Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Mini Show #26: SCOTUS, Defense Stocks, Corporate Feminism, Nuclear Power, & More!

Episode Date: March 12, 2022

Krystal and Saagar talk about corporate influence over the Supreme Court, defense companies, MLB lockout and corporate feminism while bringing collaborations with Marshall Kosloff, Kyle Kulinski, and James Li!To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/Daily Poster: https://www.dailyposter.com/Kyle's Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/SecularTalkRealignment YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3O3P7AsOC17INXR5L2APHQJames Li: https://www.youtube.com/c/5149withJamesLi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We're gonna be totally upfront with you. We took a big risk going independent. To make this work, we need your support to beat the corporate media. CNN, Fox, MSNBC, they are ripping this country apart. They are making millions of dollars doing it. To help support our mission of making all of us hate each other less, hate the corrupt ruling class more, support the show. Become a Breaking Points premium member today, where you get to watch and listen to the entire show ad-free and uncut an hour early before

everyone else. You get to hear our reactions to each other's monologues. You get to participate in weekly Ask Me Anythings, and you don't need to hear our annoying voices pitching you like I am right now. So what are you waiting for? Go to BreakingPoints.com, become a premium member today, which is available in the show notes. Enjoy the show, guys. Joining us now for our weekly partnership segment with The Daily Poster, we have David Sirota. He is, of course, founder of The Daily Poster. Great to see you, David. Good to see you, David. Good to see you both. So you guys did some deep reporting on some of the ways that the Supreme Court's

pro-corporate ideology is shaped. And this is happening on, you know, among the right wing members of the court, but not exclusively the right wing members of the court. We've seen the Supreme Court over years, including quote unquote, liberal justices like Justice Breyer, take a lot of decisions that are very favorable to corporate America. Let's go ahead and put the piece up there on the screen from Walker Bragman. He says how pro-business law and economics interests pushed the courts right as justices consider crushing the EPA. Data shows a link between judges' all expense paid free market trainings and right-wing business rulings. So talk to us about what exactly is going on here, David. So there's a movement called the Law and Economics Movement, and it's a right-wing conservative movement that was designed to have court rulings that apply supposedly economic principles to how judges interpret the law.

And not surprisingly, that is a way to ideologically shift the court's rulings to the right. What new data tell us is that there is a link between the judges all throughout the judiciary system, judges taking these all expenses paid luxury trips to law and economics conferences, and those judges systematically producing more right-wing rulings on specifically cases involving labor, the environment, and antitrust. So, in other words, you have a movement funded by corporate interests that is bankrolling luxury trips for judges to effectively indoctrinate a generation of judges to apply essentially conservative economic ideology to how they interpret the law. And this is all specifically relevant right now because the Supreme Court, of which there

are law and economics adherence on that court, that court is right now considering the kind of case that's at issue here, the case that would effectively defang the EPA and prevent it from reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Yeah, I think, you know, it's funny. Because of my background, I've been aware of this for a long time. And it's funny. I've always seen the – there's a lot of liberal obsession over the culture war issues. And I'm like, you guys don't even know what's happening on the economic side. I've always said the Federalist Society and more, they care more about defanging

administrative law than they do by social conservatism by far. So just explain what that means, not only in the EPA practice, but in general, antitrust, so much more that nobody ever focuses on. Sure. So look, the Supreme Court and the judiciary as a whole is mostly dealing with business cases, economic cases. And those cases do not get nearly the attention that cultural issues, social issues get at the court. But as you suggest, the conservative movement has been focused on moving the court specifically farther and farther, I guess you'd call it to the right, but really in a pro-corporate direction, to essentially get more and more rulings that serve corporate interests. A good example is the whole part of the court rulings that try to take power away from federal agencies to essentially do their job, whether it's antitrust regulation and the like. Another area that we see is attempting to close the courthouse door

to plaintiffs seeking redress against corporations. That's another big thing in the judiciary right now. And again, what the new data shows, not surprisingly in some ways, is a direct correlation between judges being given these luxury junkets to go essentially be indoctrinated into this ideology and those judges producing those kinds of rulings which serve corporate interests. And again, I go back to this EPA case. I can't stress enough how important this case is. This is a case where this is at issue, where the power of the EPA to do its job regulating greenhouse gas emissions is fundamentally at issue. You have West Virginia leading a case to try to essentially prevent the EPA from having that power during the climate crisis. And you have the plaintiffs making a kind of law and economics argument. Oh, if the EPA can regulate greenhouse gases, wouldn't that cost society too much?

And ultimately, then the question becomes, well, why are the judges deciding what costs too much or what doesn't cost enough? Why is that something that's at issue? Aren't the judges supposed to be ruling on matters of law, on matters of what is the EPA under the law empowered to do? But that's that law and economics ideology embedded in the judiciary system now. And who are some of the top acolytes of this approach who are currently on the Supreme Court? And do we know anything about how Biden's nominee, Kataji Brown Jackson, feels about this whole movement? Well, look, Clarence Thomas has been kind of an acolyte of law and economics. I think he went to a couple of these conferences. You've got, you know, Sam Alito. I'm not sure he's gone to those conferences, but it's the same sort

of thing. I mean, basically, the right wing judges on the court have promoted this ideology. And by the way, John Roberts, he is known as a kind of so-called moderate. He has been one at the forefront of trying to shut plaintiffs out of the court system, denying them effectively, denying them standing, as it's called. And I should mention, Justice Breyer has a pretty conservative record, especially when it comes to antitrust. So you were right at the beginning here to mention that this isn't necessarily Democratic or Republican. It's not even necessarily liberal, quote unquote, or conservative. This is sort of across the spectrum of how we identify judges. We don't know very much when it comes to this kind of stuff with Biden's new

nominee, but my guess is some of it will come out. Yeah, it's going to be interesting. And this is how over time you end up with this landscape that is just so unfavorable to working people and where corporations hold so much power and sway. David, thank you as always for helping us understand those mechanics that are operating behind the scenes. Thanks, David. Thank you both. Our pleasure. And thank you guys for watching. Go subscribe to The Daily Poster. Thank you for subscribing to us, and we're going to have more for you later. All right, guys, we got a nice little catch from our friends over at More Perfect Union. Let's go ahead and throw this up on the screen. So Marjorie Taylor Greene, Miss America First herself, apparently bought up to $15,000 of Lockheed Martin stock

the very day before she tweeted, and I quote, war and rumors of war is incredibly profitable and convenient. And just like that, the media now has a lie to use as a reason for our shattered economy and out of control inflation. So Sagar, at the same time, that she is decrying, which, you know, rightly so, that the defense industrial complex, no one will profit more from the current situation than they will. And sure enough, their stock prices have all uniformly gone up, even as the market has crashed overall. But what she didn't tell you is that she was getting in on the deal,

so she herself could profit off of war. Well, that's outrageous because she's already got a 21% return on that investment. So that's actually a lot of money. I mean, here, let's go ahead and do this live, everybody. Times 15,000, that's $3,000. I mean, the average salary, I think, of a Congress, or sorry, the Congress salary is only $175,000. So this is a substantial return for a lot of these people, especially her. I don't think she's independently all that wealthy. But it comes down to the fact

