Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Mini Show #29: Hollywood Culture, Fox News Coverage, Labor Organizing, Online Censorship, Supply Chains & More!

Episode Date: April 2, 2022

Krystal and Saagar talk about the Oscars, GOP agenda, labor organizing, Fox News' coverage, Chris Hedges censorship, stock market rigging, Chris Wallace's comments, global supply chains, and more!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/The Lever: https://www.levernews.com/Daisy Pitkin: https://www.workman.com/products/on-the-line/hardbackKyle Kulinski: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCldfgbzNILYZA4dmDt4Cd6AMarshall Kosloff: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3O3P7AsOC17INXR5L2APHQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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for the midterms and the upcoming presidential election so we can provide unparalleled coverage of what is sure to be one of the most pivotal moments in American history. So what are you waiting for? Go to BreakingPoints.com to help us out. Joining us now for our weekly partnership segment, we have David Sirota of The Lever, who has many things to tell us about his Hollywood Oscars experience. Great to see you, David. Good to see you, David. Good to see you both. So two things. First of all, congrats on The Lever, rebranding and expansion, which is very exciting. And also congrats on the Oscar nomination, even though you did not win the award.

That's unbelievable that you were nominated for an Oscar and got to go. So let's actually put your latest piece on this up on the screen because you wrote a little bit about what it was like. You say, the Oscar speech that stayed in my pocket. It was an honor to be nominated for a climate film. We must continue to demand action. So just give us a little bit of your thoughts and reflections on this whole experience, David. Well, it really was a great honor to be nominated.

And I should say it was a really great honor to win the Writers Guild's Award for Best Original Screenplay with Adam McKay. So that was from fellow writers. So that was fantastic. And look, getting nominated is just, it's not a life plot twist I ever expected. So I had a blast in the experience of it, just going to see what that entire spectacle is like. I will admit I was not in the room when Will Smith and Chris Rock got into it. I had actually stepped out to grab a drink and commiserate with some folks after we didn't win

the Oscar. So we were out in the hall sort of lamenting that. But it was all great. I will say I was a little bit, maybe not mystified, but a little bit disappointed that the climate crisis did not make any kind of appearance or mention at this huge event where there's millions and millions of people tuning in. I would have liked to have seen that platform be used to mention some of the things that are happening in our world that are of great urgent import. And that wasn't there. But as I put on at the lever, I put out the speech that I was going to give. And it was basically going to say something very simple, which is that the success of Don't Look Up, the millions and millions of people who tuned in, I mean, it was the number two most watched movie on the world's largest streaming platform. My hope is that the folks in that room would take a lesson from that to say that there is a huge pent up demand among millions and millions of

people for television shows, movies, journalism, all sorts of content that honestly struggles with the climate crisis that is bearing down on our world. And I would have asked everybody in that room to use their enormous power to continue to make content about that crisis that wrestles with the uncomfortable and scary issues surrounding that crisis. So, David, in terms of the reaction to the Oscars, it kind of validated your entire movie, didn't it? In terms of how people are just talking about Will Smith and all that while the world burns. How did you make of it in that context? I'll admit, at times it felt like I was inside the movie, like it felt kind of Alice in Wonderland, like we had made a movie about a comet headed towards Earth a platform for a discussion or at least mention of some of the huge crises happening in our world.

And instead, the takeaway from the event was a fight between two celebrities. Now, obviously, that situation was incredibly shocking for what it was, but I do think there's that meta message there, which is that there really is this unbelievably powerful culture of distraction, especially when it comes to celebrity culture, that makes it so difficult for us to struggle with, deal with, negotiate, and debate the most imminent and pressing issues of the day. And so I think it's a disturbing commentary on that. And frankly, I don't have a kind of skeleton key answer for how we fix this. I mean, I just came off of doing a movie that millions and millions and millions of people saw, and it culminated with an award show that didn't make any reference of that at all.

Now, I don't mean that as like, hey, I'm annoyed or sad or sour grapes of not winning. I was just honored to be nominated. I'm making the larger point of the question of will the culture industry and obviously the corporate media industry and the political world, are we willing to actually struggle with this crisis in a real way?, are we willing to actually struggle with this crisis in a real way? Or are we really just going to plow forward and distract ourselves as things get worse? Well, I think there's so much to dig into with this. Honestly, it's quite a profound conversation because what you did prove with Don't Look Up is that there is an appetite to struggle with the big challenges facing the world in a way that is thoughtful and that it doesn't have to be vegetables. It can be

a movie with a lot of stars that's actually really fun to watch and really, you know, entertaining. But doing another Will Smith take is easy and it's cheap and it also gets clicks and views and eyeballs. So oftentimes, you know, cable news producers or people in that industry, what they'll say is basically like, well, you guys are getting the content that you want because we know if we do, you know, the latest development and oh, now Chris Rock says he's still processing or whatever the latest take is, we know you're going to look at it. But what you've demonstrated is, while that may be true, there is this desire for this more thoughtful, more profound, more relevant, more important content as well. You just have to have the willingness to actually do the work

to make that, you know, into something that people really want to consume. That's such a good point. I mean, you're right. I mean, one of my takeaways was, how do we make the climate crisis and the end of the livable ecosystem that supports all human life as compelling and interesting as two celebrities fighting on a stage, right? I mean, it's kind of unbelievable that we have to ask that question. But it also is a profoundly, I think, troubling commentary perhaps on the creativity

of the news industry. By that I mean, if we can't make the imminent demise of the livable ecosystem as compelling as two celebrities fighting on a stage, then it's really a commentary on us. It's not really a commentary on the audience. It's a commentary on the news industry that says it's not willing to muster

the creativity and innovation to make that unbelievably compelling story about the potential end of the human species to not make that story more compelling. And so I think moving forward, the onus is on all of us to muster that creativity in a systemic way every single day. That's interesting. Here's the other thing I wanted to ask you about, David. Obviously, you and I have very similar politics. You work for Bernie. We're both broadly on the left. Do you think that the right and the sort of like

status quo and the neoliberals and the military industrial complex do a much better job of getting their stories told through sort of pop culture than the left does? Because I think that's part of why this movie struck such a nerve is because it represented a, you know, view of the world that just isn't seen that much in Hollywood. You know, I don't think that's necessarily true. I mean, I think that there are stories baked into a lot of cultural products, especially now. I mean, we go back to the 80s, it's different. But I think now you do see a number of cultural products, even, you know, animated movies for kids that tell the story of

unfairness and inequality and the like. And I think, I don't know if that's a quote-unquote left story or a quote-unquote right story, but I do think some of these stories are being told. I think the problem is that they're not necessarily calling for action. They're not necessarily indicting the political and economic system. So I think one thing that set our movie apart in some ways is that our movie was telling a story about the here and now, the system right now. I think a lot of cultural products, the problem is not necessarily a left or right issue. It's that a lot of cultural products are looking back in history as sort of the safe escape of history or the safe escape of faraway fantastical storylines. And a lot of the content is not in the here and now

wrestling with issues that are uncomfortable. And I think part of the reason is is that the culture industry is in some ways risk averse. If you make a set of content in the here and now, the issue is gonna be, the reason it's risky is that everybody has an opinion, a strong opinion about the here and now. And so it's going to inherently be divisive.

The reason I'm thinking of it this way is because you obviously have like a million, you know, cops, reality TV shows. Sure. You know, law and order all of these sort of like military and like, you know, pro-war basically, or sort of glorifying war type of feature films. And you also have a million stories of like the bootstrapping capitalists making it up through the system and the typical like American dream story. And you have very little out there for pop culture consumption that is anti-war, that is pro-labor union. I mean, the amount of union content in pop culture is basically nothing at this point.

