Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 8/4/23: Exclusive Interview with Disney Heiress Abigail Disney On Hollywood Strikes, Labor Congressman Screams At Teens In Capitol, Malls Death Spiral In Value,

Episode Date: August 4, 2023

Krystal and Saagar discuss a Congressman screaming at teen Pages inside the Capitol, Malls across the nation enter a death spiral in value, and we're joined by Disney heiress Abigail Disney to talk about the Hollywood strikes and her views on labor, capitol, and the legacy of Disney.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. much. And women have quietly listened. And all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribe. Listen to the Good Moms, Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you go to find your podcast. Stay informed, empowered, and ahead of the curve with the BIN News

This Hour podcast. Updated hourly to bring you the latest stories shaping the Black community. From breaking headlines to cultural milestones. The Black Information Network delivers the facts, the voices and the perspectives that matter 24-7 because our stories deserve to be heard. Listen to the BIN News This Hour podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip-hop. It's Black Music Month, and We Need to Talk is tapping in. I'm Nyla Simone, breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives.

Like, that's what's really important, and that's what stands out, is that our music changes people's lives for the better let's talk about the music that moves us to hear this and more on how music and culture collide listen to we need to talk from the black effect podcast network on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast hey guys ready or not 2024 is here and we here at breaking points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. A bit of an interesting incident causing a lot of controversy here in Capitol Hill. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. Van Orden, a former U.S. Navy SEAL from Wisconsin, is being rebuked by the Senate chamber because he yelled at some high school age pages.

So I guess let's first explain the situation. These Senate pages were laying on the floor of the Capitol Rotunda on Wednesday night because the Senate had late votes. They apparently were laying on that floor and they had their phones and were taking pictures of the dome, which from the direct center, which actually is a very beautiful picture. If you've ever seen it,

I encourage anybody, if you're ever on a tour, try and go to the dead center and actually look up because it is pretty cool. It's a very beautiful artwork, some famous stuff going on there. But eventually what happened is that Van Orden apparently came in there and called these kids, quote, little shits. He's like, what do you think you're doing here? Yelled at them, like got in their face, told them to leave. He said, I don't

give a shit who you are. I'm a congressman. Get the fuck out of here. So vicious tirade against the pages. And now it's chamber on chamber action. He's been censored officially by the Senate. So McConnell and Schumer calling him out for doing this. There's also some speculation as to whether Van Orden himself was drunk when any of this happened. Let's go and put this one up there on the screen. There's actually a photo there. So Van Orden claims the Capitol Rotunda served as a field hospital where countless Union soldiers died fighting to free men in the Civil War. I've long said our nation's Capitol is a symbol of sacrifice.

Our service-worn women have been treated for this country. She should never be treated like a frat house common room. Threatening a congressman with bad press to excuse poor behavior is a reminder of everything that's wrong with Washington. Luckily, bad press has never bothered me, and if it's the price I pay to stand up for what's right, then so be it.

Also, we can see the photo here. Let's put the photo up there, please, on the screen. This actually shows you Congressman Van Orden's office, beer bottles and alcohol on the table. Van Orden, to be fair to him, he says that he does beer and cheese tours out of his office for constituents. That's why the alcohol was there. It's not indicative of him being drunk during the incident. So your thoughts, Crystal? Well, they also say that his staff were heard partying loudly before he cursed out. The 15-year-old Senate pages who were doing absolutely nothing wrong, taking pictures, actually showing, I mean, really showing reverence to the Capitol building that they wanted to,

you know, capture and remember what, I mean, this is, come on. I always think that the way you treat people who are lower on the totem pole than you in terms of social hierarchies is the most revealing aspect of a human being. And we see it in this business all the time. How do hosts treat their makeup artists? How do they treat the crew?