that they do not deserve the ability in order to trade stocks when they do outrageous things like this. When you see these congressmen investing in the defense stocks and then commenting and possibly impacting the situation, as the Business Insider piece that we have showed you before, of Congress members who are on the committees themselves over the defense industrial complex are then invested in those same companies. Put this on the screen. We can show you the defense stocks are spiking all across the U.S. sector. Just yesterday, there was a photo of Mohammed bin Salman, the Prince of Saudi Arabia, at a conference in Saudi Arabia for defense companies. And it was a Lockheed Martin booth. They even had the gall to tweet it from their account, be like, welcome to His Royal Highness, King, you know, the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Yeah, this was disgusting. Right. And

look, Marjorie Taylor Greene, perhaps soon, may have to vote on banning Russian oil. Is this investment going to have an impact on her decision? I cannot tell you for certain. And thus, the appearance of corruption is just as bad as real corruption itself. We've got to get this banned. I still can't believe, you know, we didn't spend enough time on this because of the Ukraine crisis. Joe Biden, per the Washington Post itself, cut out that section of his State of the Union where he called for a ban on stock. Yes. So reportedly an early draft included that call for a stock trading ban. And as we've said here before, Joe Biden actually has a lot of credibility on the issue because that was the personal stance that he took for the many years when he was in the Senate.

Somehow that got pulled from the draft. I would love to know how that happened. But I do think it's important to also say Marjorie Taylor Greene is far sit on committees with direct responsibility over national defense who have investment in military contractors. So if you go through the list, you're talking about people like Senator Tommy Tuberville, Senator Jackie Rosen, Representative Pat Fallon, Representative Jim Cooper, Representative Ro Khanna. Definitely culprits on both sides of the aisle. And it's grotesque for our lawmakers who bear the responsibility of deciding whether or not we go to war to be in the position of profiteering off of those conflicts. So Marjorie Taylor Greene gets an extra layer of hypocrisy for buying the stock and making this investment days before decrying

this exact type of profiteering. And it just shows you how hollow their words are and how it's just posturing above any sort of actual principle. Yeah, there's nothing in America First about this. Most of the people who defend her won't say a word about it. Oh, of course not. She won't have any real criticism. And they'll be like, Nancy Pelosi is corrupt.

Yeah, I agree. We're happy to say that too. Yeah, I agree. We're happy to say that too. Yeah, exactly. And the, you know, the lack of honesty by so many sides on this debate to just show you how deeply both sides corrupt are when it comes to this issue is just, you know, absolutely astronomical. So. So, guys, just thought we'd bring you that little update on congressional corruption. We got to keep our eye on the ball and continue pushing these people to actually push through a ban because I am getting nervous. We heard some, you know,

there was movement on it and now suddenly... What's what they do? We knew that they were going to try and shoehorn it. The fact that it got dropped by the State of the Union shows that,

and especially now with Ukraine, Ukraine's the best thing that ever happened to a lot of these people. But look, war profiteering is profiteering too and we'll continue to call it out and hopefully we can get some action in terms of getting this thing moving again in Congress.

Yep. All right, guys. So there is a Major League Baseball lockout that you all might know a lot about and I am sort of vaguely aware of but have no real understanding of the details of. So in order to understand what is going on, bringing in a great friend of mine and also a friend of the show, J.D. Scholten. He is a senior advisor to the Economics Liberty Project. He is a former congressional candidate, and he is also a former minor league baseball player. Great to see you, J.D. Good to see you, man.

Great to be back on here. All right, so for people like me who have very little understanding, can you just walk us through how we got to today? Yeah, so we're on day 97 of the owner's lockout of the Major League players. And the collective bargaining agreement is what they're arguing about. It ran out three months ago, a little over three months ago, and that's kind of what they're working out right now. But it's very symbolic of what's happening in the rest of the nation. We have these owners who are billionaires who pay less taxes than their millionaire players and less taxes than probably most of the workers who work at the stadiums. And they're asking for more money. And the commissioner who is actually picked by the owners, that's the only way he gets the job, is that position originally intent was

to grow the game. And now it seems like it's just to maximize the profits for the owners. And that's kind of where we're at right now. So, okay, let's explain this then further. So the lockout is happening. Opening day has been pushed. Now, what is the justification on their end? Or do they even have one, or are they just simply retreating, saying that the MLB union is being unreasonable? That's their line. And so tonight actually is another deadline. They've passed many deadlines. But tonight might be the last deadline to get a 162-game season in. And so that's one of the urgent things that we're seeing right now. So one of the biggest things that we're seeing the hot topic is the luxury tax. So for a team that has a salary, the combined salary of their team of over 220 million right now, they get taxed on

that. And so what the players want is to bump that up because they want more salary for the players. They want good wages for their players. And then on the other be a lot of pressure. Like people would really want to be able to have all of the games and be able to generate the revenue from those games and all of that. But so what is your sense of is that a really critical sort of pressure point? I mean, there's a ton of pressure, I feel, on Major League Baseball and the owners. And we're seeing what's different now than what has happened in the past is social media and the players are on social media. In the past you'd have this huge public relations profile from Major League Baseball, but you wouldn't hear too much from the player's side. Now you're hearing straight from these players and that's a really big difference that we're seeing right now. So one of the other issues that I wish would get picked up more is the anti-competitiveness of some of these teams. So for some of the Baltimore Oriole fans, I apologize, but your owner does not invest in your team, and yet he still profits from this.

And so the Players Association is trying to challenge that. And that's one of the many parts of this. As a fan in Iowa, we have six minor league, or I'm sorry, we have six major league baseball teams that we are blacked out of. So you can buy a subscription to major league baseball TV, but we can't watch six of the teams because we're blacked out of it. And Iowa doesn't have a major league baseball team. We got to grow the game. And what we're really getting a sense is it's all about the profits. It's not about growing the game.

And this is kind of part of the frustration that we're seeing. Minor league baseball players, they're not unionized. And on average, they make about $10,000 to $15,000 a year. Last year, it came out quite extensively on social media that a lot of them sleep in their cars because their whole contract goes to paying rent. But then when they get brought up to the next level, then they have to pay that rent too.