So that's why I framed it that way. And let me agree. Let me just agree with you on that. That since the 1980s, there are a lot of tropes deep baked into content that tell a very conservative story about the country. I mean, I always think about Ghostbusters as an example. It's a story about the essentially private military contractors having to save the day from an inept government and from an EPA that's overbearing. And you can track that through up until now. I have seen something of a slight change in some recent years with telling some stories about corporate elites, corporate villains that are a problem in society. And that's

been encouraging. I think it's been belated. But I certainly agree with you on a deep programming level. There is a very conservative story that continues to be told over and over again. And that is, I agree with, those sorts of things. I would love to see more. I hope you're working on more projects. Also, shout out to the Lorax for also telling a great sort of anti-capitalist story as well. But David, it's always great to see you. Thanks for taking some time to share your thoughts and congrats again. Thanks, David. Thanks to both of you. Good to see you, man. As we've covered before, Senator Rick Scott of Florida just can't help himself. He's put out a new plan in order to try and win the election in the midterms. And that plan entails literally taxing poor people. The plan is so absurd and obviously such a political detriment that even Fox News is incredulous at his spin. Let's take a listen.

Recently put out an 11-point plan to rescue America. Let's take a listen. YEARS. IF A LAW IS WORTH KEEPING, CONGRESS CAN PASS IT AGAIN. SO THAT WOULD RAISE TAXES ON HALF OF AMERICANS AND POTENTIALLY SUNSET PROGRAMS LIKE MEDICARE, MEDICAID, AND SOCIAL SECURITY. WHY WOULD YOU PROPOSE SOMETHING LIKE THAT IN AN ELECTION YEAR? SURE.

WELL, JOHN, THAT'S, OF COURSE, THE DEMOCRAT TALKING POINT. NO, NO, IT'S IN THE PLAN. IT'S IN THE PLAN. BUT HERE'S THE THING ABOUT REALITY FOR A SEC a second. First of all, let's talk about Medicare. But Senator, hang on. It's not a Democratic talking point. It's in the plan. And also in the plan, it says we ought to every year talk about exactly how we're going to fix Medicare. Oh my God. It's in the plan, Senator. And he's right about that. Let's put this up there

on the screen. Per an interview that Scott gave to his own Florida politics outlet, he said it's, quote, unfair that poor people don't pay income taxes, which is just frankly, completely incredible. And what's so good about this is that even Mitch McConnell is like, dude, this is too far. We don't support this. This is not the official Republican position, even though it's the de facto Republican position. They support it. They just are like, why are you talking about it? Why are you talking the quiet part out loud?

Why are you giving up the game here, bro? What are you saying? And Henry Olson, he's a columnist who I actually respect a lot, really into working class politics and all that. But he's giving some very practical advice to the GOP. Let's put this up there from the Washington Post. House Republicans would only hurt themselves by releasing a detailed midterm agenda. And here's the thing, he's totally right, 100%, which is that a lot of Republicans do actually believe this. They do believe it's unfair that poor people don't pay any income tax,

even though they pay a myriad of other taxes. And if you look at their actual percentage base of income that they pay is outrageous. Also, God, I've been meaning to cover this. Maybe I'll do some evergreen monologue. But that whole report that just came out this year that people who make less than $20,000 were five times more likely to be audited

than billionaires and anybody else. Five times more likely to be audited when you make less than $20,000 were five times more likely to be audited than billionaires and anybody else. Five times more likely to be audited when you make less than 20 grand. So you're talking about the poorest Americans are the easiest ones to be audited because they're not reporting their barbershop income or their service base. Nail tips or whatever. Yeah. Okay. Go after carried interests and all that. Once you exhaust all the richest people in the world, then maybe, maybe we can talk about the guy who gets paid in cash and doesn't report his tips because he's trying to pay his rent and is struggling to pay his bills. Maybe we can have that conversation. But instead, it's completely flipped. You know, this whole Venmo thing, the going after people's Venmo transactions.

It makes me infuriated to think about it. This is classic GOP talking points. I mean, this is Mitt Romney, 47%. At that time, I don't know if y'all were watching Fox News, but I was actually doing a lot of Fox News hits during that era. Yeah, what was it like? I mean, I was in college, so I didn't fully, you know. Yeah, and this was a consistent talking point

about how half of America doesn't pay any taxes, and it's really the rich. They're the makers. I mean, this is the Paul Ryan. Makers and takers, right. Yeah, this is the Paul Ryan era of talking about the makers and takers and Mitt Romney and those very revealing comments talking about how 47% of people are never going to care for themselves, and there's no winning them and all of that stuff. They're never going to better themselves. I think that was the language that he ultimately used. That all comes from what Rick Scott is saying right here. They literally

lost the presidential election in part because Mitt Romney says this like cartoonishly villainous thing that is completely contemptible and also incredibly misleading. Because as you point out, people who are lower income pay a lot of different taxes. Much higher percentage of their income ultimately goes to taxes than certainly the very top. This was rejected by the American people thoroughly in 2012. Trump, although he governs in exactly the same way and gives a corporate tax cut, is politically smart enough to understand this is a disaster. Takes entitlements off the table. This was also a longstanding discussion in the Republican Party, George W. Bush, efforts to privatize Social Security, all of this stuff,

totally rejected by the American people. And here comes Rick Scott like, you know what we should do? If we get power again, let's raise taxes on half the country. How about we sunset programs like Medicare and Social Security after five years? How about we have a conversation every year about how we're going to, quote, fix these programs? Well, most Americans think the only fix that needs happening to those programs is for them to be more generous to support people more effectively. So, yeah, Mitch McConnell and the other strategists who are like, we're better off just not telling people what we actually want to do. They are 100 percent right. Democrats are handing the election to them. All they have to do is stay silent. And yet Rick Scott can't help him.

He just can't help himself. And this is always the problem with these types of politicians. Rick Scott bought his self the governorship. He's worth like one hundred million dollars. Has some sketchy business practices in his past, bought himself the Florida Senate seat. He's really not that talented of a politician. I mean, he visited Puerto Rico a bunch of times. Apparently that qualifies you in order to be the next senator. And look, he basically has a hold there on the Florida political machine because of an immense amount of his money. And just look at him.

The guy's literally a clown in terms of the way he conducts himself. But this is just an exact and perfect view into he is the ideology of the mainstream of the Republican senator. Not necessarily of the Republican Party, but in terms of what the mean Republican senator believes. That's it right there. They actually think this stuff. They're just too afraid to say it out loud. There are decades of infrastructure and research and apparatus just waiting. I mean, that's why the one thing Trump gets accomplished when he's in office is his tax reform that ultimately cuts taxes for the rich,

because that's what their entire movement is set up economically to ultimately sort of churn out. I just found this news article. This is kind of interesting. According to Playbook, Trump is trying to recruit Rick Scott to be majority leader, which also shows you, I don't know if this is like actually going to happen or a real thing, but he hates Mitch McConnell so much.

