltdown because it's so loaded, but some of these public spectacles that have been created around Britney is because she wanted so badly to just be with her kids and just be able to be mom to her kids.

And everyone around her says she's a fantastic mother and she adores those boys and they really weaponize that to control her like if you don't behave you're not going to get to see your kids that is just as a mom i mean that just really is as low as it absolutely gets so um her there's major questions about whether her lawyer's really been representing her interest or been representing more the interests of her dad and the other people because he's profiting off of this situation as well. It appears, at least what Brittany said, was that she hadn't even been informed that she could petition the court to end the conservatorship altogether. This latest case was about just removing her dad. So there's a chance that now she's going to be able to file to petition and the conservatorship altogether.

And hopefully there's some progress there. But an incredibly important and just very disturbing portrait of what's been going on with her over these years. Yeah. No, there's really no other way to say it. Some other important business we need to tend to here, my friend. To my sadness. So back when we were on Rising, we covered that New York Times were preparing to do a profile of Joe Rogan. And some people that we knew had gotten reached out to about like, hey, will you talk to this journalist for this story?

Most of them said no. And Tim Dillon said no in a very colorful way. I think he just wrote that. He just said F off. He was like, fuck off. Except he didn't put the... So anyway, we covered that story at Rising and you said something

very specific. I did. I said it. About what would be or not be in this profile. Let's take a listen to what Sagar had to say. If the word misinformation does not appear in the first, I'll say first three paragraphs, I will eat my own sock on camera.

I guarantee you. All right. Yeah, I said it. Okay. So this guy, I didn't know these guys watched Rising. I was under the impression that these people don't know anything about what's going on. So it's not just about the bet. He specifically called me out in the New York

Times in the little hit piece on Joe Rogan. So let's put this up there on the screen. As I said, he quoted me. He said, if the word misinformation does not appear, pledged e-sogger, I will eat my own sock on camera. He puts parentheses, his move. It was a real graph there in the New York Times. And look, like I said, they intentionally left it out. I know what happened here. I bet you they were going to put it in. They decided not to put it in in order to spite me personally because I thought it was funny that Tim Dillon told this guy to go fuck off,

which is true. I still think and remain the fact that it is funny, but I'm a man of my word. So, I brought in this sock. It's right here. This has been literally on my feet, so I'm not taking a cop out. This is an old sock. But it's been washed since it was on my feet. It's been washed since the last time it was on my feet, so I'm not taking a cop out. This is an old sock. But it's been washed since it was on my feet, let's be clear. It's been washed,

it's been washed since the last time it was on my feet. So I've done a lot of research into this. So here's the deal, guys. If I actually ate the sock, as in digested the sock, it would cause me intestinal blockage. That being said, there was one way you sent me this video, which was to cut the sock into tiny little pieces, put it with oil and some

chicken. Yeah. And also, that's just frankly a little bit too much work. Can you see what a good co-host I am? Yeah. I was trying to help her. I was researching for him, like, there must be somebody on YouTube who's done this. I've been racking my brain on this for a week.

So here's what we came up with, which is that I'm going to put this sock in my mouth to at least satisfy all of those people who have been tweeting at me angrily more and saying, oh, you're actually going to do it, and Matt Flegheimer, whatever the hell his name is, this is for you. I've been dreading this for a while. Like I said, you can see it fully. This is my sock.

I've had it for like five years. I also can't find the other one, so this is a perfect... That's a good one to use, then. So here we go. Here we go. All right. As you guys know, I salivate a lot.

This thing just absorbs all. Just soaking that right up. Oh, God. All right. So somebody on Twitter had a good idea, which is this is how much I love you. She's so nice to me. To make you a sock cookie. Now, I want you guys to know, I'm good at a lot of things.

Baking, not one of them. Here we go. There you go. You can see I had to label it. Yeah, you didn't put soccer sock on it, see? Now, I will confess, I did think about telling you that it was my kids that make this

because it looked so shitty. But it was all me. They were not involved at all. So here you go. Here is the sock. You can actually consume. Now I'm actually gonna eat this sock. That is not gonna cause you intestinal blood. My trainer's gonna be mad at me for eating this, but so be it. For anyone

who is wanting Sager to suffer, I can tell you that is not a very tasty cookie. No, it's good. I like it. Icing. It's good stuff. Thank you, Crystal.