And so there's a great group called Advocates for Minor Leaguers that I've been associated with that we're really trying to push for minor leaguers' rights as well. Wow. What has been the fan response to all of this, JD? You know, I think it's a huge backlash on Major League Baseball, and it's a shame. The other part of this, too, is you have these owners or these groups. It's been three months. For the first few months, they didn't meet for a long time. And then it's this, I think there's this thing that's taught at business school these days,

at some of the elite schools, that you reject, you reject, and then at the last minute, you nail away. And that seems to be what's happening in this situation. That is, yeah. I mean, it's just so terrible. Just reiterate one more time for the audience. What are these guys asking for? I don't, it's not a lot. Well, I mean, the difference is from these billionaire owners

from getting an extra million or two, pretty much. I mean, that's about it. And it's about the love of the game. It's about growing the game. And here we are. Even like the content creation that's happening around Major League Baseball, one of the best content that you can find on twitter and youtube is pitching ninja and he's not affiliated with major league baseball how does major league baseball not grow the game and create all this content because the fan base

is out there we've been more excited about this and then you have the owner coming out saying oh woe is us um the owners it's a bad investment to invest in owning a baseball team. Well, that was debunked right away. And this, we have a commissioner who doesn't seem to love the game the way that so many of us fans do. And that's just really a shame right now. That's such an important point. You know, after two years, COVID, the disruption, America deserves, I don't even like baseball, but America deserves baseball. I like going to games. Actually, you're talking about the Orioles. I've been to a few Orioles games that I really had a great time at. And also, minor league baseball is super fun to go to, to see your local teams. And I think,

listen, whether you're a baseball fan or not, it also tells, as you point out, a bigger story about how greed sort of corrupts, you know, just the basic joy of being able to enjoy a sport and go out on a beautiful day. And, you know, that's all being taken away by people who want extra millions added to their profit margin. So thanks for helping us understand, JD. It's always great to see you. Thanks, man. Appreciate it. Thank you. All right, guys, we had a little thing cross our radar that we just had to bring to you. Let's go ahead and throw this up on the screen. Meta's Sheryl Sandberg of Lenin fame boldly proclaimed somewhat ahistorically here that in the context of Ukraine and Russia, no two countries run by women would ever go to war. Let me give you the sentence here because this is quite astonishing from the CNBC article.

And kudos to whoever wrote this wonderful sentence here. No two countries run by women would ever go to war, Sandberg told CNBC's Hadley Gamble, in Dubai on Tuesday during a fireside at a Cartier event marking International Women's Day. I mean, if that one sentence doesn't tell you everything about, like, the worst kind of white feminism on the planet, I don't know what does. Hey, Cheryl, how many women are in the Emirate of Dubai? Do they rule the Emirate? How are they treated over there? Oh, right.

Okay. I mean, I guess she didn't say much about that, was she? Cartier event at the International Women's Day Forum in Dubai. That alone is, you know, just the height of hypocrisy. I was telling you this. I don't know what it is about, like, lean-in 2000s Obama-era feminism. It is so goddamn cringe to listen and i remember it you know i remember girls who i was coming up with you know with the uh signs in their cubicles or

whatever with cheryl sandberg like lean in like be a boss lady and all it was all you know it was like hillary ism you know in a single thing by way, this is what radicalized me the most. I'm not bossy. Yeah, that's right. I forgot about that. Be a bossy lady. Oh, my God. Unbelievable. There's something so dumb about, A, the Dubai thing.

Historically, completely inaccurate. Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, and Margaret Thatcher, this is just in the 1900s, who launched wars as female leaders of their countries, go back even further. I have to say, I mean, thank God Hillary Clinton is not president right now because she's running around every day trying to say the worst possible things. You know, oh, let's have cyber war with Russia. That'd be a great idea. Oh, you know what went really well for us? It is when we armed the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. That's the model that we should follow here. So, Like, I am on track for a complete and utter loss in the Tea Party wave of 2010.

And then at the end, they release these photos, meet a party, and comes this whole stupid, big story, which is so embarrassingly tame at this point. But I responded to it instead of being, like, embarrassed and apologizing. I was like, listen, if this was a dude, you all wouldn't care. And also, nobody cares about this sort of stuff. They care about what's happening with their family. We're still in the midst of this recession and all of this. And there was a very positive response to that. And that's how I end up going on MSNBC, going on Fox News, and get swept up into cable news media.

So it had this very feminist angle to it. So that was the space that I was occupying there. And so when I was at MSNBC, one of the things that I was actually most proud of is I created my own streaming show, which was completely buried and, you know, nobody could ever find and therefore wasn't successful. But it was about trying to focus on how feminism was not inclusive at all of the working class and ignored all of these problems for ordinary people. And so when Sheryl Sandberg came out with this lean in thing,

this was just the perfect distillation of the whole problem with this type of feminism. She's a billionaire. And her feminist answers were like, I build a nursery onto my C-suite office and had my nanny there all day. It's like, who is this for? Like, who are you speaking to right now? And so for me and my own political trajectory, Sheryl Sandberg and Lean In was actually very clarifying about what parts I wanted nothing to do with whatsoever. And I think it was clarifying for

a lot of people in that way. So I think we should thank her for that service that she's done of exposing just how hollow and how much it's a politics to benefit like a particular subset of elite women, elite, mostly white women. But yeah, she's still apparently out there peddling that she hasn't adjusted. She's still out there peddling that she hasn't adjusted. She's still out there peddling the same stuff even though like Facebook is this also sort of

discredited company at this point. It's just so crazy. For our younger listeners, if you're like Gen Z, you don't know how powerful, this was everywhere.

Like being a boss lady, every book, Barnes and Noble, like this was popular culture at the time. So it was roundly mocked. Good. And so maybe we've come a long way as a country.

We'll consider that. We'll consider that progress. I can tell you this. If I'd been saying what I'm saying right now back then, it would have been a whole other thing. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But then again, Kamala Harris is vice president. That's true.

So we can't count too much progress here. Very true. Anyway, guys, thanks for watching. We'll have more for you later. Hey, guys. Our friend Marshall Kosloff, he's going to be conducting interviews with experts and newsmakers for us here on the Breaking Points channel.

We're really excited. Yep, here it is. Hey, Breaking Points, this is Marshall Kosloff. You probably recognize me from our State of the Union coverage earlier this week. If you don't know me from there, I am Sagar's co-host at The Realignment. It's our podcast. You should go check it out. We've also had a great episode with the guest

today, so you could check that out as well too afterwards. So here's the deal. I'm going to start doing content for Breaking Points. We're interested in speaking with authors, figures, activists, politicians who can give us a bit of a deeper angle on the news and what's going on there. So to kick off this title segment, I immediately thought of Michael Schellenberger. Michael has written a book, Apocalypse Never. It's about climate change, energy policy. And he just wrote a really interesting piece for Barry Weiss's substack called The West's Green Delusions Empowered Putin. So, Michael, welcome to Breaking Points.

Thanks for having me. You point out at the start of your piece that there are a variety of angles one could take when arguing for why exactly Putin was able to invade Ukraine. But you take a specific angle related to energy policy. What's your argument? Well, the argument is that the point that I start with is just that Putin was not deterred by Europe or the West from invading Ukraine. He did not obviously fear economic sanctions, and he turned out to be right not to fear them because they carved out energy exports, which is the main way that Russia gets

hard foreign currency. So yes, we've heard a lot about sanctions on banking, but as long as Russia can sell its coal, oil, and natural gas to Europe and the world, it's going to continue to be able to finance its war, finance its economy. And the reason for that, I point out, is that just 15 years ago, Europe produced three times more natural gas than Russia currently exports. Those fortunes have shifted. Climate activists in Europe prevented the expansion of natural gas production, including by fracking. Turns out there's actually quite a bit of shale in Europe that it could have been using, and it just grew heavily dependent on Russia. And so, in fact, the role that Russia has in its control over European energy supplies is only going to increase, I believe, in the coming months.