Just based on stop the steal. Like that's the only thing that matters. So if ever you wanted to, even for a split second, delude yourself that there was some other policy platform involved, I think this should dissuade you from that view. Yeah, that's a great point. Guys, we've of course been talking a lot about some of the union drives across the country,

whether it's the strikes at John Deere or the organizing efforts at Starbucks and at Amazon. And we are going to speak now with someone who has been on the front lines of fights for unionization in this country. Daisy Pitkin is a union organizer, and she was also author of a new book that you all should definitely check out. It's called On the Line. Go ahead and throw the book jacket up on the screen there. There it is. On the Line, a story of class, solidarity, and two women's epic fight to build a union. Great to have you, Daisy. Welcome. Good to see you, Daisy. Hi, thanks for having me on. Yeah, it's our pleasure. So the book is about your specific fight to organize in Arizona. So

it's part memoir, it's parts of union history, it's part just what it takes, what it really means to have solidarity and show solidarity. So just talk to us a little bit about the backstory here. Yeah. So the main story in the book, though, as you said, it has multiple parts, but the main story in the book is a five-year campaign that I helped to lead among industrial laundry workers in Phoenix, Arizona in the early 2000s, where I worked for kind of a small small scrappy organizing union, Unite, an offshoot of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. And we underwent an experiment in Phoenix, which was, you know, at the time, a deep red city in a deep red state to see if we could organize mostly immigrant workers

in these industrial laundry factories that are in every city across the country, but kind of go unnoticed or they're largely invisible. And it took us five years to get to majority union density in those factories. And it's the story of what it took and really of one of the main worker leaders there, Alma, who's one of the gutsiest worker leaders I've ever met, who really organized her factory and the others around her across Phoenix. Wow. So Daisy, what did you learn in terms of organizing and the barriers that exist for everyday Americans who want to try and form a union? Well, I learned from just the sort of day-to-day grind of organizing that it took years to organize those factories.

The main lesson is that labor law in this country is broken. It makes it very difficult to organize unions, even when a strong majority of workers in a workplace want to have a union. And part of that is because there are a lot of loopholes in labor law that corporations, especially very wealthy corporations, know how to exploit. They delay the process. They draw the process out to try to kill momentum and to give themselves time to union bust. Daisy, tell us, sorry, tell us a little bit more. I'd love for you to elaborate on that, but also tell us a little bit more about these workers themselves and the type of work that they were doing, which was not only arduous and low paid and sort of invisibilized, but also was

actually dangerous. I mean, you're talking about sorting through soiled linens coming from hospitals, syringes and other things being found in the pockets. What was the day-to-day like for them where a union became so critical to improving their lives? So workers who work in industrial laundries actually, they sort and cleanse and iron and pack tens of thousands of pounds of linens from hospitals and also from restaurants and hotels every day. So in Alma's factory, it was a hospital laundry. They were washing tens of thousands of pounds of soiled hospital linen. Alma works in the soil sort department. So she's actually by hand sorting hospital linen that you can imagine all of the sorts of bodily fluids, but also surgical tools that come wrapped in sheets down a conveyor belt.

And very rapidly, she and her co-workers have to sort through it. So they do get punctured by needles. There are syringes. There are fluids bags that come down in the sheets. So there's a lot of chemical and biohazardous exposure. And in the rest of the factory, workers are working on heavy machinery. Jams of the machines are very common. Workers have to by hand unjam machines. And there are massive industrial presses to iron the linens later on in the factory and workers there are burned often. And and it's it's heavy, dangerous work. when you go to a hospital, when you go to a fancy restaurant that has cloth napkins and tablecloths,

you are touching cloth or linens that workers will touch at the end of the day. Workers in these massive industrial factories. And they're dangerous and workers are underpaid. And they're unionizing all across the country today. See, this is, I think, this just highlights the hidden cost of a lot of what everyday luxury life entails. You know, delivery for food is great, but somebody's got to actually deliver it. The conditions for these workplaces are completely hidden from a lot of us. So in terms of bringing attention to this by writing the book and more, what do you want more people out there to understand about unionization and what needs to change for working people in this country? I think, you know, you opened the segment by talking about a lot of the kind of groundswell of organizing that we're seeing now. Amazon workers are organizing. Starbucks workers miraculously are standing up and organizing inside that multi-billion dollar corporation despite

fierce union busting, right? I hope that the book will find its way to readers who might not normally pick up a book about labor, and it will give some context for those headlines that people are seeing on a daily basis. They'll understand not only why workers are organizing, but why it's so difficult to organize and what it is that they're up against. What do you make of the current landscape? Because on the one hand, I mean, you know, I think you watch the show some. We try to cover what's going on. There are some really exciting things. The Starbucks workers is probably the most inspiring example across the country.

This is the first time Starbucks stores have been unionized, and it's caught on like wildfire across the country. This is the first time Starbucks stores have been unionized and it's caught on like wildfire across the country. Why do you think that they've been able to succeed when so many other efforts to organize at sort of like, you know, fast food or service sector workplaces have failed? And do you think that this represents a turning point in the labor movement? Because the other side of that is you still see numbers coming out about how union density continues to fall and there continue to be fewer sort of worker militant actions than there were in previous generations. How do you evaluate all of that? I think we're at a turning point. And I say that, you know, I know that there's a risk of just sort of sounding overly optimistic, but I really am

optimistic. The Starbucks workers campaign in particular, it is the kind of groundswell that I didn't know that I would see in my lifetime as a union organizer. It's one of the most incredible campaigns I can imagine. And part of what's incredible about it is that workers are, it's really an organically worker-led campaign. These workers are organizing their own stores and then they're organizing the stores next to them in the city. And then they're forming citywide organizing committees and they're organizing workers in the next city over. It's a true organic groundswell. And I think what's important about that is that it's impossible for the company to kill that kind of momentum right through any kind of the union busting efforts that we've seen on the part of Starbucks at this point have really just backfired. momentum just increases you know like 30 stores will file for election the day after they fire

someone because because it is such an organic groundswell and i think the challenge to the union at this point and i say that as an organizer for workers united i'm i work for the union that is is lucky enough to be part of that campaign i think our challenge as organizers at this point is to do what we can to help facilitate that organic growth and momentum, right? And not try to contain it in any way, to allow it to just sort of burn across the country as the kind of wildfire that it is. We're learning a lot from that campaign, I think, about how to help workers organize themselves. And we're learning a lot about what it looks like to take on a multi-billion dollar corporation and win. Daisy, one other thing, one last thing, and I don't know if you have an answer, but this is something we've been talking about. We've been

talking to our producer James about and trying to sort of puzzle through is the average Starbucks worker is more likely to be college educated than other workers in sort of similarly situated, like in fast food restaurants, for example. Do you think that that has mattered? Has it played a role? Has that changed the way that the organizing has unfolded? What do you make of that? I think it's true that they're more likely to be college educated. And I think also the workers who I know are younger, they have been recently sort of politicized by, you know, in some ways the pandemic, in some ways the last presidential election, in some ways just sort of the world around them. It's sort of that it's that it has come into sharp focus for a lot of these workers, that there are a lot of forces inside corporate capitalism that are working against them. And they come to the campaign with some skills, basic skills about like how to build a database, how to get on Zoom and use Zoom that workers in other

industries where I've organized have not necessarily had. But I think what that teaches me as an organizer is that the expertise that I bring to a campaign in doing those kinds of basic things, that expertise needs to be democratized the moment a campaign begins, right? That those skills are important so that workers can organize themselves, can drive their own campaigns, and can organize other workers in the industry. So it's teaching me as an organizer that we need to teach those skills regardless of the industry we're organizing in so that this kind of groundswell can be built in other places. Yeah. Really interesting insights. So great to have you today. Guys, let's put the book jacket up on the screen one more time. The book is On the Line, A Story of Class Solidarity and Two Women's Epic Fight to Build a Union by Daisy Pitkin.