What do they act like when the cameras are not on? And so to be screaming at these 15-year year old pages who were there, by the way, I don't know if people know like what the page program is, but you get selected by your congressman. Most congress people run like some sort of a contest for civic minded youngsters to compete, to be able to get this honor of coming here and spending, I don't know if it's a semester or a full year, um, doing all the like grunt work, or, like, running around the Capitol. Yeah, and that sort of stuff all around. And this has been going on for many, many decades.

This program's been in existence for a long time. And so to treat these kids this way, I mean, come on. If you really have a problem with their behavior, you could explain to them why this is, you know, this is important, an important place. And here's the history. And here's why you shouldn't be laying on the floor taking a photo. Although, again, I personally think there was absolutely nothing wrong with it. So much worse behavior on his part than on the part of. Well, apparently that there's a tradition where they get to rest inside the Capitol whenever there's late night votes going on.

So I think that he misunderstood the situation and he wasn't, he's also a newer Congressman. So I think that's part of the reason why. Yeah. I mean, I don't think you should be treating kids this way. And you certainly shouldn't be yelling at them. As you said, if you really thought they were doing wrong, you could have explained, maybe they didn't know that people died on the floor or whatever. Also, I still don't think that they were doing anything particularly out of order. And so, yeah, now this is like a mini scandal on Capitol Hill. Some people are trolling him. A congressman, actually Chip Roy, did the actual pose laying on the ground and taking the photo and tagged him in it. Yeah, he's his own colleague, Ted Cruz and

all of them. Yeah, people are really making fun of this guy. So, I mean, him and his staff are refusing to back down. They're like, listen, he did nothing wrong. He did the right thing. That's the other thing that irritates me about it is, you know what? If he put out a statement that was like, you know what, guys? I was tired. It was late. I popped off. I shouldn't have done it.

I'm sorry. Okay. That's one thing, right? But he doubles down on this like he's standing up for the honor of the nation by cursing out a group of kids. Like, luckily, bad press has never bothered me. If it's the price I pay to stand up for what's right, then so be it. Like, come on, dude. Take the L.

Self-righteous. And apparently also he had previously cursed out some, like, library page. Yeah. Another kid. Yeah, I saw that. Over some, like, book in the library that he didn't like or whatever back in Wisconsin. So this is a pattern for him. And I'm sure he's all family values, et cetera, et cetera, if you were to ask him his political views. Okay. All right. Good for him. We'll see you guys later.

A really sad new economic development that's just a sign of the times. Let's put this up there on the screen. Local malls, once the hallmark of a community, are now stuck in, quote, a death spiral and are plunging in value in terms of commercial real estate. They point to, Crystal, that, quote, lower-end malls are now worth at least 50%, and in some cases, more than 70% less than they were when mall valuations peaked in late 2016. The overall, they point to several malls, for example, that have been sold at foreclosure auction. The best example was one which was appraised in 2012 for $153 million, sold at foreclosure for just $9.5 million. Wow. Quote, more than $14 billion of loans are backed by properties come due just in the

next 12 months. Mortgage rates are actually up. So refinancing that debt is going to be dramatically more challenging and expensive at the very same time that overall department store closures are actually much higher this year than the previous two years. And we're beginning to normalize over the baseline. I mean, really what's interesting to me is looking at department store closures in malls, it peaked in 2018, 2019. And then anything that did survive appears to be dying now in 2023. So it was already basically on its last legs. And now somebody is coming through and like shooting the rest. So, yeah, it's very sad. I mean, like for example, they point to Macy's, JCPenney and Sears closed quote 875 stores just between 2019 and 2020. And that quote COVID and more has quote accelerated the

death spiral of the industry because the department stores were the anchors that a lot of the smaller businesses could be around. I don't know. Maybe I'm just personally nostalgic for this because it was like a huge thing to do in the pre-internet era. Oh, yeah. Go to the mall. Walk around.

Go to the food court. Isn't there like all stranger things season around the mall? I mean, it's just- Well, there's a whole like mall cop series. Yeah, the Paul Blart mall cop. I mean, many of these like connected culturally because it was genuinely a shared experience. It was a huge hub actually for local commerce. And it basically just looks dead after the internet and especially after COVID.