I think it's possible, if not probable, that President Biden will restrict oil exports. If he does that, that will further strengthen the hand of Putin to be able to reward nations that are neutral or supportive of him with oil exports. So, you know, really, I think Putin is playing a long game. He viewed taking Ukraine as essential to Russia's survival. He viewed gaining control, a significant amount of control and influence over Europe through energy supplies as central to that strategy. Something I appreciated in the piece was your description of Europe's energy mix when it comes to energy sources. So could you describe what the energy picture looks like in Western Europe? And then what percentage of that roughly is comprised of Russian dependency? Sure. I mean, just to give you a sense of it, Germany depends on Russia for over 50% of its natural gas and oil for around 20% of its coal.

In the rest of Europe, you could just think of it as about a third of Europe's energy imports coming from Russia. That's more than enough for Russia to play a decisive role, particularly when you consider how much of that energy is traded on the margins. One of the things I point out is that Europe just consumes significantly more energy than it produces, and Russia produces significantly more energy than it consumes. And that hasn't always been that way. As I mentioned, that's really been a change over the last two decades. And a big part of the reason is that Europe has been either shutting down its nuclear power plants, particularly in Germany, or not building them. And it's also so it's also so it's been basically depriving itself of two important low carbon or zero carbon energy sources, supposedly in the name of climate change.

But that has resulted in Putin gain a stronger hand. You know, I think it's the equivalent of basically the West was soft. Its head was in the clouds. Putin's feet were firmly on the ground. Putin is focused on realpolitik. And I think Europe, like many in the West, were caught up in delusions, utopian fantasies of harmonizing human societies with nature through renewables. I think that we're at the end of an era, not just the end of the post-Cold War era,

but really the end of the post-war era. And I think Putin saw that coming and the West did not. So as a person who really came up in the environmental movement, it's not that you're arguing against the usage of renewables here. That said, given the harder-edged energy discussion you're indicating we're moving towards, what would you describe the present state of renewable energy, clean energy that's not nuclear, and what mix in an ideal world would that look like? Sure. And renewables is not a great category because it combines so many different technologies. But I'm a big defender of hydroelectric dams. Hydroelectric dams were how we lifted much of the American South out of poverty through the Tennessee Valley Authority. It's about 40% nuclear and about 50% hydroelectric. And hydro has all sorts of advantages, including to be able to ramp up and down to meet changing demand. What you want from electricity in general is you want supply and demand to be perfectly matched.

That's why electricity becomes cheap, is that you don't have to pay for the cost of storage. Every time you take electricity out of the system or put it back in, you're paying two energy penalties, which is very expensive. So I'm a big supporter of hydroelectric dams. They can have a big negative environmental impact, but they've been a way that poor countries lift themselves out of poverty. But when you get to weather-dependent renewables, particularly solar panels and wind turbines, you start to run into much bigger problems. The first one is just that they require significantly more land than either natural gas or nuclear plants.

Land is actually quite scarce in Western Europe, more so certainly than it is in the United States. But they need somewhere between 500 and 800 times more land. The other problem is that we don't make solar panels really in the West anymore. The vast majority, over 90% of the raw materials for solar panels comes from China. We now know that those solar panels became cheaper, not because of greater efficiencies in converting sunlight into electricity, but rather because they were being made in factories that used conscripted labor from Uyghur Muslims, which is a huge problem and something that, in fact, the Biden administration and Congress has been trying to figure out what

to do about. But then the other fundamental question is just that because they're weather dependent, you have to always have backup power. You have to have 100% backup power at any time so that when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow, you have something else to replace it. And that's what we saw happen in Germany last year. The first half of last year, there just wasn't very much wind. And so carbon emissions increased by 25%. Similarly, it's been a pretty low wind year across Europe. And so that increased demand for natural gas. And it came at a time when supplies were short. So we have solar panels in our backyard. I don't have any spiritual opposition to solar panels by any means. in Germany and much of the Western world in terms of how much more renewables we can do. And I think what the Ukraine situation shows and the Russia situation shows is that renewables just sort of sit on top of your electrical grid. They don't replace

fossil fuels. They can substitute for some of the fuel that's used, but you still need those fossil fuel power plants operating or some other power plant, nuclear plants, for example, to have cheap and reliable electricity. So you critique a lot of what you're describing as head in the clouds, green ideology. In the specific case of Germany, what's so interesting to this mix, though, is that the German decision, I think this is where the audience is the most sympathetic to this argument, was driven by Fukushima in 2011, this fear of nuclear energy. This isn't just a three-mile island issue in the 70s. This is a dangerous source of power separate from the

climate change argument, separate from the nuclear waste argument. And then, of course, in the news just earlier this week, you had the incident at the Ukrainian nuclear plant as Russian forces invaded. Now, at this point, it's been stated that the threat was overblown relative to what we saw in the images. It's important to be grounded with that. But I just know for a fact, a lot of the audience members are going to have non-climate change, not even head in the clouds, renewable arguments, but just basic safety arguments. How do you think we should sort through that dynamic? Yeah, I mean, look, nuclear is a really serious technology. Its primary purpose and its first purpose was as weapons. They're devastating weapons. We should be scared of nuclear weapons.

That's how nuclear weapons work. The word deterrence means to scare away. So we know that nuclear weapons are absolutely terrifying. They are one of the few ways that we can imagine the end of human civilization. So everybody has an absolute right to countries that have nuclear weapons and try to get rid of them, but then go to war would just reconstruct their weapons. So it's either a cursed blessing or a blessed curse that we have this really powerful technology. The flip side of it is that it's a relatively cheap, reliable source of zero carbon power. In my view and in the view of many other people, nuclear is really the only way that you really get to sustainability because with nuclear, you can have 100% carbon-free electricity, plus you can produce fresh water from your oceans and you can produce hydrogen gas, which unless we're going to just become newly dependent on lithium imported from Bolivia and other parts of the world, we're ultimately going to need for transportation, but also potentially heating and cooking. So nuclear

offers all these benefits on the energy side. Obviously, anytime there's some sort of military action around a nuclear power plant, as we saw last night, people are alarmed. I don't think, I think there's very few cases where panic is merited. Panic, of course, means unthinking action and behavior. We saw some of that panic, but the Russians, of course, quickly took the plant. The fire was in an administrative building. There's just a lot of things about nuclear that people still don't understand. Like, you know, a power plant is the whole site. It's not just the reactors. The reactors are where the nuclear fuel rods, where the atoms are splitting, creating heat. They were never threatened. There was never a loss of coolant, which is how reactors melt down. So it was worth, I was tweeting about it last

night. I'll probably write something about it. So I do think heightened concern around nuclear is important, but I think that the panic has been really dangerous. And I think the bottom line is if you want to be less dependent on Russian exports, if Europe wants to have greater energy security, it's going to need to keep operating its nuclear plants and build some additional ones. I will say the technology is improving. I'm not a huge fan of radical changes to the design of nuclear plants because I do think that that can make them more expensive. But we have increasingly good fuels. We're not quite there yet with the fuels being meltdown proof, but that's where it's headed.