Great to speak with you today, Daisy. Thank you so much. That's right. Link down there in the description. Everybody go buy the book. Thank you, Daisy. Thank you. Whenever it comes to Fox News and whenever it comes to taxes, you can always count on some cringe takes. So they had on a couple of experts and cried, won't somebody think of the ultra rich in this country? Let's take a listen. But as a businessman, is it smart to raise the corporate tax rate in this country? Let's take a listen. But as a businessman, is it smart to raise the corporate tax rate in this environment? Yeah, I would not be supportive of having the

corporate tax rate go to 28%. I actually don't have an issue with a minimum global corporate tax rate at 20%. Many of them don't even pay that. And I think actually domestic, we could even see 25% depending where where the money went, for things like military. And with respect to Steve, as he knows, the budget that past presidents have put in front never get to the table that way. This is going to be done by the Congress. Congress is not going to have a wealth tax in many of these things that they're touting for. But we should actually close some of the loopholes so the wealthy pay their fair amount. But you say wealthy pay their fair share when they're paying the majority of the taxes in this country.

Real quickly, though, what about the majority of Americans who are still in the last year paying no federal income taxes? How about addressing that? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think everyone has to pay their fair share. I don't have, I don't have any issue with everyone paying their fair share. So if I can finish, there's a difference. This is why. No, no. Hold on. Robert, go, go. Let me just say one thing. You have Steve Forbes on the show a lot.

And taxing the wealthy and cutting loopholes. There's a big difference between those two. I taxing the wealthy and cutting loopholes. There's a big difference between those two. I got to leave it there. Steve, you have two seconds. Go. The Steve Forbes flat tax is the way to go. Then everybody plays their fair share. There's no loopholes.

There's no special car vows for people. I think Robert and I might agree on that. All right. Good to have you both. Oh, God. First of all, God, that is why I hate cable news so much. Everybody's talking over each other. Trying to get in their jabs.

Anything from that? No, absolutely not. But actually, it's a very instructive way. What about all these people who don't pay any taxes? Why are you targeting the rich, Sagar? As I have said previously, people who are working class and poor actually pay an inordinate amount of their income in tax, just in a different tax. Just because they don't pay income tax doesn't mean they're not paying revenue to the federal government. And if you look at the percentage base of their income that they're kicking up to Uncle Sam on Medicare and payroll tax specifically, they're paying a lot more than some of the richest people

in the country. We did an entire segment on the show specifically about how billionaires actually finance a lot of their lives. I would guarantee you, for example, Bezos, I don't think he paid cash for that yacht. The way it works is he takes his hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Amazon stock and he borrows a ton of cash against it. A loan is not a taxable event, according to the IRS. So you can finance all of that. And as long as Amazon stock remains above a certain price threshold, he's got no margin call, which means that he can do whatever he wants. And this is how all of the ultra-rich live, because they don't have to sell anything. They have a taxable event one time when they buy the asset, or if they create

the company, they don't ever have a taxable event. And then they just continue to take loans on that forever and pay an effective tax rate of sometimes 2%, 1%. I mean, at one point, Bezos actually got paid by the government in terms of the earned income tax credit because of the EITC, because of his fake income, and that made it so that he was getting money from Uncle Sam. That's how it really works. I mean, Elon really is the absolute outlier here because of the way that his income was structured. He ended up paying more

in income tax or in tax than any other American before him. But that was because of the way his compensation structure was created. A lot of these billionaires never even have to sell stock in order to pay tax, period. And we're just talking about the most famous ones. Yeah, these are the richest of the rich. And not only that, but if you look at the billionaire class, it's a lot of financial engineers. And they know how to work the system more than anyone. I mean, remember when we had the Pandora Papers come out? And one of the revelations was like, oh, American billionaires, they're not actually really represented in these papers because they don't have to hide their wealth. They have an entire tax system just set up to make sure that they never pay taxes on almost any of their income,

ultimately. The other thing that's interesting, there's a couple things that are interesting here. Number one, even the dude that they got to be the opposition to be like, well, maybe we should raise the taxes a little bit. Even he's like, oh yeah, make the poor's pay too. He's like, everyone should pay their fair share. Of course, I agree with you there. So he's very meekly. He still doesn't even support Biden's proposal. He's sort of like meekly suggesting maybe the rich should potentially pay more in tax. The other thing that's interesting to note is a significant chunk of their audience does not agree with this perspective that is being offered. Something like 70 percent of Americans are on board with and enthusiastic about increasing taxes on the wealthy because it is just

so blatantly unfair. And of course, we've covered here multiple times how not only are the poor overly burdened in terms of their tax liability across sort of all categories of taxes, they are also much more likely to be targeted by the IRS. So even if wealthy people actively cheat, go even beyond the rigged system to actually cheat, they are unlikely to be audited and are audited at much, much lower rates than regular working class, lower income people. The other thing that's interesting to note here is Trump early on, remember when he was running the first time, he claimed he was going to raise taxes on the rich. And there was a kind of a freak out on the Republican side that, oh my God, he's going to change the orthodoxy here. And he's going to actually like be the

person to go after the rich. Of course, that never happened. Quite the opposite. He gave another massive giveaway to the wealthy and to corporate America. And so now they're just right back to the exact talking points from the Mitt Romney era. I mean, I keep saying this, but this is the era when I was on Fox News regularly. And this sounds like the same old crap that they were saying at the same time that was roundly, repeatedly rejected by the American public. So, listen, Republicans are well set to do, you know, quite well in these midterms because they're just like mostly not talking about their agenda with the exception of Rick Scott. But the moment that Americans get another look at what their actual economic priorities are, it could be a difference. Well, here's what's going to happen.

American politics is cyclical. They'll come in based on a rejection message. Then they'll introduce their package. People will mostly not pay attention. Then a Republican will probably win the presidential election. Then they're going to cut taxes again, and then they'll become historically unpopular. And then they'll get voted out, and a Democrat will come in,

but then they'll be unpopular because they're inept. And then the entire thing will repeat over and over and over and over. I mean, they're back to talking about, like, we've got to sunset Medicare. No, they're going to do it. Social Security. Believe them. They'll do it. As we found out with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,

then they'll become unpopular, then they'll lose an election, and then the whole cycle will repeat it. But then they'll win again because of the cyclical nature of our politics. This is the ideology above all else that they are committed to. I agree with that. I used to think it could be possibly abandoned, but I'm telling you it is baked in to the core of our- It is so baked in because this is where so much of the money and the infrastructure,

I mean, this is why when you have Trump, even someone who claimed he was going to break the economic orthodoxy, the thing that is ready-made and is pushed through, the one thing he accomplishes is the Paul Ryan tax cut. I got to say too, I get it. A lot of these people are small business owners who are the hardcore constituency of the party. And look, we are now small business owners and it's annoying as hell in order to try and navigate all the regulation and the red tape and all of that. That does not mean though, that even as a small business owner, that you would want in order to advocate for less benefits to overall people.

It actually would probably help us if that were the case and level the playing field vis-a-vis the corporation. So there's a lot of rhetorical buy-in that people who are fed up with the federal government end up buying into that they don't understand the full scale of the corporate welfare that they're actually subsidizing. They pitch it as this is for small business, but it's not really for the top 0.01%. And we found that out. I mean, the amount of red tape that we have to go through in order to run this business is unbelievable relative to a massive Fortune 500 corporation

that they have all these lawyers that are constantly saving money on taxes and loopholes and all this other nonsense. We don't have access to any of that. I mean, and so we, you know, we're the ones who ultimately suffer. And it's just like many other small business owners who can't compete.

But you get taken in then by the rhetoric and then the rhetoric is what ends up subsidizing people at the top. So look, all I would say is let's all unite together and say screw you up to the people who really have the system rigged. Indeed. They really do.