You're welcome. You're welcome. You're a man of your word. Look, a man of my word. Also, yep, secret, liquid death. Wash it down with liquid death. Thank you very much, liquid death. Look, the deal is, with all this, to try and make this serious in any way whatsoever, which is that I thought the profile was probably more fair

than it was going to be of Joe Rogan, but that ultimately it settles on this, like, mystique of, like, why exactly all this is popular. And worse is that Phlegheimer made it seem as if we were kind of being histrionic, right? Not just us, but Tim Dillon and a few others as to saying stuff like, you know, and assuming that this was going to be a hit piece. And look, there was a lot of stuff in there which I was not happy with in the

way that they portrayed Joe and more, but I think it comes down to they don't have the benefit of the doubt. I think you could say this. When reporters reach out, I'm like, what do these people want? You know, I'm like, what's the angle? What's the hit piece? What is it? Oh, you know, surpassing. Oh, you said this this one time. And Rogan said this all the time, which is when you take stuff out of context

and you put it in print, it loses a lot of what you said, right? So, like, you people who read that, you know, all the wine moms or whatever who read that because it's the first time they ever heard of Joe Rogan, they probably think, you know, you guys understand that I was saying it. All of course, I still ate the sock,

ate the sock cookie, and all that. So I'm sticking by my word. But I think what it comes down to is I don't think these people deserve our trust. As in, a lot of what they did was they went out of their way to go and find somebody, one person or whatever who was offended by Joe, and they put it in the New York Times profile.

At the end of the day, I did agree with the headline, which is that he's too big to cancel. And I thought that that actually was an important takeaway. And maybe it is important for liberals to understand, be like, hey, you can't actually take this guy down. But all of it put together. He called me out. I answered the call. It's right here. I'm sure there'll be a million annoying gifs or whatever of that, but so be it. And so I think it was fascinating to see how it all actually came together. And I will say, credit to them, go encourage you all to go and read it.

I agree with most of that. I mean, I guess I would say the political portrait of him, not the whole thing is about his political views or whatever, but the way that they portray him is sort of consistent with the very shallow caricature that's been created of him. So it's not that it's inaccurate, it's very incomplete. So they really lean into like, oh, the thing he's really into is being anti-woke, which,

yeah, that's one thing that's something he's interested in. That's one thing he talks about, but it doesn't reflect any of the deeper level conversations we got into with him about meritocracy and Amazon and all of that. I just think that that creates a very misleading portrait and about class of the sort of totality of what

and look, I don't agree with everything that Joe says or does or whatever, and that's fine. He'd be fine with that. I'm fine with that. He's all about having people on who have a wide range of views and engaging with them as best he can. So anyway, Sagar,

you're a man of your word. You're welcome. You're welcome, everyone. I hope the sock and the sock cookie were not disgusting. Screw you, Matt Flagheimer. No, thank you very much.

It's a beautiful cookie. I'm going to keep it. I'll frame it. Wow. You guys must really like listening to our voices. While 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? It's time for one of my favorite recurring segments here on Breaking Points, going all the way back to some of our early work at Rising, laying out for the world just how terrible of a politician that Vice President Kamala Harris is.

Now, I've said it before, I was genuinely shocked when Joe Biden picked Kamala Harris. He may be old, but I thought that he had better political instincts than to pick somebody like her. I mean, we're talking about someone who did so poorly they had to drop out before the Iowa caucuses and at various points was polling lower than Andrew Yang in her own home state. Now, nonetheless, the media tried to make her happen over and over again, historic in her identity, focusing only on that because if you ever paid a modicum of attention to her, it's obvious she was one of the least talented people at the top of American politics. And hilariously enough, while the media is still carrying water for her, her boss, Joe Biden,