So it's really sad. Yeah, I mean, these things were already suffering in the online retail era. And then COVID hits and that was like a death knell for a lot of them. And I was a little bit hopeful because I do like the mall. I still go to the mall. I still am very attached to my local mall, which is the mall that I went to as a child and as a teenager, shout out to the Spotsylvania town center. And it felt like at my local mall, actually there's been pretty good foot traffic. Like when I go in there, it's not dead. I will say the department stores are very sad.

You go in there and there's like no salespeople and all the merchandise is super old and it's pretty sparse. Like the department store situation is kind of sad. But overall, my little anecdotal assessment being at my own mall was that like, oh, maybe post-pandemic, it's actually made people appreciate being in person more. Maybe there's been like a little mini resurgence in the mall world. No, not so much. So you had initially, right, downtowns that got destroyed by the mall, by suburban shopping.

And now you have the suburban shopping getting destroyed by online. And some malls that I've seen, even the big department stores are now basically like Amazon warehouses. Right, that's the thing, is effectively what has happened is that there's been incredible amounts of concentration. So instead of the dispersed 800 stores, there's now just super malls like the top 10 percent locations are really the

only ones that survive. I'm relatively lucky. You know, both of us are because you live in very populated areas like populated areas, more so than like Texas, where I'm from. Right. Like, you know, I could drive an hour from where I'm from and actually not see anybody, maybe a little bit less now, but specifically whenever I was growing up. From where I, from where I live to the mall is 45 minutes. So that's my local town. So, I mean, we, at least, you know, around DC, we have like super malls that certainly are doing well. And, but the problem in my, is that now they're super crowded because they're like the only malls that everybody can go to. So now there's like one mall for like a million people, effectively. And so it's actually a very unpleasant experience,

I think, whenever you visit it. But yeah, I mean, it's just a cultural touchstone, which I think is just dying. It's just effectively gone at this point. And the shared experience, I think think for teenagers and all that if you live in a more suburban area i don't know if it's going to be accessible to a lot of i don't really know what people do now but uh it's not this and it's just that's the interesting yeah you're right you know scrolling yeah i mean that is there's just a lot less that's like in person because yeah when i was a teenager that was the thing to do yeah like especially once i could drive you know go with your friends just go walk around get a pretzel

at Auntie Anne's I'm a fan of that yeah still a big fan of that actually we had Auntie Anne's pretzels at our wedding you can get them

you can get them now in the airport that's the only time I even see them they're always in the airport they don't they're still so good so go to your local mall

for no other reason than to buy the hot pretzel I feel like the smell is particularly I don't know if it's fake or not kind of like Subway has that fake bread smell, but man, it does hit every single time. All right, everybody enjoy.

We'll see you guys later. Did a monologue last week about a class traitor that I had my eye on, Abigail Disney. She is the granddaughter of Roy Disney, one of the co-founders of Disney. She's been speaking out, become quite an activist, recently got arrested, and she's also a film producer, and she joins us now. Great to have you, Abigail. Good to see you. Great to be here. Yeah, absolutely. So this interview you gave to Rolling Stone really caught my eye. Let's put

this up on the screen. So one of the things you say here is you woke up one day and realized that just by virtue of being born lucky, I had so much more than everyone else. And I don't think I've slept well since I figured that out. I wonder if you could reflect on that moment of realization and also what you feel like you owe to society given your birth into wealth and privilege. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, actually there were many moments over the years and the one moment about private planes was definitely one moment when I was flying alone on a 737 with, you know, a waitress, I mean, a stewardess, flight attendant

and a queen-size bed to sleep in. And just, you know, wrong, wrong, just wrong. And I couldn't keep operating that way. It just felt wrong in every conceivable way. And I've had moments like that along the way multiple times. And yeah, what it brings up in you is the idea that you know that other people are suffering. A lot of people are suffering.