So guys, we have a new update for you on the latest censorship insanity. So like Abby Martin before him, Chris Hedges has now had the entire catalog of his show that he hosted on RT for years deleted from YouTube completely indiscriminately without regard to any topical considerations or anything like that. Let's go ahead and put Chris's article that he wrote on this up on the screen. He says, Hedges on being disappeared, which is a good way of putting that. I really recommend you read all of this because, as always, Chris Hedges, you know, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. Incredibly thoughtful and extraordinarily beautiful with the language as well. But this one part I wanted to read for you makes a very important point. He says, there's not one show here that dealt with Russia. I was on RT

because as a vocal critic of U.S. imperialism and militarism and of the corporate control of the two ruling parties, and especially because I support the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement against Israel, I was blacklisted. I was on RT for the same reason the dissident Václav Havel, who I knew, was on Voice of America during the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. It was that or not be heard. Havel had no more love for the policies of Washington than I have for those of Moscow. And he goes through some of the interviews that are lost here. I mean, interviews with people like Noam Chomsky, with Cornel West, with Naomi Wolf, interviews with Steven Donziger, you know, interviews with Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, discussions of literature, discussions of history. It didn't matter what it was. It was just the fact

that it was affiliated with RT in any way. It gets completely and wholly disappeared. Steven Donziger, who I just mentioned, who had appeared on the show and obviously has been insanely persecuted by Chevron in cooperation with our judicial system, he tweeted about this. Let's go ahead and put that up on the screen. He says, breaking YouTube wipes out

the entire video archive of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges, including his interviews with me about my illegal Chevron prosecution and detention. Censorship by big tech is the greatest threat to free speech today. Our friend Matt Taibbi also spoke with Chris Hedges about this. We can put his tear sheet up on the screen as well with a quote there from Chris that says, they will shut down Substack. I absolutely know. And of course, the knives have long been out for Substack. I think the only thing that is protecting Substack right now

is the fact that they do have these sort of like never Trump resistance type figures. Which is good. Which is great. It should be ideologically diverse. They've done a great job of doing that. But he is absolutely right

that any of these spaces of independent thought are ultimately at risk because you see how quickly this happened. I mean, just like this. Chris is such a good writer. I got to read more from this. What were my sins? I did not, like my former employer, the New York Times, sell you the lie of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Peddle conspiracy theories about Donald Trump being a Russian asset. Put out a 10-part podcast called The Caliphate that was a hoax. Or tell you that the information on Hunter Biden's laptop was disinformation. I did not prophesize Joe Biden was the next FDR or that Hillary Clinton was going to win the election. This censorship is about supporting what, as I.F. Stone reminds us, governments always do. Challenge the official lie, as I often did. You will soon become a non-person on digital media. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden exposed the truth about the criminal inner workings of power. Look where they are now. This censorship is one step removed from Joseph Stalin's whitewashing of non-persons such

as Leon Trotsky out of official photographs. It is a destruction of collective memory. It removes those moments in media and the press when we attempted to examine in our reality in ways the ruling class did not appreciate. The goal is to foster historical amnesia. If we don't know what happened in the past, we cannot make sense of the present. That is just so well-written and bringing you the words of a disappeared man, which is really dark. I mean- Yes, it is. Look, the guy is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. If you think that he deserves to get taken off because he happened to work for RT, you're crazy. I don't know what to tell you. Same with Abby Martin. I mean, she's done excellent journalism. I don't agree with

all of it. It doesn't matter. She is somebody, a courageous woman who has willing to, you know, gone up and stand up and scream in the face of power. No question. She deserves not just a voice. I mean, prominence, the ability to stand right up next to anybody who is challenging power in the way that they purport to, you know, over at the CNNs and all of that other world. And not enough people are willing to speak up because they happen to work for Russia today. I don't care if they work for Russia today. I care that the guy did good work, that he challenged the regime on areas that it mattered. And even if I didn't agree with the word that he said and thought, even if I thought he was peddling Russian disinformation, I wouldn't

care because that's not what a free country is really all supposed to be about. So we live in a crazy time right now. I don't know what else to say. It truly is the definition of reactionary. And that's why we focus so much on this just like attack on anything Russian. And you can see how some of the darker chapters of American history have unfolded. Like you see it happening in real time, this dark impulse and how easy it is to whip people into a sort of frenzy where they're happy to overlook this like outright bigotry of anything Russian and erasure of, you know, prominent, courageous figures like Chris Hedges, Abby Martin, and their entire body of work just like that. The snap of the fingers, no explanation, no opportunity to sort of, you know, change anything to make it right,

just like that, completely erased and gone. It really is absolutely extraordinary. And I do think that the point here too is important that there's a reason why they were on RT. It's not because they're like, yay, Russian government, go Vladimir Putin. It's because they had already been disappeared from the American traditional media mainstream. This was the only option that was left. And now with this flimsiest of excuses, they're also pushed out of that sphere as well. So I think it represents a very grim indictment of the status of our own democracy, that this type of very authoritarian and very sort of patronizing or patriarchal view of we have to like nanny state what the people can see and what they can hear and what information they're allowed to have access to. I think it really is an indictment of a lack of confidence and lack of grounding in true democratic principles here. And as Joe Biden

is laying out his whole, like, you know, this is the fight of the democracies versus the authoritarians, we would do well to turn our gaze inwards as well at the failings of our own democratic institutions. I would offer up the censorship of people like Chris Hedges and Abby Martin as a case in point in that. 100%. I wanted to break down for you a blockbuster new Wall Street Journal report seeming to indicate one more way that the stock market may be rigged and may be gamed. Let's go ahead and throw this tarot sheet up on the screen. The headline here says, big stock sales are supposed to be secret. The numbers indicate they are not. Share prices fall ahead of 58% of large sales, a Wall Street journal analysis finds. And let me just read

to you the beginning of this piece. They say, for years, something strange kept happening on Wall Street. Before a big shareholder could carry out plans to sell a slug of stock, the price dropped. It was as if other investors knew what was coming. These transactions, known as block trades, are supposed to be a secret between the selling shareholders and the investment banks they hire to execute the trades. But a Wall Street Journal analysis of nearly 400 such trades over three years indicates that information about the sales routinely leaks out ahead of time, a potentially illegal practice that costs those sellers millions of dollars and benefits banks and their hedge fund clients.

So basically, the allegation here is that when you have a large holder of these shares and they're about to get rid of them, they contract with investment banks to execute those trades, which are called block trades. Now, it's supposed to be a secret, because obviously, if you know that this big trade is coming, then you can front run it and get ahead of it, and you can sell off before they have an opportunity to and lock in a higher price. By doing that, you're, of course, driving the price down and making it so that their position is worse off by the time that these trades actually execute. And so what the Wall Street Journal found is sort of by an indirect analysis, they saw that routinely in 58 percent of the trades, the price would drop just before the trade hit. So the insinuation here, which is being investigated, by the way, by federal investigators, is that they are tipping off favored clients to get ahead of the curve. And by the way, oftentimes the people who are executing,

who are involved in these block trades, a lot of times these are, we're talking about pension funds. We're talking about, you know, the retirement savings of teachers and firefighters, etc. But even if it's, you know, a more nefarious, as somebody that isn't so sympathetic, this is just straight up cheating. Yeah, and so what they point to on this investigation is on Morgan Stanley, the big bank which dominates block trading. The firm disclosed in February it has been responding to information requests from the Department of Justice since the summer. And in November had to put one of its senior executives in charge of block trading on leave. So they refused to say why it was put on leave,

but DOJ is investigating and now the guy is no longer there. Goldman Sachs has already been probed. And the journal's analysis found that when Morgan Stanley executed a block trade by itself, the median stock would trail its peers by 0.7 percentage points in the trading session leading up to the deal, meaning half performed worse than that. That was the worst record of any of the big banks that are major players in block trading. The median for Credit Suisse was 0.4, and the median for Goldman and Barclays roughly matched the market. But across all banks, it still lags by 0.2%. So if you put that all together, it's very clear that something is

happening. And look, I'm just a guy from the outside who reads, but the very basics of a Wall Street movie or any of these other fictions, which are obviously based within some deeper truths, is when you have access to inside information, if you can trade on that inside information, it's worth a whole lot of money. One of the best books I've ever read is Den of Thieves by, I think it's James Stewart, about the 1980s Michael Milken inside trading and all that. And this stuff was truly crazy. They'd be like, oh, I heard so-and-so is about to do this. They had these guys called ARBs who would arbitrage on different trades and would trade on inside information. They were making millions of dollars. Guys who were in the investment banking side

giving tip-offs to the sell side of what exactly was happening. Sorry, research side and sell side. Truly, look, a lot has obviously changed since 1987, but I think that that's baked into the culture of Wall Street. And that's something that is obviously happening. I mean, it's obviously happening. The only question is how.