and many of the people in the White House are beginning to realize just how big of a mistake that they made. The drama has consumed Washington over the holiday weekend. I'll try to lay it out for you. It starts with that political story. It was titled, quote, not a healthy environment. Kamala Harris's office is rife with dissent. Now, the story details how Harris's staff is inept, bumbling, afraid of Harris's chief of staff, Tina Flournoy, but that ultimately, Harris fosters an environment which is insular, where she does not want to get challenged or hear other facts. And it's so bad, 22 of her former and current aides spoke to Politico of how bad of a boss she is and how terrible it is to work for her. Now, it's always amusing to see that happen. The proper thing probably would have been to just brush it off. But the White House went

into full defense mode with White House advisor Cedric Richmond saying on CNN that the people leaking against her are trying to sabotage her. Now, the reason the White House is so concerned about those stories is, number one, they know it's true. Harris's campaign was rife with missteps. She had no strategy. Her staff were consistently leaking against her during her campaign. None of it is new. But number two is because they are terrified. Because per Axios, they now see how terribly she might do in an election matchup. Here's what Axios writes, quote, Harris would be the presumptive nominee if Biden didn't run.

Administration sources believe it would be nearly impossible to unseat the first black woman vice president. They add, quote, yet many Democrats, including some current senior administration officials, are concerned she could not defeat whomever the Republican Party puts up, even if it were Donald Trump. They continue, some Democrats close to the White House are increasingly concerned about Harris's handling of high-profile issues

and political tone deafness, and question her ability to maintain the coalition that Biden rode to the White House. That's as good as Washington drama as it gets, folks. People who are close to the White House. That's as good as Washington drama as it gets, folks. People who are close to the White House and people inside of it going around town saying, oh no, there's no way this woman would win if she had to run in 2024. And worse, there's nothing we can do to make sure she's not the nominee because she's the first black vice president. Now, damned if they do, damned if they don't. You can choose to see this as tawdry gossip. I see it in one of my political maxims, which is that ultimately, things based

upon lies always fall apart. Everyone, literally everyone, knew Kamala Harris was a terrible politician. Inauthentic, her interviews are a train wreck, she is not particularly eloquent or striking in any real way. And I don't forget that this is how she handled her very first high profile interview as vice president. Do you have any plans to visit the border? I'm here in Guatemala today. I at some point, you know, we are going to the border. We've been to the border. So this whole this whole this whole thing about the border. We've been to the border. We've been to the border. You haven't been to the border. And I haven't been to Europe. And I don't I don't understand the point that you're making.

God, what a mess. Basically, the only thing that this woman had going for her was her heritage and the media who did everything they possibly could to get her over the finish line during the primary, where she still crashed and burned in one of the worst campaign defeats in modern memory. Now, she was given an ill-advised second chance by Joe Biden, who calls himself a transitional president to someone like her. But now that the transition is actually possible, the very people who work for Biden are realizing there is no way she could pull it off. Watch this space very closely over the next several months and possibly the next couple of years. If Joe Biden does not end up running for president again, this is all a moot conversation. But as his own advisors told Axios, a man would be 81 years old when seeking re-election.

The truth of the matter is you're fighting against an actual actuarial table every day and crazier things have happened before in politics. It would not be a surprise at all if Harris does end up the nominee, crash and burned again, and these people would have nobody but themselves to blame for it. Crystal, I think it's a really hilarious story. One more thing, I promise. Just wanted to make sure you knew about my podcast with Kyle Kalinsky. It's called Crystal Kyle and Friends, where we do long form interviews with people like Noam Chomsky, Cornel West and Glenn Greenwald. You can listen on any podcast platform or you can subscribe over on Substack to get the video a day early. We're going to stop bugging you now. Enjoy. All right, Crystal, what are you taking a look at?

Well, the 4th of July holiday weekend had me thinking a lot about a concept that is supposed to be at the core of America's founding and our current ethos, and that's freedom. But what is freedom, actually? Not the hollow version that would tell a poor person they have the freedom to own a private plane, or even the version that would say you technically have the right to be anything you want, but then close every pathway to actually achieving those dreams. What is meaningful freedom and who is allowed to have it in America? So here's a little stat that might be a good starting point. This chart tracks the percent of U.S. wealth, which is now owned by the top 0.0001 percent. So effectively, the super billionaire class, as Gabriel Zuckman puts it there, great economist. And isn't that lovely for them how the amount of their wealth is compared to the rest of the nation just climbs and climbs and climbs?