And sometimes indirectly as a result of the reason you have all that you know that other people are suffering, a lot of people are suffering, and sometimes indirectly as a result of the reason you have all that you have. So you really have to kind of interrogate the things that put you in this advantage position you're in and go find out what you can do about some of this inequity. That's what I'm trying to do. So Abigail, I mean, one of the reasons too that we've been taking a lot of notice of your comments, not just around that, but also, you know, in terms of the writer's strike, we have the CEO of the company, who helms

one that bears your name, Bob Iger, you know, speaking out against the demands of these writers. So as somebody both from your position, but also, you know, you have the Disney last name, like, what did it feel like to watch kind of that happen with somebody, with the scion of your family and something that you guys worked so hard to build? Yeah, I know. And actually, this is something I'm quite, I've not quietly been saying about Bob Iger

for quite some time now, because his pay has been outrageous for years. And there was a year in there when he made 2,000 times what his night janitors were making. And that's just, again, the idea that you sleep well at night, knowing that is disturbing to me. What he said about the demands being unrealistic and disruptive, those were the parts that really caught people off guard, because that was laying bare the parts that really caught people off guard because that was laying bare the reality that those demands that the writers

and the actors are making are only unrealistic if you're tethered to this particular way of doing capitalism. And you have to be unrealistic about the lives of the writers in order to expect them to live the way that they've been living. So our unrealisms are colliding with each other and there's going,

something's going to have to give. And what's been giving up till now is almost constantly the workers. The way we do capitalism, this fundamentalist version of it that we practice needs to change. And Bob Iger is just as much a practitioner of fundamentalist capitalism as Jack Welch was. Yeah. Can you speak a little bit to the mindset? Because, I mean, you swim in these circles, and so you have perhaps a unique window into how someone does sleep perfectly fine at night while some of their workers are homeless and unable to afford just the basics of life and are going out on strike because they can't afford rent. They can't afford to eat. They certainly can't afford to have a family.

How do people who are in that position make sense of that and still feel themselves to be moral actors? Well, what a lot of those folks say is, I'm just paying the going rate. That's just the rate. It's a free market, and that's what you pay. And it's not a free market, first of all. Disney gets all kinds of incentives and perks from governments, from local to state to federal. So it's not a free market. And it's not a free market in terms of wages, because if McDonald's and The Gap and everybody else has sort of made a gentleman's agreement, and I use the gender term intentionally here, to keep wages where they are, then it's not a free market. So the idea that they're just

paying the going rate is what helps them sleep at night. And then what I've heard is, well, but the government's letting them down. The government hasn't made sure that they can afford the things they need, which is kind of an extraordinary hypocritical cop-out given the way they fight the government at every turn when it comes time to pay their taxes. And they, you know, and they strong-arm all these subsidies out of the government, and yet the government is the first place they turn when they think their workers aren't getting enough to eat. So taxpayers are picking up the bill for a lot of the shortfalls that corporations are enforcing on their workers. And I feel like the rank and file in this country should be a lot angrier about the way we're

doing this right now. You know, I'm interested and most curious, Abigail, in your view of Disney itself, everything I've read about Roy Disney, about your father, about the belief in Disney animation, the connection to the family, about Disney World, the experience that the average family could get whenever they're connecting with the Disney brand and the experience they get, we've seen it monetized to an extraordinary degree, specifically also in recent months in terms of prices and all that. Do you view that kind of as a parallel to the same societal problems of what we're seeing today?

So that's essentially why I made the film that I just made, which is called The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales. And you can find it on, I hate saying this, Amazon and iTunes. Sorry about that. You know, I was so struck by how different it was from the way I remember it being when I would go with my grandfather, Roy O'Disney, and then my father, Roy E.

And, you know, I was so struck by, first of all, the way my grandfather's related to the employees there. You know, he really didn't see himself as better than anyone. He didn't really see himself as inhabiting a slice of society that was any higher or more important. And that's a really important mindset difference because that mindset difference is another piece of the way you sleep well at night when you're paying people sub-minimum wages. You sleep well at night because, well, they're not you. They're not like you. You're a different person. You're on this cloud. So my grandfather never acted that way, never treated people that way.