Yeah, I mean, you've seen this so many times. We saw it during the financial crash when it was revealed, you know, they were selling to their clients. They're like more retail clients, things that they knew that internally they were describing as total shit. It should be a crime. It should absolutely be a crime. I mean, there were many should have been crimes that were committed during that era. You also saw it. I mean, this was, you know, one of the revelations from GameStop, which we just talked to the filmmaker

of, what's the name of the film? Oh, Gaming Wall Street. Gaming Wall Street, yeah. About how all of this went down where, you know, retail investors are buying shares of GameStop, the price is going up and up and up. They're using the Robinhood trading platform, thinking that this is just a neutral kind of a thing. And then, you know, when it comes to their applying pressure to these bigger players on Wall Street, lo and behold, their ability to buy more stocks gets shut down. They're still able to sell, though, and it totally takes the thing. I mean, it's just one more instance where you see the way through either the rules that exist, they're allowed to cheat and they're sort of allowed

to rig the market. But this is just even even though go beyond that and just blatantly cheat. It also reminds me of the reporting that we've covered here from Unusual Whales and others about congressional insider trading, because it's very hard to prove that Pelosi or- On an individual basis. Anyone on an individual basis had this information and it caused them directly to acquire or sell or whatever this particular stock. But when you look at the metrics overall, and you see that these people are all beating the market, you go, okay, there's something going on here. And that's basically what this analysis reveals, is that if time and time again, before these block trades and in advance of these block trades, you see the stock price dropping. Something is clearly going on here. And so we should continue to follow it because it is heartening that federal investigators are actually looking into it for once.

Yeah, this is good news. Look, the way it always works is some guy pays a fine, never actually goes to jail. And it's not even close to what they made off of doing this. Right, yeah. They'll pay a tiny little fine, which is 2.02% of like the millions of dollars that they reap. But justice is still justice. We should see it.

It's just another little window into how the markets are rigged. Indeed. 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 Chris Wallace recently left Fox News and I'm going to read you how he is torching the network now on the way out the door.

So Chris Wallace was one example of a guy who they put out there to maintain some degree of credibility. He is one of the least partisan of the people on air, even though he still is partisan. He still is conservative. But he was put out there as like a counterpoint to the Sean Hannity types. And he's there for a long time. He always defended the network. He always thought they were doing a good job. He would always say, I remember a debate he had with Jon Stewart one time where he always said, look, we provide the counter narrative. We provide the counterbalance to the biased mainstream media. They're so liberal and we're just providing the other perspective, the conservative perspective, and we're quote unquote fair and balanced. the conservative perspective, and we're quote-unquote

fair and balanced. He seemed to really buy that propaganda and believe that notion even though it's absurd. Fox News has always been a cesspool. But now,

since he's out the door and he's launching a show, I think on CNN+, which is CNN's streaming thing, which I think launches this week and it's going to be an abysmal disaster, I'm so sad that the numbers

aren't going to be released. The numbers are only internal because the actual numbers are going to be pathetic. Although I'm afraid they'll find a way to rig the system and somehow end up beating other streaming services. So just we'll wait and see what happens on that front. But look at what he says about Fox News. So this is in Mediaite. Chris Wallace says working at Fox News was, quote, unsustainable after 2020 election. I, quote, no longer felt comfortable with Fox News programming.

Wow. Okay, so let me read you a little bit here. Wallace gave an interview to the New York Times to promote his nightly interview program, Who's Talking to Chris Wallace, which launches Tuesday, reflecting on his decision to leave Fox last year. Wallace explained, I just no longer felt comfortable with the programming at the network. I'm fine with opinion, conservative opinion, liberal opinion, he continued. But when people start to question the truth, who won the 2020 election with January 6th and insurrection, I found that unsustainable. I spent a lot of 2021 looking to see if there was a

different place for me to do my job. Wallace described the changes he observed in Fox News following the 2020 election. He also confirmed reports from several months ago that he complained to Fox News leadership about the conspiracy theories Tucker Carlson was spreading about the storming of the U.S. Capitol. Quote, before I found it was an environment in which I could do my job and feel good about my involvement at Fox, Wallace said about his time with Fox. And since November of 2020, that just became unsustainable, increasingly unsustainable as time went on. So look, I'm sure there are going to be a lot of, you know, Democratic-minded people and liberals who look at this, and they applaud it, and they say,

he kind of took a moral stand here. He said the January 6th stuff goes too far. I'm out. I can't do it anymore. And on the one hand, I'm inclined to agree with that to a certain extent because he says this crosses a line, and I was lenient with my line, etc., etc. But on the other hand, and this is the thought that dominates my mind more,

this misguided, at best, notion etc., etc. But on the other hand, and this is the thought that dominates my mind more, this misguided, at best, notion that, well, before Fox News was good, that's, to me, that is the most preposterous implication here. Because they've always been horrendous. When Chris

Wallace was there, remember when Sean Hannity attacked Obama for eating a burger with mustard on it? He had a segment on there. Remember when Sean Hannity attacked Obama for eating a burger with mustard on it? He had a segment on that. Remember when they said Barack Obama did a, quote, terrorist fist jab with Michelle Obama? They said that on Fox News. How many times over and over did they lie about the nature of what was going on in D.C. between Democrats and Republicans, where Democrats would concede and give more and more and more to Republicans, and Republicans would still be obstructionists

during the Obama era, and they would go out there on Fox News and pretend like it's the Democrats who are unreasonable and not bipartisan and not willing to compromise and are extremists, when obviously it was the Republicans who were being extremists. I mean, for Christ's sake, Democrats had a supermajority and they passed a Republican healthcare plan. That's what Obamacare was, an individual mandate system. It's

like Romney Care in Massachusetts. It's an idea that was birthed at the Heritage Foundation, which is a right-wing think tank. You would have no idea. You would have thought it was like Che Guevara was coming over to take over our healthcare, nationalize the entire thing. That's how they acted on Fox News. And they would say the things about like, you know, they're going to kill your grandma and stuff like that. This is what they were saying when Chris Wallace was there. And Chris Wallace had no objection whatsoever to any of that. Fox News is the network. Now, I don't know if Chris Wallace was there all the way back then, but Fox News was the network that wrongly called the 2000 election for George W. Bush before we knew it. And then every other network followed suit and ran

with it. And that very well could have impacted the outcome because after the full recount of Florida, we found Al Gore actually won it. So they have been biased every single step of the way. They have been rigidly, ruthlessly, viciously partisan every single step of the way. And Chris Wallace was like, well, they were a great network, and they were fair and balanced until the January 6th stuff. Now, does the January 6th stuff cross the line? Of course it does. Of course it does. The idea that, like, you know, hey, maybe it's okay that they stormed the Capitol and there was a riot and windows were broken and there were threats

and there was an attempt by a group of losers to try to overthrow the government. Maybe it's okay that Trump gave a speech saying, let's go to the Capitol, and maybe that's our... No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That stuff is all wrong and bad and crosses the line, but so did the other stuff. And, you know, that's the thing that annoys me the most, that I feel like the moral meter of D.C. journalists always misfires. Like, they never calibrate their outrage properly.