And that amount of wealth will indeed get you a lot, including a lot of meaningful freedom. You are free, for example, to buy a top newspaper if you're Jeff Bezos for an amount that's probably equivalent to the expenditure on a cup of coffee for most people. Freedom to see or not see what you want to see in the news. That must be nice. Meanwhile, as we discussed today, the blue collar workers under Bezos's Amazon have a very different level of freedom or lack thereof. Their movements are tracked, controlled, surveilled. Warehouse workers are intentionally burned out and pushed down after three years. As we discussed, you might well show up to work one day only to have an automated bot inform you that you've been fired. Sure, you've got the freedom to get another job, but if you're living in Bessemer, Alabama, let's say,

this is about the only job with anything close to a living wage in the entire city. But if you're the Sackler family, on the other hand, your wealth will give you the freedom to push a new drug on the American people, to lie to the FDA about its addictiveness and have it believed, to induce doctors to overprescribe it and then turn a blind eye when it becomes clear that a new addiction epidemic has taken off. A street dealer couldn't dream of addicting one one-thousandth of the people that the Sacklers destroyed, and yet they will build the jail on top of you if you're Black and poor and get caught doing or selling drugs. And of course, Joe Biden is going to make sure that you don't get the kind of rehab access and job opportunities that, say, Hunter Biden did. The rules are the rules,

after all, and Joe Biden wrote those rules, including their selective application. Here's a taste of the freedom that poor Black Americans had during the pandemic. The freedom to die from overdoses at even higher rates than their poor white brothers and sisters. In the city of St. Louis, deaths among black people increased last year at three times the rate of white people skyrocketing more than 33%. Black men in Missouri are now four times more likely than a white person to die of an overdose. These spikes, by the way, they were seen across America as we start to get a fuller accounting of what this year of job loss and lockdowns actually did to the nation.

Take a look at this graphic here. You can see how the nation overall fared. There was one state, South Dakota, where overdose deaths went down. Far more typical were those dark red states. In all of those states, overdose deaths jumped in a single year by more than 40 percent. Freedom to work in basically indentured servitude. Freedom to have children you can't possibly afford financially or have enough time to fully nourish. Freedom to rent the American dream from BlackRock with the help of a payday lender. You see, a truly free working class is too much of a threat to power to possibly tolerate. Just look at the horror and outrage from the American political class that workers were not immediately hopping to the moment that restaurants were reopened. The fact that workers might secure a modicum of power

and with it, the freedom to choose a somewhat less shitty job, that was treated like a political emergency. Even this tiny glimmer of meaningful freedom had to be quashed before it hardens into something like expectations of a decent and dignified life. And God help you if you actually try to bring together working class people across racial and cultural lines. Rest in power, Fred Hampton Jr. While the rich enjoy vastly more freedom than the poor, whose very existence is a sort of threat to American power, ultimately I would submit that even the rich are only free so long as they don't rock the boat for the rest of the American power elite. There are some crimes of freedom which the best connections and highest paid lawyers

in the land can't protect you from. If you commit the crimes of freedom of say Julian Assange or Edward Snowden or Steven Donziger, your class won't save you. In fact, what really got me thinking about freedom and its existence or lack thereof in America was Julian Assange, locked in prison for his 50th birthday, having his freedom robbed from him in the most literal way by the Trump administration and now continuing that by the Biden administration. Now, Assange is not an American citizen, but WikiLeaks is founded on a deeply American principle, or at least a principle we purport to be committed to, and that is freedom of speech.