And he understood the job of being a CEO as creating livelihoods, which is a very different thing from just paying salaries or creating jobs. And he really understood that people were raising their families on these wages and so if you were a janitor at Disneyland in the beginning in the 1950s and 60s you could afford to buy a house you could afford to send your children to college yes this is partly the government and you know abandoning people as well but it was a kind of a three-legged stool between labor and government and corporations, and they were balancing each other out better then. And unfortunately, we've taken that away, and we've taken away the middle class, basically, from our structure. Yeah.

What would it take to rebalance things in a more reasonable direction back to, you know, I mean, obviously, we recognize some of the inequities and the biases of that generation as well. But you said that you think that there's a fundamentalist version of capitalism that is propelled by people like Bob Iger that is sort of reinforced by the government. So what does it look like to rebalance those scales? Yeah, I sometimes think that if we followed the line back from here to Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 and just undo almost everything he did, all of those tax cuts, all, you know, from Trump's back to Bush's back to Reagan's original ones, all of the deregulation, the handicapping of OSHA and LRB, the attack on unions that happened at the federal, state, and local level.

If you just follow that line, the fairness doctrine in media, if you just follow that line of things that Reagan got going and then other administrations, not always Republican, continued from there, I think that would be the way that we would need to do it. And the other thing we'd have to do is spend money on education. You know, we have been strangling the education system and we've turned a college education into something that, you know, most people can't afford, which is such a broken promise. When I was growing up, anybody could get a college education by working a job at night.

This is insane, what we're doing to ourselves. Healthcare, we'd have to put healthcare in place too. And my daughter was living in Paris for a long time and she's 32 years old. She told me that all of her friends from the US are not having children, but all of her friends in France are having children. And the difference is health care, child care, job security, housing security, education.

Those are the things that are in place in France that we have taken out from under our working people in this country over the last 50 years. Very interesting point. And finally, Abigail, I found it very, I found it actually very powerful the way you directly called out Taylor Swift, who's a top private jet user, Leonardo DiCaprio, who was in Don't Look Up, but that hasn't stopped him from, you know, flying around on his private jet. And listen, I mean, one wealthy person forgoing their private jet travel is not going to save the planet. But it is true that the ultra wealthy have way more carbon output than your average citizen around the world. So what do you think is the role of just like publicly shaming some of these people who are blatant hypocrites in terms of their stated values and the way they actually live? Corporations and the government have not hesitated to shame working people

into recycling and using less plastic and turning their thermostats down and all the rest of it. And every one of those decisions is a decision that has a collective consequence to say everybody makes it, but really doesn't make a difference if it's just you. So those are all the same ways in which rich people are going to have to think about the way they run their lives. Yeah, it won't make a difference if I decided to fly my private plane, but it's going to make a huge difference if we all stop. So they have to acknowledge they're part of a collective,

that their actions have collective consequences, just the same as everyone else. It involves that mindset shift among wealthy people, which is at the heart of so much of the problem we have. They have to come to an understanding that they're no better or more important than anyone else just because they have these resources. And that's going to be a big mindset shift for people. Yeah, I think that's all well said, Abigail.

Thank you so much for your time. It's great to chat with you. Thank you. Thanks so much. Yeah, it're moms, but not your mommy. Historically, men talk too much. And women have quietly listened. And all that stops here.

If you like witty women, then this is your tribe. Listen to the Good Moms, Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you go to find your podcasts. Stay informed, empowered, and ahead of the curve with the BIN News find your podcast. 24-7 because our stories deserve to be heard. Listen to the BIN News This Hour podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip-hop. It's Black Music Month and We Need to Talk is tapping in.

I'm Nyla Simone, breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives. Like, that's what's really important, and that's what stands out, is that our music changes people's lives for the better. Let's talk about the music that moves us. To hear this and more on how music and culture collide, listen to We Need to Talk from the Black Effect

Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.