Like, they're not outraged about 30 million people not having healthcare, about 80% of the country living paycheck to paycheck, 45 people, 45,000 people dying every year because they don't have healthcare. They're not outraged about all that. They're not outraged about the endless wars. They're not outraged about the arming

of the Azov battalion, the neo-Nazis, or the arming of jihadist interior. They's always like little things here and there that they say, well, that crosses a line. When there were 84 things before it that crossed a line, and they were sitting there cheering it on or actively promoting the lies. And so that's what frustrates me about this thing. And my guess is, of course, Chris Wall is going to be fully rehabilitated. He's going to be welcomed with open arms into democratic aligned liberal media. And it's like, the bar for them is so fucking low. All you have to do is say January 6th was bad and I don't like Trump. And they're like, yes, welcome. We know you

love torture and illegal wars and, and a government that keeps people in poverty, but you're still okay with us because you cleared the lowest bar in human history. Now, to be fair, I don't know if Chris Wall supports torture or he probably does support Now, to be fair, I don't know if Chris Wall supports torture or he probably does support illegal wars, but torture, I don't know. But point is, he ain't a hero. And really what he's doing is now launching a show on a streaming platform that will have roughly negative five viewers.

I mean, again, this thing, CNN+, it's going to crash and burn spectacularly. Now, they might find a way to rig the system and beef up their numbers through coercive means. That's certainly possible. That's certainly what the big networks did on YouTube with the algorithm. But in a fair fight, they would get obliterated. I mean, what do you have? A book club with Jake Tapper? A show on raising kids with Anderson Cooper? Like, Casey Hunt has a show like... She has negative charisma. Negative charisma.

And never mind, it's not like she doesn't have charisma, but she makes great points. She doesn't make great points! So the whole thing is just a cesspool. It's just, let's take all of our shitty programming that nobody likes on CNN and just now put it on the streaming platform that nobody will like or care about or buy,

and then we won't release the numbers and we'll find a way to rig it so that people end up watching it in a roundabout way. Alright. Congrats. Congrats, Chris Wallace. I almost called him George Wallace. Congrats, Chris Wallace, for finally

finding something that you had a moral objection to when there were like 80,000 things beforehand that you let slide or actively partook in the negative stuff. 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, Marshall here.

We've got a great interview today. I'm speaking with Christopher Mims. He's a technology columnist, The Wall Street Journal. He's also authored Arriving Today, From Factory to Front Door, Why Everything Has Changed, But How and What We Buy.

Sagar and I did a really great interview with him a few months back. So definitely check that out on the Realignment podcast. We're here to talk about a article you put out, Christopher. It's talking about supply chains. Now, we had all these transitions after the big shocks of the China trade war, the COVID crisis, and now Russia sanctions. But let's just start

really basically, what are supply chains and why can we not stop talking about them? So supply chain, the term originated in the military because it was just how you kept an army supplied. Of course, in our globalized economy, supply chains are how we get everything that we buy, everything we consume. Right. Some supply chains are very short. You know, maybe you buy some carrots at the farmer's market and came from 10 miles away. Most supply chains, especially for finished goods are extremely long. So if you're buying, you know, any gadget, you know, anything at a dollar store, 90% of what you can get at a Walmart, those things are made, you know, in Asia, possibly Mexico, but generally they are crossing an ocean in order to get to you. You know, it's a journey that's tens of thousands

of miles long just for the finished product. And if you add up all the other miles of all the components that go into that product, let's say it's a complicated one, like a smartphone, you know, that's a supply chain that can be many tens of thousands of miles long. There's tons of single points of failure because manufacturing has been so concentrated over the years. And so what happens is, you know, if there's a pandemic or anything else, you know, it can take out the entirety of production for advanced microchips, let's say. And then before you know it, that trickles down to the fact that now it's impossible to buy a car or you can buy a car, but you're going to pay whatever the dealer says you're going to pay. And let's actually go into those. So how are the ways other than just the cars that we're feeling this process where we break down after these three big events?

You know, the big one these days, I think, is inflation. Honestly, you know, prices are going up because goods are harder to get. But there are a lot of funny things that have happened along the way. A lot of retailers ordered a lot of products that arrived late this year after the Christmas season. So there's tons of discount retailers. They're having a bonanza right now because they're selling all these goods that arrived late. You know, the shipping containers were stuck coming into America's ports and now they're hitting the beaches, so to speak. There's just tons and tons of idiosyncratic impacts like that. You know, not too long ago, lumber prices shot up because there were big forest fires in

British Columbia. But also, you know, mudslides took out the highways for, you know, trucks to move that lumber out of Canada. So it just feels like, you know, every week something happens, whether it's a natural disaster or, you disaster or now the COVID lockdowns in China or sanctions against Russia, which are going to take out all kinds of things, which we're going to feel later on, that causes one shortage or another, whether it's wood or microchips or paint or anything else. Let's just ask the big question. Is globalization over?

Globalization is definitely not over, but I think it's the right question to ask. I think the question everybody who is a supply chain professional is trying to answer is, how do we continue to leverage what's good about globalization, which is that when different regions of the world specialize in certain things, it can lead to rapid innovation, right? I mean, TSMC, which is the big microchip manufacturer in Taiwan, you know, they hold the title, they are at the cutting edge, you know, ahead of Samsung and Intel and everybody else, because they have concentrated that manufacturing on this one tiny island, you know, just 100 miles off the coast of China.

What a lot of folks are trying to do now is figure out, can I source goods from a geopolitical ally, for example, because I think Russia right now is an object lesson. And what happens when all of your supply lines get cut, you can't be a modern economy and source everything within your own borders, even when you have, you know, 13 time zones in your border and 140 million people, it just can't be done. And the key thing here is you really put on the article, and this is what I think will resonate with breaking points viewers, this idea that even companies are questioning these orthodoxies that defined how they approach things. So can you actually explain what you mean by that? And like, what are the examples of ideas that really shaped this process that companies are now jettisoning? Yeah. So for the last 50 years, what companies have been trying to do is

how do we just squeeze all the cost out of our supply chain that we possibly can? And so, you know, let's consolidate to one big factory, wherever wages are lowest or where that industry is concentrated. So usually somewhere in Asia, whether you're making gadgets or making apparel, if you're Nike, let's say. Also, don't carry any extra inventory. Just-in-time manufacturing, the definition of that is you don't have any spare parts on hand. You're not carrying any extra inventory for a month from now. You're just making and you're selling things as soon as you make them and you're buying parts only a week before you need them. So those orthodoxies have made supply chains efficient, but not robust and not resilient. So what companies are saying now is, let's say your car company, how do i make sure that my suppliers have enough money so that

they continue to invest in getting me enough parts when i need them how do i make sure that i have multiple factories in multiple parts of the world even though it is extraordinarily difficult to make factory a in asia and factory b in in Mexico produce the exact same object to the same standard of quality. So in that way, you know, we're really upending these orthodoxies that made supply chains just as cheap as possible and allowed people to really treat them as just cost centers. How do we squeeze every last dollar out of these? That's what America's CFOs have been doing for the past 50 years. It's interesting how much of this is just up to companies and how much is actually up