So the holy grail really is that you start to get nuclear plants that can withstand meltdowns that go into existing nuclear power reactors. So this is the question on everyone's mind, no doubt. There are two pressing concerns that one can have left, right, center. Either one, you think that there is a climate emergency that nuclear power can help by being the zero carbon source of energy. Even natural gas is cleaner than coal, so it also helps that in the right direction too. So there's that issue.

And then there's also the issue of, wow, there's a security concern when it comes to Russian dependency. So when you're talking about this diversifying away from carbon, building more secure type of clean energy than just renewables, then you're talking about pivoting away from Russia. How quickly can this come about, especially in the European context? Not quickly enough. I think we can all agree. I mean, that's why there's this, on the one hand, you're sort of like, yeah, we should stop importing Russian oil. That sounds like a really moral thing to do. How could you not support that? And then you realize, well, because it could really cause oil prices to rise very high.

If oil prices rise to $200 a barrel, high oil prices are often what triggers global recessions. Global recessions are really bad for people and really harmful. So you don't want to have a global recession. Expensive energy makes everything in the economy expensive. That's the bottom line. So it will take some time. Now you can get, we can, in the United States, because we're blessed with a lot of shale that we're fracking for oil and gas, you can ramp up oil and gas production within a matter of weeks. The problem is that we don't have, the refineries need to be retrofitted to handle more of our own

light sweet crude that comes out of the shales. Also, you need the liquefied natural gas or LNG terminals for cooling the gas and liquefying it and then putting on special ships and moving it to Europe. Those things take time. I mean, I think we saw over the last decade so-called climate activists blocking pipelines, blocking LNG terminals, preventing the expansion of oil and gas in the United States. I think that was a huge mistake. Ironically, one of the consequences of the natural gas shortage over the last six months has been that the whole world has burned more coal, which produces twice as much carbon emissions as natural gas does. Nuclear plants, similarly, they take, you know, if you're moving, if you have experience

building them, they can be built in as little as five years. But if you don't have experience, they can go 10 years or longer. So we're not in a great position. I think that the bottom line is that more needs to be done to get oil and gas producing. The Biden administration has made this point that there's a bunch of permits that the oil and gas producing. The Biden administration has made this point that there's a bunch of permits that the oil and gas industry has that they don't appear to be using. I think there's people in the oil and gas industry that are enjoying the high prices that want to make the money, but there are national security concerns here. And I would like to see the Biden

administration doing more to encourage that production. In terms of nuclear in Europe, I think it's a no-brainer that they should stop shutting down their nuclear plants. It's also, it appears to be the case that the three nuclear reactors that Germany shut down at the end of last year, that nothing has been done to them other than powering them down. And that means they could be restarted. Well, that's a significant amount of electricity. Think of it as about a million homes can be powered per reactor. So you're talking about a significant amount of additional energy. But look, we saw in Germany, they're saying they're willing to burn more coal in order to reduce their dependence on Russian energy imports. So, you know, it's the worst of many options, but ultimately, we're going to have to produce much more energy domestically and encourage Europe to do the same thing. And to sum everything up, I would put you in this school of thought that's climate realism when it comes to these things. How would we – it seems like we have to balance a couple of things here.

We have to balance, once again, environmental risk. So this is what you're talking about with hydroelectric power. We're talking about this with nuclear waste. You have to balance security risk when it comes to Putin, energy independence. Then you have to balance, of course, just the need to have a proper energy mix itself. How do you think we can come about, and not just the sheer percentages, because that's hard to calculate. Every country is different. What is the mental slash ideological approach we should take to coming up with that answer in each of our cases? Yeah, I mean, I think I like the term climate realist.

I also think I think similarly, you know, it's to have a calm view, you know, alert, but calm towards these issues that includes nuclear, you know, on climate change. You know, climate change is real. All else being equal, we shouldn't want temperatures to rise. That means we should try to keep emissions as low as possible, but not at the expense of our energy security. A number of climate trends are actually going in the right direction. The United States reduced its carbon emissions 22 percent between 2005 and 2020. That was mostly due to the switch from coal to natural gas. We've also seen declining natural disasters over the last 20 years just because societies are becoming more resilient. So again, we don't want to see high temperatures, but that's going to mean doing more natural gas, not less. Similarly, with nuclear, nuclear is a super sensitive technology.

It does pose all sorts of risks. You know, it turns out that the operation of nuclear power plants is the safest way to make electricity. But it's also the case that nuclear weapons are some of the most dangerous objects on Earth. But I don't think that either climate change or nuclear are best dealt with in this kind of panicky and manic and somewhat hysterical mode that we've been dealing with them, really nuclear for 75 years, but climate change for the last 30.

I think that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is the end of an era. It's clearly the end of the post-Cold War era, but I think it's also the end of the post-war era. It appears to be that the whole world is reverting back to nationalism and national trading blocks. And I think it's also the end of the post-war era. It appears to me that the whole world is reverting back to nationalism and national trading blocks. And I think that in some ways it's unfortunate, but in some ways that's just the reality of it. And I think those of us that really love liberal democracy, that love Western civilization, that don't want to live in a Chinese or Russian style dictatorship with curtailed freedoms and rights. I think we do, it is a time for us to get a bit more hard-headed and clear-eyed in terms of the need to increase domestic energy production. I think what we saw with the fracking revolution is that, yeah, there are some negative consequences, but overall, natural gas is just a superior fuel to coal,

and nuclear, all else being equal, is a superior way to generate energy than oil, gas, or coal. So I think getting our heads around the fact that nuclear is better than gas and gas is better than coal, and we should be producing more of them, certainly for ourselves, but also for our allies, that's the right direction to go in, both in terms of climate change, air pollution, as well as energy security. Well, I suggest to everyone, if they'd like to learn more about Michael's work, check out his piece at Barry Weiss's Substack. Unlike most things this

day, this is not paywalled, so you can actually go read it as well there too. Michael, thank you so much for joining us on Breaking Points. Thanks for having me, Marshall. Hey guys, Kyle Kalinske is letting us post some of the clips from his channel that we think you guys will really love in the Breaking Points community on our channel. Yep, let's get to it. So Laura Ingraham could not help herself. In the same way that she bends over backwards to defend the uber-wealthy here in the U.S.,

she now has taken that role on for Russia as well. She's going to simp for the Russian billionaire oligarchs. Let's take a look at what she said. If we could expeditiously freeze every oligarch's luxury assets, would that really stop the suffering of the Ukrainian people that's happening right now? Do we think Putin's going to wake up and say next week and he's going to get up there and just say, you know, that chalet in Gstaad was so important to me. I think you think I'll call Zelensky and send the troops home.

Now, more importantly, we have to ask, is there a possibility that this could all backfire and make things even worse for Ukraine? Is anyone in the Biden administration even gaming any of this out, you wonder? So let's be real. As satisfying as it may be to see these 400-foot luxury liners padlocked, chasing down oligarchs is like swatting away mosquitoes when a cobra is about to strike your leg. That is not true at all. So she asked a question. Hey, is this really going to make it better? My answer is potentially, absolutely.