In fact, in founding WikiLeaks and delivering on the promise of its founding, Assange was acting as a truly free man. And for exercising that freedom, the U.S. government has sought to destroy him. In this way, America is egalitarian. Wouldn't have mattered if Assange was rich or poor, black or white. His threat to American empire was simply too great. Same for Stephen Donziger, who's spending his 700th day on house arrest. What was his crime? Well, standing up for the indigenous people of Ecuador who were poisoned by American multinational leviathan Chevron. That company has refused to pay the multi-billion dollar award that they owe, and they've engaged in a relentless mission to destroy Donziger

personally, a quest which the government and our legal system has allowed. The freedom to secure a modicum of accountability from one of America's most powerful corporations, apparently that can't be tolerated. I saw this poll that was done by a right-wing group, and it showed that a majority of young Americans don't feel proud to be American. The group opined that those results were worrisome. Quote, they are a reminder of Ronald Reagan's observation that freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. My view is a little different. Maybe young Americans seeing dreams of stability, family and wealth building stripped from them just recognize how far away from the American ideal of freedom that they already are. And Sagar, this is where it gets thrown around

very casually. Joining us now, we've got the founder of Status Quo News, Jordan Sheridan. He is a great journalist who's been out on the road covering really one of the most important and undercovered stories, which is the number of people who, even with some of the safety net programs put in place during the pandemic, continue to fall through the cracks. Jordan, it's so great to see you. Thanks for joining us this morning. Hey, thanks for having me, guys. Good to see you, Jordan.

So you're just back from a trip to Louisville, a town that I used to live in, and you had some incredible interviews there. Just talk to us a little bit about what you learned on that trip. Yeah, so we actually went through four states to kind of focus on what we thought was the eviction apocalypse coming, but we soon learned that it actually already came during the pandemic. And we learned, particularly in Louisville, that the federal eviction moratorium basically has more loopholes than a roller coaster. It has protected a lot of people for nonpayment, but landlords and city government have kind of colluded together to become creative and evict potentially tens of thousands of people around the country. They've used nuisance violations, particularly in Louisville, to evict people.

They have used not keeping your property well kept to evict people, even things like if your lease is up, a landlord not resigning the lease and then telling the tenant, you don't have a contract with us, evicting them. So essentially, the eviction moratorium didn't really have any teeth beyond nonpayment, and landlords have gotten creative evicting people for every other reason. And we also found that essentially, the real estate developers have been working. It's kind of this cabal of real estate developers, kind of nonprofits and local city council working together to evict people while pretending there's no evictions going on. And so Jordan, you had this particularly striking interview that I want to make sure

you get credit for. Let's take a listen to that. We'll dissect it on the other side. Actually, I lost my job in August, filed for unemployment benefits, never received one payment from unemployment, did fall behind on the rent Reached out to Louisville Metro. They had a eviction prevention program. Submitted all my paperwork to never get resolution. I just want to tell the audience, Louisville Metro is the city government. So it's the Metro City Council. So you reached out to the city government. Submitting all my paperwork to never get a resolution was I was actually under contract with Section 8 as well. Section 8 at least expired in December and it was never renewed by the landlord due to Section 8. And, you know, no one was in the office and a lot of paperwork was behind. I also signed up with the eviction prevention and I was actually evicted in March. But the reason why I was evicted was not for non-payment of rent.

They went around that, and he evicted me for not being under contract. There was no accountability with this. Just tell us a little bit more. Give us more context about what was going on there, Jordan. Yeah, her name was Heather Boyd. She is in Louisville. She was actually working for the U.S. Census Bureau, laid off in August 2020. COVID was running rampant through the office there. She should have been eligible for unemployment, didn't get unemployment, which is another story. A lot of people eligible for unemployment didn't get it, then fell behind in rent. December comes, her lease is up. She should be protected by the

eviction moratorium for not able to pay. Then a couple months later in March, she's evicted. Only because of Black Lives Matter in Louisville was she prevented from being actually homeless. Black Lives Matter Louisville kind of set up this Airbnb where Heather and some other people in a similar situation were, just got housing like four months after being evicted. But she fell through the cracks in two ways. Number one, should have got unemployment, didn't, and should have been protected from eviction. But the landlord basically booted her, citing you're not on a lease. And something that I found even more striking is she reached out to legal aid, reached out to the city government, and the representatives of the city government that are supposed to be helping tenants with this eviction program didn't get responses from