to governments when it comes to whether or not companies take these different approaches. So governments have potentially a big role to play. They have played a bigger role outside of America, especially. I mean, there's this concept that's kind of been like a dirty word in American politics for a long time of industrial policy. So let's choose champion industries and let's subsidize them. So China has done this forever. That's why they're the world leader in production of solar panels, for example, or, you know, lots of things made out of steel. South Korea did it, and that's why South Korea owns, you know, the flat panel display industry. You know, in America, we haven't tended to do that

very much, but now, I think I saw a headline today that the Senate finally passed funding for the so-called CHIPS Act, which means $52 billion in subsidies from the federal government to bring some advanced microchip manufacturing back to the U.S. The U.S. used to make 40% of the world's microchips in 1990. You know, today it's less than 12%. So governments all over the world really are trying to figure out how do we provide incentives for companies and industries to build their manufacturing capacity and even do things like mine raw materials within our borders. And part of the reason they're doing this is they see it as a

national security issue as well. So obviously, if a shooting war starts in the South China Sea, and that takes out 90% of the world's capacity for advanced microchip manufacturing, that's a problem for the United States and all of its allies. Similarly, if China is the only place that you can get cobalt and nickel and lithium and a trade war happens or there's some other reason you can't get those raw materials, it's going to really hurt all of these car companies that are going all in on electric vehicles, because all those are required to make batteries. So unless you want to turn China into the new Saudi Arabia of batteries and green energy, then yeah, you might want to think about how do we either subsidize or facilitate or otherwise encourage the nearshoring or the reshoring of the production of certain things to the United States and elsewhere? It's also really big in Europe at this point. Yeah, and it's interesting.

What does this mean for workers? Because when you talk about how 40% of microchips were here, now it's 12%. Jobs went somewhere. Are American workers or just any worker in a domestic, are they going to have more jobs given this state of affairs? We already have an incredibly tight labor market. So honestly, one of the big challenges now for companies wanting to do this is, you know, where are they going to get the labor? And, you know, on the one

hand, they can get the labor by training workers and offering higher wages. But it's a challenge because they're competing with, let's say, you know, Amazon that's going to offer you $22 an hour for a warehouse job and $1,000 signing bonus. So, you know, the that's going to offer you $22 an hour for a warehouse job and $1,000 signing bonus. So, you know, the American worker has sort of lost a lot of leverage and the middle class in America really has been hollowed out depending on what measure you look at since the 1970s. So you could see a continuation of this trend where American workers have more leverage. I do think long-term there is a challenge though. It's a demographic challenge. So America has really put the brakes on immigration

in the past five years. And frankly, Americans just are not having nearly as many babies as they once did. So it is hard to imagine with a labor market this tight where you're going to get all these extra workers if you were to bring a bunch of manufacturing back, which is one reason why a lot of companies talk instead about near shoring, or I've heard it called ally shoring. Like, how do we make sure that this manufacturing is happening in a country that is close to us, or which, you know, we don't think we're going to lose access to in the event of a trade or an actual war. So this is good for Mexico then? Yeah, it's good for Mexico. It's good war. So this is good for Mexico then? Yeah, it's good for Mexico. It's good for Canada. It's good for Southeast Asia because they're really been pretty great so far, countries in that region, being geopolitically neutral

and being sort of a provider of choice for everybody, for China and for the US. There's other, I think, unexpected winners here as well. I mean, I talked to one supply chain expert who told me, you know, I was really looking at where was the next big pool of skilled, low cost labor. And he's like, before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, he was really excited about Ukraine. Forty million people, well-educated, you know, labor costs lower than China. He's like, I thought that they were really going to blow up manufacturing. Obviously, that didn't happen. So there's always these contingencies that you can't account for. And something I'm wondering about, you use the phrase supply web as opposed to supply

chain in terms of what the industry is transforming into. Help us understand what that word means. So, you know, a supply chain implies, you just imagine like pearls on a strand or something. It's like, you know, here's where, you know, sand is mined. Here's where it gets turned into silicon, you know, just all one after the other in a linear chain. A supply web means how do we find as many suppliers as possible and build factories in different countries, different locations, so that if one bit of production gets taken out, you know, the manufacturing and the raw materials can be routed through another factory in order to, you know, assure that, you know, business can carry on. I mean, look, this was the original model of the

internet, right? I mean, ARPANET, which preceded the internet, the whole design was how do we maintain a communications network if some important node gets taken out in a Russian nuclear attack? Oh, let's build a web, eventually a worldwide web. So how do you build that out of three big events here. So next administration changes our China trade policy, let's say the war in Ukraine ends tomorrow and all of a sudden just go away, is there no going back to the way the world used to be? Or is there something different coming? Yeah. I mean, I hesitate to be this like Francis Fukuyama, like end of history or the end of the end of history type of person, because you just never know. But I do think that we have really had decades and decades of being in this unusually benign trade environment, unusually benign geopolitical environment. And it really does feel like we are moving toward

this state of where there's just more, a permanent state of increased chaos and difficulty in accessing various markets and shipping goods around. And so, yeah, I think that old normal is, is gone. And I think that a new normal where everybody who has to make supply chains work is just constantly recalibrating to try to make them more robust, to try to find new places to make stuff is here. And I think for the American consumer, unfortunately, well, consumers all over the world, in the meantime, there is just going to be a lot of pain in terms of increased prices. Because look, even if all of these raw

materials were readily available, when you try to reconfigure these supply chains for any reason, it costs money and it is a painful transition. Yeah, it's funny. I'm from Portland, Oregon. So when you describe this world, I just think of the dream of the 90s. And the dreams of the 90s, what you're describing is basically gone when it comes to this world we used to come up in. So to wrap this one, you describe in the piece and in the book too, all these different ways that we could change things. Like you said, like the ally shoring, not a huge fan of that one. I think there's some work to be done on the branding side here. Need Thomas Friedman to get on that. But basically ally shoring, spreading out, diversifying, keeping things at hand. how much can those things reduce pain? Or is there basically nothing that could be done to make things perfectly optimal ever again? I mean, the good news is that our material civilization is not falling apart.

Like, global supply chains have shown incredible resilience and adaptability in the face of, you know, let's not forget a global pandemic and all the shutdowns that came with that. So, you know, the good news is, like, things will still work. They are just going to be more expensive, and we are going to consume less of all that we collectively, you know, and it's going to slow down the economy. But, you know, we're still in a world that is in some ways leaps and bounds better than what we had, you know, decades ago where you just didn't have access to world markets. Like we're still going to have that access. It's just, everything's going to cost more and be harder. Good way to put it. So Christopher, we'd love for you to shout out the book.

There's a bunch of copies in the back, but yeah, just shout out the book. Yeah. So the book is called Arriving Today. It's about how everything gets from the factory to the front door. Also, if you don't have the patience for a 300 page book, it's also now a documentary on YouTube and on wsj.com called Chain Reaction. It's this hour-long documentary. We send producers all over the world

and it gives you a really good visual feeling and I think a sense of empathy for the workers involved in these supply chains that I couldn't even capture in a book. So go check out the documentary to start with. It's Chain Reaction and it's on WSJ.com and on YouTube. That's awesome. We'll put that in the description.

So if you want to check out the documentary and also Wall Street Journal products, normally pay well. So this is a huge opportunity for everyone. Check out the description right below. This is huge. Christopher, thank you for joining us on Breaking Points. DNA test proves he is not the father.

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