Because, okay, the way Russia works is you have, you know, Putin is the leader. He is the president. And there are a bunch of oligarchs that control various industries. And they have a phenomenal amount of power and wealth. And that power is derived from Vladimir Putin's blessing. And so, but the power works both ways, obviously. Because if you have these giant industries that these people run, you got to keep them happy too.

You have no choice if you're Putin. And so if you squeeze them out, if you seize their various yachts, seize their offshore bank accounts, seize their Italian villas and condos, make it so that they can't fly out of Russia, if you crack down on them because they are part of Putin's inner circle, well, after a while, it's sort of like a divide and conquer thing. Well, you're going to have a split among the oligarchs. You may have some oligarchs that are still loyal to Putin and they blame the West for everything that's happening here. But you might have others who are like, hey, dog, before you invaded Ukraine, we were kind of chilling over here. We're billionaire oligarchs. We had a sweet deal.

We had a sweet gig. We didn't have to worry about anything. We didn't have to worry about somebody seizing our yachts. And now all of a sudden we do. And that's on you. And so, if you get enough of them

to turn on him, well, then some things might start to happen. So now, is it guaranteed to work? No, of course not. But I also think it's a good idea, even if it doesn't squeeze out Putin. I love the idea that we're laying the precedent of like cracking down on the obscene amounts of wealth that the oligarchs have. And also we should start calling US billionaires oligarchs have. And also we should start calling U.S. billionaires oligarchs because it's a very similar thing. And the income and wealth inequality is almost as bad here as it is there. I think there are some stats where it's actually worse here. And so I think

that's more what Laura Ingraham is concerned about. She's concerned about the precedent that this sets. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. We're just going to seize billionaire yachts and houses and bank accounts and things of that nature? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What if that comes here? To which I say, yummy in my things that I'm describing to go after Putin, the oligarchs, you know, his confidants, the government, the military, that's one thing. As soon as you start doing sanctions that hurt Russian civilians, and by the way, we are doing that, we are, well then, I'm out. I want nothing to do with that. Because you're doing collective punishment, you're blaming all Russians for the actions of a specific Russian or specific Russians, and there's bigotry in that, there's xenophobia in that, that's totally unfair, so now we've turned around and sanctioned a lot of the people who are literally out in the streets getting arrested for protesting the war. By the way, now over 4,000 people in Russia have been arrested for protesting the war. By the way, now over 4,000 people in Russia have been arrested for protesting the war.

So all these brave people who are on the side of peace, now they get punished because they happen to live on the same patch of dirt as Vladimir Putin. So, is it possible that sanctions go too far? Absolutely. Have we already passed that line?

Absolutely. But, you know, my concern is for innocent people who are bearing the brunt of this. My concern is for those who had nothing to do with it and they're being cracked down on. My concern is not for Putin and is not for the oligarchs. Throw the book at them. Do everything under the sun. Try to do a divide and conquer strategy from within the halls of power. So, we'll see. We'll see how it works out. I love those sanctions in particular.

The EU is getting real tough with those particular sanctions. The U.S. has gone too far. I mean, we shut MasterCard and Visa are now out of Russia. I mean, that affects so many innocent people that have nothing to do with this. A lot of the swift banking sanctions were implemented. Well, Russia immediately switched to the Chinese equivalent of that system. You know, you weren't able to use Apple Pay or Google Pay in the subway at Moscow. What did those people have to do with what Putin did? Nothing. And we're doing collective punishment. So, again, it's gone too far, but notice specifically who she's simping for here.

It is billionaire oligarchs. She brought up specifically yachts, as if that's the thing she has an issue with. I don't know, man. Seizing the yachts goes too far. No, seizing the yachts is making me hard. Very exciting partnership to announce here with James Lee of 5149. He's somebody that Crystal and I have followed

on YouTube for a long time, and he's going to be doing some videos for us here. James, it is great to see you and introduce you to the audience. Thanks for joining us, man. Hey, thank you. Thank you for having me. Absolutely.

Why don't you just tell us a little bit about yourself? You and I talked a little bit about this previously before you decided to come on. Who are you? Why have you decided to make all these awesome videos on YouTube? No, that's a great question, Sagar. I think, well, I see myself kind of as a, I would say, a citizen journalist. My background is in business. I still have a day job, but I think it's really important that we all play a role, an active role in understanding the actors and levers that move our society to hold them accountable. So that's why I decided to start a YouTube channel where I talk about different topics relating to business, politics, society. I try to break down different issues to find out what's important, the context, the motives, the incentive structures that are happening in our society. I try to break down different issues to find out, you know, what's important, the context, the motives, the incentive structures that are happening in our society. You know, because I

think there's a lot of what I would say manufactured outrage that happens in the legacy press that works to divide us. So I'm just trying to add a voice in the opposite direction. So, you know, I think that, you know, kind of maybe aligns with what you guys are all about. Yeah, it totally aligns with what we're all about. Um, especially that idea of the citizen journalist, because of course, core to our beliefs here is like the elites have gotten a lot of things wrong and yet they want to keep all the power to themselves. They want to tell the population, like, you can't possibly understand what's going on out there.

Just let us handle it. Whether it's the national security state, whether it's the fed, whether it's any of the people who hold power here in this town. And what you're doing is a sort of direct response to that to say, no, we can delve into these issues. We can understand what's going on. And there's huge stakes for all of us involved. And it's our responsibility to be engaged. So it's very much in line with what we're doing here.

Full disclosure, the way that we found you was that you made a really lovely video about us. That's true. And we're like, this is wonderful. My ego feels amazing right now. And then we watched the rest of your content and we're like, oh, this guy is really great. And I think it's also fair to say, I mean, this isn't your main job. But, you know, you're the type of creator that if you had started at a different time in YouTube's history, when it was more of a free and open marketplace, you would have,

you know, grown phenomenally because the content you create is so high quality. It's so well researched. It's well edited. It's well produced. It's well put together. You do a great job presenting the information. And yet YouTube is no longer a free and open marketplace. So we're hoping that, you know, for you, that it helps give a boost to your channel and what you're doing there because more people need eyeballs on, you know, you've got content here.

Is Web3 a giant lie? Is the media tricking you into hating Joe Rogan? Starbucks, the fight is just beginning. So really great and important content. Hopefully we can give a lift to you. And I know our audience is going to love what you have in store for us. So with that being said, you have put together your first offering for our audience. Just talk to us about your inspiration and what they're about to see. Yeah. Well, thanks for all those really kind words.

But yeah, so today's piece, I think to set it up a little bit, we've all seen corporations and how I think a lot of the behavior that they've been kind of, I would say, sorry. It's okay. Just come out of the top. Yeah, restart your answer. Okay, restart the answer. Okay, sorry. Yeah. I knew that was going to happen at some point. Okay. It's all right. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much for all the kind words there. So today's piece that I have for you guys is about, you know, to set it up a little bit of

the context is I would deem corporations, a lot of their behavior is being evil, greedy, I would say maybe anti-humanity. And I just wanted to delve into more of why that's happening. And something that I wanted to look into was the MBA program, which a lot of Fortune 500, S&P 500 CEOs have. And I think that deserves a closer examination. What are they being taught? I myself went through that program. So I wanted to share with you guys a little bit of the behind the scenes of maybe why corporations are potentially becoming more evil based on the education that these executives are receiving.