anybody. So she's just one of many, not just in Louisville, met people in West Virginia and Cleveland and Philadelphia that have been evicted throughout this pandemic. And kind of part of it is a gentrification scheme. Landlords have pocketed, you know, you're talking billions in federal relief, supposed to go towards payment for their tenants and then turned around and evict them and use the money for things like redeveloping the property, you know, upkeep so that they could, you know, evict those tenants and charge more for those units. Wow. Well, and it's so important to talk to the actual human beings who are impacted by these things that, you know, oftentimes we cover at the high level.

We covered here that half of those who applied for unemployment insurance, which is this incredibly rickety system, never received payment, Heather being one of those. We talked about how, yes, Congress technically appropriated this money for rental assistance to help people get current on their bills so that when the eviction moratorium does end, they're not kicked out then for nonpayment. But cities and states have had such a difficult time distributing this money that it's almost going completely unused in case after case after case. And then the other piece that you touched on here, Jordan, is the housing market and the rental market super hot right now. So all of these landlords chomping at the bit

to kick out their current residents so that they can hike up rent to whatever they want it to be. So they're using whatever loopholes they can to get their current tenants out so that they can jack prices up, which has a devastating impact on the people they're kicking out,

has a devastating impact on people who just, you know, also want a place to potentially live and see prices going up and up and up. Talk about that piece of the story and how the super, you know, red hot housing market prop, you know, in part because of permanent capital coming up and buying all these homes and wanting to be America's landlord, how that is contributing to situations like what Heather found herself in. Yeah, I mean, it's happening in cities all over the country. It's been happening for years and has only been accelerated now. You know, the phrase is gentrification. I think that's too vague. I mean, I just think it's economic terrorism. If you look at Louisville, we saw other states. Essentially, there's this kind of collusion.

You have like the nonprofit industrial complex. So real estate developers are funding nonprofits. Real estate developers are funding local city governments. In some cases, real estate developers are also on city government. We found that in Philadelphia with real estate developers on city council. And essentially, they are kind of colluding to, as they call it, economic development or urban renewal to buy up whole neighborhoods and push poor people out, often poor black and brown people, but a lot of poor white people. We saw

it in rural communities, too. Actually, in Moorhead, Kentucky, they evicted a whole mobile home park during the pandemic under false premises. So it is kind of this one on one side you have gentrification, but on the other side you have the big boys. Obviously, you know, the remaining Koch brother, Blackstone and others that are essentially using the pandemic as disaster capitalism. You know, the shock doctrine, don't let a crisis go to waste. And they're trying to essentially, you know, basically beautify and redevelop whole neighborhoods so that they could make soaring profits. And the thing is, there is no accountability at the federal level.

We saw this 2008, 2009, $700 billion, no strings attached. And now you have this eviction moratorium and rental relief, also no strings attached. There's no accountability measures in the federal law if landlords break the federal eviction moratorium. There's no penalty, nothing. And actually, for the first half a year, the eviction moratorium was only for federally financed homes. The CDC moratorium for all homes only came in September. So from March to September 2020, I mean, you're talking really the worst of the pandemic or the early wave. That was just for federally funded houses. So at the end of the day,

you have top line laws that pass. The media pushes it that this covers everybody. But there is a whole lot of people falling through the cracks. Yeah. And Jordan, tell us a little bit about the rest of the trip, the places you went, the things that you found that you thought were significant and maybe what you have planned for the future as well. Yeah. So while the media was analyzing Putin and Biden's handshake, we were covering exploding homelessness across the country. I mean, I've seen a lot of homelessness,

but particularly in Philadelphia, it was the worst I've seen. We spoke with one homeless individual that was a construction worker laid off during the pandemic, has been sleeping in a park for over a year and has gotten no relief from the local government there. Fortunately, our interview with him, a viewer saw it and now is helping him get a job. So that's a good story. We went to Cleveland, interviewed Nina Turner about her campaign, also then followed volunteers with the Democratic Socialists of America who were actually doing what the government should be doing. They were knocking door to door. They got the list of people facing eviction to give them, you know, info and legal resources. So we followed them doing that. Went over to Louisville because, you know, your old hometown.