I love it. I love that. Yep. James, very excited to have you on board. Can't wait to watch this video. Is the MBA program training our corporate elites to be sociopaths? Yes. Let's take a look. My name is James Lee. Welcome to 5149. And today I want to talk about the MBA program and why it's contributing to corporations becoming more evil. We've all seen or read the recent headlines.

Business is booming. Corporate profits are at an all-time high. But at the very same time, workers who make those businesses run are being left behind, some even homeless, on food stamps, or working multiple jobs. Also, recent upticks in high-profile worker unionization efforts have corporations like Amazon scrambling to pay big bucks for, quote, union avoidance. A recent analysis estimated that private sector employers spend nearly $340 million per year hiring union avoidance advisors to help them prevent employees from organizing in the workplace.

Cricket stuff to say the least. But interestingly, it hasn't always been this way. In 1951, General Motors hired McKinsey consultant Arch Patton to conduct a study of executive compensation. The results appeared in Harvard Business Review, with the particular finding that from 1939 to 1950, the pay of hourly workers had more than doubled, while that of top management had only risen 35%. There are, of course, many reasons for this shift. We've seen massive consolidation in most major industries since deregulation began in the 1970s, which has concentrated power in the hands of just a few mega corporations. Also, our lawmakers are in the pockets of big business special interests. and influence public policy by contributing more or less unlimited sums into political campaigns via things like super PACs and other dark money organizations with even less transparency.

We've also seen the working class gutted by a bipartisan neoliberal consensus towards globalization and union busting, which subsequently has brought union membership to all-time lows and has also crippled domestic production. But in the end, if we break it down, corporations are just people, people making choices and decisions. And those choices and decisions that they make could end up shaping the economy and are heavily influenced by factors such as education, training, and incentives. And that's what I want to focus on here today. According to Fortune Magazine, about 40% of S&P 500 CEOs have an MBA in any given year.

Just a bit of background, the MBA is what's known as a Master's in Business Administration and is the most common and prestigious advanced degree for those looking to get ahead in corporate America. Many elite universities have one of these programs with tuitions costing students tens of thousands of dollars annually with the hope that this investment will pay off in the form of a wide professional network and a good paying job. The MBA is basically a prerequisite to C-suite offices at this point, as it is by far the degree with the most representation among top business executives, and I'm one of these people, not a corporate executive, of course, but I am a graduate of New York University Stern School of

Business MBA program. So what are people like me, the quote, future business leaders of America, who could end up shaping the economy as well as the fortunes of millions of Americans? What are we being taught? Well, to start, everything that is taught in any top tier MBA program today is more or less filtered through the lens of an ethos that is summed up quite well by this 1970 headline of this New York Times Magazine article written by the famed American libertarian economist and statistician Milton Friedman. And that headline is entitled The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits. It's every keen,

aspiring business executive's guiding light. Of course, yes, our curriculum does consist of core courses like finance, accounting, marketing, and business strategy, along with other elective courses that focus on different industries like entertainment, media, fintech, private equity, and many others. But every subject, every case study seems to always boil down to this fundamental principle, this idea that management's sole duty is to maximize shareholder value with zero, or at the very least, minimal regard for workers, communities, country, environment, or anything else for that matter. But once again, it wasn't always this way as history can show us. Harvard Business School, the first graduate business program, was founded in 1908 with the mission to treat business as a science,

create a management profession on par or superior to medicine and law, and handle business problems in a socially constructive way. The first dean of HBS, Wallace B. Donham, defined it as, quote, the development, strengthening, and multiplication of socially-minded businessmen as the central problem of business. Kind of a far cry from where we are today and the, quote, business leaders being churned out by elite MBA programs. So how exactly did advanced business education go off the rails, so to speak? Well, looking at this graph depicting the Dow Jones Industrial Average through the decades, U.S. businesses suffered through a long period of economic stagnation during the 1970s and early 80s, and this brought about sort of a thorough critique of American management, including

American business education, a very kind of dramatic shift in narrative. I want to read to you a little bit from an article entitled How Neoclassical Economics Corrupted Business Schools, Corporations, and the Economy by Herbert Gintis and Rakesh Khurana, two prominent business scholars. Quote, using the poor corporate performance of the 1970s as their backdrop, these takeover artists successfully recast the image of corporate managers and executives not as wise corporate statesmen trying to adjudicate the competing concerns of a variety of corporate constituents, but rather as a self-dealing, unaccountable elite whose primary interest was taking advantage of weak shareholders to promote a leisurely lifestyle and exaggerated material gain.

I think it's a little bit funny, this image of a weak and impotent shareholder class. It does kind of show you how powerful a narrative can be if effectively sold to the public, particularly by elites who would happen to benefit greatly from the implementation of such an ideology. Oh, golly, the abuses us shareholders take from managers and workers. What a travesty. Back to Gintis and Corona. Quote, the revisionism surrounding materialism that took place during the 1980s had a profound impact on business education. It represented an institutional shift away from the basic managerialism framework that had defined and informed business education and animated the managerial professionalization project from its

start, eventually replacing it with a new conception that is never fully specified, but whose broad outlines can be understood as a conception of management as an agent of shareholders, the corporation as a nexus of individual contracts, and the primary purpose of the corporation being to maximize shareholder value. All right, you might be thinking, what's wrong with that? You know, we are running a business after all, and I don't necessarily disagree. It is important that a business make money so that it can pay its employees, make good products, invest in new things, new products, give back to the community, and make sure that shareholders are happy so they're going to invest more money in the future. But if we're talking about a holistic, socially

responsible business education that teaches future leaders to consider other goals besides profit maximization, this is not it whatsoever. Now, the next thing I'll share with you is purely anecdotal, but my business strategy professor at NYU in a lecture I remember really well brought up this example of Shake Shack and how the tables in their new restaurants were sourced from recycled wood. And she talked about how stupid the whole thing was because she felt that furnishing their restaurants with recycled wood would not help them sell more burgers and fries and that, you know, with each new store they were opening, they were lowering their return on invested capital, a financial metric that Wall Street investors happen to care a lot about. I should not say wrong in that regard. Buying

recycled tables probably won't help Shake Shack sell more burgers and fries, and will most certainly be more expensive than a normal non-recycled table. But it is most certainly better for the environment, and especially considering Shake Shack has opened hundreds of new locations and stores in just the past few years, it seemed to be doing just fine as is. In another course at NYU called Managing Growing Companies, a course that, quote, seeks to provide an understanding of the knowledge and skills that are required to manage and grow small to mid-sized firms, we actually had an entire lecture dedicated to union busting, various tactics management can and should take to end a labor strike. A particular example I remember specifically is something to the effect of training your white-collar workers to perform blue-collar tasks. And folks, we just saw how this strategy was just used by John Deere in real time when workers were striking for better wages.

The white-collar workers ended up being a total disaster. A few of them were even sent to the hospital. So right there, even in an academic setting, a wedge is already being driven between management and labor, creating this kind of us versus them mentality at a very early stage in the careers of people who aspire to be business managers and executives. And this has real world life and death implications management and workers, but also for consumers. I'll give you an example, referencing an article from The Atlantic entitled, The Long-Forgotten Flight That Sent Boeing Off Course. A company once driven by engineers became driven by finance. Essentially two decades ago, Boeing made a deliberate attempt to isolate the company's engineers from its executive team by moving the company's headquarters to Chicago, which is over 1,700 miles away from its primary manufacturing facility in Washington.

And just like what we're trained to do in business school, which is to pour over Excel spreadsheets and make fancy PowerPoints. Over the years, Boeing executives started making engineering decisions by way of financial spreadsheets in a vacuum completely separate from the company's manufacturing operations. In the case of their 787 plane, Boeing didn't outsource just the manufacturing of the parts. It turned over the design, the engineering, and the manufacture of entire sections of the plane to some 50 strategic partners. Boeing itself ended up building less than 40% of the plane. This strategy was trumpeted as a reinvention of manufacturing, but while the finance guys loved it, since it meant that Boeing had to put up less money, it was a huge headache for engineers. As a result, to this day, the plane has continued to suffer

from numerous safety and manufacturing quality issues, all in an effort to make an extra buck with, you know, kind of very little consideration for anything else. The most famous example and one with the most dire of consequences is probably the 737 MAX plane with hundreds of deaths resulting from a safety system being vetoed, according to a Boeing engineer. This is New York Times reporting, quote, a senior Boeing engineer filed an internal ethics complaint this year saying that during the development of the 737 MAX jet, the company had rejected a safety system to minimize costs, equipment he felt could have reduced risks that contributed to two fatal crashes. So right, there are real world societal life and death implications

resulting from the type of business training and the, you know, in my opinion, unhealthy shareholder maximizing ethos that is so pervasive in the curriculum of top tier MBA programs, and thus also permeating offices and boardrooms of America's top companies. And unfortunately, there is little to no penalty for this type of behavior. Let's remember that the U.S. government routinely gives companies like Boeing billion-dollar government contracts as part of our defense budget, no matter how unsafe or unethical their practices might be. Duff McDonald, who wrote the book The Golden Passport, Harvard Business School, The Limits of Capitalism and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite, asserts that, quote, the school is a force for good in a sense that HBS grads are good at what they do, but they rarely do

good. Rather than producing business physicians who vow to do no harm, Harvard Business School has become the West Point of capitalism, producing business mercenaries driven by self-interest beholden to no one believing in nothing. That's pretty scathing. And to be fair, MBA programs have responded to this type of widespread criticism by adding a sort of business ethics course to the curriculum. I myself took one at NYU, actually with Professor Jonathan Haidt. Some of you probably have heard of him. He's a fairly well-known social psychologist whose works includes The Coddling of the American Mind and also The Righteous Mind, Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. And his course, quite honestly, was super cool, very interesting discussions, but it was also extremely brief, lasting just a few sessions over the course of two weekends, which does kind of show the priorities of the curriculum, right? Like I said, I found the discussion to be really interesting, but unfortunately, the course design itself felt more like compliance, maybe even call it theater more than anything else. But just to give the other side, you know, if you're watching this and you recently got

your MBA, you might totally disagree with everything I'm saying. You know, like, no, my education was holistic. We learned about ideas like stakeholder capitalism, which is something that's currently being promulgated by the Business Roundtable. And to that, I say, yes, we definitely did talk about those types of things. Specifically at NYU, there was this phrase that was thrown around a lot that we are in, quote, the business of doing good. So I think the intent might be there. But unfortunately, the incentive structure can't possibly support this in practice. NYU, for example, talks a big game when marketing its MBA programs with inspirational

slogans like change, innovation, an MBA without boundaries. But if you take a look at the program's most recent employment report, more than two-thirds of the graduating class are recruited into traditional industries like consulting and financial services. Definitely, this is once again my opinion, but not at the top of my list of professions in the business of doing good or changing the world. This is just my personal experience, but I went in, I think with an open mind, quite an idealistic goal that I could work

in maybe news media with the goal of changing public discourse for the better. But within two weeks, I was told pretty much, you know, you can either work in consulting, banking within two weeks, I was told pretty much, you know, you can either work in consulting, banking, or for Amazon, and that is it. There are, of course, exceptional people who are able to carve their own path, but I was not one of them, maybe until now. And like anything else, the recruiting funnel is designed to respond to incentives. For example, placement success contributes 35%

to each school's overall rank in the U.S. News & World Report ranking methodology, which is kind of seen as the gold standard for MBA rankings. So of course, the school's administrators are going to push you towards jobs that uphold the nothing is going to fundamentally change ethos that seems to pervade our modern day business and political culture. And just to be fair to the students, if you strap them with hundreds of thousand dollars

of debt, they're not going to be able to take the kinds of risks that are being advertised by top tier MBA programs with this idea of change and entrepreneurship. So I guess what I'm pointing out is that there's this huge disconnect between what is being marketed and what actually transpires in reality because the incentive structures are so poorly designed that anything other than propping up the currently unhealthy and unsustainable status quo can't possibly exist, even in an academic setting, let alone real world business situations that will impact the lives of millions of people. This is a little bit of a joke, but it's really not. But it's like business schools are training students to think of everything in terms of return on capital. And if you can maximize returns without screwing over people, ignoring morals and destroying the environment, you should. But if you can't, it's also okay to screw over people, ignore morals, and destroy the environment for the sake of even the slightest increase in profits. So in a world where CEOs and executives

make millions even as their companies file for bankruptcy, I maybe naively think that it might behoove us to think about whether the system and the values we teach today will help create a world we want to live in tomorrow. Today's MBA programs work a lot like factories churning out middle to upper management professionals and managers who are becoming increasingly more diverse in the way they look, but unfortunately not in the way they think. I think it's kind of ironic that business schools often talk a lot about the importance of relationships, things like innovation, social responsibility, but at the same time are still very intolerant of ideas that deviate from traditional business orthodoxy and pretty much train their students

to function like Excel spreadsheets. More numbers and screens and less humanity and empathy. And that, my friend, is how the NBA has contributed to corporations becoming more evil. If you liked this segment and would like to see more of me and other collaborations like this, please would like to see more of me and other collaborations like this, please let Crystal and Sagar know. And of course, subscribe to Breaking Points.

If you're inclined, also check out my channel, 5149 with James Lee, where I release weekly videos about business, politics, and society. Thank you so much for your time today. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Helen gone murder line on the I heart radio app,

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You got to pray for yourself as well as for everybody else, but never forget yourself. ourselves. A wrap-away, you got to pray for yourself as well as for everybody else, but never forget yourself. Self-love made me a better dad because I realized my worth. Never stop being a dad. That's dedication. Find out more at fatherhood.gov. Brought to you by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Ad Council. 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.

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