The Breonna Taylor case, I mean, it's hard as a journalist to prove a cover up. This is very simple. There's more and more evidence coming out that the state attorney general, Daniel Cameron, covered this up. The city is covering this up. There's actually body cameras that the family were told didn't exist that do exist of the night she was murdered. So we interviewed her aunts. And then we went to West Virginia to cover Joe Manchin. You know, you've seen a lot of national media talking about him from this top line view. You know, he's he's a thorn in the Democratic Party side. We actually like dug deep and found this man has been literally helping the Republicans take over West Virginia for over a decade, sabotaging progressives and has done more to accelerate West Virginia's high poverty rate than any other politician.

So, yeah, all those videos are up. And it really is, you know, I have to say, we need more people, whether it's us, other journalists going in the field, because honestly, you know, people know at a high level view the corruption and injustice of this country. Until you see it up close, there's so many stories out there that are just not being told by corporate media, even independent media. The humanity that you captured and how critical that is

cannot possibly be overstated. And I just want to say to our audience, guys, Jordan is doing really, really important work. It costs a lot of money to go on these trips and do all the interviews with all the equipment that that requires. And so we're going to put the links down in the description box. But please, at the very least, go subscribe to the YouTube channel. I would really highly recommend you become a Patreon so that we can continue to get this type of work, actually putting human faces on some of these big stories

that are either being glossed over by the media or ignored completely that are happening at the ground level. So guys, I cannot recommend enough that you check out what Jordan is up to. And Jordan, thank you so much for the work that you're doing and for your time today. Thank you, Jordan. We really appreciate the work that you do, man.

Thanks a lot. Our pleasure. Thanks guys for watching. We really appreciate it. If you want to become a premium subscriber, watch the entire show an hour early, completely uncut. Link is right there down in the description. You also get to listen to it and you get to do weekly AMAs. There's a lot of fun stuff. We had that cool premium drop with Iremi. 30 minutes, completely unfiltered. The Funky Academic. We do two of those a month, which are only for our premium subscribers.

Note on Iremi, our friend, The Funky Academic, that is just insane. He posted to Facebook a quote from the Declaration of Independence. This is nuts. And they banned him for 30 days and said that it was hate speech.

He literally quoted from the Declaration of Independence. So make sure you raise a little bit of hell about that. But yeah, love Iron Man. Always mind expanding when you talk to him here in studio. Free Iron Man, free Britney, free them all. Free Iron Man for sure. Okay, guys. We'll see you on Thursday.

That's the next show. Yep. Thanks, guys. See you Thursday. That's the next show. Yep. Thanks, guys. See you Thursday. Thanks for listening to the show, guys. We really appreciate it. To help other people find the show, go ahead and leave us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps other people find the show. As always, a special thank you to Supercast for powering our premium membership.

If you want to find out more, go to crystalandsauger.com. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Last year, a lot of the problems of the drug war. This year, a lot of the biggest names in music and sports. This kind of starts that a little bit, man. We met them at their homes. We met them at their recording studios. Stories matter, and it brings a face to them.

It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We asked parents who adopted teens to share their journey. We just kind of knew from the beginning that we were family. They showcased a sense of love that I never had before.

I mean, he's not only my parent, like he's like my best friend. At the end of the day, it's all been worth it. I wouldn't change a thing about our lives. Learn about adopting a teen from foster care. Visit AdoptUSKids.org to learn more. Brought to you by AdoptUSKids, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Ad Council. What up, y'all? This your main man Memphis Bleak right here, host of Rock Solid Podcast. June is Black Music Month. So what better way to celebrate than listening to my exclusive conversation with my bro, Ja Rule. The one thing

they can't stop you or take away from you is knowledge. So whatever I went through while I was down in prison for two years, through that process, learn. Learn from me. Check out this exclusive episode with Ja Rule on Rock Solid. Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Rock Solid, and listen now. This is an iHeart Podcast.